1965 · Album
Sonny's Time Now
Recorded November 17, 1965, New York City · Jihad (original release) · Produced by LeRoi Jones
Albert Ayler's Shadow, Sunny Murray's Light
This music is very Ayler but more fractured and odd—the comparison is inevitable and unfair.
The first thing critics heard in Sonny's Time Now (1965) was Albert Ayler. Brandon Burke wrote for AllMusic that without Murray's name on the cover, the record could easily be mistaken for an Ayler session. Thurston Moore, listing it in his "Top Ten From The Free Jazz Underground" in Grand Royal magazine, made the same observation. The resemblance is real—the screaming horns, the spiritual intensity, the refusal to settle into conventional changes. But the comparison also obscures what Murray actually built here.
Murray's drumming is the thing that matters most. On a record where the horns push toward abstraction and the bass searches for ground that keeps shifting, the drums refuse to coddle anyone. Murray plays like he's inventing what the drums can do in free jazz in real time, which is partly because he was. He doesn't keep time in the old sense; he doesn't prop up the soloists. Instead, he enters conversations, starts arguments, pulls back, then reinvents the space entirely. That fractured quality Burke and Moore both heard—the sense that the music has no predetermined destination—comes directly from how Murray treats the kit.
This is Murray's first record as a leader, recorded in New York on November 17, 1965, and initially released on LeRoi Jones' Jihad label. It matters less as a starting point for understanding free jazz than as evidence of what happens when a drummer stops serving the band and starts shaping it from the inside out. If you come to this expecting another Ayler record, you'll hear the difference quickly.
