The Sea Ensemble

Welcome to a feast of sound and movement...non-sound and non-movement...

The way to survive is to stop trying to be like other people and just follow the thought of who you are. You receive things you need through the process of thought. These experiences and ideas come from inside and that’s why they are humanizing.

—Muhal Richard Abrams

I first saw John Coltrane’s name in the late 1970s on the inside cover of Santana’s 1973 album Welcome. He composed the title track - the last song on side 2:

I stumbled onto it in my brother’s record collection. I‘d heard Santana on the radio with songs like Black Magic Woman and Evil Ways, but those songs didn't prepare me for what I heard on Welcome. This was an entirely new sound, with an expression of the divine and meditation throughout. Welcome was recorded after members Gregg Rolie and Neal Schon had left the band to form Journey, and the New Santana Band now included keyboardists Tom Coster and Richard Kermode of Janis Joplin’s Kosmic Blues Band, along with Pharoah Sanders’ vocalist Leon Thomas. It also included guest appearances from John McLaughlin, Joe Farrell, and Flora Purim. This was a very Jazzy affair, and I took to it right from the first track Going Home, arranged by Alice Coltrane.

The song Welcome was originally released on John Coltrane’s 1967 Impulse! album Kulu Sé Mama, one of my favorite Coltrane albums.

Being that it’s New Year’s Eve tomorrow, listening to it is a good way to Welcome 2024:

Kulu Sé Mama is also significant for the appearance of guest artists who played on two of the album’s six tracks: Juno Lewis and Donald Rafael Garrett. Lewis was a drummer, drum maker, singer, and composer based in Los Angeles. On the title track, he sings in an Afro-Creole dialect. He also played Juolulu, water drums, the dome Dahka, bells, and the conch shell. Garrett was primarily a bass player and percussionist.

When the Coltrane Quartet was in San Francisco for a gig at the Jazz Workshop in 1965, Garrett and Pharoah Sanders were invited to sit in with them. They accompanied Coltrane’s band to Seattle and then returned in October to record Kulu Sé Mama at United Western Recorders in Los Angeles.

Garrett had moved to San Francisco in 1964 from Chicago, where he had worked with Muhal Richard Abrams.

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In his 2008 book A Power Stronger Than Itself, George Lewis writes:

Around 1951 or so, Abrams had met bassist Donald Rafael Garrett, whom he credits with being a major influence on the future directions that Chicago music would take. “He was a phenomenal musician,” said Abrams. “His intuitive understanding of music was incredible.” Speaking of himself and his friend Garrett, who was “brilliant, also in social thinking,” with a “nomad, Bohemian personality,” Abrams declared that “we were headed outside. We were deliberately breaking some rules. To us, Bird and them were like people who broke ground. We copied them religiously, but that was not the end; we didn’t sacrifice our individualism to do it. There were some on the scene who did, but we didn’t.”

Years later, Muhal had this to say about Garrett’s influence on his compositional process: “You don’t need to get off the ground when your musicians are spontaneous enough - just rehearse and let things happen. Donald Garrett used to tell me that someday there wouldn’t have to be written compositions - he saw it before I did. I had to write quite a bit until I had musicians who could create a part, and then I wrote less.”

In September 1960, Garrett and Abrams played in the Ira Sullivan-Roland Kirk Quintet when they worked at the Sunderland Lounge in Chicago. About this time, Abrams and Garrett were looking for an outlet for their ideas and began rehearsing at the Cotton Club Lounge on Cottage Grove and 63rd. The rehearsals consisted mainly of younger players in the area like Jodie Christian, Roscoe Mitchell, and Joseph Jarman. By 1961, the ensemble gradually came to be known as the Experimental Band. In 1963, Garrett and Abrams were also performing as a trio with Steve McCall. The following year Garrett moved out to California and missed the eventual formation of the AACM he helped create.

