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Sunny Murray

James Marcellus Arthur "Sunny" Murray (born Idabel, Oklahoma in 1936) is one of the pioneers of the free jazz style of drumming.

Murray spent his youth in Philadelphia before moving to New York City where he began playing with Cecil Taylor: "We played for about a year, just practicing, studying - we went to workshops with Varèse, did a lot of creative things, just experimenting, without a job" He featured on the influential 1962 concerts in Denmark released as Nefertiti the Beautiful One Has Come.

He was among the first to forgo the drummer's traditional role as timekeeper in favor of purely textural playing. "Murray's aim was to free the soloist completely from the restrictions of time, and to do this he set up a continual hailstorm of percussion ... continuous ringing stickwork on the edge of the cymbals, an irregular staccato barrage on the snare, spasmodic bass drum punctuation and constant, but not metronomic, use of the sock-cymbal"

After his period with Taylor's group, Murray's influence continued as a core part of Albert Ayler's trio who recorded Spiritual Unity: "Sunny Murray and Albert Ayler did not merely break through bar lines, they abolished them altogether."

He later recorded under his own name for ESP-Disk and then when he moved to Europe for BYG Actuel.

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Album Review

Clifford Thornton: Ketchaoua Revisited + Arthur Jones Trio: Scorpio

Read "Ketchaoua Revisited + Arthur Jones Trio: Scorpio" reviewed by Alberto Bazzurro


Clifford Thornton è una di quelle figure rimaste fin troppo fra le pieghe della mitologia (sia detto ovviamente senza alcun intento ironico) free, e più ancora il pressoché sconosciuto altosassofonista Arthur Jones, l'uno nato a Philadelphia nel 1936 e scomparso nel 1989, l'altro nato a Cleveland nel 1940 e morto nel 1998. Questa preziosa ristampa, che allinea i dischi d'esordio in proprio di entrambi, editi a suo tempo dalla leggendaria Byg Actuel, l'uno, Ketchaoua, nel 1969, l'altro, Scorpio, due anni ...

Album Review

Albert Ayler: Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited

Read "Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited" reviewed by Giuseppe Segala


Tra gli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta del Novecento, una vorticosa accelerazione spinse le arti e alimentò la creatività verso esplorazioni audaci, esprimendo personalità e individualità di valore universale. Autentico visionario, tra urlo febbrile e tenera carezza, tra ruvida e profonda adesione alle radici afroamericane e tensione verso il futuro, tra riferimenti tematici trasfigurati, inni religiosi, marce bandistiche e dense campiture di puro suono che hanno la forza dell'espressionismo astratto, Albert Ayler attraversò come una meteora il firmamento della musica neroamericana, ...

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Album Review

Albert Ayler: More Lost Performances Revisited

Read "More Lost Performances Revisited" reviewed by Chris May


A state-of-the-art sonic restoration of obscure but historically important Albert Ayler material by Switzerland's ezz-thetics label, which with its parent label, Hat Hut, has been creating an audiophile archive of Ayler recordings with the support of his estate since 1978. All too often, “more" in an album title means “Beware: barrel scraping in progress." Not in this case. More Lost Performances Revisited is primetime Ayler. The disc draws from three sources over a five-year timespan. The earliest ...

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Album Review

Albert Ayler: Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited

Read "Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited" reviewed by Chris May


This landmark reissue contains consummately remastered cuts of the killer (among killers) track from Albert Ayler's relatively unknown My Name Is Albert Ayler (Debut 1964) plus the justly celebrated Spiritual Unity (ESP-Disk, 1965) in its entirety. Summertime To Spiritual Unity Revisited starts with “Summertime" from the 1964 album. In his survey The Jazz Standards (Oxford University Press, 2012), Ted Gioia writes that over 400 jazz covers of George and Ira Gershwin's song were recorded in the 1950s ...

