Henry Grimes & Marzette Watts: The Call

Long before Henry Grimes became known as jazz's great Lazarus story, he was simply one of the most technically astonishing bassists working in New York City's' free jazz underground. Recorded on December 28, 1965, and issued by ESP-Disk in 1966, The Call stands as his debut as a leader, and it remains a document of quiet audacity rather than the raw energy so often associated with the label's catalog. Teaming with clarinetist Perry Robinson and drummer Tom Price, Grimes assembled a trio unlikely on paper yet remarkably cohesive on record.

What distinguishes The Call from its ESP contemporaries is restraint. Grimes does not use the session as a showcase for pyrotechnics. On "Fish Story" and the title track, he reveals a harmonic imagination well beyond his session-man reputation of the era. Robinson's dynamic clarinet, still a rare voice in this idiom, threads through the six group originals with an elliptical, almost conversational logic, closer in spirit to Jimmy Lyons than to the swing-era clarinetists one might expect from the instrument. Price holds the frame together without ever crowding it, content to color and contrast while giving the two lead voices room to breathe and respond to one another in real time.

"For Django," at over 11 minutes, is the emotional center of the record, unfolding patiently and rewarding close listening over background play. Grimes's introspective bowed- bass solo is particularly striking, adding another dimension to the track's spacious character. The closing pair, "The Call" and "Son Of Alfalfa," push furthest into abstraction without losing the thread of melody that runs beneath even the trio's most exploratory stretches. This is a record built for attentive ears rather than casual rotation, spacious where much of the era's free jazz favored density and force.

This reissue pairs the original trio session with three tracks recorded in December 1966 under saxophonist Marzette Watts's name, drawn from the separately released Marzette Watts and Company (ESP-Disk, 1968; reissued 2012). Grimes returns on bass alongside Clifford Thornton on cornet and trombone, Sonny Sharrock on guitar, Byard Lancaster on alto saxophone and flute, Karl Berger on vibraphone, Juney Booth on bass and J.C. Moses on drums. The contrast is stark. Where the trio material moves with patience and restraint, the Watts tracks push toward denser, more collective improvisation, with the additional musicians broadening the music's palette and intensity. The session offers a useful bridge to where Grimes's career was headed before it stalled out entirely by decade's end. Subsequent reissues have benefited from sonic restoration and remastering, giving later pressings a cleaner presentation of the original sessions without altering their character.

Grimes would vanish from the music world entirely by the late 1960s, his bass damaged beyond affordable repair and his name so absent from stages that some reference books listed him as deceased. He spent three decades in Los Angeles doing custodial and construction work until a social worker named Marshall Marrotte tracked him down in 2002. Given a bass by fellow musician William Parker, Grimes staged one of the most remarkable comebacks in jazz history, touring and recording prolifically for fifteen years before Parkinson's disease ended his playing in 2018. He died on April 15, 2020, at 84, of complications from COVID-19.