Khan Jamal - Dark Warrior (Steeplechase)

The Philly-Chicago nexus in creative improvised music has few proponents as persistent as Khan Jamal. The vibraphonist’s career has traveled more troughs to peaks than most, but he’s yet to concede a KO and flip the switch permanently silencing his instrument’s motor. A three album deal with Steeplechase in the 80s notched one of his most artistically noteworthy periods, free from cloying pop jazz proclivities and oriented instead toward adventurous postbop forms.

Coming on like Frank Lowe on alto on the opener “Johnny’s in Malmø,” Charles Tyler jockeys the AACMish head with a bit of difficulty but perseveres with a singing ebullient tone. A languorous waltz, “Just Us” coaxes his romantic side with a subdued Aylerian cry still threaded through his canny articulations. Tyler’s baritone bucks and blusters on “Principal,” bluntly plowing through the leader’s delicate china shop clusters like the proverbial bull to great contrastive effect. Jamal alternates plush cumulous clouds with propulsive lead progressions. His felt-capped mallets, four in number, parse out pastel patterns on the tubular bells that rarely relinquish their melodic import and add luminous breadth to the ensemble politic.

Bassist Johnny Dyani surfaces as unobtrusive linchpin. His stout pizzicato anchors the interplay, but never overwhelms or undercuts it. At various key junctures such as the potent slapping vamp on the title track and the fluid groove of “Hucksterman,” an R&B number straight out of the Noah Howard songbook, his ability to augment instead of grandstand calmly earns him the crown of MVP, a mantle he holds here and on the other Jamal led albums for the label. While hardly a heavyweight drummer Leroy Lowe actually ends up a shrewd choice for the seat. His sticks and skins keep the quartet moving and make the most of the ample space provided by Jamal’s compositions, but also address a willingness to defer to the bigger guns. Tyler’s “Space Traveller,” the only non-Jamalian tune of the set, wears its Arkestral pedigree proudly and the composer pays elegiac homage to that most famous Saturnian with more rocket booster baritone.

After a rather lackluster decade subsequent to this session Jamal’s career got a lift through a signing to CIMP. The relationship survives to this day and it recently yielded an album Black Awareness, teaming Jamal with longtime colleague Byard Lancaster and surprise celebrity guest Grachan Moncur III. The Steeplechase trifecta stands in nostalgic good company with Jamal’s renewed creative edge.