Eremite Records has just released an eponymous two-LP set by a band called The Ancients, made up of bassist William Parker, drummer William Hooker, and saxophonist Isaiah Collier. It reflects the label’s long-standing advocacy, begun in the 1990s, of free jazz, often in its most intense form.
In the past three years, Michael Ehlers, has been instrumental in releasing a series of recordings from Milford Graves’ personal archives, issued under the label Black Editions Archive, a new partnership between Peter Kolovos and Ehlers under the umbrella of Black Editions Group. Two of those recordings were trios with Parker and Graves, a giant of free jazz drumming. The first, a two-LP set, Historic Music Past Tense Future included Peter Brötzmann in a recording from CB’s 313 Gallery in 2002. The second WEBO, a three-LP set released last year, had Charles Gayle as tenor saxophonist in performances from 1991. As Ehlers describes the partnership, “Peter pitched me an idea to collaborate on a new historical free jazz imprint for his label Black Editions Group. The pitch was basically ‘bring me the baddest shit you’ve got that you don’t have the resources to produce on your own.’ I called Milford Graves the next day and spent the rest of 2020 on the phone with him discussing the acquisition of a substantial piece of his tape archive on Peter’s behalf.”
Both sets spoke with incredible force. Graves in both instances was making rare appearances in public and on record, and laying down as much compound, liberating rhythm as anyone might conceive. Parker was similarly inspired, and the saxophonists were giving performances as powerful as they ever had, 25 to 40 years from the explosive dawn of the idiom as developed by Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, and Pharoah Sanders, the era in which Brötzmann had emerged in Wuppertal, Germany and Gayle in Buffalo, New York.
Even at first glance, the two-LP release of The Ancients reveals an immediate closeness with those two other releases Historic Music Past Tense Future and WEBO. The Ancients, however, is contemporary, following Graves’ passing in 2021. It was recorded in California in 2023 by a band “formed by Parker to play concerts in conjunction with the Milford Graves Mind Body Deal exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.” It represents a special segment of the free jazz tradition, whether it’s called “spiritual jazz” or “energy music,” a branch that Ehlers has lovingly recorded and released since the 1990s.
There’s something special about that name, The Ancients, which functions here to name the trio and the records and might name the genre, a wonderful turn on a music that was once called the “new thing.” It’s a music that is both tied to black cultural freedom, as Ehlers makes clear in the record’s info sheet, but also to an on-going cultural expression. Those previous releases with Parker and Graves, as different as they are, have been among the most powerful music released on record in recent years, further confirmation of Graves’ special power and the commitment of each of those musicians. Its ties to black expression and culture are central, and in each of these occasions has a kind of sacramental quality, born of a special intensity.
If in its sixty five-year phase of jazz history, it has at times seemed bracketed out of much jazz dialogue and journalism, it may well be because of its special power, its centrifugal force. It’s one of the musics that mean the most, and its relationship to other jazz is tangential. My personal term for this music is eschatology jazz (jazz that expresses knowledge of the last days), and its companion term is jazz eschatology (the last days of jazz). It’s now built into jazz history, however uncomfortably, in the late work of John Coltrane and the music of Albert Ayler. Considered as a style, it's always the last word in jazz, and at times might even be considered the ritual sacrifice of the audience.
It is both tied up with “knowledge of the last days” and a kind of “last days” jazz, that is, somehow, outside jazz as a progression of “styles” which jazz has sometimes become in a blandly sophisticated marketplace. It makes perfect sense that the one-time “new thing” would now reveal itself as The Ancients, music as old as the energies invoked in Randy Weston at a Gnawa healing ceremony.
I discovered jazz as a child partly through television, most notably The Sound of Jazz and Miles Davis’ appearance Robert Herridge Presents. In the fall/winter of 1961-62, I both entered high school and discovered free jazz. I realize now that the mood of the times – the civil rights struggle, the cold war, and the Cuban missile crisis (just as immediate in Canada as in the United States) – and the music I discovered I needed had a special relationship. When you’re told to crouch under your desk, a 3/4” slab of wood between you and annihilation, Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, Charles Mingus’ “Haitian Fight Song,” and John Coltrane’s “Chasin’ the Trane” make perfect sense. The music would grow even more intense in the next few years, until it exploded with Albert Ayler’s Bells and Coltrane’s quintet with Pharoah Sanders and Rashied Ali. Both came with apocalyptic, religiously apocalyptic, imagery and force. It’s that spirit that inhabits the music of The Ancients, and it may feel even more insistently contemporary than it did when it was recorded in 2023.
Parker’s strengths are even more prominent with The Ancients than on the discs with Gayle, Brötzmann and Graves, the latter a virtual drum corps rather than a single musician. An essential root and foundation, the bassist comes rightfully to the fore in a sonic balance that foregrounds his essential component. No currently active musician more authentically channels the New York “new thing” of the mid-sixties than Parker, and in part it’s his relationship to the bass playing of Lewis Worrell, a rarely mentioned musician who Parker readily references. Lewis Worrell had a bass style all his own, no doubt developed far from any bass player’s academy, whether Koussevitsky’s, Jimmy Blanton’s, Paul Chambers’, or Scott LaFaro’s. Worrell might share the term “claw hammer” with five-string banjo, though it’s distinctly a bass, a swarming multi-string approach, out of which short melodic phrases erupt.
Parker maintains both a fundamental pulse and a compound drone, each note resonating with the preceding and the fundamental, a thick, grouped thrum. Worrell appeared on both the New York Art Quartet’s eponymous ESP-Disk (with Milford Graves) and (less audibly) Albert Ayler’s Bells. It's this legacy that informs The Ancients and inevitably extends to Hooker, a veteran and contemporary of both Graves and Parker, whose forceful, propulsive drumming covers a substantial spectrum of densities from spare to thunderous.
While one might expect inspired performances from Hooker and Parker, there’s undoubtedly something special here, both in the homage to Graves and the extraordinary performance of tenor saxophonist Isaiah Collier, a musician roughly fifty years their junior who is virtually channeling the authentic energy of the 1960s, finding his own voice that yet touches on Albert Ayler and Sonny Rollins (no easy range) and a few others. Each side of the two-LP set comes from a different performance, each fading out between 22 and 24 minutes. Sides A to C come from two days at 2022 Arts & Archives in Los Angeles; Side D from The Chapel in San Francisco. None of the performances is “complete,” eventually fading out, but one might consider that tacit recognition that one is listening to a record and is a reasonable compromise between fidelity and duration.
True to the improvisers’ goal, the four performances are very different, from their opening premises and voices to their developing dynamics, evolution, and emotion. Each, as far as it goes, is a distinct, well-formed musical Odyssey, by a trio that manages to sound at once like they’ve just met and have been playing together for years. Each is also a study in transformation. Side A (2023-05-12 Set II) begins in gospel suffused reverie then passes through numerous evolutions to end in wrenching shout and thrashing percussion. Side B (2023-05-13 Set I) has stretches of remarkable minimalism, the trio reduced to single drum strokes, punctuating bass tones and saxophone yips, only to conclude with Parker playing hojǒk, a keening Korean woodwind. That feeling of immediate spirit-calling arises as well on Side C (2023-05-13 Set II). Collier demonstrates sustained development and expansion of materials, eventually relaxing the long tension curve before the side fades amidst a concluding melody. Side D (2023-05-15 Set I) stretches to musical riot, with dense bass, drums, and shouts eventually prodding Collier’s ultimate cataclysm of sound, beginning with a siren and eventually alternating (one assumes from the instrument list) Aztec death whistle and the squall of overblown tenor. It’s a series of memorable performances and fitting tribute to Milford Graves’ expansive art.

