FourOneOne returns to the Sultan Room with Black Chamber Folk Music – the trio of NYC creative music veterans Daniel Carter, Cooper-Moore and William Parker. Musicians with a deep history together that goes back to the 1970s, they have repped New York City’s improvised music community all over the world, and mentored hundreds of young musicians over the decades back at home. For musicians with such a long history of playing together, in Other Dimensions in Music and many other groups, they haven’t convened as a trio as much as one might expect. They’ve never recorded together, though for a few years in the ‘90s they performed with some regularity as the Organic Trio. Reflecting on this period recently, William Parker explained, “Don Cherry used the term 'Organic Theater' before we did. I don't know what he meant by [Organic] but what I meant by it was that we didn’t have any preservatives in the music. We didn’t have any presets. We didn’t have anything that was packaged, like a melody, like a rhythm, we were coming with no recipe and letting the music move for itself, and that’s the idea of the Organic Trio. Strong people who had their own identity that would not sway to follow.” 

While each member is known as a virtuosic player on their primary instrument – Carter on saxophone, Cooper-Moore on piano and Parker on bass – they all function as multi-instrumentalists in this group, and are practically an orchestra unto themselves. Employing Carter’s battery of woodwinds and horns, Parker’s bass, n’goni, shennai and other instruments from Africa and Asia, and Cooper-Moore’s homemade Ashimba, fretless banjo and diddley bow – instruments deeply entangled with the history of Africans in the Americas – the trio bring Black creative music into sympathetic vibration with traditions from around the globe, to “really move towards non-European concepts,” as Parker has stated. “We‘re playing Black Chamber Folk Music. That means eventually having a string quartet with all African instruments, or African and Indian instruments. As long as there’s strings and it’s a quartet it doesn’t have to be viola, violin, cello and bass.” 

Watergh0st is the song writing alter-ego of guitarist Chuck Roth, who has emerged in recent years as one of the most intense improvisers of his generation. His guitar playing embraces all the noisy and timbral potential of the instrument, couched in just enough technique and a strong feeling for extemporaneous composition. He’s been writing songs as Watergh0st since 2015, and while the hypnotic clarity of the vocals and ideas may come as a surprise to those used to the ferociousness and apparent chaos of Roth’s improvising, this is still intense music that feels like it can change direction at any moment.