Noah Howard’s 1969 album The Black Ark begins with a bouncing bass and piano groove, before massed horns assemble loosely around a melody. It doesn’t last long, as a succession of solos lead the track “Domiabra” into increasingly free areas. However, nothing can prepare you for the extraordinary entrance of Arthur Doyle five minutes in, cutting short the trumpet solo with a devastating solo which builds on the more brutal developments made by the likes of John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders. In the liner notes to the Bo’Weavil reissue of the LP, Oren Ambarchi describes his playing on the track as “incoherent rage…a chaotic and murderous sound”. It is a truly shocking moment. As was his entrance to the Cafe Oto stage for this rare performance, but in a very different way. I’d seen clips of him playing with Sunny Murray or Han Bennink over the last decade, and he seemed in decent nick, so the suddenness of the decline in his physical condition was quite upsetting. Now without his dreadlocks and his teeth, he looked almost unrecognisable, and worryingly frail. During a particularly violent set of solo drumming by Steve Noble, Doyle could be seen bent double at the side of the stage, bent double, coughing feebly. When it was his turn to finally play, he shuffled uneasily to his seat, and we fell quiet to hear his spoken introduction. Which was, owing to the lack of teeth, entirely indecipherable. Read the rest of this review over at The Liminal.
1 comment
April 7, 2011 at 7:00 am
Geoff Winston
That is a moving review. Very difficult to write. Brave.
Geoff