David Murray: Hope Scope

There should be no doubt of David Murray's position. Since the death of Eddie Harris, he is the finest tenor saxophonist in jazz, arguably one of the most prolific bandleaders in the modern age. He stands among a rare few reedmen working to redefine the sonic quality of their instrument. Looking back at any of Murray's work, he is defined by a highly ambitious, omnitraditional palette and a blaring emotionalism that brings his searing intellect right home. He is a swift-moving target, so quick, in fact, the listener does not realize it is them in his sights. Murray's Octet era, spanning from the early 1980s into the 2000s, is a particularly fertile period for his experiments. Hope Scope, originally released in 1991 and re-pressed in 2025 by the Black Saint label, introduces virtuoso pianist Dave Burrell into the fold, radically shifting what was already an acutely experimental sonic direction. Compared to former members Anthony Davis and Curtis Clark's avant-garde showmanship, Burrell is reserved and dramatically intentioned—a band as large as Murray's has rarely sounded so intimate than in "Ben," a winding drama of seeping blues dedicated to Ben Webster. The piano plods ahead with infectious drive, spurring the bombast of Murray and brassmen Hugh Ragin and Rasul Siddik into unique, foot-stomping arrangements.

One would be remiss not to sing the praises of trombonist Craig S. Harris as well. His composition "Same Places New Faces," a searing bop epic that, like Curtis Fuller's Messenger-era "Alamode," fully develops the instrument's potential for intense improvisations, as whirling and confounding as its more palatable brothers. Phrases drown in swampy excess only interrupted by carnivalesque squawks from Murray and company in deliberate aggravation.

If there is anything that defines a good bandleader, it is knowing where and when to poke. Murray fits the bill, of course; no performer goes unchallenged in any track, no matter how seemingly one-minded the composition—but he does not poke so much as stab. In the title track, a sweeping dungeon built from Wilber Morris's arachnid tremblings, certain sax licks may strike the listener as uncouth, like a dullard butting into an unrelated conversation. He is perhaps even rude, trailing the band into somewhat irrelevant tangents, threatening to thrust the whole sound overboard. In "Lester" and "Thabo" he acts as a constant destabilizing agent to an otherwise soulful ode, catapulting into strange ugliness, an ugliness that only improves the track by its contemplation. The octet is populated by the genre's most iconoclastic and intelligent musicians, those tempted to indulge in their harmonic experiments endlessly, like scientists cooped up in the lab for days on end. Murray injects the world back to the music, tempering these experiments with much-needed mystery and life. Even some three decades since the original release, the record still holds that noxious but necessary aroma, the vision of great study and great play in tandem.

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