Tisziji Muñoz' Heart-Fire Sound

"Medeski seemed most enthusiastic about an evening he has dubbed "Concert of the Secret Guardians," which boasts an ensemble featuring guitarist Tisziji Muñoz, who Medeski describes as a "guru and spiritual master" who plays "healing fire-music." "

Tisziji Muñoz

"Mixing transcendentalist jazz with spiritualism, Tisziji Muñoz makes some of the most high-flying fusion since the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s ‘70s heyday. He is a self-taught player with a bold tone and a bent for harmony and melody that has earned him the musical camaraderie of Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali and other jazz heroes. Muñoz’s masterwork is 2001’s double-disc The Hu-Man Spirit, a freewheeling fusion session full of blazing improvisation. For a complete overview of his work visit www.tiszijimunoz.com."

Drummer’s Birthday Show Displays Jazz Guitarist’s Gifts

"Drummer Rakalam Bob Moses has played with Charles Mingus, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Pat Metheny, among many others, and his late-'60s band, Free Spirits, was among the pioneers of jazz/rock fusion. He also teaches at New England Conservatory. Yet for his 60th "b'earthday," as he called it, rather than celebrating his own achievements, Moses chose to showcase electric guitarist Bhapuji Tisziji Muñoz, whom he considers to be among the greatest and least- known living musicians.

"Muñoz's music evokes the cosmic free jazz of John Coltrane's later work. Like a saxophonist, Muñoz plays only one note at a time, yet he can play with such velocity that the notes blur, akin to Coltrane’s “sheets of sound.” Unlike Coltrane, who embodied the struggle toward transcendence, even at his most intense Muñoz remains serene, the struggle recalled in tranquility.

"Monday night, a substantial crowd of Moses’ students, colleagues, and fans filled Jordan Hall. When the band took the stage, cries of “happy birthday” and “Rakalam” arced over the applause. Moses spoke briefly, calling Muñoz “my teacher, my guru,” before yielding the stage to the guitarist.

"Opening the first set, “Spirit Path” began with lone guitar, displaying Muñoz’s luminous tone and breath-like phrasing as he limned the simple melody. Pianist John Medeski joined in with rippling consonant chords, then the two bassists provided some undertow, with John Lockwood plucking and Don Pate bowing. Only then did the self-effacing Moses chime in with gentle cymbals and snare.

"As Muñoz ramped up the velocity and dissonance, the band built to a volcanic rumble over which the guitarist swooped, soared, and screamed. The piece evolved like a force of nature until it returned to its songlike opening tune.

" “No Self, No Thought, No Mind” opened with Medeski playing staccato chords and Muñoz chanting the title along with them, equal parts Thelonious Monk and Zen koan. “Ode to Shompa” was Muñoz’s bittersweet dedication to the passing of Moses’ father. Medeski played Muñoz’s “Motherhood” as a solo piano lullaby. Then a familiar 6/8 vamp announced the Coltrane adaptation of “My Favorite Things,” with Muñoz playing the melody straight with a searing, bell-like tone before launching into the stratosphere.

"The second set began with “Love Is A Prayer,” sung from his wheelchair by Muñoz’s son Rebazar in an unpolished voice brimming with the joy of making music. The majestic, mountainous “We Meet Again In Spirit” had the band reach perhaps the peak of its intensity.

"Over the course of the evening, Lockwood and Pate held up their end superbly, shining in two inventive duets. Medeski ranged from Keith Jarrett delicacy to Cecil Taylor fire. And Moses sat back, supporting them all, stepping out for two brief solos with the freshness of a child at play."

Cool Sounds From The Underground

"My uptown Neanderthal bones schlepped downtown to the tiny basement Village Underground. Tables smaller than the pinky rings at Le Cirque. Mobbed, jammed, it was. It wasn’t the menu of only onion rings, mozzarella sticks, French fries, chicken wings. Wasn’t the ambience, since air is nonexistent and the décor’s early brick wall. Wasn’t the crowd, since it included a newborn with his pacifier and parents who were burping him.
What was it?
Tisziji Muñoz.
Who???!
Per David Letterman’s music man Paul Shaffer, who was walking around nursing a beer there that night: “I’m something today only because of this guy. He’s my mentor. I produced his new album, ‘Divine Radiance,’ on the jazz label Dreyfus Records because I want to bring him to the surface. I love him. See, in 1969, I was an undergrad at the University of Toronto taking sociology but my soul was into R&B. I was always depressed. I didn’t belong there. I was trying to be a lawyer but being an academic wasn’t for me. So I’m on the streets this one time in the wee hours after pulling an all-nighter and this guy’s sitting on the curb playing guitar. I did a 180 and walked back to listen to his music. I’d never heard sounds like this before. We found a piano someplace and I played with him all night. It changed my life.”
Right. OK. So about this wateverhisnameis. He’s an avant garde electric jazz guitarist. Also he has a day job as a spiritualist and philosopher. Also he was jamming that night with a marvelous group, including pianist Hilton Ruiz and John Coltrane’s sax-playing son Ravi.
I left about 10:30. The newborn baby was still there."

Tisziji Muñoz & Friends, Village Underground, New York City

"Who is this shamanistic cat with the pyrotechnic chops? And where's he been all my life? Guitarist Tisziji (pronounced tis-see-gee) Muñoz has been flying below the radar for the past 30 years, documenting his fleet-fingered, six-string take on latter-day John Coltrane in the company of such kindred spirits as drummers Rashied Ali and Bob Moses, saxophonist Dave Liebman, bassist Don Pate, pianist Marilyn Crispell and guitarist Henry Kaiser on the tiny independent Anami label. Imagine if Carlos Santana had never strayed from the intensely searching, spiritual path of Love, Devotion, Surrender and you get the picture.

"Although his name was brought to my attention a few years ago by ubiquitous taper and record-store owner Bruce Gallanter (proprietor of the Downtown Music Gallery, New York's premiere emporium for prog rock and the avant-garde), it was not until this recent record release party for Divine Radiance, Muñoz's debut on the higher profile Dreyfus label, that I actually first set eyes on the over-the-top ax slinger. Appearing in the intimate confines of the Village Underground with his dream band--a sextet featuring the twin tenors of Pharoah Sanders and Ravi Coltrane, Rashied Ali on drums, Don Pate on bass and Paul Shaffer (yes, of Letterman fame) on keyboards--this holy man of the fretboard ignited a set of transcendent music with his infinite sustain, mad machine-gun picking and unbridled passion. Visions of Sonny Sharrock in flight--broken strings dangling in the air as he thrashed away--danced in my head as Muñoz dug in with the heightened intensity of latter-day Trane, blowing "sheets of sound" alongside the former colleagues and son of his main inspiration. His sheer abandon and visceral intent rubbed off on the rest of the musicians to the point where the sextet was practically levitating a foot above the bandstand by the encore. And the audience, packed in shoulder-to-shoulder like straphangers on a runaway rush hour train, took it all in with awed delight.

"The tunes were all vehicles for exploration (launching pads, really) that developed out of simple melodic motifs. Pate's upright bass anchored the proceedings with deep-toned ostinatos and droning pedal-point work while Ali's drums provided waves of rolling, rhythmic energy underneath, freeing up the principal soloists to chase cosmic tones with impunity. Shaffer, whose keen ears and instincts are tested on a nightly basis as musical director of the David Letterman show, knew intuitively when to switch from block chords on the piano to droning organ mode, or when to lay out altogether. In subtle ways, his presence helped shape the surging music, providing a kind of harmonic nudging, if you will, in the midst of the sonic fray. On the mesmerizing, aptly-named "Initiation by Fire," he summoned up his finest McCoy Tyner imitation with a forceful left hand while feeding the soloists provocative chordal voicings.

"Sanders, the 62-year-old avant-garde icon, began the set in a placid state, playing from a seated position on a stool, but by the time they launched into the extended "Divine Radiance," he was on his feet, up on his toes, caught up in the spirit of this intense music and overblowing with hurricane force like the 25-year-old man he was on Coltrane's fabled Live at the Village Vanguard Again!

"Ravi Coltrane, indelibly connected to this music by birthright, rose to the occasion with some inspired fire-breathing tenor work of his own on "Divine Radiance." With forceful tones and a deliberate but probing quality, he authoritatively navigated the psychedelic swirl of Sanders' rampaging tenor, Pate's frenzied bowing and Muñoz's shrapnel-spewing guitar work. This kind of collective improvisation--overlapping conversations, really, rather than the neater and more orderly approach of individual soloists stepping out from the ensemble one by one to "tell their story"--reminded me of just how much the avant-garde has in common with early New Orleans jazz.

"Shaffer has made no secret of his admiration for Muñoz and the musical debt he owes the man. As the story goes, Tisziji lived in Toronto during the early 1970s and became a musical mentor for Paul in his formative, pre-"Saturday Night Live" stage. In return, Schaffer has coproduced and played on various Muñoz recordings over the years, and just a few days before this Village Underground showcase had the guitar guru appear with the CBS Orchestra on the Letterman show. As Paul said of Muñoz on the air that evening, "He takes you out--and he just leaves you there!" Letterman took that up as an oft-repeated mantra through the rest of the show to great comedic effect. Some patrons leaving the Village Underground a few days later could be heard muttering the same thing after an inspired, goose pimply set by Muñoz and his all-star sextet."

"Holy shit! Tisziji Muñoz's all-star sextet completely erupted and unleashed their dense cosmic forces on the sold-out crowd at the Village Underground this past Tuesday, June 10th!! The front-line of Pharoah Sanders & Ravi Coltrane on tenor saxes and Tisziji on electric guitar blasted with their Trane-like fury and devastated all in attendance with one amazing solo after the other, as well as backing each other as the solos soared into the heavens. The incredible rhythm team of Paul Shaffer on keyboards, Don Pate on acoustic bass and Rashied Ali on drums also were in fine form navigating the turbulence down below! The entire room was levitated and hurled into space and many felt that this was indeed the most exciting gig of the year! Tisziji's new cd 'Divine Radiance' was released the same day and includes the very same personnel plus Cecil McBee added on bass."

A Love Supreme Santana's not the only guitarist Indebted to jazz giant John Coltrane

"An Unknown Legend And in Schenectady, NY, an obscure musician-philosopher-astrologer named Tisziji Muñoz, the single living guitarist who most embodies the Coltrane sound and spirit, has been cranking out one astounding recording after another on his own Anami Music label. I first learned of Muñoz several years ago from Oakland guitarist Henry Kaiser (the Yo Miles! mastermind who did his own Coltrane turn on the master's "India" on his 1993 CD The Psychedelic Guitar Circus, with Harvey Mandel, Steve Kimock and Freddie Roulette). Now 53, the Brooklyn native has been recording on his own since 1978. His collaborators have included Paul Shaffer (yes, that Paul Shaffer), jazz veterans such as pianist John Hicks, drummer Bob Moses, bassist Cecil McBee and saxophonist Dave Liebman, plus Coltrane sidemen like pianist McCoy Tyner, Sanders and Ali.

"Tisziji Muñoz, a seriously unknown giant of the guitar, and another disciple of Coltrane. When he's not playing guitar, Muñoz is likely to be dispensing wisdom to his followers in Schenectady's Illumination Society. Here's a representative quote from his web site: "May the whole world of appearances be shocked beyond its superficial eyes, ears, faces, hearts and minds into awakening to God Fire, source of all real and make-believe worlds."

"Dat Ole Mysterium Eternalis When he is playing -- as on mind-boggling, passion-drenched recordings like the 1996 double CD Death Is A Friend of Mine, the 1997 trilogy The River of Blood, Present Without a Trace and Spirit World or the brand new Alpha-Nebula: The Prophecies and Tisziji Muñoz Live! Great Sacrifice -- Muñoz makes his notes float glowing in mid-air, streak like comet-tailed meteorites across a pitch black sky and disappear over the distant horizon of feedback. He brings to life such song titles as "Live To Give Heart-Love," "Spirit-World Contemplation" and "The Dance of Visionaries" through his dense, superheated-lava tone and unchecked outpourings of emotion. I'm sure you will never see Muñoz stepping on the stage to accept a Grammy for his powerful recorded work. Could he care less? "The music itself has always been fulfilling because it is the Truth for me," Muñoz has written on his Web site. "In a certain sense, I've not really wanted to make it because I've already made it." In a fine January 1999 Village Voice piece about Muñoz, "Bhagavad Guitar: Tisziji Muñoz's Spatial Projects," Richard Gehr wrote: "Like John Coltrane, in whose tradition he most definitely lies, Tisziji's cable connection plugs in directly to the source, the mysterium eternalis, the inner mounting flame from which music doth flow." Carlos Santana, who has likewise invested his Latin rock with a commitment to pure expression from the earliest days of the Santana band in 1969 through the present, couldn't have said it better. Indeed, whether on 1970's "Black Magic Woman" or 1999's "Smooth," Santana has always said it best in the molten "cry" of his guitar solos. Nonetheless, in the booklet to his 1995 three-CD box set, Dance of the Rainbow Serpent, Santana notes: "So my goal is always to play the guitar, or any instrument, really, from the heart. When I'm able to do that I don't feel like I'm playing, I feel like I'm transmitting. And I welcome this spirit. This is the spirit that takes the music beyond earthly tones. And so to play the guitar is learning to transmit, actually to both receive and transmit something beyond all of this." In other words, "Long live John Coltrane." "

"The ongoing record industry implosion into one big unhappy family may make it even more difficult for independent labels to secure bin space in your local CD supermarket, let alone coverage in Entertainment Weekly, but that's never been the issue for Tisziji Muñoz. "Tisziji who?" you ask, as I certainly did the first time Henry Kaiser slid one of the New York guitarist's tapes into his car cassette player and cranked up the volume until the superheated electric guitar riffs, McCoy Tyner- and Cecil Taylor-esque piano eruptions, and thundering drums threatened to shred his speaker cones. However, once you've heard the way his notes dance in boggling original configurations, stretch in taffylike lines around oddly romantic melodies, hover in midair, glowing at the edge of feedback, and then race like red blood cells in "Hemo the Magnificent," you'll wonder why the entire world hasn't rallied round Tisziji Muñoz.

"Last year marked the 20th anniversary of a solo recording career that began in 1978. Hardly anyone noticed, other than guitarist Kaiser, who celebrated the 52-year-old Muñoz with an appreciation in Guitar Player magazine and continued to force-feed his friends (including Village Voice writer Richard Gehr) with such astonishing recordings as the 1996 double CD Death Is a Friend of Mine and the 1997 releases Present Without a Trace and Spirit World, another double CD, featuring pianist Bernie Senensky, bassist Don Pate, drummer Rashied Ali, and saxophonist Pharoah Sanders (playing the way his "scream to me" fans want to hear him).

