Milford Graves Featured in Thurston Moore’s NOW JAZZ NOW
Bennington College Faculty Emeritus Milford Graves is featured in NOW JAZZ NOW, a new book co-authored by music writer Byron Coley, baritone saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, and iconic Sonic Youth guitarist/singer Thurston Moore.
Jazz Times offers an excerpt from the book about Graves's 1977 album Bäbi:
"Professor Milford Graves was, without a moment’s doubt, the perennial figure of what free jazz may very well BE — a purely African American cry coming out of not only jazz but all of African expression. His voice, through percussion and ululation, is the primal and integral engagement in a music beholden to equally value technique and mysticism.
"The trio of Graves, with saxophonists Arthur Doyle and Hugh Glover, would announce themselves so incredibly in the zone of fire music that their performances are as close to transubstantiation that a participant could ever hope to experience. Surely the audience at the WBAI-FM/Free Music Store event on Saturday, 20 March 1976, must have felt thus, as when listening to the recording there is a sense of communal energy and awe as palpable on tape as it must have been in the room. Maybe that same sense of cosmic nowness was felt across town at CBGB that very same night when a nascent Television (forebears of Punk) were playing, but what that can only tell us is that New York City was LIT UP this particular evening."