2005 · Album
Perles Noires Vol. II
Recorded 2002–2004 at various locations · Eremite Records · Personnel: [Sunny Murray] (drums), [Sabir Mateen] (saxophone), [Oluyemi Thomas] (saxophone, bass clarinet), [John Blum] (piano)
Murray's Sharpened Edge in the Twilight Years
Sunny Murray proves he can still crash with abandon while sharpening his idiosyncratic musicality to surprisingly fine points.
By 2004, Sunny Murray had spent four decades refining a drumming vocabulary most listeners found bewildering or dismissive. Perles Noires Vol. II arrives as vindication—not a reinvention, but a clarification of what he'd always been doing. Recorded across the early 2000s and released by Eremite Records in 2005, this live set pairs Murray with Sabir Mateen on saxophone, Oluyemi Thomas on saxophone and bass clarinet, and John Blum on piano. The personnel shift from Volume 1 matters: where the first volume leaned on Dave Burrell's piano weight and Alan Silva's anchoring bass, Vol. II feels looser, more conversational, the rhythm section less a foundation and more a negotiation.
Murray's sound—that breaking glass aesthetic Bill Shoemaker invoked—is still there, but the musicians around him have learned how to listen. Mateen's saxophone threads through Murray's clatter without fighting it. Thomas adds bass clarinet weight that complicates rather than stabilizes. Blum doesn't compete; he orbits. This is Murray late in his powers, still uncompromising, still uninterested in swing-era manners, but no longer needing to prove anything to skeptics. He plays quietly when the moment asks for it, maintaining that constant threat Penguin Guide critics identified, the sense that controlled chaos sits one brush stroke away.
For anyone who dismissed Murray as mere noise, Vol. II is instructive—not as a concession to taste, but as evidence that originality, once earned, doesn't dim. His peers moved toward accessibility or tradition. Murray doubled down on what made him difficult, and at seventy-something, surrounded by younger players willing to meet him there, the payoff is audible.
