Product Description

His second album from 1969, "Young at Heart" is a solo piano free improvisation (30 min.), while "Wise in Time" is a quintet w. The first recording of Henry Threadgill, also feat. Leo Smith, Lester Lashley & Thurman Barker.

Review

Though AACM patriarch Abrams had already recorded with MJT+3 and had been leading the Experimental Band since 1961, this 1969 recording offers his first piano solo on wax, and it's the first record to expose Threadgill. Wise In Time spotlights Abrams' working quintet with Barker, Lashley (bass only), Leo Smith on trumpet and flugel... springing up in a matrix of unpulsed, open improvising, the whole-note theme floats over a burning tempo, and Threadgill blows an extended alto solo using equal parts logic and fire - a sculpture built out of blue flames. Abrams 30-minute solo (Young At Heart) is lyrical, impressionistic, shifting from bursts of cluster and clamor or stride and swings back to the dominant mood of contemplation and resolution. (FIVE STARS) --John Corbett, Down Beat
Young At Heart is ravishing. Alone at the piano for 29 minutes, Abrams takes his time, deliberating over the spaces, savoring the echoes of a few well-chosen notes, leaping into aggressive fox-and-hound games, spinning fragments of melodies so gorgeous they'd make Rachmaninov weep, and never forgetting the blues and the testifying power to the left hand.

Wise In Time offers a contemporary quintet, with Henry Threadgill, Leo Smith, Lester Lashley and Thurman Barker. The opening sounds like Abrams playing the piano interior, in arresting metallic sympathy with the trademark AACM gongs and little instruments. Smith's trumpet and Barker's explosive drumming soon change the music, and Threadgill is scalding, worrying the high register... for all the reveling in timbre, the imprint of structure is indelible. --Randal McIlory, Coda
The father figure of the revolution in improvised music centered in Chicago in the 1960s, Abrams laid out the principles of his musical manifesto in the extemporaneous solo piano piece and the extended work for quintet (with Henry Threadgill, bassist Lester Lashley and percussionist Thurman Barker) on this recording from the summer of 1969. Abrams is a master of suspense and beauty; he makes incandescent improvisation an organic outgrowth of his music. --Russell Woessner, Philadelphia Weekly