REVOLUTIONARY ENSEMBLE / Beyond the Boundary of Time
Leroy Jenkins (violin); Sirone (bass); Jerome Cooper (drums, balaphone, chiramia, Yamaha PSR 1500)
Beyond the Boundary of Time documents one of the last live performances of the legendary Revolutionary Ensemble before Leroy Jenkins¹s death in 2007. This recording was made of a performance on May 25, 2005 in Warsaw, Poland.
In the 1970¹s, the Revolutionary Ensemble introduced New York to decided musical advances, many pioneered by Chicago¹s A.A.C.M. musicians. Ex-Chicagoan Leroy Jenkins, who played violin, of all unheard-of modern jazz instruments, had formed his concept from classical, swing, blues, and modern elements and had been one of the radicals who discovered new concepts of sound, space, and musical relationships in the late 1960s. Jerome Cooper had been a somewhat later Chicago explorer, while Sirone¹s freedom of motion had grown out of work with the most visionary New Yorkers. Extensive rehearsal led this cooperative trio to a shared, free sense of dynamics, momentum, and form, and a wholly unique sound: their instrumental recombinations yielded a surprising variety of textures and colors. Most of all, these highly sophisticated personalities played together to create an ensemble music even larger than the sum of its parts.
After the long overdue reissue in 2004 of their 1975 recording The Pysche on Mutable Music, the Revolutionary Ensemble - Leroy Jenkins (violin), Sirone (bass), and Jerome Cooper (drums, keyboards) reunited for both recording and performances. On this live set, each musician is represented by one of their own compositions Configuration by Sirone, Usami by Leroy Jenkins, and Le-Si-Jer by Jerome Cooper, as well as two group improvisations. All three of these great musicians are at the top of their form here, and one envies the Warsaw audience that attended what turns out to have been their final performance together. Their remarkable realization of the ensemble ideal was still revelatory and still revolutionary.
TRACK LIST
Configuration (14:58)
Usami (8:47)
Le-Si-Jer (19:11)
Improvisation I (9:54)
Improvisation II (10:13)
REVIEWS
Clifford Allen, All About Jazz
Beyond the Boundary of Time is the final recording to be released from the reformed Revolutionary Ensemble, following the 2004 Pi release And Now... Recorded live in Warsaw in 2005 (indeed, the best documents of the group's work have been live dates), the set features a composition by each of the three members and two group improvisations. Granted, much music happened for the members of the trio between their 1977 Enja swan song and the beginning of the new millennium. While Sirone composed for theater and Jenkins worked in his own numerous ensembles, Jerome Cooper's visibility stateside shrank, though he continued to work on his concept of multi-dimensional drumming, which includes reed instruments, balafon, keyboards (a Yamaha PSR 1500), gongs and the trap set.
Cooper's composition "Le-Si-Jer" exemplifies this approach, employing synthesizer as a tonal backing for mostly a capella violin and bass poems. The percussionist's own solo is a multi-layered tone-field employing bass drum, piano, chiramia and bala. In a sense, the music here is imbued with a degree of separateness not found in the Ensemble's early recordings and it's hard to expect a perfect meld after nearly a quarter-century of absence from the international creative music scene. But Cooper's piece allows the three to operate in separate, parallel spheres toward a convergence of grit and ether—a beautiful reprieve, indeed.
