with his feet planted firmly in the sky

Before one can actually play in front of others, every musician has to find ways of communicating wth listeners and promoters who are quite diverse in their needs and images of what they want. We are selling one breakfast cereal to everyone with a potential taste for it, that's what the entrepreneur is supposed to do, so we must prepare a variety of packaging. Who is the real person, an established career musician we can trust from critical hearsay, a DIY'er whom we might trust even more, or a charlatan? A performer who can deliver the goods or one who makes us come and get it? Can we even guess what the real experience of the music is going to be like? There is the surface appearance and then the actual taste; the former can fool people with words, even with samples of music, but to actually bite into a musician is the real test, and then it's too late to decide not to.

What follows first was written by a partner of mine, Andrew Drury, and is something I could not have written myself. While it doesn't mention my limitations, it is otherwise true to the facts. So I recommend this as the short, publicity version of WHAT OTHERS SHOULD THINK I AM:

JACK WRIGHT. After teaching at Temple University in the 1960s and leaving academia in the early 1970s to engage in radical politics and community organizing, by the late 1970s Wright directed his energies into music. He is one of a very small group of musicians in North America that has played improvised music exclusively since the 1970s. Through years of near constant touring, often performing for audiences in cities and towns where improvised music had never before been heard, he came to be regarded as something of an underground legend. He has deliberately eschewed the conventions and socio-aesthetic limitations of musical careerism to pursue his own vision. Although his de-professionalized approach sets him apart from most musicians at his level of accomplishment, his art has always grown, expanded, and synthesized new information. He is unquestionably an original and virtuosic saxophonist, a master improviser who is deeply lyrical, with humor never far away.

Today Wright tours frequently in Europe and North America (and in Japan in 2006), making new musical and human connections, bringing European musicians to the U.S. and bringing musicians everywhere together. His inspiration has provided crucial impetus to hundreds of musicians and has even motivated several people to establish music venues in order to present him and other improvisers (e.g. Baltimore’s High Zero festival). His vast list of collaborators includes some “name” luminaries (William Parker, Axel Dorner, Michel Doneda, Andrea Neumann, Denman Maroney, Bhob Rainey to name a few) but more significant are the many obscure greats he has played with. He has made over 40 recordings (many published on his own Spring Garden label), performed in over 20 countries, and written extensively and insightfully about music and society for journals such as Improjazz (France) and Signal to Noise (US), as well as his own website.

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Like most of my partners I am rather cynical about the credentials I can pile up; frankly, conventional packaging indicates little of what's inside. So before validating myself in that way I must say something that would more likely attract actual listeners than funding committees or established venue promoters.

JACK WRIGHT is either a very serious musician or else, uninterested to carry that burden, he could hardly be considered serious at all. In the eighties he called himself "non-commercial, not interested in the marketplace", which today might indicate an entrepreneur who has yet to find his niche market. Nonetheless, he has a huge vocabulary, which comes both from intense instrument study and a search as widely as possible for new experience, as if seeking to know his music for the first time, rather than demonstrating a thought-out and defensible aesthetic conception. He is motivated to put his love of playing in front of people. He has been a full-time saxophonist of freeimprovisation since the late 70's, beginning with the saxophone as a ten-year-old in 1952. He quit after high school, mainly because he knew he couldn't play chord-change jazz. In the long hiatus that followed he studied and reflected on history, philosophy, culture, which he continues to do. He taught in universities and quit that, engaged in radical politics and quit that when the left lost its revolutionary edge (that would require elaboration...). Rather than wallow for the rest of his life he began playing again in the late 70s and quickly began improvising freely. He has been regularly discouraged but has not stopped. In relation to the broad community of players he is still something of a organizer, as in his political days, a utopian.

Now he is known to a few people and seeks to keep the low profile, which is the hard way to go and still get gigs with the musicians he likes. He used to rage and stomp around like a Dionysian, intense scalar passages interspersed with lion roars, vocal howling, and dog barkings. For a while he played nothing but quiet and sparse sounds, working with reductionists and electronicists. Now he's brought pitches, intervallic leaps and sharp turns back into his playing. He doesn't often stand when he plays but sits crouched down, with the bell of his horn pressed against his bare thigh, so he's usually in shorts. For thirty years he has been playing sessions with everyone, but in public only with people who interest him musically and personally. That's still a lot of people, since he plays a lot of different ways, from almost-free jazz to no-recognizable-sax-sound. He may be obscure but he comes close to doing exactly what he wants in his life, and that is no simple matter for any of us.

There is much more information available at his website and even a stack of mp3's on the Sounds page and his new Soundcloud page. That is not a substitute for hearing him play in your concert hall or bookstore or laundromat, however. Improvisation is really only a live experience--that is its secret--played once for you and then gone for good.

