SUNJUMP RECORDS ANNOUNCES NEW RELEASES:
Greetings from John Esposito and Sunjump Records:
We are happy to announce our latest releases. You can find them at Spotify, I-Tunes,
Amazon and all the usual streaming/download sites. Please visit our website at
www.sunjumprecords.com for our complete catalog, a list of upcoming CD/Online releases, bios, and youtube performance links. Thanks, John Esposito

CD 1

1. How Great You Are 3:30
2. Motivation 4:15
3. It’s A Never Ending Goal 5:30
4. Ticket To Japan 9:44

Arthur Rhames – tenor saxophone, guitar & piano
John Esposito – piano
Otto Gardner – bass
Jeff Siegel – drums

Recorded Live at Ali’s Alley, Greene St, NYC January 1981
All tracks composed by Arthur Rhames
c 2022 Arthur Rhames/John Esposito

CD 2

5. How Great You Are 13:56
6. I Want Jesus To Walk With Me 17:50
7. I’m An Old Cowhand 10:39
8. Mr PC 13:00
9. On Green Dolphin Street 17:30
10. Lazy Bird 7:35
11. T’s Blues 8:00
12. How Great You Are 3:45
    

Arthur Rhames – tenor saxophone & piano (on Lazy Bird)
John Esposito- piano
Otto Gardner- bass
Hal Miller – drums

Tracks 1,7,8 composed by Arthur Rhames c 2022 Arthur Rhames/John Esposito
Track 2 Public Domain
Track 3 Johnny Mercer
Tracks 4, 6 John Coltrane
Track 5 Bronislaw Kaper/ Ned Washington

Recorded by Hal Miller live at the Downtown Athletic Club, Albany, NY – July 1981
Edited, mixed & mastered 2022 by Scott Petito at NRS Studios, Catskill, NY
CD package design: Laura Steele
Cover art: Laura Steele

Here we are, forty years after this music was made and this double CD release remains the only full band recording of Arthur Rhames available to the public. What a tragedy! And what joy I feel that Arthur’s unique conception of playing with a rhythm section can finally be heard. It’s a glimpse into the genius of a mind capable of conceptualizing a system of harmonic organization and phrasing that could be applied to saxophones, piano and guitar with maximal emotional expression and spiritual depth. Arthur identified strongly with John Coltrane and Franz Liszt and his playing revealed a musical identity deeply rooted in the complete history of Jazz, European Classical music, Blues, Rock, Funk, Hip Hop, Black church music and Krishna Consciousness.

Arthur was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, in a country built on the genocide of Native populations, the shameless aping of the inequitable European class system, constant warfare, the suppression of women, the deportation from Europe of a class of people regarded as human trash, the massive reliance on African chattel slavery and the continuation to this day of the cheap and unpaid labor of immigrants. This history has created the belief by many Americans that people have only a monetary value and that power validates itself. It has led to the diminishment and discarding of the lives of many potentially great contributors to the world with a disproportionate number of African Americans and Queer people like Arthur, becoming casualties.

Arthur Rhames was the embodiment of the aspiration to overcome the lie and excel to a kind of divinity that he believed all humans to be capable of. As a Gay young African American man with an almost frightening level of musical, intellectual and physical abilities and achievements, Arthur was a target for all of the forces of repression that America excels at producing. His resulting early death has left an air of mystery about his life and work and the legend of lost genius. At Arthur’s sparsely attended funeral, John Stubblefield told me “ Reggie Workman and I and other older musicians all thought that the history of the music in the 20th century would be Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Arthur Rhames”. I thought so too. For the currently available information on Arthur’s life and music, we are indebted to musicians like Cleve Aleyne, Charles Telerant, Doc Timberlake and Vernon Reid who were associated with him in the late 1970’s when he was a teen and was playing with the fusion trio Eternity. I hope to fill in Arthur’s story during the 1980s, a period during which I worked with him extensively and enjoyed a sometimes close and sometimes distanced friendship.

