1965 · Album
Percussion Ensemble
Recorded July 1965 · ESP-Disk · Personnel: Milford Graves (percussion), Sonny Morgan (percussion)
Two Drummers Dissolving Into Pure Sound
Remains just about the most brilliantly conceived and executed percussion album to date.
When Milford Graves and Sonny Morgan sat down in July 1965 to make Percussion Ensemble, the free jazz avant-garde was still finding its language. This record arrived on ESP-Disk in 1966 as a radical statement: two percussionists alone, no horns, no harmony instruments, nothing but the infinite possibilities of struck metal, wood, and skin. It was a cult record then and has remained one—the kind of thing that circulates among drummers and experimental musicians in whispered recommendations rather than mainstream recognition.
Val Wilmer, writing in her jazz criticism, called it "the most brilliantly conceived and executed percussion album to date," and that assessment has held up. What Graves and Morgan do here is methodical and almost meditative despite its intensity. They don't race or compete for space. Instead they build textures, trading between silence and dense polyrhythmic conversation, exploring what happens when you remove melody entirely and let rhythm become the whole subject. The two had already worked together on Montego Joe's records—Arriba! and Wild & Warm—but this is something else: stripped down, uncompromising, closer to what free jazz promised in its most experimental moments.
This isn't a starting point for Graves' work—those interested should begin with his later, more widely documented collaborations—but it's essential for anyone curious about how percussion broke free from its supporting role in jazz. Morgan died in 1976, which only deepens the historical weight of hearing two musicians at the height of their powers working in such deliberate, fearless conversation.
