JAZZ : ALBUM SPOTLIGHT : Pullen’s Legacy: Link to Native Americans

*** 1/2

DON PULLEN

“Sacred Common Ground”

Blue Note

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Don Pullen was one of a kind. A committed avant-gardist, he was equally adept at soul-jazz-style organ and straight-ahead mainstream. His death from cancer last year at the age of 53 deprived jazz of one of the music’s most ingenious and innovative talents. This posthumous release, recorded less than two months before the composer-pianist died, reveals that his skills were keen and his imagination resourceful up to the end.

By any evaluation, this is an extraordinary piece of work. It issues from a 1992 commission to compose a “jazz-Indian score” for a new dance work by choreographer Garth Fagan. “Sacred Common Ground,” a year and a half in the making, links Pullen’s African Brazilian Connection with the Chief Cliff Singers--seven drummer-singers from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai reservations in Elmo, Mont.--in a pioneering exploration of unexpected bonds between jazz and Native American music.

Jazz may interact well with a variety of musical cultures, but few have ever suggested an association with the creative expression of Native Americans.

Few, that is, except Pullen, who found a connection that has less to do with specific musical techniques than it does with a kind of joint emotional and spiritual constancy. His conjunctions, both compositionally and improvisationally, find intersections between the rhythmic flow and spontaneity of jazz and the penetrating chants and insistent percussion of Native America.

The mortar that firmly binds everything is Pullen’s own playing. Warm and lyrical passages in segments such as “Common Ground” and “River Song” are tranquil and pensive without sacrificing emotional intensity. In more vigorous sections he erupts with furiously eloquent clusters of sound and rhythm reminiscent of his avant-garde improvisations of the ‘60s.

Pullen’s adventurous lead influences the other players to expand their creative envelopes. On the climactic “Message in Smoke,” the jazz musicians and the Chief Cliff Singers join together in an astonishing collective utterance that completely transcends traditional definitions of style and manner.

Pullen did not survive to participate in the full staging of “Sacred Common Ground,” but the life and spirit he invested in the work are omnipresent in this mesmerizing recording.