Peter Brotzmann / Milford Graves / William Parker – Historic Music Past Tense Future 2LP Black Editions

Black Editions presents Historic Music Past Tense Future, the first ever album to feature the meeting of Peter Brötzmann, Milford Graves, and William Parker. Three of the towering figures in the history of free jazz forge an incredibly vital free music born from lifetimes of uncompromising, ceaseless artistry. Historic Music Past Tense Future is the inaugural release by Black Editions Archive and the first in a series of records that will present previously unreleased works featuring Milford Graves.

“2002-03-29, in the front room of CBGBs, fourteen years after their last performance together, three of the defining musicians in Free Jazz history convened for a third and final time. Peter Brötzmann had once again successfully talked his way into the U.S. without a visa to play this concert (organized by Arts for Art) and concerts with a historic drummer of a different era, Walter Perkins (organized by eremite). On March 31 and April 1, Brötzmann and Perkins recorded their duo album The Ink Is Gone (2003). William Parker had just returned from concerts in Italy with the David S. Ware Quartet. On April 2 and 3 he debuted his ‘Curtis Mayfield Inside Songs’ project in Boston & Amherst. And he still found time to sit-in for the entire March 30 Brötzmann/Perkins Amherst Meetinghouse gig. Scarcely to be found on bandstands and an even rarer presence on record, Milford Graves was a different story, a state of affairs that in 1995 prompted Thurston Moore to proclaim Graves ‘a living myth.’ Between 1999 and 2015, Graves appears on just six recordings, two of those solo; Brötzmann and Parker combined made half as many records the same week as this gig . . . The eremite Mobile Unit happened to be in the house March 29. The trio performed on a small riser facing the front door of CBGBs, with Graves’ hand-painted, Orisha-adorned double bass drum kit, captured in its full thunderous glory on this recording, occupying most of the available space . . . For this rather hastily set-up recording, Parker’s small amp was placed on a barstool behind Graves’ kit, yet you still clearly feel and hear Parker’s vivid contributions. By 2002 Milford Graves was four decades into developing and refining his radical approach to drumming. Graves’ unique and unbounded creativity across multiple mediums is only recently entering the early stages of wider discovery and appreciation . . . The music here comes from a moment of relative high visibility for the free jazz continuum. Brötzmann and Parker, among others, were taking it to the people through relentless touring…” —Michael Ehlers