NEW DIRECTIONS IN MODERN MUSIC by RASHIED ALI QUARTET

Avant-garde jazz drummer Rashied Ali played with John Coltrane up until his death in 1967, appearing on final recordings like The Olatunji Concert and Interstellar Space.After Coltrane’s death, Ali soon formed his own quartet, with Fred Simmons on piano, Stafford James on bass violin and Carlos Ward on alto sax and flute. The quartet’s first release, New Directions In Modern Music, released on Ali’s own Survival Records in 1973, exploded onto the free jazz scene, influencing the likes of Don Cherry, Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp (as well as many outside the jazz idiom), becoming a kind of manifesto for avant-garde music of the period. From this point, until his death in 2009, Ali was at the heart of the New York’s experimental music scene, collaborating in the mid-nineties on a project called Purple Trap, with Japanese guitarist Keiji Haino and Bill Laswell.