"Muñoz's choice of collaborators, his original titles, and above all, his fuzzy-/molten-toned, self-surrendering performances attest to the same Coltrane inspiration that motivated guitarists Sonny Sharrock, John McLaughlin, Carlos Santana, and others. His spiritual pursuits, manifested in metaphysical-philosophical liner notes and a self-devised astrology practice he calls "Time-Mastery," have become as inseparable from his musical expression as breathing in from breathing out.

" "I am not a person living on the fuel of any kind of ambition," Muñoz writes on his Web site. "Music has been too natural for me to have a certain quality of ambition or aggressiveness attached to its practice. The music itself has always been fulfilling because it is the Truth for me. In a certain sense, I've not really wanted to make it because I've already made it." Sony can you hear me?"

BHAGAVAD GUITAR: Tisziji Muñoz's Spatial Projects

"Where does music come from? Musicians are like radio receivers, proposes one theory, transforming sounds already zipping through the ether into the sculpted air that eventually tickles our tympanic membranes. Turn 'em on, tune 'em in, and stand back. But besides emanating a certain false modesty, doesn't this theory subtly shortchange the individual creative spirit? I used to think so, until a friend directed my own antennae toward guitarist Tisziji Muñoz.

"A self-taught guitarist who practices rarely, if ever, Tisziji (pronounced tis-see-gee) Muñoz's musical signature can be recognized clearly in about three notes. It's an ecstatic yet slightly scratchy singing voice of a guitar sound that borders on feedback like a harmonic disturbance interfering gently with the aforementioned cosmic radio waves. Like John Coltrane, in whose tradition he most definitely lies, Tisziji's cable connection plugs in directly to the source, the mysterium eternalis, the inner mounting flame from which music doth flow.

"Coltrane was the first major Western player to adjust his internal rabbit ears to the universal broadcast spectrum. Guitarists John McLaughlin, Carlos Santana, and Allan Holdsworth all eventually hopped on the Trane, extending his modes and metaphysics in a variety of contexts, while the late Sonny Sharrock took Coltrane's methodology to the harmonic outskirts of an altogether different country. But none of these guitarists' music ebbs and flows as naturally out of the void, pure spirit, whatever you want to call it, as Tisziji's.

"Most of the time you'll find Tisziji Muñoz teaching astrology and serving as spiritual guide to a Schenectady sect known as the Illumination Society. "The Bhagavad Guitar Player," Muñoz wrote in one of his many tracts, "is One Who, born Awake to Being the Sound of Light and the Light of Sound, Is Now Awake as the very Soul and Mind, Feeling and Heart-Source of Music, as That may Represent or Express the simple yet profound Love, Thought, Feeling-Tone and Free Action of One Who Is Its Own Sound." Muñoz is only invisible insofar as he has managed to avoid critical radar. Since recording Rendezvous With Now for India Navigation in 1978, he has released eight albums and four cassettes. During the past two years, he has been dropping by Rashied Ali's Survival Studio in Soho, recording hours of material with fellow Coltrane acolytes: drummer Ali, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, bassist Don Pate, and pianists John Hicks and Bernie Senensky. He recently released a trio of albums— River of Blood, Present Without a Trace, and Spirit World— from these sessions (on his own Anami Music label: P.O. Box 712, Schenectady, NY 12301; www.tisziji.com). He expects to release five more in the near future.

"A Nuyorican born in Brooklyn in 1946, Muñoz joined percussionist Mongo Santamaria's rhythm posse at age 13. After leaving the army in the early '70s, he lived for a while in Toronto, where he became a musical mentor to keyboardist Paul Shaffer, who phoned me unexpectedly on Tisziji's behalf. "Tisziji's the real deal," attests Shaffer, who is all too familiar with the other kind. Muñoz played in Pharoah Sanders's band for several years during the '70s. And although he has performed live only sporadically since moving from New York City to Schenectady in 1984, he has gigged since then with the likes of McCoy Tyner, Dave Liebman, Idris Muhammed, and Cecil McBee.

"Muñoz's music hits the ground running. "Ready or not," says someone at the outset of Present Without a Trace's "Dearly Responsible," as the group erupts into a free-time, "Ascension"-like orgy. Tisziji has described his music as a "divine catastrophe" for good reason: his ultimate goal is to unhinge himself from structure and cruise on undiluted energy. His early recordings pick up where Coltrane left off, eventually circling back in the early '90s to recapitulate such standards as "My Favorite Things," "Giant Steps," and "Kind of Blue." Having transformed such standards as "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "If I Only Had a Brain" into tension-and-release pleasure bombs on 1995's Spirit Man, Muñoz returned the following year with the portentously titled Death Is a Friend of Mine. My favorite Muñoz album to date, this double CD bids a fond adieu to the past (i.e., other people's music), most notably in an epic meditation on Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Dindi," while setting the stage for whatever the hell he's doing now.

"His three new albums contain 25 Muñoz originals spread over four discs (Spirit World's a double), most of which he reportedly scribbled down in the studio just prior to the three intense sessions in which they were recorded. River of Blood's title refers to the "racial stream" that provided Muñoz with his affinity for Afro-Cuban and salsa rhythms (he plans to record with pianist Hilton Ruiz soon), and much of the album can be heard as a struggle to escape even those loose fetters. Muñoz spills clusters, often bushels, of rapid notes, which even with his metal pick retain a warmth that quickly rises to a searing sustained heat Ali's flowing polymetrics dissipate smoothly. The other band members— even Sanders, sounding as though he cares— play solid tech crew to Tisziji's extended space walks. He's a man on a mission, and I feel grateful knowing Tisziji Muñoz is out there in the catastrophic cosmos, generating countless megawatts of spiritual power on our collective behalf."

"A warmly sustained, lightly distorted guitar dances over a modally inflected jazz rhythm section. For a few moments it seems familiar, a sound common to the last three decades of electric jazz. Yet something is very different: The notes and intervals fly by in patterns that don't equate to the usual fingering configurations. The rhythms breathe in a strange way that isn't quite swing. Lightning-fast torrents of notes are slurred or bent to odd, microtonal intervals. The longer you listen, the more unique it sounds.

"Like Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin, Sonny Sharrock Allan Holdsworth and Sonny Greenwich, Tisziji Munoz has drawn musical and spiritual inspiration from the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. The aforementioned players are known for their individuality, vibrant improvisational style, technical mastery and spiritual depth. In these respects Muñoz stands shoulder to shoulder with his more famous colleagues. While he undeniably sounds like a "Coltrane guitarist," Tisziji has taken the approach to a new place that is simultaneously in and out of tradition.

"On the six CDs and several cassette releases from Muñoz's own Anami label,{Box 712, Schenectady, NY 12301}, Tisziji's electric guitar playing explores spaces outside the usual confines of jazz. With such collaborators as Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali, Bob Moses, Paul Shaffer, Dave Liebman, Nick Brignola, Bernie Senensky and Don Pate, Muñoz has produced some of the most striking and original electric jazz of the past 15 years.

"How can such a great player be virtually unknown? The answer lies in the story of Tisziji's life, which is as singular as the music it has produced. In addition to his musical career, Muñoz is a spiritual teacher who has written more than 50 books of metaphysical/esoteric knowledge. He has studied all the major world religions, practiced several forms of yoga and Tibetan Buddhism, and developed his own system of astrology, which he calls Time-Mastery.

"Tisziji was born in Brooklyn in 1946. At age three he received his first set of drums and began to master traditional Afro-Cuban rhythms. In 1968, while serving as drummer in the 440th U.S. Army Band, he began to teach himself guitar and jazz harmony. He lived in Canada and New York City after leaving the service in '69. In the late '70s he met Pharoah Sanders and played in his band for six years. He soon stopped listening to other guitar players and other music in general—while continuing to develop his own style. In 1978 he recorded his first album for the India Navigation label, Rendezvous with Now. He moved to Schenectady in 1984, where he lives in relative seclusion and rarely performs. But he continues to record and release fine albums.

"A totally self-taught player, Muñoz makes his musical choices according to feeling and intuition. Despite having once severed the artery in his left wrist, resulting in severe nerve damage and persistent pain, he operates at a very high technical level. His non-musical activities allow little time for practice, and he rarely gets a chance to play. But when he does, he makes every note count.

" "I'm more of a space than a time player," he says. "I'm a spirit in this dimension playing from a realization of heart-sound representing total consciousness. I'm not an 'in' player or an 'out' player, but as a free spirit I have to assume certain forms to communicate with other beings on any number of planes. All the planes of the universe coexist, and I'm in the physical plane playing both from and into the spirit plane of silence."

"On the newly released Death Is a Friend Mine, Muñoz plays a Fender D'Aquisto strung with D'Addario half-wound light jazz strings through a Mesa/Boogie Mark II and Peavey Bandit amps. He uses a metal pick and attains a rich, singing tone with no pedals or effects. The new recording features standards by Miles Davis and John Coltrane as well as original compositions. Muñoz describes the album as "a musical experience contemplating fearlessness, love and humor regarding death. I'm offering the listener a broad selection of musical forms: ballads, medium-tempo modal pieces, swing interpretations, very contemplative pieces." Another recent project is River of Blood, a collaboration with onetime Coltrane drummer Rashied Ali.

"Muñoz says his music is founded on "the freedom to explore the many levels of human spirituality and reality for each musician in their own individual way." Perhaps he transcends the mundane specifics of guitar technique and equipment to create music that lies beyond the limits of conventional theory and practice."

Muñoz' heady free fall through free jazz: Into orbit and out of this world

"ALBANY -- Jazz guitarist Tisziji Muñoz makes his home in Schenectady, but at times it seems as though he is just "Visiting This Planet," as he titled his 1989 double-album.

"On Sunday afternoon, Muñoz brought his Visionary Jazz Quartet with special guest saxophonist Dave Liebman to the University of Albany's Page Hall for the latest installment of his Jazz Masters Concert Series.

"The concert was titled "A Celebration of Creativity: Music Beyond the Self-Mind," and certainly there was no shortage of creativity issuing forth from the stage.

"While not widely known outside of the insular jazz circles, Muñoz is indeed a heavyweight guitarist, and on Sunday, he took his hollow-body electric guitar into orbit for two hour-long sets of vibrant, angular free jazz. Backed by his stellar band, which featured pianist Bernie Senensky, bassist Don Pate and drummer Bob Moses, Muñoz pushed the envelope and then some.

"You won't find Muñoz and his band playing at local jazz clubs primarily because, no matter how you cut it, his music demands the full attention of the audience. On Sunday, it was dense, occasionally impenetrable and oh so outside-the-lines. Muñoz's music asks difficult questions and provides no easy answers.

" "The music, at times, will sound ferocious", Muñoz cautioned early in the show, "and it is." Unfortunately, that was about the only hint that Muñoz -- who is also a spiritual teacher and founder of the Illumination Society -- gave the small but appreciative crowd. He offered no other signposts or roadmaps, preferring to let his music speak for itself.

"After opening with an exploratory foray into a work-in-progress, "Pyramid," Muñoz was joined by soprano saxophonist Dave Liebman, and the five musicians launched into Muñoz's ambitious composition "Fatherhood" and a free-for-all version of Leonard Bernstein's "Somewhere". "Although almost everyone has heard this song in one form or another," Muñoz explained, "it's not usually heard in this context". He wasn't foolin'. Two minutes into the song, the melody was utterly unrecognizable. Adventurous? Yes. Exciting? Yes. But was it "Somewhere"? Who could tell?

"The same could be said of another Broadway tune, "My Favorite Things," which, as the centerpiece of the second set, was stretched past the point of no return until it seemed to snap completely.

"Muñoz wisely saved his best for last with a closing rendition of his "Spiritual Reunion (A Platonic Love Song)", an insinuating Latin-tinged tune that veered into the realm of free jazz without completely losing its roots in the melody and chord changes of the song.

"Although Sunday's show was not as successful or rewarding as his concert collaboration with McCoy Tyner at the Troy Music Hall in '89, Muñoz is to be commended and encouraged for taking serious musical chances.

"The next Jazz Master Concert Series performance will find Muñoz teaming up with Nick Brignola at Page Hall on Nov. 12 and 13."

Area jazz guitarist Tisziji Muñoz joins forces with McCoy Tyner this weekend

"I am not a person living on the fuel of any kind of ambition, so to speak," states Tisziji Munoz. "Music has been too natural for me to have a certain quality of ambition. The music itself has always been fulfilling. In a certain sense, I've not really wanted to make it because I've already made it. I'm happy with my music, even though I play relatively infrequently for public purposes."

For years now, jazz guitarist Munoz has been one of the best-kept secrets of the Capital Region music scene, but that's all about to change in a big way this weekend. On Saturday and Sunday nights at 8 PM Munoz will perform with the internationally acclaimed McCoy Tyner Trio in concert at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall.

Both Munoz and pianist Tyner have forged their considerable reputations on forceful, uncompromising musicianship and highly charged emotional power. Although both musicians had long known of each other's work, it wasn't until this past January that they actually met, introduced by a rather unlikely source.

"Naturally, McCoy has enjoyed as much visibility as any jazz player can have, and I remember seeing McCoy and Elvin Jones in the audience when I used to play with Pharoah Sanders in the '70s back in the Vanguard days." explains Munoz, referring to the Village Vanguard, a Manhattan jazz club. "So he was at that point familiar with some of my efforts to develop a style of playing that worked well in a musically free environment.

"But we had not talked until Paul Shaffer, a dear friend of mine from the early '70s, asked me to rendezvous with him at the David Letterman show in January. There Paul introduced me to McCoy as the individual who introduced him to McCoy's music.

"That meeting enabled McCoy and I to establish a conversation about music, creativity, McCoy's efforts, my efforts and my relationship to the music scene. And it quickly became evident to me and McCoy that we should play together. It seemed to establish a clear green light in terms of the possibility of us merging on the bandstand and providing people with a rare event, if I may use the word."

"He.and I have not played together before, but he can certainly handle all the musical freedom that I can handle and then some, and I look forward to this kind of challenge. Once we get together in our own element, it should be a very ecstatic meeting. I'm especially delighted because this is one of the few times when I won't have to discuss harmony with the keyboard player. McCoy is one of those players who, just at the signal of the sound; will know what to do with it and make it wonderful.

