David Murray Quartet

"As we tenor saxophonists get older," David Murray once said, "we tend to play fewer notes, but with more authority." If you've been around for a while - and Murray has been on stage and in the studio with pretty much everyone since the mid-1970s when he was shaking up the New York scene - you no longer need to show off with breakneck solos. He still has them, but intensity, density, the character of individual notes from which he develops stories and moods are more important. His new quartet with Marta Sánchez (p), Luke Stewart (b) and Russell Carter (dr) allows the great improviser, whose avant-garde impetus was always grounded in role models such as Coleman Hawkins, to tell these stories saturated with experience. The quartet's debut was recently released by Intakt - an expressive, stylistically diverse album full of surprises, soul and dynamics. Murray at his best - and with a lot of authority.