David Murray

condition (record/cover): NM / EX (in shrink)

Late seventies, London: David Murray, the young lion of the loft generation, alone with the tenor saxophone on the British Cadillac label - solo recital as manifesto, from a player barely into his twenties who had already absorbed Ayler's cry, Paul Gonsalves's silk and Sonny Rollins's architecture into one enormous, instantly recognizable voice. The solo saxophone format was the era's proving ground - Braxton had opened the door, the loft scene walked through it - and Murray claimed the territory early and completely: huge interval leaps, subtone whispers, false-register screams, gospel fragments surfacing and dissolving, all deployed with a storyteller's pacing that kept virtuosity in service of the tale. The Cadillac pressings circulated modestly, a devoted London independent documenting a visiting phenomenon, and they are hunted steadily today.

Early documentation of one of the great tenor careers of the last half century, caught at its audacious, history-swallowing beginning. Solo saxophone shelf: reinforced.