You can read more about the AACM here:

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In 1971 in California, Garrett met Zusaan Kali Fasteau and became her musical mentor. They lived a vagabond life as itinerant musicians living on four continents and playing hundreds of concerts in Europe, Africa, Asia, and New York. As The Sea Ensemble, they released only four recordings during their time together: one on ESP-Disk in the 1970s, two albums on the Italian Red Records in 1977, and one more on Fasteau’s Flying Note label in 2000, released well after Garrett’s passing in 1989.

The Sea Ensemble’s debut record We Move Together was recorded and released by ESP-Disk in 1974 - it was one of the label’s final releases:

You can listen to the entire album here.

All of the song titles are taken from Tai Chi moves, emphasizing a kind of free-flowing meditation feel. In a 2005 interview, Fasteau explained how in 1971 she formulated "The Tao of Music", a theory of composition based on Taoism:

According to this theory, music lives in a multi-dimensional sphere encompassing all possible sounds - the high and low, soft and loud, slow and fast, rough and smooth, legato and staccato, which can be understood as yin and yang characteristics. The dynamic, ever-changing balance of complementary opposites expresses the joyful unity of spirit and energy in sound. The Tao of Music encourages innovation… This joining of opposites expresses the joyful unity of life.

This is a forgotten classic in the ESP catalog. In fact, Garrett and Fasteau are not even listed in the index of Jason Weiss’ 2014 book Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-Disk, the Most Outrageous Record Label in America. I find that strange since it is one of the label’s finest releases. It deserves much wider recognition.

In 2000, on her independently owned Flying Note label, Fasteau released two previously unissued The Sea Ensemble recordings. The first from a 1977 studio performance in Leiden, the Netherlands. The other is a live recording from Ankara, Turkey. From the live recording, here is So Much Love:

Kali Fasteau was raised in Paris by accomplished musicians. Her mother’s father was a cellist in the New Jersey Symphony and had also played cornet in the Russian army. Her mother’s sister was an opera singer, composer, and conductor - a rare feat in those days - and played at Carnegie Hall. Her formal music training started very early, studying piano, cello, and flute.

By the time she graduated from Reed College with a degree in social anthropology with a minor in music, her politics had developed on a more progressive side. In her own words, “I had this really rebellious spirit. I almost didn’t even go to graduate school. I was really in this revolutionary mode.” By 1968 she had spent time working for the Oakland branch of the Black Panthers before returning east to attend graduate school at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where she studied with Clifford Thornton and Ken McIntyre. After graduation in 1971, she moved to California and met Garrett. According to Fasteau, “It was love at first sight - lightning struck and everything!”

They began playing together immediately. In 1974 they were married and their global musical journey together began. Yet by 1977 they had separated. Fasteau moved back to Paris and began a solo career. In 1981 she moved to India to study Hindustani vocal music. In 1985 she returned to the States.

In 1986, Fasteau started her record label Flying Note. The first release was a solo recording called Bliss:

Flying Note released many more albums, and she invited many fine musicians to work with her. To highlight just a few: 1998’s Comraderie with Noah Howard and Joe McPhee on saxophones and Bobby Few on piano; 2011’s An Alternate Universe with William Parker on bass and Cindy Blackman on drums; and 2016’s Intuit with Kidd Jordan on tenor - her last release. She died in November 2020 in Monroe, New York. She was 73 years old.

Here’s one more for the road. I find Fasteau’s People of the Ninth: New Orleans and the Hurricane 2005 one of the best from her Flying Note catalog. released in 2006, here is What Once Was:

In an artistic field with few women, Kali Fasteau was a real pioneer in free improvisational music. She loved the traditions of so many cultures; however, she was never a traditionalist. She was always more interested in spontaneity and creating in the moment. In her own words, she preferred to play in the “threshold of the unknown.”

The Sea Ensemble is special music to me. We Move Together is all about "going with the flow" following the Tao, a cosmic force that flows through all things and binds and releases them. To me, Fasteau and Garrett embody the yin as negative, dark, and feminine and the yang as positive, bright, and masculine, interacting to maintain the harmony of the universe and influence everything within it.

Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of Muhal Richard Abrams.

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Until then, keep on walking….