Arthur Doyle - The Songwriter (1994)

Judging Arthur Doyle's solo albums The Songwriter and Plays and Sings From the Songbook, Vol. 1 (on Audible Hiss, recorded in 1992 before The Songwriter but not released until 1995) according to the rather narrow criteria implied by the appellation jazz is quite simply the wrong way to go about things. These extraordinary solo recordings, made in Doyle's apartment and recorded in glorious lo-fi on a cassette recorder (complete with stop-start clunks) have more in common with field recordings of ethnic music, be it folk from the backwoods of the United States or pygmy music from the heart of Africa. True, Doyle's early years playing R&B and doo wop left indelible traces on his phrasing as both a singer and saxophonist, as did the fury of his years as a free jazz tenor titan in New York (woefully under-documented on record, apart from two extraordinary outings with Noah Howard [The Black Ark] and Milford Graves [Bäbi]), but there is little in the recorded canon of American folk and jazz, with the possible exception of Harry Partch's early hobo songs or certain tracks on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, to prepare the listener for the raw and uninhibited expression of The Songwriter. These deceptively simple songs were written while the saxophonist was in prison in France (for a crime he did not commit, and he was moreover denied access to a saxophone), and duly bear the marks of great inner turmoil, even "Are You Sleeping" (a freewheeling adaptation of the French nursery rhythm "Frère Jacques"). Listening to this is as touching (and at times as embarrassing) as reading someone's diary; Doyle muffs the start of "Ancestor" but leaves the tape running, "as evidence of [his] almost painful sincerity," to quote Robert Wyatt. An indispensable album from one of the last true originals.