Muhal Richard Abrams

condition (record/cover): NM / NM 

Eighteen musicians, two days in January 1989, and the most ambitious thing Muhal Richard Abrams ever committed to tape. The Hearinga Suite is orchestral writing that has entirely digested the European avant-garde without giving up an inch of Chicago, moving from massed brass to solo piano interludes to passages that sound less scored than weathered. Abrams dedicated the music to Steve McCall and Donald Raphael Garrett, two friends and collaborators he had recently lost, and you can hear that in the way the loud sections keep collapsing into stillness. The title is a coined word and the intention was exactly that: to make the listener stop and notice what listening actually is.

Original Black Saint pressing, 1989, produced by Abrams himself. The AACM's founding mind working at full orchestral scale, and still the most underrated large-ensemble record of its decade.