BST 84339

Kenny Cox - Multidirection

Released - 1970

Recording and Session Information

G.M. Recording Studios, Detroit, MI, November 26, 1969
Charles Moore, trumpet; Leon Henderson, tenor sax; Kenny Cox, piano; Ron Brooks, bass; Danny Spencer, drums.

5587-4 Gravity Point
5588-3 What Other One
5589-1 Smick In
5590-2 Sojourn
5591-1 Spellbound
5592-1 Multidirection

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Spellbound	Kenny Cox	November 26 1969
Snuck In	Charles Moore	November 26 1969
Sojourn	Kenny Cox	November 26 1969
Side Two
Multidirection	Charles Moore	November 26 1969
What Other One	Kenny Cox	November 26 1969
Gravity Point	Charles Moore	November 26 1969

Liner Notes

MULTIDIRECTION As was clear in their first Blue Note album (Introducing Kenny Cox and the Contemporary Jazz Quintet, 4302), this Detroit-based group has achieved a distinctive identity. Their second album, Multidirection, further underlines the remarkable qualities of a unit which Kenny Cox has accurately described as "more of an orchestral type effort than just a combo per se."

And it is the fullness, diversity, and flexibility of Kenny Cox's quintet that makes this music not only immediately arresting but durable. All the Cox and compositions in this set are by two members of the group trumpeter Charles Moore. Each piece is uniquely intriguing in terms of structure, and each speaks so clearly for itself that I don't feel track-by-track analyses are required. That's something I learned from John Coltrane. "When you write notes," he once told me, "if the music is real, don't dissect each number. Let the listener come to it fresh/ in his own way."

I do think, however, that the group itself can be characterized without words getting in the way of the music. I have seldom heard a unit that is so "together." Each solo emerges with organic logic from the ensemble context. The result is indeed more than the kind of combo that sounds as if several reasonably compatible soloists have gotten together with a rhythm section but could just as easily be interchanged with other musicians of similar musical predilections.

This set is really what jazz as a collective experience is all about. Each time I've listened, I've discovered another element of the unusual empathy with which these five men create their own musical microcosm. I would suggest, for instance, that you listen at least one time through with particular focus on the attentive resiliency of Kenny Cox's comping, and then again for the complex sensitivity with which drummer Danny Spencer is able to power the group as a whole and each soloist with such a multiplicity of resources. It's intricate drumming but never in an exhibitionistic way. Like everyone else in the quintet, Spencer is always alert to the total musical environment. Similarly, bassist Ron Brooks's playing is an inventively integral part of this wholeness of collective conception.

Trumpeter Charles Moore, though influenced by Miles Davis, is his own man; and I'm especially impressed by his firm sense of improvisatory structure as well as the intensely probing thrust of his horn. Tenor saxophonist Leon Henderson, the younger brother of Joe Henderson, also is continually building — rather than scattering or fragmenting ideas. And like Moore, he retains a strong personal sound and style that is continually complementary to the overall "orchestral" nature of the quintet. Again, considering the individual strengths of each of this unit's members, the naturalness with which they fuse into so cohesive a group is a tribute both to their own capacities for communality and also to Kenny Cox's unifying leadership.

Cox's playing — his clarity of line, crispness of touch and range of harmonic colorings — reveals a broad knowledge of jazz roots along with a searching openness to new possibilities of enlarging and reshaping the language. In his work — and this applies to everyone in the quintet — there are no excess embellishments, no waste of notes or time. There is a singular thoughtfulness in Cox's music and that of his colleagues. As soloists, they are simultaneously superior editors; and together, they fit seamlessly.

The scope and depth of the group's essential lyricism also ought to be noted. In this album, as in their first, Kenny Cox and his quintet move in a stimulatingly varied number of directions. "Variations," Cox says, is the best way to summarize their music in a single word. But within whatever changes in time and line and color take place, there is a core of lyricism — a soaring of feelings.

Listening to this album and its predecessor, I remembered what Martin Williams had written in The Jazz Tradition (Oxford University Press): "The high degree of individuality, together with the mutual respect and cooperation required in a jazz ensemble, carry with them philosophical implications...It is as if jazz were saying to us that not only is far greater individuality possible to man than he has so far allowed himself, but that such individuality, far from being a threat to a cooperative social structure, can actually enhance society."

It is at this level — of feeling as well as musicianship — that Kenny Cox and his Quintet are operating.

- NAT HENTOFF