Alan Braufman: Valley of Search (Valley of Search)
From Clifford Allen’s liner notes:
“What we know of Downtown New York comes from the countercultural and creative flowering that emerged in lower Manhattan in the 1960s, attributable to cheap live-work spaces called lofts. These were often abandoned and disused small manufacturing spaces and they became a nexus for artistic practice and life. From a jazz perspective, lofts were alternatives to the club scene, and they gained notoriety in the 1970s. Places like Studio We, Studio Rivbea, The Ladies’ Fort, Ali’s Alley, and Environ became central in the development of the new music. But even the underground had an underground, and the happenings at 501 Canal Street on the West Side were a point of activity in which a small but dedicated number of people took part […] In 1973 a cadre of free improvising musicians relocated from Boston to lower Manhattan: pianist Gene Ashton (now known as Cooper-Moore), bassist Chris Amberger, and saxophonists David S. Ware and Alan Braufman. All had studied at Berklee College of Music, though they stood apart from most collegiate musicians. […]
Braufman was born in 1951 in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, moving to Boston to attend Berklee in 1968 […] Braufman's sound — ‘Alan had a huge sound on alto and voice that was his, and that was rare in a town where you had lots of young players coming up’ (Cooper-Moore) — was immediately appealing and rooted in such forebears as Jackie McLean […] Braufman later played on McBee’s debut Strata-East LP Mutima, recorded in New York in May of 1974 and a precursor to the bassist’s role in Valley of Search.
Valley of Search is a document […] of relationships — people who lived or worked together and were humanly close. Braufman met Bob Cummins, the founder of India Navigation Company, at a party at McBee’s apartment in Harlem. The label had just been conceived, and Braufman would be its second artist. McBee, Lee, and Williams were obvious foils for their place in the saxophonist’s work and life, the latter providing a bevy of instruments that he would later apply to work with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith […]
Invoking with a dulcimer and bowed bass drone undergirded by flits of percussion, Ashton chants the Bahá’í prayer ‘God sufficeth all things above all things, and nothing in the heavens or in the earth but God sufficeth, verily he is in himself the knower, the sustainer, the omnipotent. God sufficeth all things above all things…’ granting the music’s higher search a stirring, declaratory shout amid mountain strings. Soon, liquid alto keen, harried screams, and rhapsodic piano chunks edge a dense fracas toward the sharp, sinewy groove and foamy crests of the following movement […]
Valley of Search has enjoyed a cult status among followers of this music, and it captures a unique and very alive historical slice of New York’s creative improvised underground.”
Clifford Allen
Brooklyn | March 2018