"So for me it should be a very easy gig in some respects and then a very demanding one. I will utilize this.opportunity to get as deep as possible into the music so that the people who attend will remember it all the more with lasting quality. I have this theory that the deeper the music, the longer it will be useful to the listener. There will be that many more layers of its own onionness to peel."

Although Munoz has lived in the Capital Region for the past five years, his area performances have indeed been rare. ''There was an attempt to meet what appeared to be a demand to play in 1986," he says, "when I felt OK about playing and trying to establish contact with some of the local players. However, the only players who seemed to have a high compatibility reading with what my intentions and concepts were happened to be Nick Brignola and his drummer at the time, David Calarco, who is a very game and powerful musician. David and I did a number of gigs with various other musicians in the Albany area, particularly at Justin's.

"We definitely had very bright and high moments, but it seemed that at that time musicians as well as other people didn't really understand why I was playing the way I was playing. There was nothing wrong with the way I was playing from my point of view," he says with a laugh, "but playing this kind of open, creative music in a restaurant atmosphere is not always conducive to the experiences of either playing or dining. Eating requires a certain amount of relaxation. The music was quite fun and exciting but very possibly too strong for the environment and the circumstances.''

Munoz's music is, in fact, very powerful. It's intense and energetic, certainly not the kind of mellow background music to dine or flirt by. It almost demands active participation by the listener.

"In its purest form music is a celebration that includes society," Munoz explains. "A communion of spirits is ultimately what it's for, playing for the sake of the tribe, the listening tribe. That to me is the ultimate level. of what music is about. The highest function of music is to serve other beings and to give other beings a creative part in the music."

Left without a local venue for his probing musical self-expression. Munoz has decided to offer his music to the listening tribe via recordings, and his debut double album Visiting This Planet has just been released on his own record company Anami Music (PO Box 712, Schenectady, NY 12301).

"The album is the first production of an intended series of recordings which captured for the most part spontaneous events-the musicians showed up, and the music happened," Munoz states almost matter-of-factly, "There were no rehearsals in any case. Even on the tunes that are structured there was just a talk through, and in some cases music was provided simply to open the doors to focus the vibrations of sound. That was it. We went for broke, and some things of magical quality happened."

He's being overly modest--there's a plethora of magical musical moments on this double dose of Munoz. Seven of his stunning original compositions and two John Coltrane tunes ("Equinox" and "To Be") are buoyed by Munoz's own inspirational playing and stellar contributions by such jazz greats as bassist Cecil McBee, drummer Idris Muhammed, saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Dave Leibman, and yes, even Paul Shaffer.

"In terms of jazz concepts that I use, minimal limitation or minimal suggestion is all that's necessary, along with maximum freedom and trust in the individual musician's creative powers." he says of his open-ended approach to composition. "Their spirit determines what choices and decisions they make in any particular musical operation or rite. Whatever the celebration requires."

"In terms of selecting the material for the album, the concept that I used was to give the listener the opportunity to hear the use of structure with melody predominating and then to progress from that to a freer use of artist's discussion, which makes the music apparently more complex. It is this freedom that is granted the players in order to express themselves at this depth that makes various levels of perception accessible."

His relentlessly questioning, creative music is in many ways a forum for Munoz to discuss the mysteries of life with his audience. And if you take the time to listen, he will touch your life. Or as drummer Bob Moses wrote about Munoz in the liner notes to Visiting This Planet: "What's he sound like? Some Coltrane, some Santana. That sound that stuns the Laser Beam of Love...."

Sad as it may be, many first-rate musicians toil unnoticed by the jazz public for as much as a lifetime. Even major figures occasionally slip through the cracks, often attaining only regional acclaim. If they're fortunate, a larger national light shines on them while they're still alive.

Guitarist Tisziji Muñoz is one such major player, a true original who has never been in the broader jazz spotlight. And he doesn't mind it a bit.

A member of Pharoah Sanders' band for several years during the 1970s, Muñoz has played and recorded with the likes of Elvin Jones, Charles Lloyd, Stanley Clarke, Cecil McBee and Joe Henderson. The path traveled by more commercially successful guitarists like Stanley Jordan, Pat Metheny and James "Blood" Ulmer has been open to him, yet Muñoz has been content to stick with a set of priorities that has kept him out of the mainstream.

He leads a group that includes drummer Bob Moses, pianist Donald Brown and bassist John Lockwood in a rare area appearance this Friday at the 1369 Club.

"I've never really tried to 'make it' in a certain context of the word," the 40-year old Brooklyn-born Muñoz said from his home in Schenectady. "I've been pretty much happy as an underground musician. I've been involved in a lot of typically spiritual activities. I'm sort of semi-retired up here and finishing up writings that are very important to me before I get back into music, probably for my last lap."

The father of four, Muñoz runs a sort of philosophical/spiritual group out of his home and teaches astrology at Hudson Valley Community College. Music, however, remains a significant part of his life. He recently started a record company that will release his own music. Friends like Moses, Sanders and pianist John Hicks will be featured.

In an appearance at the 1369 Club last year, Muñoz displayed a sonorous electric guitar voice that ranged from jaggedly tension-filled to soothingly lyrical to downright ethereal. Although, like a 1980s Thelonious Monk, he roams on and off stage after his solo flights, his playing is nonetheless sharply disciplined whether on originals or tunes like Miles Davis' "My Funny Valentine."

"I'd tend towards opening it up more, getting into deeper creative levels in the spirit of some of the freer things that Trane did later on," he said, referring to saxophonist John Coltrane.

"When I open it up so it becomes a creative event for everybody, we're all surprised," he continued. "In that sense, my spiritual background is clearly related to my musical concepts in terms of being free of certain mental limitations, which are translated into sound forms. I like to throw away what I know so I can be played by the unknown."

Muñoz, who grew up in a household where Afro-Cuban drumming was an important ingredient of family life, hasn't cut himself off totally from outside projects. He'll be recording in September with a group that will include Moses, Jerry Bergonzi and Dave Liebman.

Tisziji Muñoz - not an ordinary name in the Capital District. But then, Muñoz is not an ordinary man.

The 38-year-old guitarist, living here since last fall, is one of a relatively small number of people who use the term "creative music" to describe, or at least label, what they do. Some such players live in the Woodstock area, but few are to be found this far north.

Muñoz is articulate about his art, which he dislikes to call jazz but which many people would recognize as arising out of jazz.

Others might call it fusion music or space music. Often it has an other-worldly quality. He also calls it "conceptual music" and lists John Coltrane, who died in 1967, as a primary influence on him. Someone familiar with jazz styles would bear similarity between some of Muñoz's music and what Coltrane was doing in his last two or three years.

Muñoz has worked with several notable players, including Elvin Jones, Pharoah Sanders (with whom he also recorded) and Charles Lloyd, and has studied with others. He has one album out on the India Navigation label, and has, he said, enough recordings "in the can" to put out five albums. Self-financed, they include an impressive group of sidemen: saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Dave Liebman, drummers Adam Nussbaum, Bob Moses and Idris Muhammed; percussionist Guillerme Franco; bassists Art Davis and Cecil McBee; and pianists Hilton Ruiz and John Hicks. And on those tapes, Muñoz also plays synthesizers and conga drums.

In his spacious Nott Street studio he played examples, and the music showed considerable variety, including standards such as "Climb Every Mountain" and "My Funny Valentine," but mostly his own compositions which vary in mood and often have unusual harmonic progressions.

His sound on guitar is much like Carlos Santana's; definitely an electric sound, not typical of jazz guitarists. But while on the surface the sound is like a rock player's, the musical content is far from that.

"Much of what I do is very logical," he said, meaning accessible to a listener with some exposure to jazz or sophisticated pop music. "It will have more commercial appeal than my 'crazy wisdom music,' as I like to call it."

The music - he must find a record label willing to issue it, not a simple task - still needs to be remixed, and Muñoz said he hopes to do it somewhere upstate, although that will depend on locating a studio with the digital tape equipment he needs.

Born in New York of Puerto Rican parents, Muñoz was always musical and mystical. "I started playing very young - 1 or 2 years old - and I got involved in Latin music. I was hanging out with people from Mongo Santamaria's band when I was 12 and 13."

But Salsa was not to be his thing. "When I was 13 years old, playing the ukulele, I managed to record with the Tokens, believe it or not, right after their first big grand slam - "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." I think I got paid $30 for doing a guitar track in a Brooklyn studio. Right after that I made my first record, I was 13 years old, it's supposedly still selling today. The group was called The Arrogants and we had very advanced harmonies for local kids." This time, he was playing drums. Backed by The Marketts, they did a version of "Canadian Sunset" that he said was a regional hit in the 1960s.

"We never signed anything, so whatever money they made, they made off of our ignorance." The Arrogants also toured with the Beach Boys in California, he said.

Muñoz went into the Army in 1964, at age 17, wanting to be a helicopter pilot. "I stayed in long enough to be approved to go to flight school [but] I started to question what was going on in Vietnam." He wound up in the 440th Army Band at Fort Bragg, N.C. "This time I didn't have it in me to get into the drums. What seemed to be necessary for me was to get melodic expression. I stayed in the military band for about a year, and then I was out of the service. I was in the concert band as a percussionist; I was in the stage band as a Latin percussionist, and at the same time studying the guitar.

"I met a lot of good players there. The war and the conscription policy at that time brought together a lot of talented people." Among them were players who had worked with Eric Dolphy, a highly influential woodwind player in the early 1960s.

"In 1969 I managed to get up to Canada and met Don Thompson, who I played with and who introduced me to Sonny Greenwich, the legendary jazz guitar player of Canada. Don Thompson [at present the bassist with pianist George Shearing) was the key that led me to [the late] Lenny Breau. He and I became very good friends, and once I started to get my act together, I subbed for him [played engagements that Breau had to miss]. I also subbed for Ed Bickert. These individuals helped to shape my direction to some degree. "I had a intuitive feeling with the music ... my creative urges are more right-brain oriented."

Muñoz music can range from straight-ahead, garden variety modern jazz to works that depend on unusual harmonic progressions that can have sustained high tension levels. What he plays in public, he said, depends on where he is and what the public expects.

"I have not based my music on an academic or theoretical basis. I have approached my music from a conceptual basis. This has been good for making music with some individuals, and absolutely undermining" with others.

Muñoz wants collaborators "who can psychically tune into the energy field and work with this energy", provided they have the musical background to begin with. "I don't intend on sounding like anyone else. I'd rather try to express as much as I can the ideas and feelings I have about some aspects of reality."

A Muñoz composition may be more a starting place for group improvisation or exploration than the typical jazz or pop tune; that is, less restrictive in structure. That, he said, requires more empathy among the players.

"We work with concepts and certain laws relative to harmony that dictate the kind of playing that comes out. Now, this may be considered a relatively primitive approach, however it is also a very sophisticated approach. If you have a musical education behind you and you want to find something more creative, what do we do? We work with concepts and we bring out own musical ability to them just as a writer or an artists were to work with an image or a subject."

So each piece may be realized differently. "I would definitely sketch something out, but nothing that would be too inhibitive, nothing that would be too dictative. I want to give people an opportunity to express themselves. Jazz is supposed to do that. I'm speaking in terms of a wide open concept: It is harmonically left up to the individual to express himself and rhythmically left up to the band, the unit, to work in sympathy.

"I seldom come out with a statement that I feel I have to control by notation. Many of the composition I play are basically doors into a state or realm of possibilities, and I really feel that what is important is to get the other artists experience. Rather than dictate, I will suggest.

"If there is just a melody line, yet the concept does include the intensity of various rhythms, the drummer must meditate to a degree, or contemplate on the melody, and fill in the time-space with rhythmic patterns. The intensity is determined by the amount of rhythm and the complexity of rhythms that the drummer plays. A psychic basis is really essential. Where there is not much [written] music determining where the notes are supposed to be played, then you need a very strong psychic element - then you need big ears, as the players say. The players need to intuit ... I like a simple approach where the most can be gotten out of the least."

Muñoz stands away from mainstream American life, both in his music and in his views about many things. There are words that crop up again and again in his speech: psychic, spiritual, conceptual, beauty, healing. So it isn't too surprising to learn that he is also a professional astrologer.

"I've had a very mystical life experience. At a very early age I would have what they call today an out-of body life experience. I didn't control them then. I was raised in a spiritualist family - seances, mediums, that sort of thing, and playing Afro-Cuban trance music on the drums, I became aware at a very early age that music was basically a form of meditation in order to move or expand consciousness to states that are outside the usual state of being. It hasn't been a drug-oriented approach. So I've always sought to find musicians with these kinds of principles. I've often felt I was a kind of reincarnated Atlantian with an intuitive understanding of what sound is and how important it is for us to play certain tones."

He has, he said, used Yoga to increase his breathing capacity (he plays a double-reed instrument called a shenai or shanai - there appears to be no English word for it - that is nearly impossible to keep in tune; and also plays the Indian tamboura (a drone instrument) and keyboards as well as guitar), and used biomagnetic techniques to cure an arthritic condition.

Muñoz said he has performed in New York night clubs, including the Village Vanguard when he worked with Pharoah Sanders, but that the conditions, particularly the physical atmosphere, were more than he could stand at the time. "I was not feeling up to the punishment on the circuit, the hard hours which can be fun but are also psychically exhausting and can wear you down on all levels."

Here, he divides his time among astrology readings, his writings, music, and certain philosophical inquiries, he explained. What he would like to do, he said, is to connect with other musicians who share some of his approaches, or possibly to attract students with open minds.

"I would like to stay here indefinitely; I'd like to work weekends [in local clubs], establish a rapport with the audience, and then bring some of my own musical ideas to a standard jazz gig."

Although some of his recordings would be considered "far out" by the average listener, Muñoz says his approach on stage is to "give due respect to the needs of the audience to not feel disintegrated." In other words, he plays what they may need to hear.

"There was a moment Tuesday night at the Village Vanguard when I felt like yelling out loud and launching head-first through the ceiling - that's the kind of feverish pitch that Pharoah Sanders and his group hit me.

"Sanders has regained an intensity on his saxophones that made him a real jazz happening a few years back when his albums "Karma" and "Jewels of Thought" propelled him to the forefront: his new group is just the best he's played with as a leader. They have to be seen and heard to be believed.

"For a number of years. Sanders seemed to have left his Coltrane-inspired saxophone religion in favor of a lot of mumbo-jumbo and bell-shaking. Leon Thomas, a fine singer whose melodic yodeling complemented Pharoah's wild shrieking very well, had left the group, and Sanders adopted a percussive accent that unfortunately overwhelmed his playing.

