Kali Fasteau

by Laurence Donohue-Greene

G21 Jazz & Improv Critic

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In a world of music full of borders, sections, categories, and genres, it's always a relief to hear sounds created by masterful musicians that refuse to be so conveniently compartmentalized. Whether an unusual hybrid or fusion of more than one type of music (i.e. jazz rock, soul jazz, etc.), or an amalgamation of many music forms in general, it's a blessing to revert to Duke Ellington's and Louis Armstrong's timeless advise for two main music categories--good or bad.

Zusaan Kali Fasteau certainly falls into the former of these two categories. "Good music," Fasteau personally and justly reveals, "is a source of pleasure, inspiration, energy, and good health." I'm sure she'd receive no argument from Duke or Louis, -- or me for that matter. Fasteau uniquely welds together a music of tones, colors, textures, and sounds all her own.

She has recorded over a dozen albums as either leader or co-leader from the early 1970s to present day, successfully fusing the musics of jazz with folk songs from the many countries she has visited. These include many cities in America, Italy, Nepal, Morocco, Senegal, Congo, Holland, France, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Greece, Haiti, India, and Turkey. Her "world music", or better yet music of the world, is a genuinely spiritual one. It seems "beyond category", if I may once again quote the Duke.

Fasteau is a master of many instruments and has collaborated with many masters of the various music worlds she has traveled. She easily explores the so-called avant-garde and free jazz realms. She can regularly be heard on soprano saxophone, on which she has developed a fully personal sound over the course of her career. She is also proficient on cello, piano, tympani, and drum kit. In addition, she is an expert of various flutes from around the world, including the Moroccan end-blown reed flute known as the nai, the Bulgarian/Balkan kaval, and the Japanese bamboo shakuhachi flute. It's not uncommon to hear her on other exotic instruments, including the Egyptian mizmar, the Chinese Mouth organ known as the sheng, the sanza, jew's harp, conch shells, berimbau, and various other odd percussion and indigenous reed instruments which she has gathered during her world travels over the course of the last three to four decades.

Her vocal work lies somewhere between a female rendition of the Yoruban and Pygmy influenced deep throated yodel work and glossolalia of the late great Leon Thomas in a speaking-in-tongues type manner mixed with a haunting hint of Sheila Jordan's vocalese and the unique high pitched Moog synthezier and keyboard frequency sounds created by Sun Ra in his infamous Arkestra.

As far as the company she has kept over the course of the last three to four decades, Fasteau has performed and/or recorded with many individuals and pioneers of free jazz such as composer/bandleader/keyboardist-Sun Ra, soprano saxophonist and trumpeter Joe McPhee, tenor saxophonists Archie Shepp and Dewey Redman, alto saxophonists Noah Howard and Oliver Lake, percussionists- Hamid Drake, Rashid Ali, Badal Roy, and Warren Smith, bassists Bob Cunningham and William Parker, pianists Bobby Few and Sonelius Smith, and her music and life partner for many years the late Donald Rafael Garrett.

Garrett himself was one of the few unheralded sidemen who played and recorded frequently with John Coltrane during Trane's latter years. He can be heard on Coltrane's Impulse recordings from the mid 1960s, including "Om," "Kulu Se Mama," and "Live In Seattle."

Known primarily for his work on the acoustic bass and bass clarinet, Garrett collaborated with Fasteau on several now hard to find sessions as the two person group, Sea Ensemble. They recorded one of the last handful of releases for the 1960s and 1970s groundbreaking ESP label, entitled "We Move Together" (1974). Though several mid 1960s ESP sessions are slowly being re-issued of late (including Paul Bley's "Closer," Sun Ra's "Nothing Is," and Milford Graves' "Percussion Ensemble"), Fasteau and company still patiently await the re-availability of one of the true great "world" music albums.

Two of their recorded collaborations, however, have recently been re-issued as a two CD set under Fasteau's Flying Note record label which is entitled "Memoirs Of A Dream." The first of the two discs includes two approximately 15 minute long tracks which feature each player on an array of instruments.

The second disc (a live concert session from 1977, performed in Ankara, Turkey) breaks things up into more varied "taster" plates, if you will, of twelve tracks ranging from several two minute jazz and world tinged ditties to more extended tracks in the ten and eleven minute range.

The first track, "Wind and Water" sets the scene for a varied listening experience -- from Yusef Lateef-like flute work from Fasteau, to a brief but convincing Dizzy Gillespie/James Moody-like bop scat from Garrett. The piano vamp towards the end of the piece is reminiscent of what Alice Coltrane was renowned for during the early 1970s. The final track of this second CD, "So Much Love", suggests what one might hear if Duke Ellington's "Black & Tan Fantasy" were to have met Ravel's "Bolero", as both Garrett and Fasteau are featured on clarinets. And in the interim, you can only let their sounds and off-the-cuff improvisations take you away, altogether forgetting about the not-so-up-to-standard audio fidelity.

