Preface: FROM the wind to a shriek, everything which the universe has given life has a right to that life and a right to propel into that life all the values it can. Whether they be approved by a human mind or seen with a human eye is no concern of that right. The right of the voice, whatever language it speaks, is to sound as strong and as beautiful as it can whether heard or unheard, whether made immortal by Billie Holiday or transcribed by Schoenberg. Instinctive and successive interests of every song-smith, poet, etc., go on, ever making his hopes, ever shaping the new ones, ever cutting through new space, until time arrives when man, while enduring life as he must, breathes his own concerti or poems, and if he wants them, ballads.
He lays back at night or day in his house, smoking and listening to the sounds of he city in their honk and roar of arranging their variations for their songs of their life, and he peers up over the buildings and sees his visions in their reality, hears the transcending strains of the song resounding in their many shapes and in all their excellence.
Preparations for this recording were begun over one year ago. There has doubtlessly been much energy and sensitivity introduced into the writing and arranging of the music. Tony Williams offers his music not only to you, the listener, but also the hope that, as composer and player, he may be better educated by what he hears.
These compositions, in their form and delight, achieve the cognizance of an attempt to flow beyond word-language-analogy. Everything played in the five tunes of this album can be sung, including “Memory,” which is improvised spontaneously in its entirety. If they should be sung, or better, if they should speak words to you, they would prefer to remain as they are completed for flow; that is, recorded on this disc in time, and in a state of peace. They exist. Their plea for existence, which suggests itself, is that a song has but a few rights, the same as for many citizens in the world today; indeed, in this country.
If a song feels like walking (with you at its side) down the center of the street and into the next, past all intricacies, past all involvement, and leaves you where you have never been before, why not let it? And if a song feels like kicking over a musical law or a litter basket, it need not be prevented.
Music does not have to match the voice. Music does not have to be polite or operatic. It frees itself from the idea that all pleasing sound rises in measured proportion to the strength or aptitude of the human ear, diaphragm or other interesting points. It is able to fit all places, delighting each point it touches.
Tony has said many times over that his music should not be taken in the belief that the music is highly serious; that “the music is not space music. It is universal, for everyone.”
What you will hear on Life Time sings not only for everyone, but by and for itself, because it is music that definitively sings. Tony’s music con now enjoy itself without making a bow. It lives without being outraced or out-distanced by W. A. Mozart Or C. Parker.
Music must be a feeling. If music feels like gathering momentum toward other lifetimes where there has never been life or time to play the experience that has not been played, to amass its energies for o charge upon new altitudes that are not already there, who con possibly hold it back or break it up?
Profile of the leader: Anthony Williams
Anthony Williams was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 12, 1945. He began his study of music at the age of nine in Boston, Moss., and “possibly before in Chicago.” Before his arrival in New York City in December 1962, Tony worked with the Japanese pianist, Toshiko Mariano, and at the same time did extensive study and experimentation with tenor saxophonist Sam Rivers. His collaboration with Rivers led to an important series of exploratory concerts with the Boston Improvisational Ensemble which proved to be invaluable in its scope and originality.
While he was working a date in Boston, alto saxophonist Jackie McLean heard Tony’s playing for the first time, and asked him to come to New York City, assuring him that his abilities were needed there. The result of Tony’s proceeding move to NYC was the immediate formation of the Jackie McLean All-Stars (including Bobby Hutcherson, Grachan Moncur III and Eddie Khan). This group gained wide recognition during its short duration.
At one of the many concerts given by the McLean band in early 1963, Miles Davis was present and heard for the first time a drummer who would soon be stirring a new kind of spontaneity in the magician’s repertoire that had not been felt since the late 1940’s.
Life Time is Tony’s first recording as leader and composer. All of the tunes on this album ore Williams originals, arranged with the help of Herbie Hancock. Describing the conception and purpose of Life Time, Tony has mode it clear: “It is simply music to listen to!”
Flexibility, as it always has been, is the most concentrated capability any musician has at his command. A flexible musician contributes certainly to any musical situation; he never chants about how he played this way or that way “years before” or “years ahead.” He simply plays what is going on around him, so to speak. The simplicity of just listening to Tony Williams’ music is the key to the enjoyment of Life Time. Life Time has innate brilliance in its planning and execution; its inception is as luminous.
About the accompanying musicians:
SAM RIVERS is from Boston, Moss. where he first met and played with Tony Williams. He recently worked with the Miles Davis Quintet. As you will witness, his virtuosity on the tenor saxophone is unparalleled. While at the Boston Conservatory of Music, he studied with the Armenian composer, Alan Hovhaness. Sam ploys other reed instruments, including soprano saxophone, flute, boss clarinet and clarinet.
GARY PEACOCK come to New York from Los Angeles in 1962. Shortly after his arrival, he joined the Bill Evans Trio, followed by a period with M. Davis’ Quintet. He is in Europe at this writing with trumpeter Don Cherry.
RICHARD DAVIS is the most flexible bass player in jazz. He has performed under the conductor Leopold Stolcowski; he has performed with Ben Webster.
BOBBY HUTCHERSON is forward and looking back over his shoulder at other vibraphone players. He has worked extensively with the late Eric Dolphy, and is the 1964 winner of Down Beat’s New Star Award on his instrument.