"Now, in electric guitarist Muñoz (he goes by that one name only), Sanders has found the best soloist he's ever had in his bands. Munoz' carefully wrought attacks are outstanding, placed next to Sanders' instant intensity. Together, especially when Sanders plays his East-toned soprano sax, they have come up with a singular wailing sound. The whole ensemble cooks. Steve Neil really works his bass, and Greg Bandy on drums is no less energetic or tasteful.

"Sanders took off right away with his tenor on "My Favorite Things," a tip of his mid-cap to Coltrane, with whom he once played, and got so loose he began blues-shouting on the finale, "Love Will Find a Way." What a rush! You can catch him at the Vanguard through Sunday."

"There is a very talented musician in Toronto who qualifies for the moment as an underground specialty. Muñoz has played countless free gigs everywhere, most notably a series of Sunday nights at the Hall, and is an enormous favorite. A superlative guitarist, he turns up regularly at the benefits and even a few demonstrations, and has earned a loyal and growing following.

"What makes him inspiring is that he is two things most musicians aren't completely, personally dedicated, and non-commercial. One of his intentions is to create new expression in music. Another is to help stimulate underground musicians. He's not in it to make money. He and his quintet are therefore sociologically important. Imagine if he could make the idea spread that you play music for the good it does your own and other people's heads!

"Tisziji Muñoz's guitar speaks to me of two things- pain and faith. He has a mission that he is trying to fulfill through his playing. Some of the words he used to talk about this were: "I feel my music was given to me as a child to express things. What I play corresponds to my being. It helps me to search for God inside myself."

"You get the feeling that he's had a lot of pain and shocks and that he's playing for the good of his soul. He has been utterly and completely into music all his life.

"The amazing thing about him is that, at 24, he has been playing guitar for less than three years. From New York City, he began the drums at age two. At 21, he found himself drumming in a US Army band when someone suggested he switch to guitar. He had ideas and melodies in his head that he couldn't express through drums, so he made a switch to the guitar. To see his progress, it's not hard to get the suspicion that he is a little of a musical genius.

"When his quintet plays at the Hall it has often turned into a magical, fine, beautiful experience. One time that I saw them there were hundreds of people swaying and listening to his gentle yet dramatic songs and watching the dancers that accompany them there.

"Muñoz and his wife Ellen live with their two children in the 14th floor commune in Rochdale, where he jams frequently. They are unpretentious and gentle people, and extraordinarily friendly.

"Muñoz deliberately has no commercial plans. No records to plug, and no commercial engagements he could think of except the Meat and Potatoes on Easter Weekend, along with an Easter church concert. A lot of musicians could learn from him in a lot of ways."

Tisziji Muñoz: Divine Radiance. Paul Shaffer and Tisziji Muñoz, producers. Dreyfus 36706

"Of the jazz guitarists inspired by saxophonist John Coltrane's mid-'60s spiritual quest, upstate New Yorker Tisziji Muñoz has remained at once the most steadfast and the most obscure. Unlike John McLaughlin or Larry Coryell, for instance, this 57-year-old Brooklyn-born guitarist has never ventured far afield from the alchemy of a thick, molten electric guitar tone and furious sheets-of-sound scales that became popular at the dawn of jazz-rock fusion. Indeed, those who have somehow found their way to Muñoz's music (perhaps through his sporadic performances with saxist Pharoah Sanders and pianist McCoy Tyner) will find Divine Radiance quite familiar, with few departures from the score of albums Muñoz has released on his own Anami label over the past decade. But those hearing the Schenectady-based spiritualist for the first time, thanks to the wider distribution made possible by Dreyfus, will be blown away by Muñoz's mercurial fretwork, unbridled passion, and urgent quest for self-expression on what can only be called a higher metaphysical plane.

"Like Coltrane, this self-styled astrologer draws equally inspired performances from his musical partners, in this case tenor saxophonists Sanders and Ravi Coltrane, and his longtime rhythm section collaborators—bassist Don Pate, drummer Rashied Ali, and pianist Paul Shaffer. (Yes, that Paul Shaffer; he and Muñoz met at York University in Toronto in 1970 and have remained friends ever since.) On three epic-length pieces (two clocking in at 16 minutes, one at 24) and two short ones, Muñoz powers through late-Trane-like squalls of collective cacophony and meditates on poignant, legato melodies played in a breathtakingly luminescent tone.

"While Muñoz's recent CDs with pianist Marilyn Crispell were cleanly produced by guitarist Henry Kaiser, the sometimes-muddy mix here won't win any audiophile prizes. But that becomes irrelevant when Muñoz, like Carlos Santana, the late Sonny Sharrock, and McLaughlin at his Mahavishnu peak, achieves such intense levels of embodied spirit." DR

"...Guitarist Tisziji Muñoz makes explicit in his liner notes a need to bring back this kind of spiritual energy music. Recorded in New York on October 2001, Muñoz’ stated purpose was to “demand no less than Divine Radiance from everyone, in order to balance out the loss of light and the flood of sorrow released on September 11, 2001.

"Muñoz’ aspirations can be seen in his choice of musicians for this session—tenor sax player Ravi Coltrane is John Coltrane’s son, and tenor sax player Pharoah Sanders and drummer Rashied Ali are veterans of Coltrane’s final group. The bassists Cecil McBee and Don Pate also contribute to the proceedings, the former a fixture on Sanders’ landmark late 60s albums and the latter an associate of Gil Evans for a time. Rounding out the group is keyboardist Paul Shaffer. ... And, because he’s been a friend and collaborator with Muñoz for over 30 years, nobody can doubt his sincerity.

"Muñoz’ obsession with John Coltrane may be on display throughout Divine Radiance, but his playing and composing actually brings to mind two of Coltrane’s guitarist disciples: his more tranquil moments evoke John McLaughlin, while Sonny Sharrock is the obvious signpost when Muñoz works up a good head of steam. Indeed, the ghosts of early Mahavishnu Orchestra and Last Exit hang just as heavily over Divine Radiance as Coltrane’s guiding spirit.

"The CD opens with “Moment Of Truth”, a brief melodic statement over a Jan Hammer-like wash of synths. Its sets the mood, much like the brief pieces on Keith Jarrett’s Expectations.

" “Visiting This Planet - Leaving This Planet” features an arcing melody, almost all whole notes, delivered over another wash of synths. The result is very much like Birds Of Fire-era Mahavishnu Orchestra. Muñoz unleashes a flurry of notes as the bassists lock into a complementary rhythm. Ravi also delivers a melodic solo as he builds from some basic Blues licks to some intensity. The piece ends by recapitulating the “Visiting” theme and then adding the “Leaving” theme. “Leaving” is more conventional, sounding like a movie score’s love theme.

" “Initiation By Fire” offers some muscular, McCoy Tyner-style piano playing by Shaffer as the intensity level is increased. This is closer to John Coltrane’s Meditations than something that would feature Jan Hammer. Muñoz starts out of the gate with a fiery, chromatically ascending solo. Pharoah Sanders joins in, opening with a brief quote of the “Pursuance” theme from Coltrane’s Love Supreme before launching into the stratosphere with his trademark overflowing technique. As Muñoz delivers Sharrock-like ecstatic sounds, Ravi unveils a nice melodic line."

" “Fatherhood” is a duet between Muñoz and Shaffer ... It’s a pretty melody.

"The CD finishes with the titanic blowout “Divine Radiance”. It seems to have a loose structure of solo features for 2 or 3 musicians linked by communal improvisation. This is the sort of instant composition that brings to mind Coltrane’s Ascension or Frank Lowe’s Black Beings. It features an incredibly intense duet for the bassists with subtle backing by Ali, and a duet between Sanders and Ravi where they both explore overflowing. Ali also gets a solo to highlight the fantastic energy that he’s poured into the whole album. Finally, toward the end, Muñoz goes clear into Sonic Youth territory, bowing his guitar to mirror the bowing of the basses. Amazed by the intensity of what they just played, one of the participants can be heard muttering at the end, “Woah...woah. Heh heh heh heh.”

"Somewhere, John Coltrane was smiling."

"On Divine Radiance, relatively unknown guitarist Tisziji (pronounced Tis-See-Gee) Muñoz brings together the impressive cast of Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali, Ravi Coltrane and old friend and student Paul Shaffer (who also co-produced the album) for a celestial Jazz voyage. ... Muñoz is a voyager who has published books on spirituality and seeks to meld that sense of higher consciousness to his music. The music here roars on the backs of winged solos and Ali’s signatory dense rhythms, with Muñoz’s tone and flurries of notes recalling Carlos Santana’s early work. With the meat of this album in its three longest tracks (16-25 minutes each), this is for Jazz fans that like their music shooting through the stratosphere."

"Dichotomy. In two words "Divine Radiance" is simplicity as well as complexity. It is sheer energy that was inspired by the free jazz of John Coltrane.
"Oh, by the way, we're talking about the latest album by guitarist Tisziji Muñoz. If you're looking for melody, harmony and a rhythm that is a natural metronome for your feet, forget it.
"This music is meant for a different configuration of mind, body and soul. Muñoz and fellow guitarists John McLaughlin and David Torn have traversed some of the same obscure terrain. But Muñoz sees a light that reflects his spirit.
"That spirit is substantially about 'Trane, and on this album there are trace elements throughout: his son, Ravi Coltrane; Pharoah Sanders, who built his own wall of sound style; Rashied Ali, Coltrane's last drummer; and another cat we'll get to later.
"Having listened to a spectrum of poseurs and pretenders to the Coltrane wailing-wall approach, it's difficult to find anything more unique about Muñoz's sensibilities than a comparison to 'Trane's stylistic approach.
"While Coltrane favored thick, fat chordal structure, Muñoz prefers the single-note, sheet-metal glissando runs. He plays along the edges of perception, while Coltrane kicked down the door.
"Ultimately the effect is the same.
"There are no easy conclusions to draw from this music; there are no obvious answers to the curiosity that Munoz's music indefatigably poses.
"But if you need an entry point before Hurricane Tisziji blows you out of your comfortable music consciousness, listen to "Moment of Truth" and "Fatherhood," which are rich but gentle undulations in the eye of the storm.
" "Late Night With David Letterman" music director Paul Shaffer, a longtime fan and former Muñoz collaborator, produced and performed on this record. Totally out of character for the keyboardist. But there's no schtick here. Somebody get a cape.
"Recommended If You Like: Ambitious Lovers, Lounge Lizards, Arto Lindsey, David Torn and early John McLaughlin."

Tisziji Muñoz/ Pharoah Sanders/ Rashied Ali/ Don Pate/ Paul Schaffer/ Ravi Coltrane  Divine Radiance    (Dreyfus) 

"There are many free-minded musicians, including guitarists, who are identifying themselves with the legacy of latter-day John Coltrane. Think of volcanic eruptions of the late guitarist Sonny Sharrock, who, like guitarist Tisziji Muñoz, played with Coltrane's band members drummer Elvin Jones and saxophonist Pharoah Sanders on his masterpiece 'Ask The Ages'. Think of the younger guitarist Nels Cline who recorded an excellent interpretation of Coltrane's 'Interstellar Space' with drummer Gregg Bendian. But Muñoz fascination with the latter-day John Coltrane is going deeper and sometimes even bordering with incest. On his new disc, he brought along Sanders, Coltrane's last drummer, Rashied Ali, and his son, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane. Muñoz even writes in the liner notes that this recording should be an "acknowledgement of what was to be passed from Pharoah to Ravi". But Muñoz's innocence, conviction and even plain spiritualism and mysticism transcends any doubts about the mission that Muñoz has taken.

"Divine Radiance is the first Muñoz disc on a label other than his own Anami Music since 1978's Rendezvous with Now (India Navigation). The record develops gradually, opening with two peaceful, even meditative pieces: the brief "Moment of Truth," where Muñoz doubles on synth, and the 16-minute "Visiting This Planet - Leaving This Planet." Both are beautiful, and display an interest in the earlier Atlantic recordings by Coltrane. Things begin to warm up on the third piece, "Initiation By Fire," where Sanders shows that his recent forays into Bill Laswell-produced discs were quite misleading about the state of his playing. The fourth piece, 'Fatherhood' is a gentle, angular, piece for guitar and synth that does not fit with the rest of the material on the disc.

"The final, titular track is really the piece I was waiting to hear, a collective, muscular, free improvisation. Quoting Muñoz, it is really a "baptism by Heart-centered fire-Sound". Sanders blows like he did on Coltrane's 'Live at the Village Vanguard Again!' almost forty years ago. Ali shows how great a drummer he still is. Ravi Coltrane, who hardly ventures into free playing on his own discs, fits in, surprisingly, quite easily. Producer and keyboard player, Paul Shaffer, the musical director of The Late Show with David Letterman and a longtime associate and admirer of Muñoz, augments the band mainly through his synthesizer and organ playing. Muñoz, needless to say, is a virtuoso player, but his playing delivers more. It brings a feeling of purity, a deep honesty, truly divine."

"Quick! Name a shredding electric guitarist heavily influenced by late-period John Coltrane... If you said Sonny Sharrock, you're probably not alone; Sharrock built a career out of translating the turbo-charged tenor saxophone sounds of Coltrane, Albert Ayler and other first-generation avant garde players to the guitar. Few know, however, that Sharrock, who seems peerless, has company in this arena.

"When the sextet led by guitarist Tisziji Muñoz, and featuring Coltrane collaborators Pharoah Sanders (who also worked with Sharrock) and Rashied Ali, charged into "Initiation by Fire" at the Village Underground last month, the first thing I thought of was Sharrock's Ask the Ages. Everything from the instrumentation to the highly melodic quality of the written music to the thicket-like counterpoint of Muñoz and Sanders recalled that seminal release. Listening to Divine Radiance, I still think of Sharrock, but I notice that these two players use melody in very different ways. While Sharrock famously tried (very successfully, e.g. on "Devils Doll Baby" from 1986's Guitar ) to "find a way for ... terror and ... beauty to live together in one song," Muñoz' performances tend to be either terrible (in the most ironically positive sense) or beautiful.