We met on guitarist Steve Geraci’s record date in July 1980. The Beat City Records producer was Bruce Calabrese and the engineer was David Baker. At age 27, I had been living in NYC for six months surviving by working as musical director/accompanist for soap opera stars who were doing industry showcases. I worked temp office jobs when I was in between gigs.

This record date was my first real taste of the NYC Jazz music industry. It was in a very high end studio: Sound Mixers in the famous Brill Building. The privileged, upper echelon NYC Jazz reality: expensive recording studio; slick, fast talking producer with haughty blonde girlfriend; famous engineer and a Mount Shasta of Colombian Rhumba Powder on the board because in Jazz at that time the universal attitude was Things Go Better With Coke. Everything, I was told, was financed by moving guns and drugs from Florida to NY. The cherry on the cake was that Bob Dorough was recording next door and I got to chat with that affable Arkansan on our breaks. When I arrived there was a tall, thin young man playing the keys off of the Steinway. After listening to him tear Mr PC apart, I thought, “Oh well. They found a better piano player than me and I’ll just quietly leave.” It was explained to me that this person was actually the alto saxophonist, a certain Arthur Rhames, from Brooklyn, who was being brought in by my friend John Stubblefield, who I was happily surprised to find out would be playing flute, soprano and tenor saxes on the date. I had no idea then that Arthur also played guitar. He was 23 years old.

Arthur and I hit it off musically and exchanged numbers. I had a two week booking in Montreal with singer Estelle Denson in September at a club, L’Air Du Temps and was tasked with putting the band together. I asked bassist Otto Gardner and drummer Jeff Siegel to join us. We all had trouble at the border due to missing paperwork and Arthur arrived exactly at start time on the first Monday night. He quickly assembled his soprano sax, muttered “I got something to play” and counted off Mr PC at a furious tempo. I had the sensation of having stood too close to the tracks when the interstellar express train came by, caught my jacket and took me away off the planet.

When we finished the song, he asked me ”Can you play in keys?” Thinking that he wanted to play a standard in a different key than normal, I said “Yes”. “Good. Impressions in 12 keys up in fourths.” After that, Minority (composer Gigi Gryce was his high school band teacher) up in minor thirds, Cherokee down in Major thirds with the modulation happening at the bridge, Mr PC up in fourths. And so on for the whole two weeks. Including Giant Steps in keys and a Blues I foolishly proposed that modulated in a half step, then a whole step, then a minor third etc, which Arthur dubbed John’s Expanding Interval Blues. I developed a splitting headache for much of the first week.

He never asked if we knew the tunes. He just informed us of the sequence of key changes. We were supposed to know tunes. After this gig, he never again called tunes. He would just start playing without asking whether we knew them or not. Tempos were often blazing.

A week after our return from Montreal, Arthur called to say that he had management and wanted me, Otto Gardner and Jeff Siegel to be his band and that his manager would be calling with dates. Otto was unavailable. Our first gig was Halloween October 31 and November 1, 1980 at the Jazz Forum with Salim Abdus Salaam on bass, Stanley Jordan playing guitar, WKCR recording and with Roy Haynes and Miles Davis’ valet Freddie The Freeloader in the audience.

This was followed by a long run of gigs with Gardner and Siegel at Rashied Ali‘s club Ali’s Alley starting in November 1980. Both Rashied and Jeff Siegel had played drums on the Geraci record date. The first set would often be two hours long. I worked hard to be sure that I never got caught short on the tunes. Rehearsal would consist of Arthur playing his new original tunes on the piano as I looked on, after which he would say ”You got that, John. Right?”. Then we would start the set. I would leave the piano with broken fingernails, bruised fingers and the keyboard covered in bloodstains. Otto developed blisters. Siegel broke 14 sticks one night.

The demo that you hear on this Sunjump release was done in the club before our evening set. For a while, we were preceded during Happy Hour by a solo electric bass set by Jaco Pastorious who frequented the neighborhood and later formed a trio with Arthur and Rashied.

