Michael Marcus

Here At! is the 1994 Soul Note album of New York reed player Michael Marcus, a regular partner of saxophonist Sonny Simmons, who here leads a group drawn from the city's free jazz scene. In 1993 he had formed a trio with bassist William Parker and drummer Denis Charles, and both are on this session, alongside a second bassist, Fred Hopkins, a second drummer, Sadiq Abdu Shahid, trumpeter Ted Daniel and trombonist Steve Swell. Marcus wrote all eight pieces and plays a whole cabinet of reeds, from tenor and baritone saxophones to the stritch, manzello and saxello.

The album was recorded at Sear Sound in New York on September 7 and 8, 1993, with Jon Rosenberg engineering, assisted by Bil Emmons and Fred Kevorkian, and Giovanni Bonandrini producing; Gennaro Carone mastered it and K. Leander Williams wrote the liner notes. The label's credits for Marcus also list straight alto saxophone, Conn-o-sax and B flat clarinet. Two of the compositions already had a history. Ithem and Here At had been recorded by the trio with Parker and Charles at Smash Studios in New York on February 12, 1993, seven months earlier, a session that Ayler Records later issued on the album Ithem. On this record they return with the larger band. Top Of The Hill (Daly City) opens the programme, This Happening is the longest piece at over nine minutes, and the set ends with the brief In The Center Of It All, at a minute and a half.

This is the Soul Note CD, catalogue number 121243-2, first released in 1994.