"The most energetic and effective track, "Divine Radiance," a marathon collective improvisation in the general mold of Trane's "Ascension," undoubtedly falls into the latter category. Here, Sanders and fellow tenor man Ravi Coltrane alternate between hoarse brays and molten runs that clearly evoke the elder Coltrane, while Muñoz matches them shard for shard. The guitarist has an impressive range of sounds at his disposal; he shuffles pyrotechnic upper-register somersaults, blues-metal chunks that recall Vernon Reid, and ambient string scrapes. In total contrast to "Radiance" is "Fatherhood," a gem-like guitar/synth duet featuring Paul Shaffer, who uses a plush, vibraphone-like tone. When Muñoz and Shaffer initiated this piece at the Underground, I was totally taken aback by its unabashed lushness. On record, Muñoz' ringing notes float over the cloud of Shaffer's New Age atmospheres, and if one can abide the considerably dated sound of the synth, the piece is quite affecting.

"While the performances on Divine Radiance do seem a bit one-dimensional in comparison with Sonny Sharrock's best work, Tisziji Muñoz's latest is, on its own terms, an extremely well-played (Ali in particular is in fine, bruising form) example of post-Coltrane free jazz that fans of this style will certainly enjoy."

HIGH NOTES - NEW RELEASE - Tisziji Munoz: "Shaman-Bala"

" "I've always known music as a way of spontaneously expressing free heart feeling," says guitarist and metaphysical theorist Tisziji Munoz in an e-mail from his home in upstate New York. "Playing music as a broken or wounded heart is a constant characteristic of my heart feeling, or Soul, as some call it."

"Munoz' latest album, "Shaman-Bala," which means "strong medicine man," is a sustained explosion of the Soul that will floor any listener who likes it heavy, raw and loud. Recorded live in New York City, it features a former John Coltrane drummer-of-choice, Rashied Ali, Bernie Senesky on piano and Don Pate on bass. At times the quartet channels the music so hard that only Ali's remarkable intuition and sure hand hold it together.

"Commenting on the recording, Munoz says, "Every time I play the way that I play, it is an opportunity to be creative and enter the transcendent fire of Spirit. This is easy to do with Rashied and the other cats on the 'Shaman-Bala' CD."

"Listening to "Shaman-Bala," one can feel Munoz going deeper and deeper into a sort of immolation therapy. On virtually every tune, his fat, singing tone sears the edges of his trills, glissandi and notes, which he holds a bar at a time as the band rocks on. Particularly impressive is his solo on "Initiation by Fire," which ruthlessly attacks the high register, then suddenly digs into the register below, only to leap back to the highest frets on the neck. On "My Favorite Things" the guitarist leaves behind all known idioms as the notes fly by in a timeless, instinctive cascade. And on "Visiting This Planet" the band improvises off a riff so nasty that it makes most metal bands sound like bubble-gum pop. Throughout this double-album the band lends inventive, visceral solos as they ride along with Munoz, exploring spaces where few musicians dare to venture -- and their joy in doing so is palpable.

"Although Munoz never had the chance to play with Coltrane, he has clearly absorbed aspects of the great man's thinking through his jamming and recording with Coltrane's musical next-of-kin -- Ali, of course, but also McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders and Coltrane's son, Ravi. Speaking of his work with Sanders, Munoz says, "Pharoah just told me to play. Into the fire we would go, and the rest is history. For in the fire, I am fire!"

"Perpetually on fire, Munoz is now thinking about his next release, "Divine Radiance," which has already been recorded. The album features Ravi Coltrane, Sanders and Ali, among others, and Munoz says the band is pushing to make a short tour of Japan after the album's release next year."

"TISZIJI MUNOZ QUARTET - Shaman-Bala (Anami Music 22) [2 CD set] Live at Tonic on May 12th of 2001 and featuring Rashied Ali on drums, Don Pate on acoustic bass, Bernie Senensky on piano and our favorite shaman electric guitar sorcerer - Tisziji Muñoz!  Holy shit, this is truly cosmic music!!!  Like Trane's stream of notes on 'Interstellar Space' (with Rashied on drums 35 years ago) or Olly Halsall's liquid guitar lines on "Money Bag" (from the first Patto album) or Alan Holdsworth's flash of notes on "Hazard Profile" (from Soft Machine's 'Bundles') - Tisziji reaches for infinity by unleashing an immense and intense flow of notes too quick to comprehend that become a waterfall of currents difficult to navigate without drowning unless you just swim in the flow.  The first time I heard a pre-release of this magnificent live set, I was in my friend's Michael's car in the middle of a thunder storm with breathtaking lightning a flashing in the skies as Muñoz's was also letting those lightning-like lines erupt on the car stereo.  It felt like the same force of nature in all her spectacular beauty/power.  The quartet on this mind-blowing cd is a perfectly balanced and chosen - Bernie Senensky from Toronto is one of the unsung greats of modern avant-jazz piano and takes numerous thunderous McCoy Tyner-like solos.  Don Pate is a local giant of the acoustic bass and consistently bows and plucks with inventive spirits.  The lynch-pin hear is master drummer Rashied Ali, who plays with an incredible subdued yet massive free-flowing waves which seem to levitate the entire quartet upwards as Muñoz digs deeper and reaches for the heavens simultaneously!

"Tisziji's other great quintet with Paul Shaffer on keyboards, Don Pate & John Lockwood on basses and Bob "Ra-Kalam" Moses on drums - played at Tonic once more two weeks ago for their yearly sojourn to the big apple and again blew many minds for two sets of their thunderous spirit-force sound.  Muñoz was in especially great spirits and form - telling stories, providing provocative self-effacing grains of wisdom and even dancing around - making us all feel like a part of his extended and loving family.  The next release on Anami will be a superb duo with Marilyn Crispell and I hope to get Muñoz and his ensemble with Dave Liebman into the Vision Fest next year. "Shaman-Bala" refers to a big spirit-healer or medicine man, so if your spirit needs some healing, you can purchase this wonderful two-CD only set for $18"

"TISZIJI MUNOZ-Parallel Reality (Anami 020) Featuring Ravi Coltrane on tenor & soprano saxes, Rashied Ali on drums, Don Pate on double-bass and our favorite electric guitar god - Tisziji (pronounced tiz-zee-gee) Muñoz!!  Our main man Muñoz is back once again with the 20th release on his own Anami label and we are in for another journey into the cosmos.  Tisziji's main inspiration has always been the later explorations of sax god -John Coltrane and finally Muñoz connects with Coltrane's son Ravi, as well as with Muñoz' long-time partner & Trane's final drummer of choice - Rashied Ali!  Although no one can play with the overwhelming hurricane force that John Coltrane rose to, Muñoz' ever-probing guitar consistently burns with that same inner mounting flame and here pushes Ravi further into same cosmic terrain.  On 'Parallel Reality' there are no covers, only original offerings from Muñoz - Ravi had to learn these tunes on the spot and jump in - swim or drown!  "Disconnected" opens with a slow tempo and cautious vibe - Ravi's tenor tone is pure and restrained - gradually Muñoz takes off, slowly building his cascading lines more quickly with a dark, angular, fat tone taking off for the stratosphere.  The opening theme on "Crazy Heart Wisdom" is rather warm and ballad-like - soon the tempo escalates as the rhythm team gets busier and Ravi starts to dig in and explore - when his solo is done, Muñoz comes flying in with ferocious force and lets it rip - impossibly fast and intense - both Rashied and Don buzzing furiously as well - as the guitar reaches for the stars!  Eventually both Ravi and Tisziji weave their quick lines in a dense fabric and we are left with an inspired drum solo from Rashied.  Ravi does a fine job of pacing himself, playing in a more relaxed way as the trio around him spins more quickly - on "Will to Freedom" Ravi and Don listen and play together closely while the guitar and drums are connected and speed into oblivion - yet it still works as one force as the two spheres inter-connect and end up in the same place.  Even on "No Self, No Thought, No Mind" the bass & drums play this lovely, haunting melody while the guitar hovers above with some occasional lightning flashes for excitement.  Ravi embraces the melancholy melody of "Never Enough Heart-Break" with ghost-like grace as the quartet flows in slow motion on one level, but then the guitar and sax begin weaving streams together once more - ascending higher and higher skywards.  Ravi plays soprano sax on "Spirit Path" which has that delirious snake-charming like vibe and the elegance of that "My Favorite Things"-like beauty -Muñoz also plays a somewhat restrained, yet free-flowing solo which builds into a story.  The title track is the longest and Munoz' quartet take their time to build into wave after wave of spiraling lines rising to the heavens and beyond - Ravi's solo is more laid back while Tisziji's begins this way before he starts to propel things into hyper-drive.  The theme is quite a memorable one, which you might just be whistling sometime soon.  The final track is a splendid short one called "Offering of Love" and it is just the right way to end our marvelous journey.  $12."

Tisziji Muñoz - Breaking the Wheel of Life and Death

"Tisziji Muñoz, an upstate New York spiritual master possessing transcendent chops, channels the cosmic spirit of John Coltrane in long and short modal excursions. Reminiscent of Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin and Sonny Sharrock all at once, Muñoz is a fire-breathing presence who travels the spaceways on casually ecstatic rifts, alternating fleet flurries of notes with hornlike wails. He’s supported here (on Breaking the wheel of Life and Death) superbly by pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Don Pate and former Coltrane drummer, Rashied Ali, who know which way the astral winds blow."

February 16, 2001:
"TISZIJI MUÑOZ-Breaking the Wheel of Life and Death! (Anami 019) Featuring Marilyn Crispell, Don Pate, Rashied Ali and Tisziji on brain-melting guitar!! Amazing and spiritual Trane-like intensity and certain to devastate all who listen."

March 2, 2001:
"Featuring Marilyn Crispell on piano, Don Pate on bass, Rashied Ali on drums and Tisziji Munoz on guitar, bells and compositions. Henry Kaiser put together a session for his guru and guitar-god Tisziji Munoz last year with a hand picked group that Henry chose for both guitarists to play with - this astonishing encounter was released a few months ago as "Auspicious Healing" and featured Marilyn Crispell on piano. The cosmic Coltrane vibe that Tisziji and Marilyn both share was brought together again a few months later for a powerful quartet date with Munoz' often regular rhythm team of Don Pate and former Coltrane-collaborator Rashied Ali. I just witnessed Marilyn playing in a trio with Barry Guy and Gerry Hemingway the other night at Tonic and she consistently blows mind with her ultra-deep playing. From the very first piece on this CD "Divine Urgency" Munoz opens with that tone which gets the spirits flowing and trio around him float in cosmic space as time stands still. The title track comes next - a slow and mysterious Trane-like modal thing which takes its time to ascend higher and higher spiraling upwards as Tisziji lets those notes cascade like waves of energy flowing. Marilyn's solo comes next and it ever so elegant and beautiful, hushed and graceful that Munoz slows down the vibe to almost a standstill. Marilyn opens "Lemuria" with one of her superb harp-like solos which transcends up into the heavens as the tune itself grows from the innocent intro melody into another stellar region amongst the stars. The longest piece is "The Elder of the Mysteries" another tune in which the quartet sounds as if it is playing in slow motion as Tisziji starts to bend those notes upwards higher and higher one level at a time - Marilyn also taking a dream-inducing solo as well and a fine solo as well from Don Pate on acoustic bass. On this piece in particular there is some amazing call and response between the guitar and piano - notes that caress each other and us as well. The pulse picks up on the final long piece "God-Fire (Pyramid)" where Tisziji unleashes swarms of notes which crash over us in waves of urgent force. Marilyn also takes a spectacular piano solo - the forces of the gods to be reckoned with as she also spins notes in crashing waves, like a torrential rainstorm. Eventually the guitar also answers the call and explodes together with the piano as one cosmic force. Almost too much for us mere mortals!"

Tisziji Muñoz - Breaking the Wheel of Life and Death

"Tisziji Muñoz makes a great story. The 54 year-old guitarist cut his solo debut, Rendezvous with Now (India Navigation), in 1978. He has devised an original astrological spiritual system called "Time-Mastery." He runs his own record label, Anami Music, out of Schenectady, New York. He performs and records with such renowned musicians as saxophonists Pharaoh Sanders and Dave Liebman, bassist Cecil McBee and pianists McCoy Tyner, John Hicks, Hilton Ruiz and The Late Show’s Paul Shaffer. And he issues his self-produced CDs the way Tiger Woods wins golf tournaments-in prodigious bunches In 1999, for instance, he released four studio albums: Presence of Joy (Samboga-Kaya), Presence of Truth (Dharma-Kaya), Presence of Mastery (Nirmana-Kaya) and Alpha-Nebula (The Prophecies) plus a live recording, Great Sacrifice (Maha Yajna).

"Muñoz’s new quartet recording, Breaking the Wheel of Life and Death, anchored by the extraordinary rhythm section of pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Don Pate and drummer Rashied Ali, has its companion release as well, a quintet date, Auspicious Healing!, with Crispell, bassist Mark Dresser, drummer Lukas Ligeti and globetrotting improvising guitarist Henry Kaiser.

"As fascinating as his biography may be, Muñoz makes music of even greater enormity and intrigue. Like the late Sonny Sharrock, the Mahavishnu Orchestra-era John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana, Muñoz unleashes supercharged, rapid-fire, molten-toned guitar lines with the same sense of spiritual quest (and similarly dense "sheets of sound") as saxophone master John Coltrane. And while he plays electric guitar amped up to the edge of feedback, his music is no more jazz-rock "fusion" than was Trane’s Meditation or A Love Supreme. It is "energy music" that transcends any earthly definition by tapping into a cosmic flow and channeling larger-than-human-life forces into spontaneously generated sound.

"Muñoz’s meeting with Crispell was facilitated by Kaiser, but on Breaking the Wheel of Life and Death, it feels like a predestined musical marriage. A longtime member of saxophonist/composer Anthony Braxton’s avant-garde quartet, Crispell years ago underwent a life-changing experience listening to A Love Supreme. Moved by its emotional immediacy and generosity, which she describes as "a presence of great love," she dedicated herself thereafter to playing "music that came totally from the heart and spirit." So her musical sensibilities, including her unpredictable approach to improvising-informed by the thunderous power of McCoy Tyner and the freedom of Cecil Taylor-intuitively mesh with those of Muñoz, manifesting a kind of creative empathy more typically cultivated through years of collaboration.

"The harmonically attuned Pate, a veteran of the late ‘70s Gil Evans Orchestra and George Adams Quintet, has appeared on several Muñoz recordings, as has the rhythm-spreading, propulsively sympathetic Ali, who recorded with Coltrane on such outward-bound sessions as Meditation, Interstellar Space and Stellar Regions.