HERBIE HANCOCK needs no introduction to Blue Note listeners. He is the thinking musician.
RON CARTER is one of the few classically trained bass players now playing. He has performed with nearly every innovator in jazz.
Cover Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER
— LAWRENCE RUTTER
RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes
A NEW LOOK AT LIFE TIME
Tony Williams was the most precocious genius in the history of jazz. This is his first album as a leader, and is not to be confused in either personnel or style with the equally innovative electric band Lifetime that he formed in 1969. Life Time was recorded when Williams was only 18 years old, and included among the all-star personnel are four musicians who he was working with at the time in the Miles Davis quintet. The five performances sound nothing like that legendary band's music, and represent the first complete program of '60s avant-garde jazz to be released by Blue Note.
Williams reached this audacious point through his own inquisitiveness and early experiences. His formal training was at the hands of the great drummer/educator Alan Dawson, and took place when Dawson was still teaching out of what was then the Berklee School of Music. Years later, Dawson recalled how the youngster would soak up everything he heard on recordings. "Tony showed up one day in 1960 and announced, can play in 5/4 time. Can you?' I had never even conceived of trying at that point; but Tony heard Dave Brubeck's Time Out album, which had just been released, and already could duplicate Joe Morello's solo on *Take Five."' Another significant tutor was multi-instrumentalist Sam Rivers, who brought a teenaged Williams into the Boston Improvisational Ensemble. The group stressed total spontaneity at a time when the " New Thing" was still associated with fixed tempos and defined structures, and Rivers has recalled playing in museums and art galleries with the art as thematic inspiration. Williams brought Rivers into the Miles Davis quintet in the summer of 1964 and, through this album, to the attention of Blue Note.
Life Time was recorded on two days with two different sets of personnel. Rivers and bassists Gary Peacock and Richard Davis were present at the first session, which produced the first three tracks. Contrary to the listing on a previous reissue, Davis is only heard on the "Two Pieces Of One" sequence, while Peacock is the lone bassist on "Tomorrow Afternoon." The melodic theme of "Two Pieces Of One: Red," and its unison presentation by tenor sax and bowed basses, immediately calls to mind Gil Evans and his 1961 arrangement of "Where Flamingos Fly," Davis solos first, pizzicato, over Peacock's bowed accompaniment, Rivers enters as the quartet establishes a medium walking feel, with both basses plucked, Williams creates an abstracted beat, sometimes stating new ideas and at other moments pulling phrases directly from the tenor solo, and the bassists' success at keeping the melody in the air is miraculous, Peacock then takes a guitar-like solo, Davis supporting with a pedal-point feel before bowing double stops. The theme returns, and the bowed basses have the coda.
"Two Pieces Of One: Green" sounds like another excerpt from what may have been one long improvisation. It begins with Rivers blowing over Williams, and as the tenor solo proceeds both players stretch and compress their phrases. Rivers displays great clarity in the conception and execution of his complex yet attractive ideas. The wave-like shape of the solo suggests that he may have influenced Williams's unique juxtaposition of percussive phrases. The bowed basses enter for a brief ensemble, then Williams solos around the idea of a medium-up swing tempo. The very concept of the beat becomes thematic material, marking Williams as a major post-modernist whose concepts were related to the minimalist composers and proved apropos to impending directions in Miles Davis's music. Rivers and the plucked basses return briefly, then lay out again as drums conclude the performance.
"Tomorrow Afternoon" suggests what in later decades has been called freebop or burnout. The trio states a quick melodic idea and is off. Peacock had recorded the seminal Spiritual Unity with Albert Ayler and Sunny Murray six weeks earlier, and a track like "The Wizard" from that session makes a fascinating point of comparison. This trio hews more closely to traditional jazz rhythm, displaying their highly attuned reflexes in the process. Portions of Peacock's solo are played over tenor sax accompaniment with drums laying out. Another memorable moment occurs when the trio backs its way out of the second tenor solo into the theme.
The collectively improvised is in essence a percussion trio performance by Hancock, Hutcherson and Williams, and it looks even further ahead in the freedom continuum by anticipating the "little instrument" creations of Roscoe Mitchell and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Hutcherson was among the first musicians in New York to play with Williams, and he shares the drummer's sense of line, space, pace and poetry. After Hancock's winding lines grow more pronounced, Hutcherson switches to marimba, returning to vibes while Williams rides the cymbal. As the leader grooves on, his partners vibrate in the background.
Williams does not play on "Barb's Song To The Wizard"; but he wrote this magical composition, which is performed by Hancock and Carter. Hancock once explained the title by noting that it, like his own "Little One," contained a veiled reference to Miles Davis. Barb was a woman friendly with the members of the Davis quintet, and the piece was the drummer's notion of what her tribute to Davis would sound like. Its beautiful development of a minor waltz fragment might be an endnote to Hancock's masterpiece Empyrean Isles, which the pair had recorded with Williams and Freddie Hubbard two months earlier.
Did we already mention precocious and genius when referring to Tony Williams? That goes double for Life Time.
- Bob Blumenthal, 1999
