Glenn Spearman

The Fields is a studio album by the Glenn Spearman Double Trio, the band tenor saxophonist Glenn Spearman led in the Bay Area until his death in 1998. The idea is in the name and in the stereo picture. Spearman and drummer Donald Robinson are placed in the right channel. Saxophonist Larry Ochs and drummer and timpanist William Winant are in the left, with pianist Chris Brown and bassist Lisle Ellis between them. Two horn-and-drums pairs face each other across the field, and the long pieces leave room for both.

The album was recorded at Bay Studios in Berkeley on November 15 and 16, 1994, by Robert Shumaker, who also mixed it with the producers Don Paul and Ochs. Ochs plays tenor and sopranino, Spearman tenor. Spearman wrote five of the seven pieces and Ochs the other two, the opening Melts at fifteen minutes and Just There. The record is built around its two long works: Melts at the start and Spearman's Sound Section, which closes the disc at more than twenty-one minutes. In between, Fields Before The Ram runs twelve minutes and Hot barely three and a half. The band mattered beyond its own records. Ellis, Ochs and Robinson came out of it to form the trio What We Live, whose own Black Saint albums followed in the late 1990s. Spearman and Ochs had already shared a studio ten months before this session, as two of the eight saxophonists of Rova's Figure 8 on Pipe Dreams, also recorded at Bay Studios.

This is the Black Saint CD 120197-2, the album's original 1996 release.