"Breaking the Wheel comprises seven tracks, including a four-and-a-half-minute opener appropriately titled "Divine Urgency!," a two-and-a-half-minute solo "Piano Intro to Lemuria" and a second brief solo Crispell coda at album’s end, the gospel-infused "Spirit Path Intro." Four extended pieces occupy nearly an hour of the recording’s 77 minutes. Throbbing with the palpable sensation of plunging into the unknown, they warrant such evocative and cryptic tittles as "The Elder of the Mysteries" and "God-fire (Pyramid)." Whether the notes burst forth like serial explosions of firecrackers or slowly describe great arcs of romantic feeling, Muñoz’s guitar sound carries that bittersweet cry of the seeker who is able to make his story reflect the pure essence of a far greater scheme."

A subjective take on the best of this year’s avant-garde and jazz

"The obscure electric guitarist from upstate New York adds to his prolific output with another all-star setting for his thick-toned, mercurial fretwork. With pianist Marilyn Crispell at her thunderous best, former John Coltrane cohort Rashied Ali crashing and caressing the drums, and longtime Munoz sideman Don Pate on bass, Breaking the Wheel of Life and Death! offers more than an hour of evidence that Munoz is the unchallenged claimant to the Coltrane-of-the-guitar title. Fans of early Mahavishnu John McLaughlin and the late Sonny Sharrock should start their Munoz collection here.

"But, this is only one of three new CDs from the metaphysical master: Auspicious Healing features Crispell, bassist Mark Dresser, drummer Lukas Ligeti and second guitarist Henry Kaiser, and the even newer Parallel Reality has Ravi Coltrane on tenor and soprano sax. All vibrate with transcendent energy."

“The guitarist/composer (Tisziji Muñoz) cuts an arresting figure on the sleeve of this album. Muñoz sports a stern expression framed by samourai-style hair as he brings a black hammer down on a shimmering, ceremonial gong. If this is the eponymous wheel of the title then what will be the effect of Muñoz breaking it? Might we live longer or die sooner? Extension and contraction of the gap between existence and non-existence is a consumptive subtext to this set of viscerally passionate compositions. At times it’s pure sonic scorched earth with the leader’s molten metal phrases crushing all in their path, wittling away the rhythmic backdrops to the faintest of murmurs. Elsewhere there’s an altogether more tender toughness that emerges as the warm harmonic bridge between Muñoz and pianist Marilyn Crispell and the tight rhythmic interlocking of drummer Rashied Ali and bassist Donald Pate conspire to produce a kind of musical out-of-body experience. On themes such as Divine Urgency and Lemuria, Muñoz really creates a feeling of sanctified heresy; it’s as if he’s tearing down stultified religions like some kind of trippy avenging angel, boiling up the afro-cosmic soups of past collaborator Pharoah Sanders and injecting an extra dose of post-Sharrock metal into any notions of standardized free jazz cacophony. Sonically, Muñoz is in a class of his own; the hard serrated edges of his guitar take their cue from the most violent of free jazz saxophonists, yet what impresses most is his overwhelming sense of melody, his ability to retain a string narrative thread in the middle of the wildest extrapolations. Marilyn Crispell is the perfect partner in this sense and her streaming, contrapuntal attacks help create terrifying, beautiful moments on a record of pure primeval power.”

Auspicious Healing and Breaking the Wheel

"New York guitarist and mystic Tisziji Muñoz is blessed with a great musical talent that is coupled with a finely tuned ear. Throughout his career he has managed to surround himself with a superb supporting supporting cast of inventive players that have included, amongst others, legendary saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and drummer Rashied Ali. On Auspicious Healing! He finds himself once again in fine company. This time with fellow guitarist Henry Kaiser, bass player Mark Dresser, drummer Lukas Ligeti and fabled pianist Marilyn Crispell, whose contribution here adds an incredible extra dimension to Muñoz’ sky scorching bursts of cosmic guitar interplay. In his sleevenote Kaiser endows Crispell with Cecil Taylor status, no mean accolade which, as the record progresses, soon bears the promised improvisational fruit. It is not only Crispell’s talent that shines through either. The spirituality which pours from her playing is also to the fore, and it is this which makes her and Muñoz a match made in heaven. There are moments here which are truly dazzling, as great windmilling swatches of intricate keyboard work from Crispell seamlessly interlock with Muñoz and the rest of the band to produce a music which is organic, orgasmic and genuinely jaw plunging.

"The thrills continue on Breaking the Wheel of Life and Death, a quartet record where Muñoz and Crispell are joined by bass player Don Pate and the aforementioned Rashied Ali on drums. The result is, again, is awe-inspiring. Especially on ‘Lemuria’, which opens with a stunning ‘Piano Intro’ by (Marilyn) Crispell before the main track is allowed to crash through with Muñoz firmly in the driving seat, pushing his playing to new extremes of spiritual and creative awareness. Meanwhile, Ali’s and Pate’s perfectly paced drum and bass accompaniment and occasional soloing guide and prod the main players into musical territory that they themselves had probably never dreamed of exploring. Like previous Tisziji Muñoz records, (this goes) beyond jazz as most 'fans' understand it."

Auspicious Healing and Breaking the Wheel

"New York guitarist and mystic Tisziji Muñoz is blessed with a great musical talent that is coupled with a finely tuned ear. Throughout his career he has managed to surround himself with a superb supporting supporting cast of inventive players that have included, amongst others, legendary saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and drummer Rashied Ali. On Auspicious Healing! He finds himself once again in fine company. This time with fellow guitarist Henry Kaiser, bass player Mark Dresser, drummer Lukas Ligeti and fabled pianist Marilyn Crispell, whose contribution here adds an incredible extra dimension to Muñoz’ sky scorching bursts of cosmic guitar interplay. In his sleevenote Kaiser endows Crispell with Cecil Taylor status, no mean accolade which, as the record progresses, soon bears the promised improvisational fruit. It is not only Crispell’s talent that shines through either. The spirituality which pours from her playing is also to the fore, and it is this which makes her and Muñoz a match made in heaven. There are moments here which are truly dazzling, as great windmilling swatches of intricate keyboard work from Crispell seamlessly interlock with Muñoz and the rest of the band to produce a music which is organic, orgasmic and genuinely jaw plunging.

"The thrills continue on Breaking the Wheel of Life and Death, a quartet record where Muñoz and Crispell are joined by bass player Don Pate and the aforementioned Rashied Ali on drums. The result is, again, is awe-inspiring. Especially on ‘Lemuria’, which opens with a stunning ‘Piano Intro’ by (Marilyn) Crispell before the main track is allowed to crash through with Muñoz firmly in the driving seat, pushing his playing to new extremes of spiritual and creative awareness. Meanwhile, Ali’s and Pate’s perfectly paced drum and bass accompaniment and occasional soloing guide and prod the main players into musical territory that they themselves had probably never dreamed of exploring. Like previous Tisziji Muñoz records, (this goes) beyond jazz as most 'fans' understand it."

"Just as the willfully obscure guitarist Tisziji Muñoz plugs directly into his amplifier with no effects or processors in between, so does this music immediately connect with the receptive listener. With his singing tone and gift for heartfelt melody, Muñoz brings to mind Carlos Santana; his speed and edginess recall Mahavishnu John McLaughlin. With titles such as "Teardrop (Blood from the Astral Heart)," one can guess that this is no easy-listening disc, though there are many passages of sheer beauty. Pianist Marilyn Crispell and bassist Mark Dresser are fascinating soloists and masterful accompanists; guitarist Henry Kaiser and drummer Lukas Ligeti provide shifting colorations. But it is Muñoz's passionate guitar playing - fierce, lyrical, exciting and gentle by turns - and his profound musical vision, spontaneous and spiritual, that set this CD far above the ordinary. Tisziji Muñoz, "Auspicious Healing!" (Anami Music)."

"So what’s this miracle aluminum sliver like? If you’re expecting the usual everybody-plays-some-semblance-of-melody-then-bang/zoom-doodling-solos, forget it. This album is almost completely improvisation...but lest you think it sounds like a free-for-all with five humans playing simultaneously but not together, forget that too. These folks listen to each other, closely, and each is a master of playing "freely" while keeping a sense of song (however abstract). Muñoz’s guitar yields holy noise like its channeling the ghost-sound of Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix jamming in the Great Beyond. Auspicious Healing comes from a collective unconscious, from a place where Beauty comes from - and becomes - Catharsis. It’s better if you free yourself from the concept of ‘event’-style thinking and just let these sounds wash over you and let them sweep you along . . . Getta hold of this now."

"This wonderful release features an all-star quintet of Tisziji Muñoz and Henry Kaiser on guitars, Marilyn Crispell on piano, Mark Dresser on contrabass and Lukas Ligeti on drums. This first time quintet of five kindred spirits was organized by our pal and West coast guitar god - Henry Kaiser, and he chose these players extremely well. This powerful CD begins and ends with a glowing, lovely duo of Marilyn and Tisziji on piano and guitar. Although they had never heard each other’s music, they work as a perfect duo - both heavenly inspired by John Coltrane’s heavy vibrations. ‘Auspicious!’ - the opener, is a touching ballad - somber and elegant, just the right way to begin our journey. The flood gates open wide on ‘Shenai Letticia Muñoz’ with a powerful trio erupting out of Trane-land, Marilyn building in harp-like waves, Marks, dense thumping, throbbing, slapping bass and Lukas’ fierce rhythmic storm ever expanding as Muñoz begins these spiraling, cascading lines, reaching higher and higher into the clouds and beyond. Eventually, Marilyn takes over soloing, also in McCoy-like waves with devastating results! This must be the most lyrical and most jazz-like of many Muñoz CDs, the pace is more calm than usual. On ‘Teardrop’ the quartet once again begins with a slower pulse as Tisziji’s guitar starts to build and levitate, the notes quickening to lightning-like flashes. Henry doesn’t enter our journey until the fourth piece - ‘Prayer for Tolerance’ in which Tisziji opens with a strange reed sound (shenai) or sample, once more that calming vibe is at the center of this tune and Munoz takes the first tale-spinning solo as the heavens part. Henry continues the same vibration with his own distinctive (processed) sound as the group winds down to more peaceful terrain, another work of luscious warmth and beauty. Both guitars and even some synth by Munoz weave frenetic bliss on ‘orange Chocolate Mint Medicine in G humor’. The high point her is ‘Brahms’ Lullaby’, which has a gorgeous, old-fashioned melody to start and reminds me of what Coltrane did to ‘My Favorite Things’ of ‘Chim Chim Cheree’. Tisziji takes the first mind-blowing solo - fragments of lines burning, blurring, buzzing and ascending ever upwards! Both Henry and Marilyn also take astounding solos as the heavens open up and the sun shines through. The final piece, ‘Healing’ is another piano and guitar duo and it is a refreshing, rare and precious lullaby to help us glide into a somber, peaceful, dream-like world."

"Auspicious Healing is the most recent release from guitarist Tisziji Muñoz on his private Anami Music <http://www.anamimusic.com/> record label. It features an all-star band brought together with the help of guitarist, musical seeker and long-time Muñoz fan Henry Kaiser-he sought out Muñoz and helped arrange this recording date.

"Muñoz is a self-taught musician. Born in 1946 in Brooklyn, he began playing drums as a child and became well-versed in Afro-Cuban percussion. He started playing guitar at the age of twenty-two. From 1974-79 he played with Pharoah Sanders.

"In 1984 he moved to Schenectady, New York, where he lives isolated from other musicians and infrequently performs. However, he has been documenting his music on his Anami record label.

"Muñoz's playing has been influenced by the modal improvisation of John Coltrane. His music also shows a spiritual quality influenced by his study of Hindu Yoga and Tibetan Buddhism. His style of playing, based on long, single-note runs played with a singing sustain, remind me a bit of John McLaughlin or Sonny Sharrock (although he uses less distortion than Sharrock).

"Guitarist Kaiser recruited players that turned out to be very compatible with Muñoz: pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Lukas Ligeti as well as Kaiser himself.

"Marilyn Crispell's playing is one of the highlights of the session. The album opens and closes with duets by Muñoz and Crispell. She's an adventurous player and has played (together with Mark Dresser) in Anthony Braxton's acclaimed quartet. Crispell has also recorded a Coltrane tribute. She has absorbed the intensity of Cecil Taylor, the focus and spirituality of John Coltrane and the lyricism of Annette Peacock.

"Although some of the pieces are a bit long, this album has beautiful playing and intense interplay. If you haven't experienced Tisziji Muñoz before, Auspicious Healing is well worth seeking out. "

Auspicious Healing! and Breaking the Wheel of Life and Death

"In less than a year, the New York-born Puerto Rican guitarist Tisziji Muñoz has gone from being a footnote in the discography of Pharoah Sanders to fully occupying a zealously carved space of his own, somewhere beyond the splintered blues of the late Sonny Sharrock and the otherworldly fire of John McLaughlin at his peak. With a back catalogue now way into double figures, starting with 1978’s Rendezvous With Now on India Navigation, it’s astonishing how he kept himself a secret for so long. Still, there’s never been a better time to get on board. Auspicious Healing!, his first recording with a new quintet including pianist Marilyn Crispell and second guitarist Henry Kaiser, is his best yet. In terms of intuitive power, the group’s only contemporary rival is David S. Ware’s foundation shaking quartet.

"Maybe it’s got something to do with Muñoz's inspirational warmth (on almost every CD sleeve, he’s the sweat-drenched figure hugging his collaborators) but once locked in, the players pitch in with unflagging intensity and commitment. The first track, however, is a bit of a red herring. with Muñoz's guitar-tone somewhat sickly sweet. It makes a lot more sense when you come out the other side, so save it for later.

"The second track "Shenai Letticia Muñoz (Prayer For a Safe Birth)" is where the blast-off happens. The track coasts in on a titanic wave with Crispell sounding iconoclastic chords that tumble through huge melodic conceptions, while bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Lukas Ligeti blur in a multi-directional dervish. Muñoz finally enters with the most sumptuous run of fuzzed notes, wailing over the group with the higher-minded logic of Ware and a tone as epic as Neil Young. Crispell scatters the group with a solo that briefly halts the insane momentum, as she sends fountains of notes spurting skyward, before Kaiser takes a punk solo that leaves everyone drooling. From here on in they’re unstoppable, even steamrolling Brahms’s "Lullaby" when it innocently strays into their path. If you’re looking for a date that combines high energy rocking with the dizzy cranial power of free jazz, then this is most assuredly it. As Muñoz himself shrugs in the liner notes: "They can kick it!"

"By contrast, Breaking the Wheel of Life and Death, for which Muñoz and Crispell are joined by bassist Don Pate and drummer Rashied Ali, doesn’t quite make it. It’s certainly heavy as hell — Muñoz’s tone is even more gnarled and insane than usual-but the group doesn’t quite gel like they did on Auspicious Healing! In the face of that kind of achievement, however, it still feels pretty heroic."

