** Deluxe matte laminate gatefold sleeve and polylined paper inner sleeve ** Paris, August 1969. Sunny Murray books a studio for a single afternoon and walks in with thirteen musicians - among them three members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the working sextet built around Archie Shepp, and the singer Jeanne Lee. What they cut that day, Hommage To Africa, is one of the high-water marks of the legendary BYG Actuel catalogue, and one of the warmest and least abrasive records the free jazz movement ever made.
Murray had already remade the language of his instrument twice over by the time he reached France. As the drummer in Cecil Taylor's unit and then alongside Albert Ayler on sessions like Spiritual Unity, he had quietly dissolved the bar line, trading timekeeping for a continuous, shifting weather of cymbal and snare. The bassist Alan Silva once said Murray was the first drummer to play the theory of relativity - music so fast it came out slow. In 1968 he left a New York that had little work to offer him, and the following summer a wave of American free players followed Shepp to the Pan-African Festival in Algiers and on to Paris, where the BYG label recorded them in a feverish handful of months. Hommage To Africa, the third volume in BYG's Actuel series, is among the first of those sessions to fully catch the communal, exploratory spirit of that moment.
Side one belongs to Suns of Africa, a single piece in two parts. It opens almost weightlessly - scattered bells, a gong, the twitter of flutes and Jeanne Lee's wordless voice drifting through the room - before Murray's drums gather the whole company into a slow, rolling pulse that swells without ever turning harsh. Malachi Favors lays down balafon, Roscoe Mitchell and Lester Bowie thread alto and trumpet through the haze, and the music climbs toward an ecstatic collective peak that feels less composed than summoned. This is free jazz at its most hospitable: a long communal exhale rather than a confrontation.
Side two narrows the field to a smaller group drawn from Shepp's band. R.I.P. sets Grachan Moncur III, Clifford Thornton and the horns around a stark, recurring theme, the soloists peeling away with the loose, telepathic ease of players who had logged months in the same ensemble; there is something of Ayler's haunted marching songs in its gait. Unity closes the record on a note more searching than its title promises - a reminder that the Pan-African ideal these musicians carried was an aspiration rather than a given - before Murray seals it with a single cymbal crash. Dave Burrell's piano and Alan Silva's bass hold the ground throughout.
More than fifty years on, Hommage To Africa remains one of the essential documents of the BYG Actuel era - a snapshot of a brief, near-impossible community of musicians who had never all played together and never would again. Original pressings have long been a quiet quarry for collectors of the period. This reissue returns one of Sunny Murray's finest hours as a leader to where it belongs: within reach.
