David Murray, Dave Burrell

Windward Passages is a duo record by tenor saxophonist David Murray and pianist Dave Burrell, recorded in Milan in December 1993 and issued by Black Saint in 1997. The title comes from Burrell's jazz opera Windward Passages, written with the Swedish-born poet Monika Larsson, his wife, who is also heard here as a voice. The two men had a long history by then. Burrell's sideman credits with Murray run through Lovers, Deep River, Ballads and Spirituals, and this disc puts that partnership in its barest form.

The session was taped on December 8, 1993 at Mu Rec Studio in Milan and mixed there on December 27, with Paolo Falascone engineering, Giovanni Bonandrini producing and liner notes by W. Royal Stokes, printed next to a poem by Larsson. Murray plays tenor and bass clarinet, Burrell piano and voice. The programme mixes their own pieces with older ones. Murray's Sorrow Song (For W. E. B. Dubois) opens it, and his Conversation With Our Mothers comes near the end. Burrell brings Zanzibar Blue, and with Larsson he wrote the two songs, It Hurts So Much To See and Cela Me Va. Jelly Roll Morton's The Crave comes from a composer Burrell knows well: his own discography includes a whole album of Morton, Jelly Roll Joys. John Coltrane's Naima appears twice, an eleven-and-a-half-minute second take placed third and a fourteen-minute first take closing the album. In his David Murray consumer guide, Tom Hull singles out this disc and Burrell's 1991 duo In Concert on Victo as the strongest of Murray's piano duos.

This is the Black Saint CD 120165-2, the album's original release, dated 1997 on the disc.