Larry Nozero: Time

Here is an odd one. Originally released on the short-lived Detroit label Strata in 1975, Larry Nozero's Time defies categorization. First-generation spiritual jazz, Henry Mancini, Motown, strings (real and synthed), the Swingle Singers, Braziliana and Shaft era Isaac Hayes jostle around the mic, along with Sibylline hints of Kamasi Washington. Is it for real? Is it a put on? Either way, it is an often-compelling mix, fronted by an expressive and lyrically minded saxophonist and flautist.

It gets odder. The album was not produced by a commercially minded Los Angeles producer with an eye on crossover success such as David Axelrod, but by Detroit trumpeter and community activist Charles Moore. Moore had recorded extensively with Wendell Harrison and Phil Ranelin in local musicians' collective The Tribe and had mixed genres himself, playing flugelhorn on Detroit agit-rockers the MC5's High Time (Atlantic, 1971). In 1964, he co-founded the Detroit Artists Workshop with onetime MC5 manager John Sinclair, later a founding member of the White Panthers political party and a weed warrior who was given ten years for possession in 1969 (but released in 1971). Sinclair designed Time's cover and wrote the original sleeve notes, and his wife, photographer and political activist Leni Sinclair, took the cover photo.

Now stir in Larry Nozero. Soon after playing soprano saxophone on Marvin Gaye's masterpiece What's Going On (Tamla, 1971), Nozero was drafted. Picking up his career later, back in Detroit, Time was the first of a handful of albums he recorded. His cousin, Dennis Tini, has a major role on Time, playing synths and keyboards, arranging the strings on around half the tracks and voicing the wordless choral vocals which crop up throughout the album. Most of the pieces are originals by Nozero and/or Tini, although there are a couple of standards and a cover of an obscure tune from an Antonio Carlos Jobim film soundtrack.

Given the uncompromising counterculture credentials of the principals involved, we can take it that Time did not have its tongue in its cheek. The unexpectedly mellifluous album was meant to be taken at face value—these people did not mess around, and to "sell out" would, in their eyes, have been a cardinal sin. Check the YouTube slow burner of Jobim's "Chronicles Of The Murdered House (Part 2)" below.

Jazz likes odd.

This reissue (there have been others) on London's BBE (Barely Breaking Even) label comes in a handsome 2x45rpm vinyl LPs format.

P.S. In 2022, Britain's Strut and Art Yard labels got together to release the excellent John Sinclair Presents Detroit Artists Workshop: Community, Jazz And Art In The Motor City 1965-1981, which includes tracks by Charles Moore/Stanley Cowell, Donald Byrd, Bennie Maupin and others. A review can be read here. (Despite the presence of Cowell on two 1965 tracks, there is no connection between Strata and Strata-East other than Cowell might, repeat might, consciously or unconsciously, accepted some nominative steering when he set up Strata-East six years later.)

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