Flowers for Albert

Murray’s second album, released in 1976 and reissued on CD at twice its original length in 1991, is a live quartet performance from the Ladies’ Fort, one of the better-known New York performance spaces of the loft era. Murray, joined by trumpeter Olu Dara, bassist Fred Hopkins and drummer Phillip Wilson, churns through seven pieces, several of which he would re-record many times. As the album’s title hints, there’s a lot of Albert Ayler in his melodies and his early style, but the music swings pretty hard at times, too, pointing to the traditionalism that would manifest more and more strongly in the ’80s.