Before Sunny Murray, the drummer's job was pretty clear: hold it together, keep the time, give everyone else a foundation to work from. Murray decided that was the wrong way to think about it. Playing with Cecil Taylor in New York in the early 1960s, he started treating the drum kit less like a clock and more like a weather system — something that built pressure, shifted direction, responded to what the other players were doing rather than leading them in circles. This wasn't sloppiness. It took serious control to play that freely and still make it feel like music rather than noise.

His records with Albert Ayler are probably the best entry point if you've never heard him before. Spiritual Unity (1964) is one of those albums that sounds genuinely strange the first time, even if you've heard a lot of avant-garde music. Murray's drumming underneath Ayler's keening saxophone isn't accompanying in any traditional sense — it's more like another voice in the room, pushing and pulling, occasionally surging forward, never quite landing where you expect. Gary Peacock holds the bass line together as best anyone can while Murray and Ayler orbit each other. It shouldn't work as well as it does.

Murray led his own dates too, and they're worth tracking down. His records for the BYG Actuel label, made in Paris in the late 1960s, capture him leading groups of serious players through extended collective improvisation. The Paris period matters because it gave a lot of African American avant-garde musicians space to work that they weren't always getting back home — better club opportunities, more recording access, audiences who took the music seriously. Murray made the most of it, recording prolifically and playing with other expats who'd made the same trip.

He stayed active and committed to free playing across decades when the music fell in and out of fashion. Some drummers who came up in that first wave of free jazz eventually softened their approach or moved toward more accessible contexts. Murray mostly didn't. That stubbornness — or maybe just consistency — meant he never had a mainstream commercial moment, but it also meant his late recordings sound of a piece with his early ones. He knew what he was doing and he kept doing it.

If you're coming to Murray fresh, don't expect to tap your foot. That's genuinely not the point. Listen for how the texture of the drumming shifts, how he creates tension without a steady beat, how the whole ensemble ends up breathing together in a way that's completely unlike swinging in any conventional sense. Give it a few minutes before you decide it's not for you — the music tends to open up once you stop waiting for it to settle into something familiar.