Orange Birthday

The Decoding Society: Byard Lancaster (alto sax), Charles Brackeen (tenor sax), Vernon Reid and Bern Nix (electric guitar), Billy Bang (violin), Melvin Gibbs (bass), Ronald Shannon Jackson (drums) and Erasto Vasconcelos (percussion). From the album Eye on You (1980).

In 1975 Ronald Shannon Jackson became a member of Ornette Coleman’s free funk group Prime Time, with whom he learned his theory of the harmolodics, and in 1978 he collaborated on four albums by Cecil Taylor. Finally, in 1979 he founded his own group, the Decoding Society, with which he played a mixture of avant-garde, funk, rock, pop and ethnic music, and in 1980 he also recorded with James Blood Ulmer. The instrumentation and arrangements of his band along with the compositions and his style of playing the drums won critical praise. Their music could be wild and danceable or soft and contemplative. During the 1980s they traveled on behalf of the Voice of America to India, 8 countries in East Asia and 15 African countries.

From 1986 to 1990 Jackson was part of the free jazz group Last Exit, which published Iron Path. In 1987 he also created the avant-garde group Power Tools with guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Melvin Gibbs, and recorded Strange Meeting. After that, he played free funk again, this time with the trombonist and singer Joseph Bowie. His string quartets and other compositions have been interpreted by leading orchestras in Europe and the United States, and he gave lectures and seminars at numerous universities. He died of leukemia in 2013 at the age of 73.

Jackson plays an unusual rhythm and right away Lancaster and Reid expose in unison a choppy and intricate theme at medium tempo. Next Reid is left alone playing weird sounds with the guitar and then he introduces himself into a stream of very fast notes to which the rest of the musicians are gradually added warming up the performance until it becomes a collective improvisation. To close, the group re-exposes the theme.