2010 · Album
Boom Boom Cat
Recorded September 2009, The Vortex, London · Foghorn Records · Personnel: [Sunny Murray] (drums), [Tony Bevan] (saxophone), [John Edwards] (bass)
Murray's Hour-Long Pulse at The Vortex
Murray's slow-burn hi-hat chomp sings out as strongly as Bevan's horns, shaking you like a rag doll.
September 2009 at The Vortex in London: Sunny Murray on drums, Tony Bevan on saxophone, John Edwards on bass. Three musicians, one room, and what emerged was an hour-long title track built on a single hypnotic foundation — Murray's trademark hi-hat pattern, steady and relentless, the kind of thing only a drummer could sustain without it wearing thin. The setup was deliberately spare: no piano, no chords underneath, just rhythm and the two horns dancing around it.
Murray was 73 by then, decades into a career that had always moved against the grain. His approach to timekeeping had never been conventional, and here it becomes almost meditative. Bevan's saxophone roars and rasps, finding unexpected pockets of melody within the texture Murray creates. Edwards locks in on bass, scrambling for space and texture rather than walking a line. Stewart Lee, writing for The Times, heard something unexpected in the pairing: career-high intensity from all three, the British players pushing Murray to places he hadn't necessarily reached before, or at least not in this particular configuration.
The album has a celebratory feel to it, less like hard-won abstraction and more like three musicians genuinely enjoying the friction between constraint and freedom. For listeners accustomed to Murray's earlier free-jazz work, this isn't a departure so much as a refinement—proof that at that stage of his life, he could still extract everything from the simplest possible setup.
