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Free spirit
Tisziji Muñoz plays the truth
BY TED DROZDOWSKI

When people ask me what I play, I don’t tell them ‘jazz’ or ‘guitar,’ I tell them ‘truth,’ " musician and guru Tisziji Muñoz explains. "I just play truth; everything else is coincidence."

In the case of Muñoz, who will play the Regent Theatre in Arlington this Saturday, the truth sounds remarkably like free jazz. That’s free jazz as offered by its greatest practitioners: John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, Sonny Sharrock. Muñoz has staked a claim as their musical peer through roughly 30 years of performances and 25 albums, as well as a vocabulary that embraces high-flying modal excursions and lush harmonic treasures, all colored by a love of melody.

His latest album, last year’s Divine Radiance, on his own Anami label, matches him with a typically distinguished group: horn men Sanders and Ravi Coltrane, drummer Rashied Ali, and bassists Cecil McBee and Don Pate. The wild card in that cast is David Letterman’s bandleader and sidekick, Paul Shaffer, who, it turns out, has been a student, friend, and occasional bandmate of Muñoz’s since 1970. Joining Muñoz in Arlington will be two of this area’s finest jazz musicians, drummer Bob Moses and bassist John Lockwood. "It’s an honor to be able to play with such very distinguished jazz masters as Bob and John, who are also beloved friends," Muñoz tells me over the phone from his home just north of New York City. "I believe I’ve only performed with a trio once before. But all the music that’s been played and will be played is present, available to us. We need to establish a state of mind where we can make it available to us."

If this sounds a bit unconventional, consider that Muñoz was born in Brooklyn in 1946 into what he describes as "a family of psychics. Right from the beginning, I had a very high degree of intuitive understanding and knowing. My relatives were Christian mystics and healers, but on their altars, they also had little statues of the Buddha. So I also grew up exposed to his presence as a serene figure in the homes of my relatives.

"I’ve studied all religions, but I subscribe to none of them. I’m not interested in the rules of man. I follow the spirit. I have my own sound, my own value system, my own religion." Altogether he’s written more than 50 spiritual tracts; this accounts for some of the time he’s spent away from performing. Nonetheless, he says he has a backlog of 15 albums that he’ll begin issuing soon.

Muñoz is a self-taught musician, though he considers the process of learning to play more an opening of the self than a conventional educational discipline. "I began to play drums as an infant, but I had to withdraw when my left wrist was [partly] severed in an accident when I was five." By then, he had a grip on Afro-Latin rhythms. When he returned to music after four years, he began to play ukulele. "My aunt encouraged me to practice in the closet with my eyes closed."

Like most of Muñoz’s dramatic live and studio performances, the Regent show will be entirely improvised save for perhaps a few rough arrangement sketches. "I always go for the first take. It’s not that you can always get perfection on the first take, but I feel it’s the most important. Rehearsal goes against the state of mind you need to connect with the pure sound that I call Heart-Fire sound. It’s a sin against the spirit."

Tisziji Muñoz plays the Regent Theatre, 7 Medford Street in Arlington, this Saturday, April 24, at 8 p.m.; call (781) 646-4849.


Issue Date: April 23 - 29, 2004
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