Boston Phoenix
Bob Blumenthal : 06/12/1973

With a title like Epistrophy & Now’s the Time Richard Davis‘ set should be even more traditional than the Brooks, but traditional it definitely is not. Joining master bassist Davis and drummer Freddie Waits are two of Pharoah’s forces, Marvin Peterson and Joe Bonner, and hard bop veteran Clifford Jordan, who gets more adventurous every time he surfaces on records. The quintet use the two be-bop standards of the album title as jumping-off points in a heated live appearance recorded last September at New York’s Jazz City. Energy music on traditional themes is a risky proposition, and in many spots it becomes a case of pedal-point till ready. Then ideas come, and the entire band rises to the challenge. You can hear the two horns get into it on Epistrophy, followed by Bonner’s enveloping piano (the best recorded example of this fine musician), and Peterson carries on with force on the more straight-ahead reading of Now’s the Time. Richard Davis races around the lines of the others, holding the reins a bit too tightly, not letting enough of his own song out. An uneven but important document of what even Don Schlitten must see as the coming mainstream.

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Buffalo Evening News
Jeff Simon : 07/14/1973
A Night to Remember, but Davis’ ‘Epistrophy’ Suggests No Pattern

There’s an exceptional record I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now. I hadn’t gotten around to it until now because other records seem to suggest clear-cut and irresistible patterns whereas Richard Davis‘ Epistrophy & Now’s the Time falls into no pattern whatsoever.

It consists of two 22-minute free-form live performances loosely based on venerated be-bop standards recorded in the fall of 1972 in New York’s Jazz City.

Besides bassist Davis and multifarious drummer Freddie Waits, the group is comprised of fiery but far-from-awesome jazz talents – pianist Joe Bonner, trumpeter Marvin Peterson and tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan.

But it’s an electrifying set in a jazz style that might now be called “standard avant-garde” (Buell Neidlinger‘s name for it was perfect – “New York City R&B”). What happens here are some solos that are, unavoidably, too long and some top of the lungs screaming for want of something better to do.

But there is a kind of mystic, intuitive group sense to the performance which makes it terribly intense even when what is happening is less than startling. On the liner notes, Davis says “I was crazy about that group and that night” for which one can hardly blame him.

Performances like these are probably the reason men become jazz musicians in the first place.

Monk’s Epistrophy opens mysteriously until Jordan injects some saxophone heat and oratory. Trumpeter Peterson enters with riffs and fanfares, the tempo accelerates, Peterson’s smears and burrs become inspired. The mood changes into Spanish wails, incantation and, again, frightful assaults.

The way Jordan and Peterson get back to the theme is positively miraculous. A la be-bop there are a few quotes in here but, significantly, of Coltrane tunes – A Love Supreme Acknowledgement in Epistrophy and Bessie’s Blues in Charlie Parker‘s Now’s the Time.

Muse/Onyx, by the way, is a new label but already they have released a few classic jazz performances.

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Cleveland Plain Dealer
Chris Colombi Jr. : 06/01/1973
‘Epistrophy’ is a mind-throbber

Muse Records continues to release some of the highest-quality material in modern jazz performance by some of the best musicians presently working.

An excellent example of this pinnacle of musicians and material is the new Muse release Richard Davis: Epistrophy and Now’s the Time wherein bassist leader Richard Davis, accompanied by Clifford Jordan on tenor saxophone, trumpeter Marvin Peterson, pianist Joe Bonner and drummer Freddie Waits, literally causes your mind to throb in unison with his music.

Special music it is, too, in the sense that the two-tune disc (Side One is a 23-minute performance based on Thelonious Monk‘s composition Epistrophy, while Side Two duplicates the effort on behalf of Charlie Parker‘s Now’s the Time) has a free-form attack on two of the best of the bop-era classics and everything comes up “copacetic,” as the boppers used to say.

Whether Davis is the top gun in the field of jazz bassists is for others to argue while I report that this recording reaffirms his ranking somewhere in the top trio of bassists at work today in the minds of most.

Davis’ solo wrangling is especially noteworthy on this album and he and his group take a fruitfully-relaxed approach to analyzing both the Monk and Parker compositions as perennial commodities – which this recording indeed proves them to be.

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Washington Evening Star and Daily News
William Holland : 05/26/1973
New Davis Disc is Exciting

Richard Davis is considered by most jazz listeners and critics to be one of the most talented and innovative bass players in the country.

