Art Edmaiston / Chad Fowler: Memphis Mandala

We often approach recordings as if they were live performances: fully present in the moment, deeply engaged, and then rarely revisited. Like a concert, the sounds drift into the ether, lingering in memory and, perhaps, subtly reshaping the listener's internal landscape.

Yet Memphis Mandala, the 2024 live collaboration between saxophonists Art Edmaiston and Chad Fowler, resists that pattern. Though comfortably situated under the free jazz rubric, this is a recording that rewards, and arguably demands, repeated listening. Each return reveals new details, new relationships, new currents within the collective flow.

Edmaiston, a Memphis fixture since 1990, brings a musical vocabulary forged well beyond the avant-garde. His work at B.B. King's Blues Club and performances with artists spanning Bobby Blue Bland, Little Feat, the Allman Brothers Band and Galactic to Snoop Dogg have instilled a blues-grounded fluency that proves central here. The session itself emerged from an intense year of study with master percussionist Ra Kalam Bob Moses, whose presence, alongside longtime collaborator Damon Smith on bass, anchors the performance. Completing the ensemble are drummer Clifford "Pee Wee" Jackson and Mahakala Music founder Fowler.

What distinguishes Memphis Mandala is not simply its instrumentation, but its sensibility. Edmaiston's blues-inflected phrasing and the ensemble's unmistakable Southern intonation lend the improvisations a sense of warmth and inevitability. The music's primary engine is conversation. From the opening "Open The Gates," Edmaiston's unadorned tenor engages in a probing dialogue with percussion, recalling the searching elasticity of John Coltrane and Elvin Jones without slipping into imitation. As the full ensemble enters, that conversational ethos expands rather than dissipates.

Smith's bass functions as both mediator and provocateur, its lines continuously shaping the ensemble's direction. Moses and Jackson generate a layered percussive field with bells, cymbals, drums and vocalizations that are texturally rich yet never congested. Fowler's contributions on stritch and flute widen the sonic palette, creating striking contrasts with Edmaiston's tenor and soprano saxophones.

Across the performance is an audible undercurrent of affirmation. Even at its most abstract, the music carries an inherent sense of rejoicing, an impression not imposed by structure, but arising organically from the ensemble's interplay

This is free jazz not as rupture, but as communion.

And that, perhaps, explains why this recording invites return rather than farewell. Like a memorable live performance, it lingers. Unlike one, it continues to evolve with each listening, its conversations still unfolding, its resonance still deepening.