Kahil El’Zabar and David Murray

When Kahil El’Zabar and David Murray—two of today’s most incandescent working musicians, and friends of over fifty years—play as a duo, each of their dynamic practices is revealed anew. On tenor saxophone, Murray flicks rapidly between timbres, coaxing his instrument to bark, bleat, or prickle; a single passage might begin with an effortful whistle, as though straining from between gapped teeth, and deepen into a primordial storm. Meanwhile El’Zabar deploys his voice as an anchoring bassline or texturizing wash; scatting over the complex polyrhythms he produces across drum kit, congas, and kalimba, he challenges the primacy of sung melody. In the grand tradition of spiritual jazz, the duo conveys the simultaneous terror and beauty of the sublime, invoking the urgency of Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity and the call-and-response of a gospel choir. Even their full-body playing, which extends from vivid facial expressions to foot-taps amplified by ankle bells, resembles the ecstatic quaking of parishioners.

Between the two of them, Kahil El’Zabar and David Murray have touched every corner of modern American music. El’Zabar trained at and led Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians; Murray came up in New York with members of St. Louis’s Black Artists Group and Los Angeles’s Underground Musicians Association. Their hundreds of records feature the likes of Pharoah Sanders, Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Amiri Baraka, Cassandra Wilson, Vijay Iyer, and Questlove. Their status as historic jazz heavyweights is undeniable; the chance to see them share a stage is unmissable.