Coming soon on Hightwo…

Sonic Liberation Front Meets Sunny Murray.

After the release of SLF’s debut album, Water and Stone, Sunny Murray engages the band for a series of collaborative concerts, including a 2002 appearance at the Vision Festival. The circulation of recordings from these concerts among fans enticed Murray and SLF to head into the studio together for the first time in 2008. Sonic Liberation Front Meets Sunny Murray features those studio recordings plus bonus recordings of the Murray’s appearance with SLF in Philadelphia in 2002.

“I had an image in my mind as to how things would play out,” says Diehl. “But as is normal with Sunny Murray, it ends up being something else. I envisioned Murray playing freely over the folkloric bata rhythms. But I found myself playing freely over the bata rhythms, and Murray tapping into something more fundamental. Something which actually permeates his approach to his music — his Native American heritage. Murray plays rhythmically with the bata. He does so using a Native American approach to pulse. It then tied in what I heard with early Albert Ayler recordings where Murray’s vocal chanting is a s much as part of the experience as the drumming.”

It is not only the folk-melody content where parallels are drawn, but also in the authenticity of feel, in the life-force that is present in both ancient and to the future forms.