John Esposito & Second Sight: Flying With The Comet

More than twenty years have passed since we recorded this music. The world has continued to change and to fail to change. We’ve all continued to grow musically; our roots thread their way back to this music and farther back still to the older players we did our apprenticeships with. We’ve gone on to make many different kinds of music. We’ve all changed. I no longer have the mustache shown in the photo. Dave could grow one now if he really wanted to. And despite it all, Fred is still the handsomest of the bunch…

This really was a seminal band. This was everyone’s first record release. I had done a record for guitarist Steve Geraci with Arthur Rhames, John Stubblefield, Jeff Siegel and Rashid Ali, which I don’t think ever saw the light of day (hopefully that will soon be rectified). Siegel and I had worked in Arthur Rhames’ quartet for several years, and everyone was just getting their feet wet in New York.

Second Sight was a cooperatively run band. Everyone pooled resources. Marx and Siegel did most of the booking. I produced the two record dates: the one you have before you and one recorded a year later, in 1987, and never released, titled Tiger Tracks.

On this first date we recorded a dozen tunes in two days. Five were released on a Direct Metal Stamped, Teldec Vinyl, audio-phile record. The original artwork is reproduced on this CD. This is the first release of “We Got Rhythm,” “Jump at the Sun,” “Two” and “Don’t Look Back.”

This was a band that worked consistently in NYC and the Northeast and this was part of our working repertoire. We played only original music, no standards or Jazz repertory. We were interested in referencing the work done by musicians before us and moving it forward in our own way.

Determined to remain creatively independent, I formed Sunjump Records and found a partner to do promo – Elliot Lloyd, promo genius, blues singer and jack-of-all-trades. He’s passed on and is road managing for James Brown again, no doubt.

Twenty-three years old Dave Douglas, already making things happen, soon brought in two other projects he was working on with guitarist Jose Chalas and vibist Marc Wagnon.

During the Eighties the young generation of Jazz musicians produced some of the saddest ever, backwards looking music with the support of the music industry. Reagan was President… of Jazz too. With the advent of CD technology, music of earlier generations was re-released, but those revolutionary players in their forties and older were ignored and the Jazz market rebirth benefited the twenty year old Jazz wunderkinder. There was a return by the industry and young players to a mid-Fifties to early-Sixties mainstream aesthetic.

Few thought it odd that Young Lions lectured the public on a history they were too young to have lived while their elders who had lived it were pointedly ignored as embarrassments. Young musicians professed nostalgia for a time they had never experienced.

The young Jazz musician began to be marketed as a middle class cultural and sartorial icon. If you wanted to work in NY clubs, you bought a suit. Arthur Rhames, undoubtedly the great genius of his generation, was ignored, despite his suit.

A Downtown scene developed around the first Knitting Factory for players who had something to say that didn’t fit inside the newly constricted and strictly defined world of Jazz.

I was disconcerted to find Second Sight listed in Downbeat magazine as members of the Young Lions. It made me want to go out and record some free music right quick. Dave later did a tour with Horace Silver but soon had his Young Lion status revoked by various functionaries in the Jazz industry and found a home downtown and later worldwide.

Eventually it all came out in the wash. The scene changes. We all survived to find our own voices and do our own music. Douglas, Siegel and Marx have all become distinctive composers and all are playing musics that cross genres with unselfconscious ease. And happily, a new crop of young players have come along who are finding their way out of the Jazz-as-American-Classical-Music trap. I’m proud to have played this music and to listen back to it and hear how fresh and alive it still sounds.
– John Esposito April 2008

“I recently heard Second Sight. I was impressed both individually and collectively. Excellent solo playing and ensemble playing. It is gratifying to hear some young guys playing with the caliber of musicianship that these guys have. Their original compositions are worthy of much merit.”
. . . Horace Silver

Original Flying With The Comet 1986 Liner Notes:

Second Sight: The ability to perceive that which cannot normally be perceived; clairvoyance.

Nobody who loves Jazz “in the Tradition” could fail to be enthusiastic about SECOND SIGHT. Their music calls to mind so many favorites; writers and players that have made rabid Jazz fans of us all. Echoes of the writing of Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter and McCoy Tyner ricochet around this LP and resolve themselves into a voice that belongs to this group of players alone. One suspects from listening to this record, that they are bigger fans of “the music” than the rest of us. The phrasing and shadings in the horn solos bespeak of care and respect for detail that lift the performances into the rarified atmosphere of the greats.

Formed in January of ’86, all have had extensive experience playing with the likes of John Stubblefield, Carter Jefferson, Dave Liebman, Lou Donaldson, Larry Coryell and James Spaulding. Their collective credits only begin there.

What excites me most about SECOND SIGHT as a unit is the ensemble feel in the playing, the musical ESP that seems to happen less and less in this era of pre-packaged, over-hyped product. My favorite compositions are “Flying with the Comet”, “Birthright” and the delicious ballad “Barbara”; but I know that like all my favorite records, those will change each time I listen.

I tried to make these liner notes restrained and scholarly to give you a balanced perspective on the group and their sound, but that’s just not me. I’m a listener and I’ve had my turn. Now it’s yours, I envy you.

– JOSEPH A . MILNER