Marzette Watts
Backdrop for urban revolution....
Marzette had a painterly theatrical approach to the tenor saxophone from the beginning.
- Steve Tintweiss
The first ESP-Disk album I ever bought was The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra.
I have no idea when or exactly where I found it, but it must have been back in the early 1990s. I was unfamiliar with the label ESP-Disk. I only bought it because I was a Sun Ra fan. I loved the album’s total commitment to the art experience - the cover, the music, the whole package. Exquisite!
From that moment, I started to collect ESP-Disk - always a slow process, as you could never find them. Over the years, one album, in particular, eluded me: Marzette Watts and Company.
It was the advent of eBay that made it possible for me to finally locate the album sometime around 2018. If not for the internet, I’d likely still be looking.
Marzette Watts’ legacy is small but significant. He only recorded two albums. The first is the aforementioned Marzette Watts and Company recorded in December 1966 and released by ESP-Disk in 1968. This is a masterpiece.
His second, The Marzette Watts Ensemble, was produced by Bill Dixon and recorded in 1968. It was released by Savoy in 1969:
Except for Watts’ version of Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman with Patty Waters on vocal, I find the album as a whole interesting at best.
I think his first release Marzette Watts and Company is the high-water mark of American avant-garde jazz. On this week’s journey, we’ll explore just the music from this three-song masterpiece.
The compositions, musicians, and musicianship on Marzette Watts and Company are excellent. Watts is joined by Byard Lancaster on reeds, Sonny Sharrock on guitar, Clifford Thorton on trombone and cornet, Karl Berger on vibraphone, Henry Grimes and Juney Booth on bass, and J.C. Moses on drums. This is a top-notch band.
The first song on the album, Backdrop For Urban Revolution, is featured above.
Another version of this song appears in Wu Ming 1’s 2007 92-page book The Old New Thing: A Free Jazz Anthology. The book includes a CD consisting of only songs from the ESP-Disk label.
Wu Ming 1, pseudonym of Roberto Bui, is a member of the fascinating Wu Ming writers collective created in 2000.
Wu Ming is an interesting group of five Italian authors formed in 2000 from a subset of the Luther Blissett community in Bologna. In Chinese, "wu ming" can mean "anonymous" or, with a different tone on the first syllable, "five people", the pun being part of the reason the collective adopted the name. According to Wu Ming’s website, the name is meant both as a tribute to dissidents ("Wu Ming" is a common byline among Chinese citizens demanding democracy and freedom of speech) and as a rejection of the celebrity-making machine which turns the author into a star.
One of the songs on the CD is Backdrop For Urban Revolution, edited with spoken word excerpts from Martin Luther King’s, “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963, and Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or The Bullet” speech in Detroit on April 12, 1964:
I find this an interesting version, although the song is incorrectly named, as on the original ESP-Disk album the song is la. Why Wu Ming 1 used the wrong title is a mystery, much like the life of Marzette Watts himself.
Not yet a musician, in 1960 Watts arrived in New York City. He completed a degree in Art Education at NYU in 1962 and then moved to Paris to study painting at the Sorbonne. While in Paris, he started playing sax to earn some cash. He recalled, “When I started to play, I thought I’d be playing something very accessible…but it came out like a painting I was interested in, which was Abstract Expressionism.” He returned to New York City in 1963 and moved into the 25 Cooper Square building in the East Village.
His loft later became an important space for early avant-garde jazz sessions.
After a year in Denmark to focus on music, in 1965 Watts returned to New York City. He continued to practice and in December 1966 put together a band to record Marzette Watts And Company.
After recording his second album in 1968, Watts progressively retreated from performing and focused on sound engineering. Interestingly, Watts’ output as a sound engineer was more prolific than his recording output. The quality of his engineering is evident in these three seminal jazz releases:
Rashied Ali and Frank Lowe’s 1973 Duo Exchange on Ali’s Survival label
Ronnie Boykins’ 1975 The Will Come, Is Now on the ESP-Disk label:
Arthur Doyle’s 1978 Alabama Feeling on Charles Tyler’s AK-BA label:
Marzttte Watts’ story remains mostly unknown. Here is one of Watts’ only interviews, conducted at his loft in New York City on July 3, 1974. French writer Chris Flicker and photographer Thierry Trombert were covering the Newport Jazz Festival and activities at Sam Rivers’ Studio Rivbea for Jazz Magazine. Their feature was published in its September 1974 issue, but the magazine showed no interest in the Watts interview. Luckily, The Wire magazine published it in its October 2018 issue.
Here is a picture of Watts outside his loft, taken by Trombert at the time of the interview:
Here’s one more for the road. Here’s the flip side of the album:
Geno is the final song from Watts’ masterpiece:
Late in his life, Watts moved to Santa Cruz, California to raise his five children. I find it interesting that all the time I was hanging around Santa Cruz in the early 1990s, hunting the record stores for Marzette Watts' album, he was living there. Such is the mystery of life.
Marzette Watts died in Nashville in 1998, a week short of his 60th birthday. His contribution to jazz was brief but very important.
Next week on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in to explore the headwaters waters of my jazz journey, Fred Astaire.
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Until then, keep on walking….