Steve Tintweiss And The Purple Why - Live In Tompkins Square Park 1967 (Inky Dot Media, 2025)

By Nick Ostrum

The first time I heard Steve Tintweiss was in college. I got my first album by Albert Ayler, Nuits de la Fondation Maeght, which captured one of his last performances, and was floored. Then I began flipping through the booklet and found the bassist. I did some quick Google searching and did not find much on him at the time. (This was a couple decades ago, after all.) So, apart from that recording, he would remain just a mysterious part of Ayler’s late band for me until quite recently. As it turns out, Tintweiss performed with everyone from Marzette Watts and Frank Writght to Burton Greene and Byard Lancaster. He just released sparingly.

Live in Tompkins Square Park 1967 captures Tintweiss and one iteration of his Purple Why (Jacques Coursi on trumpet, James DuBoise on trumpet, Perry Robinson on clarinet, Joel Peskin on saxophone, Randy Kaye on drums and piano, and Lawrence Cook on drums) performing the bassist’s compositions in the fabled (but also very real) Tompkins Square Park in 1967.

Live in Tompkins Square Park is very much of its time and in that late Ayler vein, though without the insistent melodicism. Rather, Tintweiss and company are exploring abstraction and dynamic range. Listen to the music box string duo five minutes into News Up/Down for one of softer moments. Then follow the piece through to the full-blast realization of the leitmotif. Or check out the modal lyricism of Space Rocks, a piece that starts with a slow folk march before opening into a collective but mostly contained funerary wail. Or the smokey jazz club romance of To Angel With Love, which is absolutely beautiful. As was common for the 1960s downtown scene, most of these pieces are bookended by short grooves and ditties that decompose into freer interactions that embrace the moment of creation and the probing quest to find the right rhythm or combination of looping horns or textures. Through all the sparring that reeds and winds do, the propulsion comes from the relentless drive of Kaye and Cook paired on percussion, and Tintweiss, himself.

Now to the recording. It is somewhat raw but it works. It works because the tapes are a half-century old and capture the band live and outdoors. For that it sounds great. It also works because the background hums, the imperfections in balance and other infidelities catch the live experience better than a crisp studio production would have. And this music is about that in-person excitement, which one hears in the chatter and genuine participation (singing, cheering, impromptu percussion, applause) of the audience.

Tintweiss will likely always be best known for his brief stint with Ayler. But recordings like this show he had sensibilities and vision that stand on their own.

Live in Tompkins Square Park is a limited release and can be purchased through Tintweiss’s own Inky Dot Media.