"Whatever you make of Muñoz's effusive spirituality, his music goes straight for the solar plexus. Helping him prop open the doors of enlightenment on Auspicious Healing! Are fellow guitarist Henry Kaiser, pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Lukas Ligeti. On paper alone that line-up merits the exclamation mark. As ever, it's an ecstatically melodic cascade from start to finish, and very much the leader's vehicle, but the internal structuring of his music has rarely sounded so well fortified.

"The accompanying quartet is running off the same dynamo, gravitating stylistically to Muñoz with the readiness of musicians steeped for long periods in John Coltrane's oceanic outpourings. Ligeti traces the guitarist's tracks, laying down rhythmic markers or sending out cymbal spray, while Dresser's fibrous strength holds the centre steady. Crispell seizes the opportunity to run the risk of sounding florid, a highly disciplined indulgence in embellished playing that suits the context perfectly. Kaiser shadows Muñoz, occasionally interjecting bursts that suggest there might be other paths leading outward.

"Titles of individual pieces seem largely an irrelevance, at least during the period of initial listening. Track follows track in continuous surge. The penultimate piece does, however, arrest the attention as Muñoz launches into Brahm's Lullaby. The opening bars are enough to raise fears that the entire troupe of celestial commuters is about to become engulfed in a tide of syrup, but all turns out well as some of the toughest playing on the record diverts the sugary flow into a clear pulsing stream. There's a perilously thin line between ecstasy and excess, but in this company, more than ever, Muñoz stays on the right side of the divide."

Tisziji Muñoz - Presence of Truth; Presence of Mastery; Presence of Joy

"Style: Free Jazz / Avante Garde

"Musicians: Muñoz (guitar); Don Pate (bass), Rashied Ali (drums); plus Truth: Hilton Ruiz (piano), Mastery: Paul Shaffer (keyboards); Joy: Dave Liebman (sax), Bernie Senensky (piano), Cecil McBee (bass).

"Review: In interviews, mega-Grammy winner Carlos Santana often pays homage to John Coltrane as an early inspiration. That’s a nice nod. Yet despite fumbling attempts at imitation, Santana’s music has never embodied the complex collision of earthly fire and spiritual transcendence of Coltrane’s late work. I used to think it was that six strings simply couldn’t conjure the gods (the devil, sure) the way a sax could. Then I heard Tisziji Muñoz a musical visionary from Schenectady, NY who sets fire to his strings with the same furious marriage of Buddhist grace and Christian fire and brimstone that Coltrane managed. Muñoz’s tone favors the same piercing wail that Carlos digs, but he combines this with Coltrane’s penchant for shards of glass drama and a buckshot blast of notes that gives the sense that the music’s burning through his flesh like stigmata. It’s an original sound that a scant few have heard. That’s because Muñoz is a fringe dweller, a spacey mystic who speaks in Ghost Dog-like platitudes (sounds like Carlos again) and releases his own discs with little or no promotion. He does have his cartel of musical supporters, though, and they show for these three recent discs.

"Premier is the rhythm team of former Coltrane drummer Rashied Ali and bassist Don Pate. They make a loose but frantic team, perfect for the leader’s helter-skelter pacing. Keyboardists Hilton Ruiz and Letterman side kick Paul Shaffer spar on Mastery and Truth but they don’t hold their own as well as sax man David Liebman does on Presence of Joy, easily the most essential of the three. Liebman’s a strong voice who fights for his solo time (a necessary evil when up against divine intervention), thoughtful to Tisziji’s stream of consciousness. He’s comfortable with Coltrane’s fury and free with Tisziji’s own tunes of furious meditation. Of course, Muñoz is the blustery star here and throughout these three works you can’t help but wonder why he isn’t a free jazz household name. I guess when the heaven’s are yours, who has time for earthly delights. "

"Astonishing but seldom-heard guitarist plays with three new records out on his own label.

"Right now, Tisziji Muñoz is probably the most amazing guitarist you've never heard of.

"That surely would change if his three new releases (on his own Anami Records), Presence of Joy, Presence of Truth and Presence of Mastery, were available in stores or widely disseminated.

"But the reclusive Muñoz doesn't travel, play gigs or care that his music isn't reaching the masses.

" "I don't have a self that is concerned with what people think about what I play," explained the guitarist (whose name is pronounced Tiss-see-jee Moon-yos). "So I really have no interest in gigging a lot or looking for distribution for my CDs."
"It wouldn't make too much sense to have Tisziji sit in on a cover of a Stone Temple Pilots tune, would it?" — Paul Shaffer, "Late Show With David Letterman" bandleader

"With his white jacket and '70s-style moustache, Muñoz looks like Andy Kaufman's nightclub-entertainer parody Tony Clifton. But Muñoz is no joke. When the 54-year-old picks up his guitar, it's as if the ghosts of saxophonists John Coltrane and Albert Ayler and guitar wizard Jimi Hendrix have come back in a singular, human form.

"Muñoz's lack of "a self" may be traceable to his spiritual practice, which the guitarist speaks of through his Web site and liner notes. It involves a theory of astrology that he developed called "time mastery." He lectures on this and other spiritual matters to the Illumination Society, a group that, like Muñoz, is based in Schenectady, N.Y.

" "Basically, we started recording my talks and publishing them. The Illumination Society is really just a publishing company. It's a loose-knit group of people who feel drawn to me," Muñoz said.

Prime-Time Players

"On his three new records, Muñoz is joined by a stellar cast of musicians that includes former Coltrane drummer Rashied Ali and pianist and "Late Show With David Letterman" musical director Paul Shaffer. The Presence of Joy disc finds him with saxophonist David Liebman and bassists Cecil McBee and Don Pate.

"Muñoz is reluctant to speak about his specific musical compositions, but he described a few selections from Presence of Joy. " 'Happy Sadness' was part of a feeling I had about my daughters. I felt they needed the prayer. ... 'Presence of Joy' was just total spontaneous playing. Everyone knew what to do, there was one take, and not a word was spoken."

"Muñoz's style comes from the same 1964–67 Coltrane period that has provided inspiration to guitarists Sonny Sharrock, John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana. On Presence of Truth, the leader covers Coltrane's "Miles Mode" (RealAudio excerpt) with a band that features pianist Hilton Ruiz.

"Muñoz has a raging, single-note style — "playing straight into the fire," as he calls it. (Chordal playing is painful for him as a result of an accident to his left hand when he was a child.) On the new releases, he alternates splurges of manic soloing with New Age-like interludes.

" "He really doesn't repeat himself, which is incredible," guitarist Henry Kaiser said. "I've played with him and recorded with him as well. He doesn't go back to licks or patterns. He is really an improvising guitarist."

"Muñoz was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. He received a drum set at the age of 3, and by the time he was 13, family members had introduced him into the circle of percussionists surrounding conga master Mongo Santamaria.

"Tisziji taught himself to play guitar while serving in the 440th U.S. Army Band, where he performed as a featured percussionist. During his military stint, Muñoz met such musicians as Eric Dolphy and began a serious study of the music of Coltrane.

All Together Now

" "I hear Coltrane's record Meditations with saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and Rashied Ali as everyone being absolutely free," Muñoz said. "The guys are playing in sympathy with each other, and they are more psychically in tune. When you listen to it carefully, you hear the harmony and the unity."

"In 1969, the guitarist was active in the Toronto music scene. One morning, while he was playing guitar on a stoop, a York University theology student walked by and was struck by what he heard.

"That student, Paul Shaffer, recalled the incident: "I was just blown away by what he was playing. He's been a source of inspiration for me. He really is a unique and totally improvisational musician, and his playing today sounds as strong and fresh as ever."

"Shaffer plays on all cuts on Presence of Mastery, joined by Pate and Ali. When asked why Muñoz had never appeared with the Letterman band, Shaffer laughed. "It wouldn't make too much sense to have Tisziji sit in on a cover of a Stone Temple Pilots tune, would it?"

"After touring with former Coltrane sideman saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and recording Rendezvous With Now for India Navigation in 1978, Muñoz moved to Schenectady, where he records whenever the mood strikes. Aesthetic Healing, the next release tentatively scheduled for late summer, will feature Muñoz with friend and musical partner Kaiser."

Presence of Truth (Dharma-Kaya); Presence of Joy (Samboga-Kaya); Presence of Mastery (Nirmana-Kaya)

"It's remarkable that a Brooklyn-born guitarist who has spent more than quarter of a century working with saxophone colossus Pharoah Sanders and other custodians of the Coltrane legacy should only now surface into broader public view. His name may currently be unfamiliar, but Muñoz's music enters the world fully fledged and ready to soar.

"As the titles in this trilogy indicate, this is jazz conceived as ecstatic discipline. John Coltrane's modal extrapolations are the essential touchstone, and his composition "Peace On Earth" is respectfully realised twice on Presence of Joy. Muñoz's own themes are substantial enough to feed extended improvisation, yet not so imposing as to stem the flow. The guitarist's spiritual goal may be vertical ascension, but notes issue from his instrument in headlong streams. The impact of his technical fluency and assured tone is heightened by the company he regularly keeps. Rashied Ali, Coltrane's great interstellar companion, steers percussively towards the oceanic state. Don Pate, a former sideman of Gil Evans and Chico Freeman, plays bass with firm yet flotational touch.

"Music that professes spirituality runs the risk of becoming formulaic, offering brief package excursions into realms of intensity otherwise closed to those of us who don't share such mystical leanings. But Muñoz's playing is far superior to such quick fix concoctions, as he showed unequivocally on last year's live album Great Sacrifice (Maha Yajna) which, in spite of its portentious title, included warmly terrestrial interpretations of Tony Crombie and Benny Green's "So Near, So Far" and Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Dindi", as well as a scorching account of Coltrane's vintage "Miles Mode".

"Muñoz carefully rings the changes with additional personnel. Puerto Rican pianist Hilton Ruiz adds pungency to Presence of Truth. Sparks fly when the guitarist's knife-like edge soloing glides across the ruggedly defined surface of Ruiz's punchy and angular playing. When the pianist tries to pursue the majestic flightpath traced by Muñoz, he resembles a big cat chasing the shadow of a condor, but his frictional insistence keeps the ensemble honed. Presence of Joy sees the group expanded to a sextet. Bernie Senensky, who recorded Present Without A Trace with the group in 1997, is a more lubricant pianist than Ruiz, but Dave Liebman, always among the most estimable acolytes attending Coltrane's shrine, injects fiery, yearning tenor and soprano bursts that add a further expressive dimension to the core ensemble sound. Another bonus is a second bassist, Cecil McBee, a veteran who added distinctive depth and colour to Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane's classic inner space probings. On Great Sacrifice, pianist and organist Paul Shaffer played a highly restricted role, furnishing background synth effects. On Presence of Mastery he participates as a fully integrated member of a balanced and purposeful quartet. In a brief sleevenote Shaffer remarks that he has played with Eddie Van Halen, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Carlos Santana, but none is comparable to Muñoz, who "swings wild". Indeed he does, and here's the evidence, in triplicate."

Alpha-Nebula: The Prophecies

"Were it not for the fact that no-one else seems to have heard of him either, I'd feel worse than I do about being in the dark about guitarist Tisziji Muñoz until a very recent introduction to his work. As it stands, I do feel chastised for my ignorance. Here's a man who, for the past three decades, has been building a body of work which defines the word 'uncompromising' and whose aesthetic trajectory - unusually in either jazz or rock music - has been one of increasing purity. He is, as a friend put it to me, HARDCORE.

"Born in Brooklyn in 1946, and originally a drummer, Muñoz was drawn towards jazz in the late 60s, specifically to the transcendent music of John Coltrane. (Indeed, Coltrane's notion of musical improvisation as a route to spiritual enlightenment has had a lifelong impact on Muñoz, who is as much an evangelist for his own melding of Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism and astrology as he is a jazz musician.) The early years of his musical awakening saw him playing with such masters of the free/spiritual jazz hinterland as Pharoah Sanders, Dave Liebman and Elvin Jones. Meanwhile he began to develop a signature approach to the guitar quite as singular as any other I've come across."

Alpha-Nebula: The Prophecies; Presence of Joy, Presence of Mastery

"If ever there was, out of nowhere, a John McLaughlin reborn for the new century with passion, grace and fire, plenty of fire, this is the prodigal son of the electric guitar, come to save us all from faceless melodies and bland rhythms. On ‘Alpha’, the one you start with, you will witness a guitar intensity the likes of which you haven’t heard since the days of the most furious Mahavishnu improvisations or the most searing parts of Santana/McLaughlin’s ‘Flame Sky’. With just himself on primarily red-hot electric guitar, plus support from two drummers and two electric basses (and when you hear it you can understand why), he fires off electric guitar rounds at rapid-fire delivery and urgent intensity so that it all rises to one incredible crescendo before suddenly falling right back to moments of fragility, illustrating the range and depth both of playing and composition. Firmly instrumental, it’s fusion that avoids the clichés, guitar work that is fast and furious at one end, tender and heartfelt at the other, producing emotive music at all times, with a combined rhythm section that really delivers. Why, there are even bits of mellotron to keep the seventies flavour intact. The album is basically one long, joined track allowing you the luxury of putting it on and just letting it go, as waves after wave of guitars, drums, electric basses, and occasional synth textures, really deliver to an extent you’ll find hard to put down. Then if you like the ‘Alpha’ album, and it is seriously hot, you should try the other two and really get down to some of the finest electric guitar work of its kind, for a long, long time."

Tisziji Muñoz - Galactic Guitarist

" "I sing through the guitar. I talk through the guitar. I basically came out of the womb playing," claims cosmic jazz guitarist Tisziji Muñoz. "I began playing seriously about a year and a half into life," he continues. "Ordinary children will be drawn to playing percussive taps on surfaces, but for me it was an obsession. When I was three I was ready for my first set of drums. I was fortunate to find an instrument before my self was even formed. I was playing way before any sense of what is right or wrong was put upon me by adults or the authorities. It was a native impulse."

"Born in 1946 in Brooklyn, New York to Puerto Rican parents, Muñoz is a self taught musician whose musical vision transcends the everyday to enter the mystical realm. By the age of five he had mastered the basic drum patterns of his heritage, using drums as meditative instruments to set his creative spirit free. "When I was about eight or nine I had five conga drums that I would play upon for hours and meditate upon on my own," he reveals. "I discovered that if you play certain patterns you start to levitate — I mean this in terms of awareness, not physical levitation. That's when the trance aspect of playing time as a meditation became very real to me and inevitably led me to meet with people who were more deeply involved in Afro-Cuban rhythms."

