People in Sorrow

During their sojourn in Paris, which lasted from 1969 to early 1972, the Art Ensemble recorded over a dozen albums; this is among the most striking. A single 40-minute piece stretched across two sides of vinyl, it was made before drummer Famoudou Don Moye joined, so it begins as a meditative, sparse soundscape — the horns whisper and keen as Malachi Favors’ bass rumbles along and occasional splashes of hand-held percussion mark intervals — but in its final third it builds to multi-horn polyphony, sometimes quite beautiful, as one member, likely Roscoe Mitchell, subverts it all by producing a seemingly endless wavering tone like a malfunctioning door-buzzer from an unidentified reed instrument.