Jazzmatazz Review - Don Pullen

Don Pullen

Solo Piano Album
(Sackville)

Between 1974 and 1980, Bill Smith sponsored a series of avant-garde concerts in Toronto. He also produced some landmark avant-garde albums for Canadian based Sackville Records by many of these musicians, including Julius Hemphill, Anthony Braxton, Oliver Lake, George Lewis and Barry Altschul. Many of the albums were solos or duos. Sackville is now making them available for the first time on CD, in a bimonthly series of ten 1000-copy limited editions, available only by mail. The first issue in the series is Don Pullen's Solo Piano Album recorded in 1975.

Don Pullen worked with Muhal Richard Abrams, Giuseppi Logan, Milford Graves, and other avant-garde musicians in 1964 and 1965 but, to make ends meet, he played organ on soul-jazz groups and accompanied R&B singers from 1965-72. He then got back into jazz, playing with George Adams on Mingus's last great quintet (1973-75). From 1979-88 he co-led a group with George Adams and also led his own groups until his death in 1995 at age 51.

Pullen put together a varied program on this album, making use of his background in blues and R&B as well as in the avant-garde. He had a beautifully percussive style, with a ringing, singing tone.

The first piece, the beautiful "Richards Tune" (written for Muhal Richards Abrams), starts out as a ballad and then gets more percussive and dissonant. The programmatic "Suite (Sweet) Malcolm" is an extended suite for Malcolm X. The piece starts slowly, with a lot of space, and then warms up as it becomes more chromatic and Pullen starts to use larger masses of sound.

The foot tapper "Big Alice" has a R&B/blues/gospel sound, reflecting his background in that area. "Song Played Backwards" is more dissonant, more in a Cecil Taylor mode. The piece emphasizes his two-handed playing (a few times each hand seemed to be playing in a separate style) and features long lines consisting of fast runs of notes and tone clusters.

This, Pullen's first solo album, is an important work, and I'm glad it's finally available on CD.

— Alan Lankin, January 2001

Release Date: October 2000 — available from Sackville Recordings, Box 1002, Stn. O, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4A 2N4 (416) 465-9093

Solo Piano Album :
1. Richards Tune (8:20) / 2. Suite (Sweet) Malcolm (Part 1: Memories and Gunshots) (15:35) / 3. Big Alice (10:01) / 4. Song Played Backwards (9:05)

Personnel: Don Pullen: piano

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last update 19 January 2001