1970 · Album
An Even Break (Never Give A Sucker)
Recorded November 1969, Paris · BYG Actuel · Produced by Not specified in available sources
Malachi Favors Anchors Murray's Spiritual Free Jazz
Less than half an hour, four performances of pure free jazz improvisation held together by one bassist's unflinching presence.
Bassist Malachi Favors is the spine of this record. While Sunny Murray's drumming drives the session forward with his particular brand of spiritual free jazz intensity, it's Favors who gives the music its moorings. In free jazz, especially when recorded live or live-to-tape like this, the bass player either becomes an anchor or gets swept away entirely. Favors does neither—he holds the center without dragging the music backward, a difficult balance that saxophonists Byard Lancaster and Kenneth Terroade depend on to stretch their own improvisations across these four mid-length pieces.
The album runs less than thirty minutes, which tells you something about the stakes here. This was not a band in any traditional sense, just four musicians brought together in a Paris studio in November 1969, feeling their way through free jazz conversation. The rough edges are audible, which AllMusic reviewer Thom Jurek noted honestly—there's no polish, no safety net. What holds it together is Favors's ability to respond, to provide shape without imposing it. His work here represents what the best free jazz bass playing could do in that moment: listen harder than anyone else and make space for others to move.
Murray would go on to record more extensively, but The Penguin Guide to Jazz called this "Murray's finest hour of the fast-disappearing '60s," and much of what makes that judgment stick is Favors's contribution. For someone curious about free jazz improvisation from this era, this is a solid entry point—short enough to absorb in one sitting, focused enough to hear what each musician is actually doing.
