Dave Burrell

Featuring: Alan Silva, Clifford Thornton, Sunny Murray, Archie Shepp, Grachan Moncur III

condition (record/cover): EX- (5 clicks at beginning of side 2) / VG+ (tag on front and small cut-out)

Gatefold sleeve. 

Paris, August 1969, the month when BYG recorded what felt like the entire American avant-garde in a few frantic weeks. Echo is Dave Burrell's contribution and it is one of the most extreme things in the whole Actuel series: a side-long piece that builds from almost nothing into a collective roar and then keeps going, with Burrell's piano functioning less as an instrument than as a percussion battery driving the ensemble forward. The pianist who would later become known for the most sophisticated re-readings of Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton is here at his most uncompromising and most physical. No melody to hold on to. That is the point.

Original BYG Actuel pressing, France. High-water mark of the label and of the whole Paris moment.