Fasteau's two most recent recordings, "Vivid" (2001) and "Comraderie" (1998), each allow the listener glimpses into some very unique vibrations that may leave one with the impression of unfinished or incomplete thoughts consisting of sounds that take you half the way to a place you've never been. This is due to the fact that there are, unfortunately, several abrupt and truncated endings to tunes, awkward fades, and some rough editing spots. Maybe the destination and end is irrelevant -- it's the actual beginning of the journey towards a new direction that is the novelty of Fasteau and company's departure. The collective sounds are the impetus for you to use your own imagination to think of what stories you may, because with the introduction of each new track, the starting point is altogether a different place. Think of where they could have possibly landed when all was said and done in the studio and, primarily, live in concert. All the tracks heard on "Vivid" were recorded live between 1998 and 1999 at three separate locations (in the United States and Canada) and half of the tracks on "Comraderie" were recorded live in New York City, alternating track to track with studio sessions done seven months earlier in 1997.

Vivid is literally a lesson of color in sound, with each track title being a color associated by its correlating sound in Fasteau's mind and ears, not to mention the listeners'. After hitting "Play", you'll feel like you just popped in a Grateful Dead bootleg with the sudden (versus subtly and professionally faded in) entrance of audience ambience, clapping, and cheering before Fasteau and Joe McPhee (both on soprano saxophones) enter, jump-starting into a frenetic definition in sound of the first tone poem of color, "Orange". Thoughts of Pharoah Sanders' frequent sky-soaring collaborations with Coltrane immediately come to mind. Elsewhere through the spectrum of other colors on this disc, Sabir Mateen lends his reeds and winds (alto and tenor saxophones, as well as bamboo side flute), Hamid Drake and Ron McBee provide the percussion, and bassist William Parker convincingly serves as the closest imaginable extension of the ever creative Donald Rafael Garrett, providing a solid foundation for the unclassifiable music of the highest order and genuinely complementing Fasteau in her mission of music and inspiration.

With, once again, the varied use of instruments and collective instrumentation on her previous recording of Comraderie, the music is a unique journey from the first track "Blessings" to the fourteenth and final piece, "A Gift". The invocation of an opener is reminiscent of an early John Coltrane Blue Note recording of the Jerome Kern/Johnny Mercer standard, "I'm Old Fashioned" (from his 1957 Blue Train session). Fasteau puts more of a latter day Coltrane feel to the vibe, as if to say Coltrane would have sounded a bit more like this were he to have recorded this in his final years, or better yet, on this very day. "Here is perhaps where he would have gone with this," Fasteau may have thought while blowing those inspired runs. She decides to play it on soprano saxophone appropriately enough, as of course Coltrane really only began picking up the straight horn and experimenting on it after 1960 and especially within the last five years of his life on this earth. And speaking of latter day Coltrane (a period which many seem more difficult to acknowledge and absorb, especially in comparison to his earlier work with Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, and his first sessions as a leader for the labels of Blue Note, Prestige, and early Impulse albums), Fasteau offers several awe inspiring moments in her "Joyful Blues" paralleling a similar soul searching glimmer of Coltrane's original and unofficially first free jazz/avant-garde recording of Ascension (1965). It' s no wonder that her music shall forever be connected with Garrett and, consequently, with Coltrane's final few years of music and sound creativity on this planet. Though Garrett did not actually contribute to the Ascension recording, his prime collaborations with Coltrane in the recording studio was during that very same significant year.

The Coltrane connection doesn't stop there, as Fasteau has also utilized the great drummer and percussionist, Rashied Ali. Ali, of course, played with Coltrane's group featuring fellow drummer, Elvin Jones, before actually replacing Jones in Coltrane's final years of playing and recording, coincidentally (I think not) in 1965 (and right up until Trane's death in 1967.) Fasteau's Worlds Beyond Words (1989) is one of her great in-studio achievements and represents my own introduction into her unique world of music from which she has continually added on to her ever growing achievement in the enlightenment through music principle. The late critic extraordinaire, Robert Palmer, matter of factly stated in the liner notes of the album, "(Fasteau) indicates a direction Coltrane might well have explored had he lived longer.a fitting tribute to Coltrane's search for a transcendent all-embracing musical language." Need more be said? Have a listen.

And.keep your ears open to the music.

SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

KALI FASTEAU - Vivid (Flying Note) 2001
ZUSAAN KALI FASTEAU/DONALD RAFAEL GARRETT - Memories Of A Dream (Flying Note) 2000
KALI FASTEAU - Comraderie (Flying Note) 1998
ZUSAAN KALI FASTEAU - Sensual Hearing (Flying Note) 1997
ZUSAAN KALI FASTEAU/NOAH HOWARD/BOBBY FEW - Expatriate Kin (CIMP) 1997
ZUSAAN KALI FASTEAU - Prophecy (Flying Note) 1993
ZUSAAN KALI FASTEAU - Worlds Beyond Words (Flying Note) 1989
SEA ENSEMBLE - We Move Together (ESP) 1974