When I first heard about the trio documented on The Ancients, I was thrilled. Saxophonist Isaiah Collier has been making a lot of waves in the last few years, primarily as the leader of his group the Chosen Few (who made four albums, including two released in 2024, before disbanding), but also in the duo I AM with percussionist Michael Shekwoaga and on a direct-to-disc session released under his own name. His music is socially engaged spiritual jazz, a point on a line that runs from John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders to Gary Bartz to Charles Gayle to Kamasi Washington…and particularly through Roscoe Mitchell and Ari Brown and Fred Anderson, because Collier is emphatically a Chicago musician. 
What’s compelling about his approach is that he’s a synthesist who takes bebop, R&B, soul, gospel and free jazz and combines them all in ways that showcase the best aspects of each. His playing is emotional, but grounded, and structured in a way that allows you to follow his musical statements from beginning to end. In an interview in the fourth volume of trumpeter Jeremy Pelt’s Griot book series, Collier says, “You can’t know freedom if you don’t know restriction. There’s a balance to all this stuff. Even playing free isn’t playing free. I learned that playing with Denardo Coleman. I learned that playing with William Parker. I learned that playing with Ernest Dawkins. I learned that studying with Roscoe Mitchell. There are prerequisites to this stuff.”
And as that statement proves, Collier is someone who knows what he doesn’t know and seeks out opportunities to gain that knowledge, by playing with musicians generations older than himself, as he does here. Drummer William Hooker has been performing for almost 50 years, self-releasing his debut album, …Is Eternal Life, in 1977. His music spans free jazz, noise rock (he’s recorded duo albums with both Sonic Youth guitarists, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo) and indescribable zones of pure sonic exploration. Bassist William Parker is, of course, William goddamn Parker, a legend of avant-jazz who’s played with everyone you’ve ever heard of and led a thousand brilliant bands.
This double live LP features recordings from three nights of shows — May 12 and 13, 2023 at 2220 Arts & Archives in Los Angeles and May 15 at The Chapel in San Francisco. It’s a breathtaking 90 minutes of three-way interaction, two ascended masters supporting a new but very promising disciple. Collier borrows from the AACM, from Pharoah Sanders, from Charles Gayle, and from bebop (I swear he quotes “Salt Peanuts”), while Parker makes his bass sound like a guembri, a donso ngoni, a guitar, and someone beating their palms against the inside of a wooden ship’s hold, and Hooker’s drumming is heavy foot and precise snare, plus some of the most amazing cymbal washes you’ll ever hear. This is “free jazz” as ancestral lore being passed down live in the moment. Forty years from now, Isaiah Collier will be teaching it to musicians in their twenties who heard these recordings and sought him out. (From The Ancients, out 1/31 via Eremite.)

The minute that this record was announced it shot straight to the top of my anticipated list for 2025. Thankfully, the January release means that we don’t have to wait that long, and the arrival of The Ancients more than lives up to expectations. Anchored by jazz luminaries William Hooker and William Parker, themselves no strangers to collaboration over the years, the pair folds a slightly newer name into the mix. Isaiah Collier has already been on the radar here with his outfit The Chosen Few, backing Angel Bat David in Tha Brothahood, and as a guest with The Heavy Lidders at Milwaukee Psych Fest. Here, he proves more than capable of sparring with his more well-known partners, devouring styles that swing from soul jazz to the scars and squeals of the free set. The album’s main energy stems from Collier’s willingness to both give and receive energy from other points in the trio, scrawling his runs across the speakers in blood one minute and riding the rhythm like surf in the next. That rhythm is, as expected, completely hypnotic. At this point Hooker and Parker have spent years perfecting their way around and through the maelstrom, but it’s nothing short of amazing to hear the two of them work the rudder here. The record is comprised of two sets recorded at 2220 Arts & Archives in LA and one set from The Chapel in San Francisco. The former set dominates, a turbulent bout of avant-jazz that offers to turn sweat to steam in a matter of instants. Capped with a run at The Chapel, the closer is no calmer eddy, instead letting the marrow boil out of the listener with a swipe at Hooker’s noise-adjacent past. Eremite has had an untouchable run of late and this debut from The Ancients instantly lodges itself among the label’s highlights.