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Album Review

Albert Ayler: New York Eye and Ear Control Revisited

Read "New York Eye and Ear Control Revisited" reviewed by Mark Corroto


The backstory of New York Ear and Eye Control is a significant factor in the music and the direction free jazz took in the 1960s. Filmmaker Michael Snow commissioned Albert Ayler's trio with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray to record a thirty-minute soundtrack for a movie, “Walking Woman," he had yet to film. As explained in the liner notes, he “wanted to buy a half hour of music." Also invited to the session were trumpeter & cornetist Don ...

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Album Review

Albert Ayler: New York Eye And Ear Control Revisited

Read "New York Eye And Ear Control Revisited" reviewed by Chris May


The development of so-called free jazz in New York during the first half of the 1960s was topped and tailed by three landmark recordings: Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (Atlantic, 1961), John Coltrane's Ascension (Impulse, 1966) and Albert Ayler's New York Eye And Ear Control (ESP, 1966). Of the three discs, only New York Eye And Ear Control broke away completely from jazz's normative structure of theme/solos/theme. Commissioned as an art-film soundtrack, Ayler's recording was also the product of an altogether ...

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Album Review

Albert Ayler Quartet with Don Cherry: European Recordings Autumn 1964 Revisited

Read "European Recordings Autumn 1964 Revisited" reviewed by Chris May


Many attempts have been made to locate the source of tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler's muse in American history and culture. Among the less outlandish suggestions are the field hollers of slaves toiling on Southern plantations and the Pentecostal church's tradition of talking in tongues. Given the importance Ayler's parents placed on him attending church as a child, and his own abiding interest in spiritual matters, talking in tongues could well figure. The most likely source, however, yet the one most ...

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Recording

Sunny Murray Meets Sonic Liberation Front on High Two CD

Sunny Murray Meets Sonic Liberation Front on High Two CD

Source: Gapplegate Music Review by Grego Edwards

The student of the music we call jazz at some point must come to terms with the impact of the avant-garde from the '60s onwards. Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, later John Coltrane, and the musicians who associated with him brought about a vast infusion of musical vocabulary and ways of speaking into improvisational practice. Looking back we can see that regardless of the rhetoric let lose in the years that followed, the innovations of these important artists have ...

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Recording

Sunny Murray in Duet with Sabir Mateen: "We Are Not at the Opera," 1998

Sunny Murray in Duet with Sabir Mateen: "We Are Not at the Opera," 1998

Source: Gapplegate Music Review by Grego Edwards

Many if not most of the readers of this blog will know that drummer Sunny Murray is the godfather of “free" drumming. He played with critically important improvisers of the new thing musical explosion in the early sixties (like Ayler, Taylor) and he developed a uniquely effective “freetime" style, one that rarely stated an overt pulse, but proffered a running commentary and complement to the solos and bass punctuations. That's textbook fact. But listen to him in an especially exposed ...

192

Recording

Sonic Liberation Front Meets Sunny Murray (High Two, 2011)

Sonic Liberation Front Meets Sunny Murray (High Two, 2011)

Source: Music and More by Tim Niland

Drummer Sunny Murray is a legend in avant-garde jazz circles, performing with everyone from Albert Ayler to Cecil Taylor, as well as recording several sessions as a leader. An accidental phone call led him to get together with the Philadelphia based ensemble Sonic Liberation Front, and it was a fortuitous meeting for all concerned.

This disc is split between two sessions, the first half from a studio meeting in 2008, and then the second half of the disc was recorded ...

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Performance / Tour

Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet + Sunny Murray Factor in Philadelphia

Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet + Sunny Murray Factor in Philadelphia

Source: All About Jazz

Ars Nova Workshop presents: Thursday, October 20 | 8pm TAYLOR HO BYNUM SEXTET with Taylor Ho Bynum, cornet Matt Bauder, tenor sax/clarinet Mary Halvorson, guitar Evan O'Reilly, guitar Jessica Pavone, viola/electric bass Tomas Fujiwara, drums “He is one of those once-in-a-lifetime talents who can play everything and always sound like himself. Remarkable technique, inventiveness, energy...Bynum can really 'talk' with that horn of his and ...

Sonic Liberation Front
band / ensemble / orchestra
Ziv Taubenfeld
clarinet, bass

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