Today, Blue Note Records releases Forces Of Nature: Live At Slugs‘, a previously unissued live recording from 1966 by jazz greats McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson. The album’s producer is Grammy nominee Zev Feldman, who discusses the project with SJF’s Charles Waring.
With a capacity of about 75 people, Slugs’ Saloon was a small, dingy New York nightspot in Manhattan’s East Village that operated between 1964 and 1972. Sadly, it’s best remembered today as the place where trumpeter Lee Morgan was shot and killed. But before that tragedy, Slugs’, which had a reputation as a rough dive where fights would sometimes break out, was renowned as a crucible where progressive-minded musicians forged cutting-edge jazz. Sun Ra and his Arkestra were regular visitors; so were other intrepid pathfinders like Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp, and Jackie McLean.
In the spring of 1966, Slugs’ hosted pianist McCoy Tyner and tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, two rising heavyweights of the contemporary jazz scene; Tyner had made an indelible mark with the John Coltrane Quartet, which he had just left, while Henderson had been probing the frontiers of jazz with five remarkable albums for the Blue Note label, on three of which Tyner featured. For the Slugs’ gig, both men, then in their late twenties, hired 30-year-old bassist Henry Grimes, whose credits ranged from Sonny Rollins to Albert Ayler, and a 23-year-old drummer called Jack DeJohnette, who had just moved to the Big Apple from Chicago.
Forces Of Nature: Live At Slugs’ shows that despite his relative inexperience, DeJohnette brought a vibrant, youthful energy to the bandstand, lighting a fire under Grimes, Tyner, and Henderson which helped to push them to undertake explosive musical explorations that pushed the jazz envelope to the Nth degree. The quartet’s synergy is epitomised by Henderson’s freewheeling composition ‘In ‘N’ Out,’ a blistering 26-minute barnstormer that creates an almost unbearable but thrilling intensity as it navigates a tightrope between hardbop and a less constrained, more progressive, type of jazz. The complete concert also contains Henderson’s classic tune ‘Isotope,’ Tyner’s swinging jazz waltz ‘The Believer,’ and a gorgeous version of the jazz standard, ‘We’ll Be Together Again.’
It’s thanks to DeJohnette that we can now take a front-row seat in Slugs’ and hear the music that is aptly titled Forces Of Nature. Eager to hear himself playing alongside jazz titans, DeJohnette asked for a tape of the gig and kept it in his archives for decades until he met up with the “Jazz Detective,” producer and tape sleuth Zev Feldman (pictured below), who was able to negotiate a release via Blue Note Records. Dubbed the Indiana Jones of jazz, Feldman is no stranger to unearthing buried jazz treasure but as he tells Charles Waring, this discovery was special and blew his mind.
Zev Feldman Q&A
You’ve uncovered some astonishing archival discoveries in recent years but you’re about to release one of your most significant finds to date, Forces Of Nature, which languished for 55 years in drummer Jack DeJohnette’s archives. What’s the story behind it?
I’ve been fortunate to do a lot of archival releases over the last 15/16, years and this is at the tippy top of of everything that I’ve done. I’ve known Jack DeJohnette’s legal counsel Steven Reich for several years. He’s an attorney based in Berlin who’s also a jazz pianist. He represented the Brunner-Schwer family when I worked on the Bill Evans Some Other Time release, which came from there. We stayed in touch and he was really happy with how everything turned out. He knew that I was in the marketplace looking for previously unissued recordings and in maybe 2018/2019 he said, ‘Zev, you need to meet Jack DeJohnette, who’s one of my clients. He has an enormous tape archive.’ So he put us together, and I made several visits up to upstate New York, where Jack and his wife Lydia live. On the first visit, Jack played me this tape from Slugs’. When I heard ‘In ‘N’ Out,’ I lost my marbles.
How long was the tape’s journey from discovery to release?
It took some time. There are always a lot of steps that go into doing these sorts of projects. Around the same time, I started working for Blue Note Records, so that was advantageous. I took the recording to (Blue Note President) Don Was, and said, this is probably the most important recording that I’ve brought you and it needs to come out. I didn’t have to sell it to him. The music speaks for itself, and what’s so great is that he’s a musician and a friend of this music. He understood from the moment we started talking. So I felt very grateful to have that sort of reception and his openness. Now here we are several years later, and for the first time, these recordings are coming out. Sometimes it takes the stars and the moon to align for these sorts of projects to happen. Sometimes it’s not meant to be – but this was meant to be.
It’s a portal that takes the listener into another time.