The Ancients are an intergenerational 21st century free jazz trio that began as a one-off ensemble. While playing together they discovered their collective potential. Prolific bassist William Parker recruited vanguard drummer William Hooker and young Chicago sax firebrand Isaiah Collier together to perform concerts in conjunction with the Milford Graves Mind-Body Deal exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. This two-LP set (also a digital download) from Michael Ehlers' Eremite label captures four side-long improvisations at 2220 Arts + Archives in L.A. and The Chapel in San Francisco, all in 2023. One can hear the inspiration of Ornette Coleman's Golden Circle trio as well as John Coltrane and Rashied Ali's powerful Interstellar Space, Pharoah Sanders' Tauhid, and Cecil Taylor's early-'70s trios. Nearly 90 minutes long, the album starts with the second set of their May 12 L.A. gig. It commences with Parker and Collier offering a modal framework. While the bassist lays down a sparse, open modal line, the saxophonist digs into serious deep blues phrasing. Hooker plays with brushes until the saxophonist begins to break the cadence and follow a dissonant modal line without sacrificing the blues. Hooker becomes more active as Parker begins to play arco. Collier goes right at Hooker, and the track explodes into intense free improvisation but never loses its center. Both sets from May 13 are included. The first offers intimate yet action-oriented Eastern modalism that Collier addresses in a manner that reveals the depth of his creativity. Sparse tom-toms and Parker's insistent lines increase tension before handing it over it to the saxophonist. Collier drives the intensity into the red while cutting across bebop, hard bop, modal, and modern jazz in a fierce improvisation that has his bandmates hollering their encouragement. Parker's rumbling bass is insistent but hypnotic in the intro to the second set as Hooker dances behind him with powerful accents and fills. Collier enters with a series of short drones at 2:25, then finds Parker and lays down a circular vamp that again reveals his blues roots. Hooker's hyperkinetic yet groove-centered playing adds drama with a forceful kick drum as Parker bridges his trio mates, offering a syncopated gospel melody that Collier grabs on to, wailing. The set closes with the May 15 first set in San Francisco. Once more introduced by Parker, it is speculative and spacey as the bassist runs through modal patterns with a pronounced pulse that Hooker embellishes and Collier plays across, before they open it up, at four-and-a-half minutes. On the surface it sounds like all three bandmates are soloing; however, with a bit of attention you can hear Parker guiding the band toward integration before engaging Hooker in interlocking rhythmic conversation. At one particularly intense segment near the end, Collier brings out his hoary "Aztec death whistle" as the trio explode in fiery communication. The Ancients is intensely focused 21st century free jazz via a shared and inspired bandstand consciousness. It exists without aimless noodling or egotism, making for a set as musically startling as it is powerful.

Free jazz trio spanning decades of interest, with recent Chicago tenor sax heatseeker Isaiah Collier merging against a rhythm section of Wm. Parker and William Hooker, recorded live by Bryce Gonzales (who engineered that marvelous Jeff Parker ETA IVtet record from a few months back) from sets in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Parker never stops, ever, but it’s been a while since Hooker’s entered my sphere (he’s truly something, humbled a bit but cracking off snare hits like rifle practice), and Collier’s fiery works like in his duo I AM have given rise to a new generation of sax deities, in the tradition of Fred Anderson (doesn’t come out to shred lungs, though it’ll happen; more focused on soulful tone and expression, and that jazz lives in space between the notes, too). This’ll peel paint when appropriate, but unlike the ‘90s output involving 2/3 of this trio, that’s not the primary target; incredible stretches of groove set in amidst these epic sides, all three participants not only loud/clear but in spatial relation to one another (Collier’s panned hard left, Hooker’s on the right, and Parker’s down the middle like the 7-10 split), every thwack, scream and valve slam rendered with the utmost clarity. LA gets the most of this album but SF gets the nut cracker on side 4, Collier playing with some sort of toy siren/ring mod in the home stretch that renders his instrument a high-tone belt sander alarm, something in my decades of enjoying jazz I’ve never heard before. Lots of reasons to lose faith these days but here, my friends, is belief restored.

Chicago based multi-instrumentalist Isaiah Collier has made waves with a series of albums that synthesise elements of spiritual jazz, gospel, soul, hiphop & the AACM. On The Ancients he communes with two older masters of free jazz, bassist William Parker & drummer William Hooker. Documenting a 2023 West Coast tour, this double LP goes deep. On “2023-05-12 Set II,” the rhythm section gives Collier plenty of space to develop long, soulful saxophone lines that are full of invention & dynamic variation, culminating in a climax of squawking multiphonics, woody bass runs & multi-directional drumming. Best of all is a riveting set dedicated to Don Cherry, where Collier vocalises freely through a megaphone, setting off its alarm at key points.