Free and Wild Jazz

CD1 : Jays (feat. Kalaparusha, Chris White, Jumma Santos)
CD2 : Blue Phase (feat. Ahmed Abdullah, Charles Brackeen, Mashujaa, Leroy Seals, Rickie Evans, Rashied Sinan)
CD3 : Something's Cookin' (feat. Sunny Murray, David Murray, Byard Lancaster, Khan Jamal, Fred Hopkins)

From Wildflowers Loft Jazz New York 1976 (Douglas Records, 2006)

Yet another edition of the brillant and complete Wildflowers sessions with some of the great free jazz performers at the time like Jumma Santos, Ahmed Abdullah, Anthony Braxton, Sam Rivers, Sunny Murray and Fred Hopkins. This live album is the result of recordings at the Studios Rivbea, the loft home of saxophonist-composer Sam Rivers, during the seven nights of the Spring 76 Music Festival, thirty years ago. It contains three cds and it's produced by Alan Douglas, who not only produced the posthumous Jimi Hendrix Crash Landing projects album in 1974, John McLaughlin's Devotion in 1970, Lightnin' Rod Hustlers Convention but also jazz perfomers like Eric Dolphy and Miles Davis... If you want more information about him, see his bio wrote by The Wire.

The common critical consensus is that the 1970s, particularly the latter half of the decade, were the historical low point for jazz in America. Very few albums survive from that era, compared with the avalanches of reissues and vault clearing box-sets of 1950's and 60's groups. Part of this is, of course, due to the short shrift granted the avant-garde by most jazz historians. The music of the so-called New Thing, which by rote doctrine had burned itself out by 1968, in fact continued throughout the 1970s, expanding to Europe in search of audience and growing and evolving artistically to astonishing levels of power and beauty. This is not the story offered in most histories of the music, though; instead, the story is one of dwindling audiences and artistic stagnation, lame attemps at fusion coupled with sessions work on disco albums and other ignominious attempts to remain somehow culturally relevant. (by Phil Freeman, from the liner-notes)