The original booklet carries a line about the old fear in African American churches that jazz was the devil's music. David Murray grew up inside that argument: his first music was the gospel church in Berkeley, where his mother played. Speaking In Tongues is the record where he goes back.
His partner is Fontella Bass. Most people know her from Rescue Me (1965). Listeners of this music know her from Theme de Yoyo on the Art Ensemble of Chicago's Les Stances à Sophie, from the records of her husband Lester Bowie, and from her guest spot with the World Saxophone Quartet. By the 1990s she had returned to gospel full time, and she sings here with the authority of someone who never treated it as repertoire.
The session took a single day, 5 December 1997, at Studio Forber in Paris, where Murray was living. The band is closer to a church rhythm section than a jazz group: Jimane Nelson on Hammond B3 and piano, Stanley Franks on guitar, Clarence "Pookie" Jenkins on electric bass, Ranzell Merritt on drums, Leopoldo Fleming on percussion, with Hugh Ragin's trumpet next to Murray's tenor and bass clarinet.
The material is How I Got Over, Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen, Amazing Grace, Blessed Assurance, A Closer Walk with Thee, a Thomas Dorsey song, a Nelson original, and Murray's Missionary, the longest track at nearly twelve minutes. Murray does not tone anything down. The overblown tenor of his loft years sits over the organ and makes the old case that the cry of 1960s free jazz came out of the sanctified church in the first place.
Japanese CD edition from Solid's Justin Time series.
