"[I]t's one music from Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller," said the magnificent and ferocious tenor saxophonist, composer, and poet Glenn Spearman. "It's one continuous push to bring beauty in[to] a world of madness and frustration."

When Glenn Spearman played his horn he sounded more like Albert Ayler and Frank Wright than Louis Armstrong. But he unmistakably injected - into the most burning and intense style of "free jazz" playing - the sound of beauty. After his untimely death in 1998 at age 51, he leaves behind a body of work that bears witness to the continuing vitality and creative possibilities of the enormously passionate music first blazed in the Sixties by Ayler, Wright, John Coltrane ("the late Coltrane," that is), and Pharoah Sanders. Above all, his recordings bear witness to the tremendous abilities of a great and sadly overlooked musician.

Spearman studied with Wright, as well as with pianist Cecil Taylor - both titans of energy and musical intensity. He even studied orchestration with bassist Alan Silva, a Taylor and Sun Ra alumnus, and saxophone technique with Charles Tyler, a former colleague of Albert Ayler. Spearman fairly quickly became a composer to be reckoned with, as well as a formidable saxophonist: at his death he had completed over 500 compositions for tenor sax, more than 100 compositions for Duets, Trios, Quartets, and Quintets, and even four large orchestral works. A poet of note, he published The Musa-Physics: Poems and Equations.

Many say that his most powerful recordings came with the Glenn Spearman Double Trio, a melding of the aesthetic personas of Ornette and Albert Ayler, bringing together to two divergent strains of "free jazz." These discs - Mystery Project, Smokehouse, The Flame, and Blues for Falasha - present the melodicism of a noble and battle-scarred warrior, able to appreciate beauty all the more for the difficulty of winning through to the true and honest article. There are passages as furious as anything on Ascension or Spiritual Unity, but Spearman invests this kind of music with a joy that is not often associated with it - influenced perhaps by Ornette. This is music of great grandeur, distinguished not only by Spearman's huge and glorious tenor tone but also by the other performers. Larry Ochs on tenor and sopranino saxes is as huge as Spearman, and is able to keep up with him even at the highest speeds. Chris Brown is able not only to play Taylor's famous "eighty-eight tuned bongos" but also to underscore the lyrical low-volume passages with complete sincerity and an utter lack of derivativeness.

Toward the end of his life he made a series of recordings with Bob Rusch's CIMP label that seemed to suggest a new direction, especially a series of duets with bassist Dominic Duval called Working with the Elements. These are all important and valuable recordings - but even more tantalizing and tragic is the question of where they may have led.

But there is still the work he has left us, and for that all those who love and appreciate improvised music can be grateful. As he himself put it in a poem:

AFTER many multiplications
ALL IN GOD
REJOYCE, paint dancing the scene, as
blood flows to be in rain, reflective
absorbed continuance, MYTHOLOGY,
YOU YOURSELF, REALISM
PROCLAIMS the corners of the earth,
the exotic spirit BIRTHS things beyond
HER, yet the breath in BIRTH must be
confirmed as flow to with from beyond
to beyond, full liberty full freedom....

It's in his music: "full liberty full freedom."

"He was always feeding music to the band to take it to the next level. Life for Glenn was always deep and spiritual, and he was cliche-free, going for the heart of whatever he was doing." --Benjamin Lindgren

Familiar with Glenn Spearman's work? We welcome your comments.