Certainly many other upright bass players helped music progress to the point where the instrument would be considered as melodically important as any other in a jazz group, but it seems as if Davis, with his disarmingly fluid penchant for melodic swoops and slides, crystalized the sound so many were trying for when the music was awkwardly bridging bop-influenced jazz and the new, freer music.

He’s also done a number of albums with artists known primarily as rock musicians. It was Davis who was the man playing those hypnotic drones on Van Morrison‘s classic album, Astral Weeks. He’s also prominent on the new and excellent solo album by Barbara Mauritz, formerly of Lamb.

His reputation blossomed in the last 10 years, when as a young man of the New York scene, he worked with highly regarded transition groups led by Clifford Jordan and Andrew Hill. More recently, he’s cut several solo albums and has worked with the Joe Henderson group.

His new album, Epistrophy & Now’s the Time, is the most exciting live jazz album I’ve heard in quite a while.

The title is composed of two tunes written almost 30 years ago by Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. Both Monk’s Epistrophy and Parker’s Now’s the Time became as much as vital part of jazzmen’s repertoire for jamming as staples like Johnny Be Goode have become for rockers.

However, there are no bop replays on this marvelous album. Just as Miles Davis played Basin Street Blues a life time away from Louis Armstrong a decade ago, so Richard Davis and his group change the focus of these songs. Clifford Jordan on tenor, Marvin Peterson, trumpet, Joe Bonner, piano and Freddie Waits on drums manage to create a collaborative story of music that leaves the formal chord restrictions of the songs almost at once. The musicians said they were all crazy about the tunes when they were young, so when they were called (off the cuff) they simply got into the substance of the music. Terrific album.

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Down Beat : 07/19/1973
Joe H. Klee : 5 stars

This, said the man, is the way to make a jazz record. Just let the musicians do it without any time limitations or other restrictions. The format courts the danger of allowing players to belabor some ideas to the point of boredom, but not with these cats. Each of the two selections takes up a full side and runs more than 22 minutes, without loss of interest or momentum.

If I have a preference for Now’s the Time, maybe it’s because I love blues, though this version of Charlie Parker‘s classic is about as far away from traditional blues as you can get. The feeling is there, but the conventional limitations are gone: the bar lines themselves have ceased to hold any strict meaning. The opening by Freddie Waits makes it clear that this Now’s time is different from other times, and Freddie’s time sets the mood for the entire selection.

On Monk‘s Epistrophy it is leader Davis who intones the mood of the piece. That he is a superlative player is no news to anyone at all informed about music, and tenorist Jordan is no newcomer, but Peterson, Bonner and Waits, the younger contingent, deserve wider fame. I found the drummer and the trumpeter particularly effective.

It is of interest that these advanced players chose two bebop standards as a framework on which to hang their variations. The boppers often made standard chord changes the basis for their far-outings. Now, the music of the once far-out Monk and Bird has become the basis for improvisations by players who in other instances have moved further from the tradition than Monk and Bird ever dreamt of or tried to, but here show that they still know and respect it and can find something new to say within it. But then, Monk’s Epistrophy began as a theme for Cootie Williams‘ big 1942 band, under the name of Fly Right – another link with tradition.

Ponder that for a while, or just be glad for some good sounds to dig.

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Liner Notes by Garry Giddens

The Background

The two compositions that comprise this record emanate from a feverish apex of creativity known as Be-Bop. Now’s the Time, a classic Charlie Parker blues, made its recorded debut on Bird’s first date as a leader, in 1945. Slightly altered, it reappeared in the mid-50s as an R&B hit, The Hucklebuck (Louis Armstrong recorded it under that title), and then again in 1961 as a dance craze for assiduous rock ‘n rollers.

Thelonious Monk‘s Epistrophy was first introduced in 1946 on the first record session led by Kenny Clarke. Monk waxed it two years later with a quartet that included Milt Jackson, and though it has been played by numerous musicians since, it is best known as the theme Monk uses to open and close his sets. Monk’s titles are frequently as intriguing as his music and are usually conversational fragments, descriptions of the music or obscure terms. The best explanation I could come up with for Epistrophy is a botanist’s term referring to a condition of plants where protoplasm and chlorophyll granulates collect on free cell walls. What else?

Both sides were recorded one evening last September when Richard Davis‘ group was working opposite Pat Martino at New York’s Jazz City. The musicians were feeling good and the packed audience was enthusiastic and supportive. When the Davis group came on there was an almost palpable tingle of suspense between them and their listeners. It is an usual group and they knew no more about what was going to happen than we did.

