Sunny Murray: On Taking the Leap from One Reality to Another

Robert Levin

Contributor since 2010

Robert Levin is the author of "When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot."

Recent articles (7 total)

Published: July 18, 2010

"I was scared as hell. Finally they left and drove away and I ran over to Jeanne's place. Ornette [Coleman] was there. I asked them, 'Am I out of my nut? Is someone really trying to kill me? Jeanne said, 'Sunny, I'll tell you the truth, it could happen that way because this music is bothering a lot of people who don't want black people to play this way. The whole club scene will come down if this music really happens.' And Ornette said, 'Yeah, that's what's happening, man.' And I said, 'Oh shit, you shouldn't be saying this, you should be saying I was nuts or something.' And he said, 'Listen, those people paid me not to play for a whole year.'"

"I think I remember that..."

"Yeah. I stayed at Jeanne's until the sun came up. Then, dig this, when I went to Europe with a group I co-led with Albert [Ayler]—that was the 'Free Jazz' group, and Gary Peacock and Don Cherry was in it—a lot more strange things happened that I didn't understand. Like when I had gone to Europe a year earlier with Cecil as the leader, almost everything had been pretty cool. But with Albert and me it was different. Like, first of all, part of the tour was cancelled when Albert hit some promoter in the mouth over ten dollars. I always thought he hit the wrong cat. The cat he should have hit he was always smiling at. And like later, when we got ready to go home, I had to go to the embassy because I didn't have enough money.

"Everybody else in the band was cool. I didn't understand that shit—why was I the only one that was uptight? The embassy had to give me a transport ticket to go home. Another funny thing was like on the first tour, when I was playing with Cecil at the Montmartre in Copenhagen, one night this bartender went crazy. He started screaming and tearing up the bar. 'Stop the music. I cannot stand the music!' Then on this tour he comes back. Albert, who had played with us on the first tour, saw him and said, 'There's that dude.' And the dude came back and he said, shaking hands and very quiet, 'You have freed me.' He'd been in a home for almost a year."

"That's funny."

"But a lot of strange things. In Denmark, [the bebop drummer] Art Taylor, who's been living over there, told me we were chased to Europe by the business world. The tour was agreed upon by a lot of business cats just to get us out of the country. He said that anything could happen and to be careful. He said, 'Look what happened to Eric [Dolphy].' I said, 'Man, are you serious?' He said, 'Just watch yourself.' And I almost did get killed. See, I was getting strange vibrations all the time we was in Europe. We were very in tune with the spirits when the 'Free Jazz' group was over there—we were the most spiritual band in Europe at the time. Eric Dolphy, who'd come over earlier with [Charles] Mingus, had stayed in Europe to play with us, with the 'Free Jazz' group. He wanted to bust loose and really play free. But he died. Suddenly! Rumor was that he was poisoned."

"Eric. How old was he?"

"Thirty-six? Thirty-seven? Yeah, that set me off and I began to realize that a lot of people were doing things to me to hang me up. I started to get very nervous. It seemed like they was always doing something to me to stop me from the way I was playing. I was getting sick a lot—drugs, I'm serious, were being put in my drinks, and shit like that. Then, when the time came to go home, everybody split on me—Albert said, 'Bye,' and flew home. I was stranded and frightened. I was in a hotel room alone in a foreign country. The embassy said, 'Okay, we'll send you home on an army boat.' They told me what boat to catch.

"And this is how another attempt on my life came about. I had known a chick from the earlier tour, and she came up to me and invited me to stay at her home, which was sixty miles from Copenhagen. I said, 'I'm catching the boat tomorrow and I can't go that far.' She said, 'Don't catch that boat, catch the next one.' So I got a strange vibration and I didn't go home with this lady. I packed my bags and headed for the train station to take a train to the port where the boat was. When I got on the train, two cats got on right behind me. They were dressed very debonair. They kept watching me. Smiling at me. Every time I went to eat they followed me into the dining car—real foreign intrigue shit!

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