Noah Howard - Patterns

Action-painting derived, spiritually inclined free jazz masterclass from the visionary Noah Howard, first released on his own label in 1973 and now back in print again thanks to Aguirre's ever-probing tendrils. Howard labeled his kind of approach to playing as 'sound paintings', and that's a phrase that does a lot of the heavy lifting when getting a grip on Patterns' free-form impressionism. On first needledrop, you'd be forgiven for thinking you've walked in halfway through, greeted by the rumble of something already occurring, as if suddenly tuning into an infinite hidden frequency (and aren't the best paintings often experienced interstitially, caught between where their creator left them and where the audience picks them up? Show, don't tell). And that frequency is an overtly political one, too, made in part by African exiles expressing freedoms not readily available elsewhere (note Patterns was recorded in the Netherlands, where Howard had relocated in an attempt to escape the more oppressive racial tensions of the US), a context that also lends an compellingly spiritual, defiant quality to their improvisations. Heavy music certainly, necessarily radical in form and function too, though unusually joyous also, a celebration of free, untethered thinking with a worldly view.