David Murray

Featuring: Sunny Murray, James Blood Ulmer

condition (record/cover): NM / EX+ (obi has light yellow stains)

Gatefold sleeve. Obi included.

New York, 1986, documented by DIW - the Japanese label operating at the peak of its Murray devotion, taping the tenor giant in his home city at the height of the eighties renaissance he did as much as anyone alive to power. David Murray in this period was ubiquitous and never once routine: big-toned, history-drunk, structurally daring, equally convincing at a subtone whisper and a full-lung roar, often within the same eight bars. The mid-eighties New York scene - the World Saxophone Quartet years, the big band experiments, the endless quartets - was creative music's engine room, and DIW had the wisdom to simply keep the tape rolling near its center.

The DIW catalog numbers from these years form their own collecting field, hunted by tenor obsessives worldwide and pressed to Japanese standards throughout, this one included. Mid-eighties fire from inside the furnace, on the label that understood its value in real time. Historical and hot, in equal measure.