OVER THE TRANSOM: "Hell & Bunny" sounds like something you might come across over at engrish.com, but in fact it's an improv duo consisting of cellist Hans Buetow and percussionist Ben Hall (I'm not sure who's hell and who's bunny but I guess it doesn't matter), who might be more familiar to readers as two thirds of Graveyards, with ol' Wolf Eye himself John Olson. On this splendid CDR release on the Alberta-based Bug Incision imprint they're joined by another prowling wolf of American free music, saxophonist Jack Wright, and it's the most impressive Wright release I've heard since the two trio dates with Michel Doneda and Tatsuya Nakatani, from between (SOSEditions, 2003) and No Stranger To Air (Sprout, 2006). At the turn of the century, Jack Wright took a decisive step (every step Jack takes is decisive) into lowercase territory, generously acknowledging the influence of Bhob Rainey, but throughout the decade his playing, especially solo, has gradually been getting more combative again – though it's nowhere near as fiery as it was back when he started out in the early 80s. On Over The Transom, Hall's soft mallets and Buetow's elegant micromelodies and delicate pizzicati pull him back into more restrained territory, but you can tell he's just itching to burst into flames. Wright has always taken the line of most resistance as a player (I still think he should team up with his English namesake Seymour), exposing himself to as much risk as he can find. Just as well he's not a Wall Street trader. Listen to how he jams the horn against his thigh and really goes for – and gets! – those awkward multiphonics, just when the music is quiet enough to show up the tiniest mistake. This stuff is as poised as gagaku, as focused as shodo and as intense as butoh.

Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic, 2009

AS IS: Decades ago, before Wire year zero, I wandered into a London record store, Honest Jon's, then located off Charing Cross Road, where a solo bass disc by Dave Holland was on the player. "That's far out," I remarked to Wire founder Anthony Wood, working behind the counter. "No, it's near in," he retorted. Even Anthony couldn't describe As Is as near in. Its three live tracks, two on soprano and one on alto, are uncompromising solo sax improv. Jack Wright left music in the mid-60's for radical politics. Returning in the late 70's to free jazz, by the milennium he was playing free improv with Bhob Rainey. If an improviser is producing tones at all on saxophone, it's hard to avoid a jazz element, and while the alto track starts out with noise, there's a moment when Wight is almost "soloing" on "Three Little Words". Raw, visceral, urgent, his music demands to be heard.

--Andy Hamilton, "Jazz and Improv", The Wire, Dec. 2006

UP FOR GRABS: There is much to like in Jack Wright's mature improvisations; the first feeling is one of "warmth": even at his most squealing corrosive, his soprano holds on to a nicely contoured permutation of fluted harmonics, sublingual contortions and analytic use of multiphonics, halfway through controlled stabilization and total fluster. Jack's soloist approach tends to a versatile evisceration of chosen parts, a monologue where larval hissing and note splitting are central for the exaltation of air's role in this beautiful gathering of physical imagery. Notes and  instrumental noises pour out in a deconsecration of useless sax gadgetry, hiding after their own deviated scoff to make one think about the many and one ways musicians could use to reverse immoral attitudes towards sound; people like Wright could deliver us from this impurity.

   --Massimo Ricci, touching extremes  

FROM BETWEEN: Many practitioners of lowercase Improv nowadays sound like they're going through the motions. Saxophonists and trumpeters spit, dribble, gargle and drool, guitarists and percussionists scratch their prostrate instruments as if they were pimples, and laptoppers sit statue-like behind their luminescent Apples fizzing like soluble aspirins. But albums like this show that lowercase definitely need not mean 'lacking in intensity and commitment'.

Saxophonists Doneda and Wright have been active on either side of the Atlantic for going on 25 years, and each has recently contributed landmark documents to the solo sax repertoire, but the eventual collaboration that happened on Doneda's recent US tour turns out to be even better. Both are sufficiently inquisitive (and stubborn) not to rest on their laurels.

       --Dan Warburton, The Wire, Sept. 2004 

BIRDS IN THE HAND: When two legends of american improvised music decide to share with us the space of a moment, their passion for the duo, we can only be curious, then won over. The saxophonist Jack Wright remains the most indispensable musician of his generation. A true catalyst of energy, indefatigable explorer, conjurer of white magic in a music inspired by black, he is still the reference par excellence for all the generations who have followed. As for Bob Marsh, he can be described as an agitator of the american alternative scene. Showing up everywhere, from California to Chicago, he brings his freshness and vigor of renewal to all projects in which he participates. We can understand from this past why he is still so courted. Birds in the Hand includes all the qualities and surprises we can expect, with a bonus of rare humor and complicity.

