Since then he has worked with everyone from Jim Hall to Madeleine Peyroux, from Maceo Parker to James Taylor. Goldings honed his craft as an improviser/arranger working as musical director in singer Jon Hendricks’s band. Born in Boston, he studied at New York’s Eastman School of Music and the New School for Social Research, with teachers including Ran Blake and Jaki Byard. “Saudades” marks Goldings’s debut on ECM, although he appeared on Carla Bley’s ECM-distributed WATT recording of 1999, “4 X 4”. Larry Goldings, in fact, had been approached by Tony Williams shortly before the drummer’s untimely death in 1997 (aged just 51) to form a new group in the spirit of Lifetime band, a further musical-historical rationale for Trio Beyond. John had been playing with Larry Goldings for a while, another admirer of Tony, and we both felt he was the perfect person to round out the trio based on Tony’s Lifetime band.” Among other things, his innovative propulsive rhythmic approach and his visionary concept of time and space had been a tremendous influence on us both. Jack DeJohnette: “The idea for this trio came out of conversations that John Scofield and I had regarding how important Tony Williams had been to us both musically and as a band leader. ![]() The rest of the material, composed and/or improvised by the trio members, includes Larry Goldings’s “As One”, which launches the sequence that includes Larry Young’s “Allah Be Praised” and the collective piece “Saudades” on CD 2, “Love In Blues” which flowers out of “I Fall In Love Too Easily”, is also a group improvisation. Trio Beyond also looks fleetingly at Larry Young’s “Unity” recording of 1965, an important pre-Lifetime statement (with Elvin Jones, Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw). “Pee Wee” is a piece Williams wrote for the Davis group, and recorded on “Sorcerer” in 1967 in the classic 60s Davis group with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter. The standard “I Fall In Love Too Easily” was also part of Miles’s book in the early 1960s, recorded on the “Seven Steps” album and, again, two years later on the “Plugged Nickel” sessions. “Seven Steps To Heaven” was one of the first pieces that the then 17-year-old Williams played with the great trumpeter, recording it on the album of the same name in 1963 and, soon afterwards, on several live discs (“Miles In St Louis”, “Four and More”). However, in rounding out this portrait, DeJohnette, Scofield and Goldings also retrace the path of Tony Williams, going back to his early days with Miles Davis. Thus “Emergency” and “Spectrum” are drawn from Lifetime’s first disc, while Coltrane’s “Big Nick” and Larry Young’s “Allah Be Praised” were part of the repertoire on the follow-up “Turn It Over”. Trio Beyond echoes the instrumental format – organ/guitar/drums – of Lifetime, as Larry Goldings, John Scofield and Jack DeJohnette revisit material once played by Larry Young, John McLaughlin and Tony Williams. ![]() ![]() Only “Bitches Brew”, which paved the way for diverse progressive jazz-funk hybrids, was as highly regarded by players at the time. Although jazz critics comprehended Lifetime’s achievement only retrospectively, the band’s confrontational cross-referencing of jazz improvisational fluency and rock dynamics was enormously influential amongst musicians. A blistering live set, recorded in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in 2004, with music originally presented under the rubric “Lifetime and Beyond: Celebrating Tony Williams.” Project initiator Jack DeJohnette replaced his good friend Tony Williams in the Miles Davis group in 1969, when Williams left to launch Lifetime, the explosive and short-lived group that had a powerful impact at the dawn of electric jazz.
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