Walt Dickerson

Philadelphia vibraphonist Dickerson died last year, after a career that saw him heralded as a 1960s avant-garde innovator and then so neglected that he dropped out from 1965-75, and appeared only fitfully thereafter. But Dickerson (whose partners included John Coltrane, Sun Ra and Andrew Hill) was an astonishing vibraphonist who eschewed the instrument's traditionally soft-lights glow in favour of a brittle, woody sound, and who could improvise such fast melodies that his mallets seemed barely to be making contact. There are just two long tracks on this 1975 set, with Wilbur Ware on bass and Andrew Cyrille on drums. The leader opens the first with a seven-minute meditation, mixing soft-struck reveries with rushing runs, before Ware's bass adds rolling interjections over Cyrille's rattlesnake noises, and the piece steadily changes in mood as the drums gather to a storm. The title track is a wistfully simple theme that goes from Dickerson's mercurial touch over a low percussion rumble to a freewheeling three-way jam. It's an unadorned venture of monastic purity, but if this were the unsung Dickerson's only epitaph, it would be a triumphant one. - John Fordham, The Guardian.