Aug. 24, 1974: The jazz trio Birthright

 

A group that’s now legendary among free jazz cognoscenti. 

Aug. 24, 1974

Birthright – Aiming for Jazz Frontiers 

“YOU HAVEN’T READ our brochure?” Paul Gresham is saying. “I think you’d better read it first. It’ll answer a lot of your questions.”

          He’s right. This is no ordinary star-struck organization casting about for an updraft in the music biz firmament. Birthright is a way of life. To grasp it, you’d best dig a little on the philosophy.

          “The spirit of Coltrane,” the brochure announces. “The moods of Miles. The soul of Herbie Hancock. The climate of Weather Report.

          “The group’s underlying objective,” it continues, “which is to explore the ‘truth in art’ that is missing in much of today’s music, has subsequently led to adding the music of many outstanding contemporary composers … to the Birthright repertoire.

          “E.g., Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis, Joe Henderson, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, Sam Rivers and John Coltrane.”

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THEY HAVEN’T tapped these jazz giants for simple adulation and imitation. Why, percussionist Nasara Abadey has even worked with Tyner and Hubbard. The reason Birthright chose them is because they’re aiming for the same frontiers.

          Gresham, the group’s business manager, lecturer and chief philosopher, is given to describing their music as “a material force” that can’t be contained, or a natural expression of “our musical heritage.” And sometimes he just calls it “free.”

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“YOU HAVE to feel it inside,” he says. “You think of what you’re playin’ and it’s gone. Either you get inside it and play with it, man, or it won’t make that much sense to you.

          “Getting inside’ll get you listening to rhythmic patterns. The drums, the piano, the bass player and all that’s makin’ music. It’s all layin’ out a path for you to travel on.

          “Before I learned that, I used to listen a lot. Sometimes even now when we rehearse I can’t feel myself inside the music and I don’t wanta play if I don’t feel I can contribute.”

          Joe Ford is Birthright’s main composer and plays keyboards, flute and a second sax to Gresham’s. Where Gresham is incisive, Ford works the angles and ironies.

          The three of them – Gresham, Ford and Abadey – can function as a complete band, but more often than not they’ll call in up to six other players, depending on who’s available.

          “You know how many jazz gigs there are in Buffalo,” Ford says. “You can’t commit some cat for one night when he might have six somewhere else. So it’s always changing.”

          “The whole idea for Birthright began as sorta like a rehearsal band,” Abadey says. “When did we start? ’71?”

          “ ’70,” Gresham says. “Each Sunday we’d do different things the cats in the group wanted to do. We went on the old Black Development Foundation show on Channel 7. That’s when the group became a reality.

          “We went through some separations. Joe was out in California. Nasara and I were living in New York City for a while. He was playin’ with Sun Ra and I was doing work with Doug Carn. But the spirit stayed alive.

          “Since we got Birthright together, we’ve had to learn a lotta stuff that had nothin’ to do with music. We had to learn the record industry. There’s a lotta things that keep our kind of music underground.”

          “The record companies don’t put nothin’ behind you,” Ford says. “The music doesn’t get exposure. If you heard jazz every day the way you hear Top 40, you’d hear things you like.”

          “With our album,” Gresham says, “it was past time. We were just missing opportunities or not getting opportunities. We invested time and rehearsals with other people and we felt we should do something as far as helping ourselves.

          “We recorded in May over at Trackmaster. I like the record, but I think it coulda been better. It wasn’t as positive as it could be.”

* * *

THE ALBUM, called “Free Spirits,” is on the group’s own Freelance label. Different Drummer, the Rochester jazz magazine, found traces of Coltrane, Henderson, Hancock, Miles, Weather Report and Shorter in it.

          Its flavor is mid ‘60s free music, busy but never strident, and full of delightful complexities and shifts in mood. It’s available at $5 a copy from Birthright, Box 514, Buffalo, 14207.

          Playing with them are Onaje Allan Gumbs on electric and acoustic piano, Jim Kurzdorfer on bass and Jimmy Manuel on piano. In all, it’s a testament to and an extension of Birthright’s roots in post-bebop jazz.

* * *

FOR GRESHAM and Ford, it started by listening to Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, then was refined by playing with Buffalo’s most dedicated free music man, Charles Gayle.

          “It was an honor for me to be on the same bandstand with him,” Gresham says.

          For the next few months, Birthright is looking into giving music lectures and playing at schools and colleges to keep active between those hard-to-find club dates.

          Currently, Douglas (Trigger) Gaston of Trigger Happy is sitting in on keyboards and Gregory Mullar, who’s played with Charles Earland and Buffalo’s Ronnie Foster, is doing electric guitar.

          Their next appearance will be next Saturday afternoon at a Buffalo Parks Department music festival in War Memorial Stadium.

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: From left, percussionist Nasara Abadey, keyboardist and saxman Joe Ford and saxophonist Paul Gresham.

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FOOTNOTE: Paul Gresham’s LinkedIn page indicates that he earned a juris doctor degree from UB Law School. He also went on to record another album, “Every Sound We Make,” in Boston, Mass., in 1977. Commentary on popsike.com says, “Exceedingly scarce and very beautiful private jazz LP out of Boston on Freelance Records, whose only two other releases were by spiritual jazz outfit Birthright, of which Paul Gresham was a member. Gresham seemingly disappeared from performance after this album.”

Joe Ford got an invitation to join the McCoy Tyner Quartet as saxophonist in 1976 and has appeared on more than 80 albums and soundtracks. Inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame in 2004, he won the Downbeat magazine critics’ poll four times when he was with Jerry Gonzalez and the Fort Apache Band. He’s returned here regularly in recent years to play with the city’s other jazz notables.

Nasara (or Nasar) Abadey reunited with Joe Ford in a Birthright-like band called Supernova that has released a pair of albums and toured Africa as Jazz Ambassadors. Based in Washington, D.C., he is professor of jazz percussion at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University and has played with many of the greatest names in jazz and at festivals all over the world. Supernova performs periodically around D.C. and appeared in Buffalo at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in 2019.

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FURTHER NOTE: All of these transcripts of old feature articles about the Buffalo music scene can be found in a somewhat more legible and searchable form on my Blogspot site: https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/4731437129543258237.