1975 · Album
Things to Come From Those Now Gone
Recorded 1975 · Delmark · Produced by Not specified in verified sources
Muhal Richard Abrams in the middle of the decade
A record that refuses to settle, moving between chamber ballads and hard bop with genuine restlessness.
By 1975, Muhal Richard Abrams had already established himself as a bandleader and composer willing to move in multiple directions at once. Things to Come from Those Now Gone captures him working with an open roster — Wallace McMillan, Edwin Daugherty, Richard Brown, Emanuel Cranshaw, Reggie Willis, Rufus Reid, Steve McCall, and Wilbur Campbell, with vocals from Ella Jackson — each bringing different textures into seven compositions. The session approach itself reflects Abrams' philosophy: vary the personnel, vary the setting, see what emerges. Some combinations click immediately. Others feel like controlled experiments, which is fine; not every take needs to land the same way.
The music here ranges openly — chamber pieces sit alongside hard bop moves, electronics drift in, there's even mock opera. The Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide caught it right: this album runs the gamut. That lack of tight focus bothered some listeners. AllMusic reviewer Brian Olewnick heard it as "a hodgepodge" that swung from "weirdly bad to the astonishingly beautiful." Fair enough. But the Penguin Guide to Jazz understood what Abrams was after: he believed tradition and advancement weren't opposites. He was proving it track by track.
This is solidly middle-period Abrams — not his introduction to the scene, not a late career statement, but a working musician testing ideas within the AACM spirit of collective exploration. It's for listeners who want to follow Abrams into his thinking rather than settle for a single mood or sound. The album doesn't resolve itself neatly, and that's intentional.
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