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.

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.

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.

I rarely analyze cover art in reviews, but maybe I should. In this case, the cover consists of a photograph flanked on either side by a firey bundles of wheat (or carpet?) and, below, paintings of a flower and a soft blue bird. Above is the title, The Ancients, crowned by vine scrolls, all in black. This highlights the center photo, in which Isaiah Collier, William Parker, and William Hooker stand on a New York rooftop, two wearing scarves, one sunglasses, all three staring at the camera. But the photo looks like a faded polaroid, primary hued with hushed blue and yellow. It looks old. The three men look like ancients, fuzzy from memory, almost haunting the image.
In other words, the image is making a claim to lineage and the album lives up to it. Recorded over two nights of concerts – two at LA’s Arts & Archives and one at The Chapel in San Francisco – in 2023, The Ancients is both urgent and classic, reaching back to the slow methodical modal build-ups of 1970s free jazz. Collier starts with a patient layering of phrase upon phrase, which accretes tension until an eruptive release about 17 minutes in. Parker lays a propulsive bass, leaping from furrow to furrow through additive embellishments and sheer drive. Hooker plays with a concertedness that betrays not age, but wisdom and experience. He is busy and rhythmic, but with precision and crisp, discernible arcs rather than free-for-all clangor. (In that, he is on par with Andrew Cyrille right now.) With Parker and Collier’s emphasis on process and development, this works perfectly and brings me back to some of my first encounters with the music of Noah Howard, Sonny Simmons, Kidd Jordan, and, of course, late Coltrane. Then again, one would not mistake Collier for them. I am not sure what it is, exactly. Maybe it is the replacement of patience and slightly longer tones, or fewer beats per measure, for the rush of those earlier works. Collier, Parker and Hooker are dealing with similar ideas and aesthetics but developing them in different ways. Take Parker’s turn to the hojǒk, a Korean instrument akin to an oboe, at the end of the second LA night, and Collier’s adoption of various unidentified “little instruments” and the Aztec death whistle, which sounds like a human scream, as evidence. Or, take the extended, spacious bass-drum duo in the second LA night, that replaces some of that early energy music exuberance with special attention to construction.
My only real criticism is the cuts between tracks. Each set fades out rather than finishes. One wonders whether this was done to fit each set onto a side of a record. If so, that is a fine reason, but one is left wondering what is missing. Somehow 22-minute cuts just are not long enough.
“free jazz is an enduring high art. its greatest expressions belong to their particular moment in history, & live on to transcend & refract in amaranthine ways. inside our present historical moment, we are fortunate to have the master musicians in the ancients bringing us their high level creation.” Agreed, but let us also remember the current moment, and the new generation who are building on that tradition, Collier himself foremost among them. God damn, this is good music. Cheers to the ancients, the forebearers, who established this tradition, and an extra spilled libation to those of whatever generation who are keeping it alive and relevant.

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.