Various Artists: John Sinclair Presents Detroit Artists Workshop

Valuable as both a curated chronicle of jazz history and as high-grade music, John Sinclair Presents Detroit Artists Workshop: Community, Jazz And Art In The Motor City 1965—1981 comprises around 70 minutes of live recordings by some of Detroit's finest sons along with an informative 24-page booklet. Among the musicians are trumpeters Donald Byrd and Charles Moore, reeds player Bennie Maupin and, resident in the city in the mid 1960s, pianist Stanley Cowell.

The backstory: The Artists Workshop was founded in 1964 by a collective of radical musicians, poets and artists including Moore and jazz aficionado, poet and community activist John Sinclair. Moore is on the left in the cover shot, Sinclair on the right. The workshop was a self-help organisation, funded by the members of a collective, and its mission was to foster artistic expression independent of any commercial or funding entanglements, and then to bring the results to community audiences. It flourished for around seventeen years. Such was its collective energy that it was galvanised rather than weakened by Sinclair's jailing in 1969 on a ten-year sentence imposed for offering an undercover police officer a couple of joints. (The severity of the sentence provoked an international outcry which led to Sinclair being freed in December 1971.)

In 2022, Sinclair is still a countercultural force, but Byrd, Moore and Cowell, along with other musicians featured on the album, have passed. Happily, Bennie Maupin is still with us and his one track on Detroit Artists Workshop is a corker. The 08:52 performance of "Water Torture," recorded at World Stage with his quartet in 1981, is superior to the versions heard on Herbie Hancock's Crossings (Warners, 1972) and Maupin's own Slow Traffic To The Right (Verve, 1977). It starts and finishes with a heavy jazz-funk theme statements, with Maupin between times taking his tenor saxophone far into freeform territory.

Other highpoints in a consistently fine album include Donald Byrd's "Cristo Redentor" and "Blackjack," recorded at Orchestra Hall in 1978, and three tracks from the Detroit Contemporary 4, comprising Charles Moore, Stanley Cowell (in one of his earliest recorded performances), bassist John Dana and drummer Danny Spencer, recorded at Wayne State University in 1965. The quartet's personnel is the only complete lineup given in the 24-page liner booklet. It is a shame Maupin was not asked about the members his quartet, but perhaps he was and can no longer remember. The booklet is otherwise excellent though, and the disc's audio quality is surprisingly good.

An important release. File next to the 2 x CD set Message From The Tribe: The Complete Edition (Tribe, 2020), an anthology of recordings from the early and mid 1970s made by another Detroit collective, the Phil Ranelin and Wendell Harrison led Tribe.

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