Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre

Peace And Blessings is the quartet record Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre made in Milan on June 18, 1979 for Black Saint, with trumpeter Longineu Parsons, bassist Leonard Jones and drummer King L. Mock. Born in Clarksville, Arkansas, in 1936 and raised in Chicago, McIntyre was a founding participant of the AACM in 1965 and had recorded Humility In The Light Of The Creator (1969) and Forces And Feelings (1970) before taking the name Kalaparusha and moving to New York. Through the 1970s and 1980s he worked in both cities, and this Milan date came ten years after those Chicago records.

The quartet recorded at Barigozzi Studio, with Giancarlo Barigozzi engineering and Giovanni Bonandrini producing. Both horn players double widely. McIntyre plays tenor saxophone, flute, a wood-carved flute, clarinet, bass clarinet and the shenai, the Indian double-reed horn, and adds bells, tambourine and a monkey drum. Parsons plays trumpet and flugelhorn and also flute and three recorders, sopranino, soprano and alto. The six tracks run from the 70-second African Procession to the nine-minute pieces that open the record, J & M and Anyway You Want It. The second half brings N° 39, Not This and Hexagon, between five and a half and seven and a half minutes each, for about 41 minutes in all.

This is the Black Saint CD 120037-2, which Discogs lists as a 1993 reissue of the album first released in 1979, with the six original tracks.