The Music

Be-Bop was NOT the order of the night. In the dark, busy operation of a street level cellar, the dark, busy artists labored long and lovingly over their magic-machines, arms flailing and embracing, fingers kneading, plucking, hammering, skittering, necks rearing, shoulders arching, cheeks exploding. Call it free, avant-garde, new thing, modern, whatever: it was beautiful, gutsy, swinging and inspiring. It was a music of the moment, a tune picked out of the air and then assaulted and palliated from every direction by the five generals. Their combustion metamorphosed the environment. Cogwheels pinioned by each other thrust fireworks into the sky which remained aloft until a fire-balm of lyricism provided the parachutes for them to descend lightly like Ariel blessing the celestials. If you get in step with the canter at the center of the banter, it will assimilate you too. You will flow with it and hear the testimony dulcify, edify, modify and deify the time (which Now Is). Freddie Waits, who can upset the firmament while the lit pipe implanted in his mouth never wavers, rolled out the treacherous path for Richard Davis to plant guideposts on with thick, ductile cat-gut while filigrees of lightning were swept up from Joe Bonner’s piano. Clifford Jordan, bearded savant alternately whispering and exhorting, stampeded the incursion with root-looking beckonings that warmed the blood even as they excited the mind until, at the peak of Epistasis, Marvin Peterson brazenly inculcated the devil himself, Hannibal hurdling the Alps. Then, just as the tableau seemed most distinct, it suddenly melted, dispensing lyrical leaves, golden brown, to flutter through every autumn that ever was or ever will be, and the congregation gratefully opined as one, “I accept!” The quintet, having punctured the balloon with silence, sized up the situation and knowingly nodded, “You had damn well better.” Criticism was once again obviated.

The Theorist

Criticism having been obviated, the critic purses his lip and somberly returns to the sober business of critical sobriety, knowing – in the way that the young equestrian knows that he had better quickly remount the horse that has just thrown him – that he must consider his critical machinations and possibilities if he is not to find himself written into obsolescence by his own hand. After theorizing intensely, he emerges finally from his dank, cobwebbed, sanctum, feebly led by the soft glow of his oil lamp to offer the following cornflake.

Jazz has altered our ideas about time. ‘Our’ meaning white, western, classical. ‘Time’ meaning not rhythm but the purely temporal, linear development of a musical work. Traditionally time has meant structure. The 15 minute movement of a Beethoven symphony extends through theme and variation. We follow its logical structure as explicitly as the plot of a novel. The seventh minute of the piece is clearly related to the third minute by key and a formal sense of melody and rhythm.

The logos of the jazz solo enlarges the structure by shrinking it to chorus size. When the soloist is working with the cyclical order of a 12 bar blues or 32 bar song he is imposed upon by a harmonic fixity but not a melodic continuance. (Thematic improvising has always been evident in jazz – one could not, for example, subtract a chorus from Louis Armstrong’s Tight Like That solo without feeling its absence – but it is not the norm.) The average jazz improvisor will construct his solo with logic but it will be an esoteric logic that makes sense because of the way the solo has traveled in time, from first to last chorus, not because the eighth chorus is a variation on something in the fifth that emanated from a figure dropped in the first.

In the last ten years, the so-called New Thing musicians have opened the door wide. A musician stranded without chords, without superimposed form and temporal structure, has nothing but his own inventiveness and energy. This record never ceases to a be a storybook because the artists never stop having something to say.

The Musician

“I liked the idea. There was no discussion about what we were going to play. I picked Monk’s tune, just got into it and then everybody joined in. Monk is one of my favorite composers. Epistrophy is from the late 40s so it just shows that good compositions are perennial. I was crazy about the group and that night. Everybody was into everybody else’s vibrations. Now’s The Time is the be-bop thing. I think Clifford Jordan set the theme on that one. The idea was just to play sounds and music.” – Richard Davis

“American can’t create Our Music – or destroy it.” – Clifford Jordan

“What does it matter the man’s age as long as he can lift the weight and bear the pain.” – Hannibal, Marvin Peterson

“I’m constantly striving for inner piece and self-improvement determined by the mere survival of daily living as well as my musical experiences. Hopefully, my truest and most pure feelings are expressed through my work. However, if I have accomplished relating truth and purity to the audience at the best of my ability at any given time, I have but the creator, my family and my fellow artists to thank. This particular album with Richard Davis was one of the most enjoyable experiences I have had. There was a consistent joint interchange of music, love and understanding expressed by all the musicians which I felt was dynamic.” – Freddie Waits