Strata East Live sounds sublime at Barbican

Yet only the hardest of hearts would have wanted to cast a stone at what they saw projected on to the rear of the stage tonight. This celebration of the pioneering independent label Strata East, fronted by its co-founders, trumpeter Charles Tolliver and pianist Stanley Cowell, has a backdrop of sumptuous hand-drawn portraits of both the aforementioned as well as some of the other musicians whose work they helped to market.

Ben Connor’s monochrome figures, their bold lines and slightly doodleish detail a subtle nod to the Black Panthers illustrator Emory Douglas, consolidate the inevitable nostalgia around the event. Looking up at a giant picture of Clifford Jordan, whose ‘John Coltrane’ was practically a signature tune for Strata East, is absolutely soul stirring.

Of Cowell and Tolliver’s fellow bandmembers it is tenor saxophonist Billy Harper who can be said to uphold the spirit of the ‘Wise One’ most compellingly. The great emotional depth of his composing, which is exemplified by ‘Cry Of Hunger’, arguably the highlight of the whole evening, brings a hushed reverence to the auditorium. But if Harper, like many on the label, drew heavily on Trane’s modal vocabulary, then he really has brought his own idiosyncrasy to the table, first and foremost by way of a tone that is steam-heat solid and infused by a gospel warmth. During the passages where he is heard unaccompanied the sound has a gloriously vibrato-free, piercing authority.

Double bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Alvin Queen complete the line-up and the former’s excellent ‘Mutima’ also serves notice of how many gems there are among the 50 or so releases that dotted the Strata catalogue from its genesis in 1970 to its exodus from the music business in the early 1980s. All this blessed work has aged very well.

Yet there are a few wrinkles in the performance, particularly as the players find their feet in the first set. Tolliver is pushing a bit too hard in the upper register and his articulation falters while the mix buries McBee at the expense of Queen’s snare, which, on occasion, is not given the requisite lightness of touch. Furthermore, in the second set the rhythm section simply doesn’t groove hard enough on an underwhelming rendition of Gil Scott-Heron’s The Bottle’, featuring poet Mike Ladd, that reminds us that ‘the godfather of rap’ whose Winter In America is another key Strata release, was a musical as well as lyrical legend. His melodies are not at all easy to negotiate. The band doesn't get hold of the song’s core and Ladd’s verses are hard to hear.  

For all that the evening is a success. Everybody does settle into the material and the beauty of the writing comes into its own. The arrival of guest vocalist Jean Carne, the soul-disco diva whose early work in jazz was issued on Black Jazz, another independent label with a similar ethos to Strata, brings a surge of energy to proceedings and the version of ‘Spirit Of The New Land’ is quite majestic for the gliding, airborne nature of its theme as well as the great cultural significance of its text, a plea for people of colour to find solace in an America defined by division and exclusion rather than harmony and collective thinking.

Carne is indeed a powerful presence on stage and after some initial adjustments to her microphone she is a welcome addition to the ensemble, underlining how important was the written word as well as the musical content of labels such as Black Jazz and Strata East. The sight of the iconic pyramid that featured in the latter’s promotional flyers brings to mind both the non-western slant of the label as well as the slogan ‘A magical, mystical force’ and that does pervade the stage on pieces such as Tolliver’s ‘On The Nile’ and Cowell’s ‘Effi’, a waltz of sublime beauty that the two men also played when they were members of Max Roach’s quintet in the late 1960s. The deep, very audible sigh of recognition that could be heard several rows away from me makes it clear that this is a composition that is well-known and well-loved. It is also well played by musicians who did not want for courage 45 years ago when they decided to take their destiny into their own hands.    

– Kevin Le Gendre

– Photos by Roger Thomas