--Sébastien Moig, Jazzosphere no. 19 (French publication)

PLACES TO GO: In the rarefied, underground world of experimental free improvisation,saxophonist Jack Wright is king. For over 20 years as a pioneer of extended techniques like overblowing, tongue clicks, multiphonics and microtones assembled in spontaneous compositions, Wright’s been an inspiration, mentor and musical partner to many players. Here, with silence as his only foil, Wright solos in various live settings, creating a technical primer that demonstrates ecstatic flights of musical imagination unfettered by euphony or meter.

Wright plays more wildly in Baltimore and more meditatively in Boston, but it sounds like he has the most fun recording in his own Boulder, Colorado, kitchen. Drawing on a vast vocabulary of hisses, clicks, pops, howls and siren blasts amid conventional tones, Wright blows complex, quickly flowing phrases that showcase not just creative virility but tremendous healing sanction-offering holy water from the horn of plenty.

With nimble fingers--and an embouchure to die for (lips and tongue becoming subtle acrobats challenging a high blown wire without a net)--Wright ties his axe in knots and unties it with the dexterity of a prestidigitator. His mysterious, un-sax-like tones may sound like something imagined by a science fiction writer creating a Martian culture, but one thing the sax does exceptionally well is imitate the human voice, and Wright furthers this tradition of soulful cries by blending his own guttural or shrieked voicings with those of his instrument. Despite its difficulties, Wright’s music remains human and exciting because it is clear and true.

--Jeff Bagato, the Washington Post, April 27 2001

There is an intimacy in this music, but rather than being conversational improvisations, the four come together to make music that is intrinsically interwoven. Each of the players spin intricate lines, but it is how these lines come together that creates the whole. There is a delicacy as they move from a hushed whisper to heated intensity. Throughout, there is an openness to their playing as they all maintain a collective balance to their spontaneous abstractions. Wright brings a free Jazz sensibility to the music, his grittier tone providing an effective foil to Rainey's sliding tonalities and stuttering percussive flurries. The two cellists constantly shift from linear arco to scrabbled textures as the woodiness of the instruments' tone ping-pongs off the breathiness of the horn players. Ideas are collectively molded and through these compact collective structures, it becomes next to impossible to keep track of the individual voices. This release is an acknowledgment of how improvisation continues to grow in the hands of musicians working independently to foster collective, spontaneous interaction. Listeners should also be appreciative of labels like CIMP for fostering and documenting sessions like these and making this music available."

--Michael Rosenstein, from a review for Cadence Magazine, 2000

[In another set] Wright is one of the most interesting and eclectic saxophonists on the scene. He plays sui generis, something that, when you consider the innovations on saxophone in recent years, is a remarkable feat. Wearing his characteristic purple shorts and mixed colored socks, Wright seems to blow without preconceived notions. He blows air, stuffs his horn with curiosities, launches enigmatic lines, and seems to create bursts of notes in reverse order. On soprano, his advanced techniques enthrall, as his mind works at super speed. Zornish at times, his squeaks and screeches are less random than coordinated, sporting little sounds, mouthpiece treasures, and spitting forth pings and pops: Donald Duck meets Evan Parker.

--Steven A. Loewy, Cadence Magazine, Nov. 1999

--tom boram, Baltimore, May, 1999

---Gianni Gebbia, Curva Minore, 1997

Jack's playing is replete with the feeling that it is spontaneously structured on many different levels at once, and that you can choose to listen to different energies that run through it. It is truly polyphonic music, played on traditionally monophonic and linear instruments. Jack Wright's playing involves a constant self-reflexive listening. He listens intently to the sounds that he produces, and reacts to them as if they were another player -- it gives Jack's playing an eerie feeling of time, as if each moment were supremely contingent on the last, each a turn from the last. This sits well with my feelings of nihilism: that we are reinventing the world in each interaction.

--John Berndt, Baltimore, 1993

--Dan Plonsey at Berkeley Store Gallery, Dec. 13, 1992, in Freeway

I think most people find it hard to live with unpredictable music. I wish it was all like that-screaming messengers of Pan hurling themselves into the mists with engine full throttle and brake lines cut. Just listening-unquestioning, accepting, letting it fill me-I found that a curious thing happened. By my acceptance, I became the completing instrument, not only interpreting what I heard, but creating its final form. So even I, with my leaden fingers, was performing in a public place. That's a hell of a gift to receive, Jack. Come back soon."

--Derek Davis, Welcomat, Oct. 21 1992, Philadelphia

--Glen Thrasher, lowlife magazine, Atlanta 1991

Schwabische Zeitung, March 1986