Notes by Tim DuRoche:

Anyone familiar with Thollem’s career and trajectory knows he’s been an inveterate, peripatetic musician of the Johnny-Appleseed-sort —meeting with musicians across this hemisphere and beyond—developing rich collaborative relationships with countless individuals and groups ...and returning again and again to stretch initial meetings like the best taffy-pull you can possibly imagine.

Over the last 17 years of our friendship that has manifested in many beautiful, fortuitous, and often unexpected ways for me— always resulting in something deeply musical, emotionally satisfying, and building block upon block on whatever came before. Thollem and I played a lot originally as a duo, but each time he would come to Portland it became almost comically complex at times to find those opportunities. If you know his energy, generosity, and inborn curiosity as an improviser, he’s always attracting new and different players into his expansive orbit. After trying to do a number of gigs as a duo —one, where quite characteristically, like a magnet with a string of paperclips, he showed up with five saxophonists—I realized the best way to play a duo was to show up to a gig of his where he was booked as a solo artist. And so it goes.

Fast forward a few years and we’d successfully booked a duo gig in north Portland and as we’re getting set to play, in comes, unannounced, André St. James with his bass, natural as anything, and what blossomed from that was a deeply moving and out-of-this-world chemistry. Out of so many musical meetings this was perhaps one of the richest. The trio produced a recording on the legendary ESP Disk label, Live in Our Time, (Thollem/ DuRoche/StJames)—which I think we’d all become proud of.

André (who left this mortal coil at the age of 69 in 2018) was a special musician, larger-than-life-cheerleader for his fellow musicians, and an even more remarkable human being who crossed paths with a dizzying swath of modern jazz and improvised music, including Dewey Redman, Sonny Rollins, Pharoah Sanders, James Moody, Andrew Hill, Sun Ra, and Portland’s Nancy King, Mel Brown, The Kin Trio, and Get Smashing Love Power, among many more. He was one of my dearest, closest friends and the most intimate musical collaborator I’ve known. We worked together for close to 20 years in more situations than I can remember, playing together not only with Thollem, but with Perry Robinson, Roscoe Mitchell, Bill McHenry, Burton Greene, John Gross, George Sams and Lori Goldston, and many others.

The recordings on this release were part of an evening (which featured the otherworldly vocalist Aurora Josephson with Thollem and myself, as well as John Savage, Alissa DeRubeis, Ralph Thomas, Andrew Jones, Scott Looney, and John Gross) that honored André St. James and raised money for Bravo Youth Orchestras, a Portland-based nonprofit that works with young people and music, which André worked with for many years and was very proud to be associated with.

Turn Turn Turn, where the recording took place, is one of those uniquely Portland places which is part town square, part trading post (with its quirky mix of vintage record store and hot-dog-centric bar menu) and, even in its intimate space, invites an enormous world of sound, sight, big ideas, and beautiful community-based creativity. No small coincidence that its proprietor is a former HS social studies teacher —Scott, aka Udo Dirkschneider, understands the currency of openness, possibility, revolution, and the confluence of musical connect-the-dots...from rock, noise, spoken word to jazz, free improv, and beyond. Honestly I’ve never felt more welcome in a room with my fellow travelers.

It’s hard to even talk about the deep chasm that André’s sudden death created for all those who knew him. “Bright moments,” he would always say, and so here we are (after so much this last year or more) continuing to light the way, like so many fireflies in an expanse of deep, night sky, with our songs, our voice, or poems, or protest, and sheer presence. Bright moments.