These guys, McCoy and Joe, are giants in music, and there’s also this amazing back story because the recording was made at Slugs’, which to me and a lot of us, is this hallowed lost shrine. And the fact that the recording was also made by a guy named Orville O’Brien is amazing. He recorded (Freddie Hubbard’s) Night Of The Cookers, Charles Tolliver’s Music Inc. (Live At Slugs’ Volumes 1 & 2), and Alice Coltrane (Journey In Satchidananda). He was quite prolific, and one of only a few African American recording engineers at that time. It’s a really important recording. I think that Forces Of Nature speaks to a lot of us because of the greatness of these guys. And look, we’ve been listening to their catalog for decades and decades and decades, right? And I can talk about that from my perspective. So having something new, not just some tape, but a new chapter, sheds a lot of important light.
It’s like restoring a lost moment in jazz history, isn’t it?
It is. And you know, I look at those posters from Slugs’, and I see Hank Mobley, Art Blakey, Larry Young, Sun Ra, and all these incredible guys and I often say to myself, ‘Man, what did it sound like? What would it have been like being there?’ So this release is an incredible reveal. The intensity of this music is overwhelming at times. It just reminds us of the greatness of these musicians. So many of us have heard all of McCoy and Joe’s records, and we keep revisiting those, and they’re amazing. They’re very important. But having this is like something different. I like to say, ‘Hey, if people think they’ve heard it all, they have not.’ This is a very special recording.
Do you know why it was recorded or who wanted it recorded?
I do and I’ll give you a little back story here. So Orville O’Brien, a recording engineer who I mentioned, as Jack, explained to me, had these services that he would offer musicians, where, if you, if you hired him, he would come out and record the concert, and you got a tape, and he got a tape. And by the way, I have tried tracking down Orville’s tape archives. He passed away in the early 1980s. He was an airplane pilot and died in a plane crash. I believe he used to fly back and forth to the Dominican Republic or Costa Rica. His son was Guy O’Brien, aka Master Gee from (the rap trio) the Sugar Hill Gang. So I spoke with him at one point as well. He tried helping me find the archives but couldn’t. So anyway, Jack (DeJohnette) had the foresight to say, ‘Hey, man, I’d like to have a recording of this.’ So he had Orville O’Brien do it, and he’s been holding onto that tape since 1966.
What was your reaction when he played it to you?
My jaws were on the floor. When you listen to this, it’s not just another tape. It’s a revelatory, remarkable discovery, and it starts to paint a picture for you of what kind of music was being played in those clubs by these giants together. I think that it just speaks to these musicians’ genius. They’re playing at such an ultra-high level that it makes you really wonder what else have we been missing. What else was going on in those clubs? It was a good thing that Orville O’Brien came out and ran tape that night.
Let’s talk about the bassist, Henry Grimes (left). He’s not as widely celebrated as, say, Ron Carter, for example, or Ray Brown, but he had an impeccable musical pedigree, didn’t he?
He certainly did. I think some of us associate him with the avant-garde and those Blue Note records of Don Cherry. Those were what introduced me to him but I recently worked on a Sonny Rollins production (Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Recordings on Resonance Records) and I was reminded of how he also plays inside (the jazz changes). He was on the 1959 tour with Sonny when he went to Europe. And you know what? That was actually in itself, avant-garde at its time, playing in a trio of musicians without a net. So Henry strikes me as a guy who could play the inside and the outside. He was a rock. I think he was a really solid bass player, and he was really moldable and could adapt to different sorts of scenarios. I think he’s one of the greats. What’s nice about these recordings is that we all start to talk about these gentlemen again. I think Henry’s an important guy in the music, and I hope he gets some more due because, man, he’s really bringing it to this date. He was a great bass player.
We have to talk about Jack DeJohnette (right). He was the baby of the group at the time, just 23, but he wasn’t exactly wet behind the ears. And he doesn’t sound out of depth playing along these side these giants, does he?
No, I think that there’s a lot of energy and oomph. He’s on fire. He’s a flame in the caboose, so to speak, and really inspiring. The musicians are going at these paces when you listen to this, and they’re not slowing down. And it’s, again, that intensity. A lot of that stemmed from Jack, who was probably inspiring the guys on the front line. As a collective unit, it’s just so combustible. I think that Jack is also to thank for the quality of this recording because his playing inspired the rest of the band to raise it to a whole other level. So Forces Of Nature is very important, documenting when giants walked the earth. I’m so glad that this isn’t just tucked away anymore. This needed to be released. There are a lot of tapes that I come across, and they’re not always like that. There’s a distinction between good and great. But this is supreme. This is as great as it gets. It’s extraordinary.
Forces Of Nature: Live At Slugs’ by McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson is out now on double vinyl, CD, and download via Blue Note Records
