(desperation + noise)

Expand and abandon shape.

Improv is the last frontier. Improv was the first frontier. Improv will be there for you when she is gone and you have hidden all her good records from her and you know that though you are probably in dire need of something comforting, soothing and maybe depressive, you will instead listen to her Ornette Coleman LPs. Because that which mimics the great noise of our soul most comforts us. Because the idea of someone having been there and escaped brings hope to an otherwise hopeless and barren table that is also missing a few legs.

Exhibit No. 1: Last Exit.

Who actually probably didn’t escape.

Who, through their sheer rhythmic power, seem to still have legs (note: they are rotting from the inside).

Who sound somewhat like Naked City gone feral. Who predate Naked City by two years.

Featuring the talents of one Sonny Sharrock, who raged blackly through his guitar his whole damn life. Who is missed. Whose work here will one day be heralded as the most accurate sonic attempt to reflect blood’s shift from wet drip to dry stain.

And then there is Peter Brötzmann’s bell through which he communicates the inner thoughts of a burn victim screaming for morphine. Screaming for death.

Though at other times he resumes the “machine gun” role he asserted on the seminal free jazz album of the same name. A man who has turned his automatic protector on himself. Cheeks vibrating with bullets and blood. Bleat. Bleat. Bleat.

Ronald Shannon Jackson, who I thought severed his arms permanently on John Zorn’s Spillane, returns here as the only drummer I’ve heard yet that can keep up with Brötzmann. For each Brötzmann scream, Jackson serves as a death rattle.

Finally, Bill Laswell’s bass contains all the collected sounds in the life of a long-discarded can. These are sped up so that they may erode the senses at a rate comparable to the other instruments.

Sometimes they coalesce into raw, unbridled rock with malice burning and coiling the corners—like a Nazi emerging from a blistered punk’s eyelid.

Sometimes locusts burst through outright—complicated, chaotic little things that serve to annoy and purify the stained earth.

Sometimes there is “Crackin,” where they take turns violating you.

And sometimes there are a million voices and ideas penetrating the light of the soul simultaneously.

Exploding the shape.

All of this is purple because that is the nature of prose inspired by mostly-free jazz. It is an assortment of sounds forced uncomfortably together to form an uncomfortably unforced picture (fitting that Coleman picked a Pollack painting for Free Jazz). It is difficult to write about without analyzing said picture in vague degrees.

Because despite this inherent “freedom,” the sound is assumed. Because a destroyed shape is still a shape. And as much as I’d like to highlight Last Exit’s defining qualities in an exact framework, as much as I’d like to perfectly describe why their live records are some of the most peculiar and exciting tantrums in the free jazz canon, or why their lone studio album, Iron Path, is eternal proof that reverb is not the devil’s invention and that free jazz can hold atmospheres beyond “chaotic,” it would all degenerate into the above paragraphs. Perhaps they would abuse new adjectives but the message would remain singular: This music is damaged. This music is beautiful because it is damaged.

And this music is most definitely not free. It is trapped in an emotional vortex similar to yours. For she is gone and you are in the cold and unsure grip of the future and for a brief moment you were looking to vacate your guts through a record that speaks to you, but you realized you really just needed a record on your level.

Expanding and abandoning its shape. In the process finding it is imprisoned under glass.