Rashied Ali

Featuring: James Blood Ulmer

condition (record/cover): NM / EX-

The man who drummed on Interstellar Space takes the leader's chair: Rashied Ali's quintet on his own Survival Records, the label he founded in the early seventies when the New York loft scene decided to stop waiting for the industry and press its own documents. Ali's whole post-Coltrane path was an exercise in self-determination - Survival the label, Ali's Alley the club, the music organized by the musicians themselves - and this quintet session is that ethic in sound. The multidirectional pulse that Coltrane trusted at the very end is here applied to Ali's own band concept: free but grounded, exploratory but always breathing together, with the drums as weather system rather than timekeeper.

The Survival releases circulated in modest numbers and have been collectors' quarry ever since, both as music and as artifacts of the era when the avant-garde built its own house. Loft jazz at the source, from one of the movement's central figures.