Sam Rivers

Colours is the album Sam Rivers made in Milan in 1982 with Winds Of Manhattan, an eleven-piece band made up only of saxophones, flutes and clarinets, with an oboe. There is no bass, no drums, no piano and no brass. Rivers, who ran the loft space Studio Rivbea in New York in the 1970s with his wife, wrote all six pieces, so the rhythm has to come from the reeds themselves. Black Saint released it in 1983.

The session took place on September 13, 1982 at Cine Music Studio in Milan, with Giancarlo Barigozzi and Giancarlo Lupo as engineers and Giovanni Bonandrini producing. Rivers plays tenor and soprano saxophones and flute, and the section includes Steve Coleman and Bobby Watson on alto, Patience Higgins and Jimmy Cozier on baritone, Bill Cody on tenor and oboe, and five others. Most of them double on flute, so the colour of the band can change completely from one passage to the next. Side one opens with Lilacs and the title piece, then Spiral, at more than eight minutes. Side two runs from Matrix through Revival, a two-minute interlude, to Blossoms, the longest piece at over eleven minutes.

This is a copy of the original 1983 Black Saint LP, catalogue number BSR 0064, on 140 gram vinyl: CAM Jazz, which now owns the label, describes it as original stock recently found in its vaults. Ducale lists it as 120064-1.