"However, Muñoz soon realized that the drums were too limited to achieve his musical goals. Fired by an interest in jazz (acquired in 1968 while performing in an army band), he began to teach himself guitar. "I did play little bit of guitar when I was a teenager," says Muñoz, "although I was not emotionally ready then to move to the strings. When I had arrived at enough suffering to put my mastery of time to melody, that's when I made the significant and critical change from drums to a melody instrument. That became a beginning point in a whole new evolution."

"Muñoz was drawn to John Coltrane's intergalactic dimension of sound. "Hearing Coltrane was like actually hearing my own roots," he explains. "I identified with his tendency to scream and express himself outside the parameters inherent in musical education. The latter part of Coltrane's music is not an end point but more of an ultimate beginning point: we should start there, and begin with freedom, which is the most important thing I got out of whatever I heard Coltrane play. We have to go towards what I call "original freedom' and bring everything else in line with that."

"Muñoz's application of Coltrane's later music into his own musical philosophy and teachings eventually bore creative fruit when he was given the opportunity to play with Pharoah Sanders and Rashied Ali. "I had the fortunate karma of working with Pharoah Sanders for 25 years," he says proudly. "That's about as close to the Coltrane vibration as anyone can get because he's the one that inherited his psychic sense of sound. The most important thing I learned from Pharoah was to be able to be ready and prepared to play at the drop of a hat, regardless of what you thought you were supposed to be playing. When I met with Pharoah I met a kindred spirit."

"Muñoz's discography numbers 14 releases (available through his own Anami Music label), with four CDs featuring Pharoah Sanders and a three CD set called The Presences already in the pipeline. His most astonishing record is his 1997 recording Alpha Nebula: The Prophecies, where his astral planing guitar is segued with dramatic electronic soundscape interludes. "Alpha Nebula was my way of saying that I'm not really from this planet," he explains earnestly, "if being on this planet means playing all that slop that is popular on the radio. I wanted to offer a musical experience that enabled people to transcend what they thought and felt about jazz. To get free from all the shackles is what Alpha Nebula is about, remembering not just our human, personal and terrestrial reality, but our cosmic identity. That part of us which loves to look at the Hubble photographs and say, "Yeah, that's us. We are the cosmos, we are life, we are it, we are the total." "

"Tisziji Muñoz is a self taught guitarist of Puerto-Rican descent who has seemingly come from nowhere. The reality is that he has been making records for his own Anami Music label since 1984, and has played and recorded with a host of respected jazz figures that include bass player Art Davis, along with ex John Coltrane band members tenor sax player Pharoah Sanders and drummers Elvin Jones and Rashied Ali. Both Sanders and Ali join Muñoz on the epic Spirit World, a 2CD set which veers from full blown free jazz freak out to evenly paced modern jazz piano interludes (here performed by Bernie Senensky). The music on Spirit World is at its best, however, when Senensky is less prominent and Muñoz locks musical antlers with Sanders and Ali in a jam session that spiritually celebrates the art and artistry of Coltrane's later years. Pleasingly unpretentious, devoid of bland mimicry and ripe with original thought, Spirit World is a dazzling album which reaches out and touches the listener's soul.

"Even better, though, is Alpha Nebula: The Prophecies, which features the guitarist's playing more centre stage. As its title suggests, here he is looking towards the stars, and beyond, to create a galactic guitar symphony which is segued with extreme electronic music passages. These tumbling, abstract, musical meteorites add to the atmosphere of the album which comes across sounding somewhere in-between Band of Gypsies period Jimi Hendrix, John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra and Interstellar Space era John Coltrane. Nothing, though, can really prepare the listener who is coming to Munoz's playing afresh for the thrilling musical adventure that they will experience once they log into Alpha Nebula. Beyond rock, beyond jazz, Tisziji Muñoz is making music that, as he confidentially declares, will take you to the moon and back."

"With his white jacket and 1970s porno moustache, Tisziji Muñoz looks like Andy Kaufman's nightclub entertainer parody Tony Clifton, but when the 54-year-old New Yorker picks up his guitar, it's as if the ghosts of John Coltrane and Albert Ayler have reanimated the corpse of Jimi Hendrix. Spirit World teams him with two late-period Coltrane sidemen, the drummer Rashied Ali and the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, the latter matching Muñoz's stratospheric improvisations leap for leap. Without Sanders's sax as a jazz touchstone, the 19 tracks on Alpha Nebula approach the unfettered free noise of Japanese bands High Rise or Fushitshusha, Muñoz alternating giant splurges of manic soloing with almost banal new-age interludes, and achieving, as he embellishes the low-end buzz of Creatitude, that rare balance of divinity and dissonance." SL

"Alpha Nebula is a unique recording in the Munoz canon of works that have been released so far. It’s the most removed from the traditional idioms and styles of electric guitar music. It’s also organized in a unique way. Post-production here is just as important as the inspired moments of the players’ collective creation in the studio. After the session, Tisziji’s visions were further elaborated through electronic soundscapes that were edited together with the original sessions to create a unified and complex, long-form work, that exists in its totality. To compare it to a novel: you can dig the words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters of great writing — but you also must consider the work as a whole. It’s the same here with the notes, phrases, and movements in relation to the entire CD. That’s a startling development here, unprecedented so far in Tisziji’s work: a whole for you to dig. To get the most out of this recording you must put yourself into the whole. Paradoxically: the whole that Tisziji presents for you, you must dig it yourself.”

"Tisziji Muñoz is a self taught guitarist of Puerto-Rican descent who has seemingly come from nowhere. The reality is that he has been making records for his own Anami Music label since 1984, and has played and recorded with a host of respected jazz figures that include bass player Art Davis, along with ex John Coltrane band members tenor sax player Pharoah Sanders and drummers Elvin Jones and Rashied Ali. Both Sanders and Ali join Muñoz on the epic Spirit World, a 2CD set which veers from full blown free jazz freak out to evenly paced modern jazz piano interludes (here performed by Bernie Senensky). The music on Spirit World is at its best, however, when Senensky is less prominent and Muñoz locks musical antlers with Sanders and Ali in a jam session that spiritually celebrates the art and artistry of Coltrane's later years. Pleasingly unpretentious, devoid of bland mimicry and ripe with original thought, Spirit World is a dazzling album which reaches out and touches the listener's soul.

"Even better, though, is Alpha Nebula: The Prophecies, which features the guitarist's playing more centre stage. As its title suggests, here he is looking towards the stars, and beyond, to create a galactic guitar symphony which is segued with extreme electronic music passages. These tumbling, abstract, musical meteorites add to the atmosphere of the album which comes across sounding somewhere in-between Band of Gypsies period Jimi Hendrix, John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra and Interstellar Space era John Coltrane. Nothing, though, can really prepare the listener who is coming to Munoz's playing afresh for the thrilling musical adventure that they will experience once they log into Alpha Nebula. Beyond rock, beyond jazz, Tisziji Muñoz is making music that, as he confidentially declares, will take you to the moon and back."

Tisziji Muñoz - "Confrontation" from Present Without A Trace

"Shit, this isn't this unknown New Yorker? I think I have heard this. This guy has been around since the 60s. A guy played this to me in the Downtown Music Gallery, which is a very good store in New York. It was like, 'This is this unsung genius'. And I liked it. It's very much out of [John] McLaughlin, if you ask me. This reminds me a lot of the Mahavishnu style, early McLaughlin, maybe a little more abstruse. What's his name?

"Tisziji Muñoz. He's played with Pharoah Sanders on and off for 25 years. Rashied Ali is on drums here.

"It's really good. I wouldn't categorize it as jazz or rock. Do you know who I think is the best exponent of this style of guitar? Ollie Halsall. He could play the shit out of this frenetic jazz rock stuff. This kind of really athletic free jazz style on guitar, he was my favourite. It's good. I occasionally dip into this bag. The trick with this kind of music is to vary dynamics and textures, because if you do too much of it, it's like too much of anything. After a while it just congeals as the wall of sound, and it can be something people don't want to scale, do you know what I'm saying? It's daunting and I want to draw people in. But a little of it is great, it's bracing."

Tisziji's Excellent Music

"Dave Calarco, who ought to know, called Tisziji Munoz "one of the best kept secrets" of Capital Region jazz in introducing him to the audience at Justin's in Albany at an engagement last year.

"How right he was.

"Munoz has lived in our midst for several years but is little known. Astoundingly, back-to-back concerts he did with the McCoy Tyner Trio last spring drew only a few hundred well-satisfied listeners each night.

"There are two immediate ways to hear him. One is to go to Justin's tonight (Aug. 4) and tomorrow night (Aug. 5), for Calarco is there and Munoz is a sideman, along with the estimable trumpeter Tom Harrell and bassist John Lockwood.

"Another way is to buy Tisziji's fine new album, Visiting This Planet by writing to him at Box 712, Schenectady, 12301.

"But don't get the idea that because this two-disc album is out on his own 'Anami Music' label, and is not readily available in stores, that it isn't worth hearing. Quite the opposite. Billboard magazine, Bible of the music industry, lauded it.

"If you are impressed by names, note that the album, recorded in several early '80s sessions, features these players: drummers Adam Nussbaum, Bob Moses and Idris Muhammed; pianists Paul Shaffer, Bernie Senensky and John Hicks; bassists Dennis Irwin, Art Davis, Cecil McBee and Ratso Harris; percussionist Guillerme Franco; and saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Dave Liebman. There's hardly an obscure name.

"Musically, Munoz was clearly in control. One can hear his debt to John Coltrane not only in the two Coltrane compositions but in all the Munoz pieces that constitute the major part of the album. But Coltrane had many guises. Tisziji took his inspiration from Coltrane's third major period, beginning in 1964, when he emphasized spiritual themes. As a guitarist with a decidedly unconventional timbral preference, Tisziji Munoz evokes the Coltrane of that period in his compositions and his improvisation, which is refreshing; I don't think Coltrane need ever go out of date.

"Munoz is not a Coltrane clone, though. No artist can mimic his sources and remain an artist. Munoz is an individual, and as his concerts with Tyner showed clearly, a musician with his own voice. With all these fine sidemen, Munoz remains the primary soloist. Now and then one hears a piano solo, or Shaffer playing synthesized strings, but mostly it's Munoz. But it's not exactly soloist and support; mostly it's more like band and leading voice. The chords may move rather slowly compared with classic modern bop (which Munoz also can and does play, and he'll do it at Justin's, but it's not his primary focus), and the result is a curious combination of relaxation and tension.

"Tisziji's guitar takes on a human quality, the result of the tunes' structures and his timbral preferences. Tisziji exploits the electric guitar rather than relegating the electronics to the role of mere amplification.

"How else to describe the music? Fusion. But not the tired jazz-rock synthesis devised over 20 years ago and not much changed. Munoz combines jazz with a smattering of rock and some Eastern influences but scarcely anything from his Puerto Rican background.

"If I had the bread, I'd devise a concert featuring him and tenor saxophonist George Adams, one of my favorites and one who seems to share some of Munoz's approaches.

"Self-confident and articulate, musically and verbally, Tisziji really is a well-kept secret, despite a mammoth piece I did on him several years ago. So much for the power of the press. He's an utterly serious musician, and an important element of our music scene."

"This list obviously doesn't reflect all the new albums we've acquired over the past few weeks, and I feel I should mention one: Rendezvous With Now by Muñoz (India Navigation). I've always regarded the later music of John Coltrane as a kind of mountain in jazz, and after a while it seemed that, after trying to get even halfway up, musicians began to lose interest and retreat to the valleys. There are the notable exceptions, including Pharoah Sanders, the early work of Ian Underwood and of course Turiya Alice Coltrane, but by-and-large people have been afraid to move down the trail blazed by Trane. Muñoz is almost scary in this regard; except for using a guitar rather than sax, he could as well be Trane. He's right at home in this heightened musical atmosphere. The liner notes are laden with mystic-religious comments; but then so are a lot of liner notes to albums by Earth, Wind & Fire - that alone doesn't account for the rush of deja vu. Of course, Trane put in his time as a "mortal," if you will - his blowing with Miles or on the Stardust set points to things to come while staying rooted in a more basic jazz. Muñoz leaps directly to the higher plateau, and, while he does so effortlessly, I have a perverse wish that he'd include something like "My Funny Valentine" on his next outing; not as a concession to the commercial, just as a reminder and a re-assurance. Rendezvous With Now is not for everyone; the more intense experiences in this life, such as mountain-climbing, usually aren't."

Love Everlasting - Bob Moses / Tisziji Muñoz (Amulet)

"I hope I’m still alive in the year 2026. Like last year with Duke Ellington and this year honoring the 100th anniversary of Louis Armstrong’s birth, 2026 will mark John Coltrane’s centenary. Coltrane, who bore so many musical descendants, will surely be pleased with the various tributes to come. One early contribution to that upcoming year is the spiritually driven Love Everlasting, released recently but recorded thirteen years ago. While you do the math, I’ll thank Medeski, Martin, and Woods’ drummer and Amulet label owner Billy Martin for releasing this session and also re-releasing Bob Moses’ classic free-psychedelic Bittersweet In The Ozone, with Dave Liebman, Billy Hart, Howard Johnson, Eddie Gomez, Randy Brecker, and Jeannie Lee from 1975.

"The "wow" factor is elevated by the co-leaders Moses and Muñoz tribute to post-Love Supreme Coltrane. Think of the Coltrane bands plus Pharoah Sanders and you have located this recording. Garzone and Bergonzi, two devout subjects, shoulder the front lines of this session. But it is the drumming of Moses and Ben Wittman and the propulsion of Muñoz’s guitar that creates the character. Like Coltrane, the fury Moses and Muñoz bring is not about anger, but love. It is a sacred creative music born out of improvisation and a search for beauty. In the last ten years it has been rare for a band to reach for these heights. Maybe it is the self-centered age in which we live or that the measuring stick placed by the great one was at such a high level. But 2026 is coming and let’s hope we are ready.

"Track List: Love Everlasting; The Lioness; Elephant Song; Earth Changes; Fatherhood; Naima.

"Personnel: George Garzone - Saxophone; Jerry Bergonzi - Saxophone; John Medeski - Piano; Brad Hatfield - Keyboards; John Lockwood - Bass; Wesley Wirth - Bass; Bob Moses - Drums; Ben Wittman - Drums; Tisziji Muñoz - Guitar."