Paul Flaherty - A Willing Passenger (Relative Pitch, 2025)
I first listened to A Willing Passenger on Bandcamp and thought it was great. When I got the CD, I realized I was missing an important component. There’s a liner note with a background narrative by Flaherty, describing an incident with a group of construction workers in the 1980s when he regularly played solo saxophone on the street. It’s a strong, if not essential, complement to the recording, as well as the source of both the CD title and the individual track titles. I don’t wish to burden Paul Flaherty’s music with the special burden of the post-Ayler saxophone’s history, perhaps even theology, but I think it’s strong enough to carry it.
One of Flaherty’s most powerful statements -- both musical and titular – is a duet recording from 2000 with drummer Chris Corsano. It’s essential music, in a couple of ways, but its title is essential too: it’s called The Hated Music. It’s out-of-print in all its forms but Bandcamp, but its ideal form is the two-LP reissue on Byron Coley’s Feeding Tube label with extraordinary cover art by Gary Panter and a certain physical mass that the music seems to demand. There’s something both brave and determined about that title, pre-emptive acknowledgement of some element of a music’s reception, free music’s edgy and complex legacy.
It’s a music sometimes tracked by madness, so out of courtesy to the masks and mouthpieces of many, I won’t go so far as to name names, but I’ll make one careful distinction that shouldn’t be ignored. Consider the late Peter Brötzmann, one of Albert Ayler’s first and greatest disciples, who dedicated to Ayler both a recording and a band named Die Like a Dog , a vision of life cruel enough to suggest even a canine shelter gassing or a KKKanine lynching. There’s a crucial difference between the sounds of Ayler and Brötzmann, even given the relative harshness of some of Ayler’s earlier recordings. It long ago occurred to me that Brötzmann’s music sounds like Albert Ayler without transcendence, without God. I know it’s a theological reading, but it’s rooted in timbre, the way Ayler, live or on any decent recording, had a sound that’s full of light, that light a matter of singing high frequencies breaking through and hovering over a sound that could suggest gauze or grit. If Ayler could, at his most enlightened, suggest angels’ wings in an updraft, Brotzmann, with high overtones barely evident in his sound, might supply a hydraulic drill attacking concrete.
Paul Flaherty’s music is deeply rooted in the work of Albert Ayler -- vocalic, impassioned, explosive -- which can be a blessing or a curse. Any close listener of free music will know, or perhaps at least suspect, that it regularly inspires both the greatest and worst of music from profoundly spiritual and existential orations to the most clownishly vacuous exuberance one will ever hear. The style’s explosive core can mask distinctions only so long before the poles of the practitioners get sorted out. It’s a music I’ve been around in various forms for 60 years. Along with Coltrane and Sanders [together] and Albert Ayler, I even managed to hear Charles Gayle in 1966, long before he became memorable. I have heard prophets and poseurs. In case I’m somehow mistaken, I make a practice of never writing about those I consider the latter, unless circumstances make it unavoidable and then its brief, suspecting that the low level of rewards in the field make them at least sincere poseurs.
Flaherty’s opening “Do You Know” defines the recording’s level of intensity. It’s a dirge, beginning in funereal melody, but one that will stretch to the tenor saxophone’s expressive limits – high-pitched squeals to overblown fundamentals in the lowest register that then become multiphonic blasts that cover multiple registers at once, then phrases that range suddenly from contorted to lyrical to circulating lines that stretch amongst all of those boundaries – avatars of music’s ultimate range.
“Would you like to take a ride?” is superbly lyrical alto saxophone, every technique subservient to expression, like Flaherty’s ability to mutate tone from note to note, bending from interjective squawk to sudden illumination in long recirculating lines embodying an essential lyricism.
“Oblivious to Surroundings”, taken on tenor, initially suggests a refraction of something Coltrane may have played but soon proceeds with a distinctive Flaherty mode, a pattern in which a lyrical phrase is then remodelled, clean pitches turned to ambiguity and multiphonics, smooth tone turned to abrasive wail. In the case the exploratory passages become tremendously intense, suspended
The title track is another fine alto performance, the identification based as much on register as tone, for Flaherty has the same breadth of sound on alto that he possesses on tenor, following the same imagination. The work again follows that rapid route from the lyrical to the expressionistic ultimately compressing them into single phrases – moving from torture to sweetness and vice versa.
“Small Lonely Looking Cloud”, on alto and just three minutes long, has an extended melodic exposition that suggests the uninterrupted transfer of image from a vision in nature to a single expository line with expanding sympathy and resonance, recalling certain shakuhachi recordings.
“Almost Finished”, is a powerful envoi on tenor, as expressive as one might be, and a reminder that in this particular field, the intensity of conviction, the depth of expression, is form itself.
A Willing Passenger is, clearly, often harsh, but it’s always vital. Much of it, most of it, has its own intense lyricism. Its greatest strength may be its immediate emotional intensity which in Flaherty’s mind, hands and breath becomes form. Even when there is a sense of developed melody (and virtually everything here is melody), it’s the keening emotional input and a corresponding attention to nuance that defines the shape of individual notes and short phrases. It is as human a document, with as substantial an emotional punch as a recording by Son House, (say “John the Revelator”) or Blind Willie Johnson (maybe, “God Moves on the Water”).
There’s a fine on-line interview with Flaherty where he talks, among many other things, about playing with massed frogs and a train. It’s a great introduction: https://15questions.net/interview/paul-flaherty-about-improvisation/page-1/
There’s also a fine account by Nick Metzger on Free Jazz Blog of Flaherty’s previous Relative Pitch solo release, Focused & Bewildered, from 2019.
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