Azar Lawrence

★★★★ Summer Solstice JAZZ DISPENSARY. LP

Repress of Los Angeles jazz sax-player’s long out-ofprint spiritual journey.

Azar Lawrence boasted maturity way beyond his years. A musical prodigy who played violin in the Los Angeles Junior Symphony at five, by his early twenties he’d switched to tenor sax, gilding his growing reputation on McCoy Tyner’s Enlightenment and Atlantis before his extraordinary live audition on Miles Davis’s Dark Magus blew him into the solo limelight. Lawrence’s fiery, fast-fingered skills and soaring Coltrane-influenced technique shone brightly on 1975’s debut, but this sequel trumps it: a ballad-heavy, Brazilian influenced affair that balances his horn’s high-note lyricism with Albert Dailey’s fleet piano flurries and Raul De Souza’s grounding, grooving trombone. The second half is near impeccable: Lawrence switching up from the title track’s driving intensity into tropicália territory on a beautifully questing, flute-infused reading of Amaury Tristão’s Highway.