Infinite Sound – Contemporary African-Amerikan Music LP Aguirre Records (Belgium)

2021 repress. Aguirre Records present a reissue of Infinite Sound’s Contemporary African-Amerikan Music. This is conscious free jazz featuring Roland P. Young, originally released in 1975 on the eclectic 1750 Arch records. “‘1750 Arch was a beautiful Spanish-style hacienda,’recalls Young. ‘It had a recording studio in the basement and the salon was a performance.’ Young played solo gigs there and also in duo with cellist Chris Chaffe. He remembers it as a particularly ‘transcendent’ setting for concerts by this trio, with singer Aisha Kahlil and bassist Glenn Howell. ‘What appeared to be ‘experimental’ was reaching for sounds and emotions that were unfamiliar. We performed at rallies in support of various causes; our ultimate goal was a blending of cultures.’ In 1968, Young was working as a DJ at KSAN, an underground rock station in San Francisco. ‘Glenn used to call me when I was on air to comment about the music I was playing; he was a musician and I invited him to come talk about music, then decided to play. The pair met Kahlil at one of their concerts. ‘A mutual friend introduced her and told us she was a good vocalist, loved our music and wanted to sing with us. We invited her to a rehearsal and soon after invited her to join the group. Infinite Sound came together easily; we had a shared intuition, and created a lot of music. Each of us would bring ideas to rehearsals and we would work on them. We talked about how to present our material and how compositions would flow; we were also conscious of how we dressed for performances, how we moved on stage, how we interacted with each other and the audience. On occasion we would invite dancers to perform with us, friends of Aisha.’ Contemporary African-Amerikan Music preserves a fascinating glimpse of the trio in action. Their compositions embrace mobile forms, with Howell’s buoyant bass taking a role around which Young’s horns and Kahlil’s voice move. Rhythms dissolve into textures, and melodic shapes soften or flare into exuberant bursts of tonal color. The music’s mood swings unpredictably from flamboyance to introspection. Moments of musical allusiveness mutate into passages of wild inventiveness. Tantalizingly, this was this trio’s only release. Times have changed, yet increasingly in recent years creative artists have come to accept the need to erase musical boundaries and erode the constraints of aesthetic categorization.” –Julian Cowley.