iSound

Alvin Fielder is a drummer because at age 12 he heard a Max Roach recording and liked it. His family wanted him to study Pharmacy, his father’s profession, and although he became a Pharmacist, music helped shift his destiny. In 1963 he was one of the founders of the now legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and there, he was in good company: “Sound”, Roscoe Mitchell’s masterwork, was the first recording with his name on it. The records that followed – many of them as a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra – contributed to the development of the myth surrounding this pioneer of free jazz who thinks that music is like painting a portrait or writing creatively: “Drumming is not beating on something”, he warns.

If anyone still has doubts about that after all these years of great examples, along comes Fielder with a trio made up of pianist Chris Parker and trumpeter Dennis González - a trio sometimes transformed into a quartet (with Aaron González on t...