The Arthur Rhames Quartet went on in various incarnations with a number of personnel changes. We did a number of trio gigs without a bassist, one of which was documented by Verna Gillis on DIW records as Arthur Rhames Live at Soundscape. There were some gigs at Greenspace, one without drums, with a bassist, singer Cort Cheek and trumpeter Wallace Roney. We did some gigs at Princeton with Stanley Jordan when he was a student there. Two performance videos were made which have been lost.

Arthur’s manager kept us working steadily in addition to his sessions, gigs and tours in bands with Reggie Workman, Richard Davis, Sangeeta Michael Berardi, Elvin Jones, Beaver Harris, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Walter Davis, Albert Dailey, Rashied Ali and others. There was even a year of gigs in 1983 with Steve Arrington’s Hall Of Fame. Record company representatives expressed enthusiastic interest and then mysteriously backed away. Max Gordon, owner of the Village Vanguard came to hear us at the Alley but lay passed out drunk at the front table during the whole performance. A record date with Arthur, me, Wallace Roney and Cindy Blackman was in the works but evaporated. Arthur’s manager asked me if I could persuade him to play like Sydney Bechet because it would be easier to get him a recording contract. What could be done with a virtuoso multi-instrumentalist who could and did play rings around and upstage any saxophonists, pianists or guitarist bandleaders who might hire him?

Abruptly, everything came to a crashing halt in January 1984 with the end of his management contract after a devastating review in the Village Voice by Stanley Crouch.

Arthur’s music was deeply rooted in the Black music revolution of the mid 1960’s, a period that was anathema to the Make Jazz Great Again Neo Conservative movement that arrived in NYC at the start of the 80’s with the return of the three piece suit for gigs, the arrival of the Reagan presidency accompanied by New Orleans musical orthodoxy. Arthur fell into the chasm between the Lincoln Center Jazz and the Downtown Music scenes during the Jazz culture wars. His ability to play the 1950’s era music the Young Lions espoused (at a level they were unable to equal), combine it with the progressive music of the 60’s and 70’s, and then indicate a way forward that included 80’s dance music, was just too intimidating.

We played gigs like Gerald’s in Queens where we wore suits and played Cherokee, I Got Rhythm and a full program of Bebop era standards with Arthur referring thematically to Bird and Lester Young. We played gigs in Albany with Arthur playing his originals while wearing combat boots, jeans, a belt with “Butch” on the buckle, shirtless Mr. Universe physique, wearing a cop hat and playing transcendent, high energy guitar while standing on his amp. I watched musicians experience his switch from tenor sax to piano to guitar at Ali’s Alley with expressions that betrayed realization, shock and then despondency, followed by knocking back shots at the bar. Audiences everywhere went out of their minds applauding, cheering and just screaming. Many musicians came by to hear him play.

It was only to be expected that the competitive, patriarchal, toxic male nature of the Jazz scene engendered a buzz that expressed awe and admiration by some and fear, jealousy and homophobia by others. This latter outlook motivated the machinations of influential musicians and a vitriolic critic who were at the forefront of a campaign to discredit Arthur as a poseur and worse, a homosexual. This was the start of a downward spiral that would see him homeless, struggling to find work and dead at 32 from complications from AIDs.

Contrary to Arthur’s competitive generational peers, John Stubblefield expressed his own assessment (along with that of Reggie Workman and the NYC community of older generation musicians) when he told me at Arthur’s funeral: “We thought the history of the music was going to be Louis Armstrong, Charley Parker, John Coltrane and…. Arthur Rhames.”

Arthur wisely decided to take a break from the dangers of living in NYC after the series of negative events involving the Jazz Establishment, his manager and some New Jersey Mafiosi… a story for another day. At my invitation, he came to stay in New Paltz during much of 1984, at first with me and later with saxophonist Jim Finn.

New Paltz is a college town and it was possible to play almost any night in one of a half dozen bars. It was a short trip to Albany where there were a number of music venues for us to play in. With the help of drummer Hal Miller, Arthur started working as a counselor at the NYS Division For Youth prison facility in nearby Highland, NY. Our daily routine for six months was to get up and play piano/drums (me) and piano/sax (him) duets. This was followed by weight training (he was in competitive bodybuilder shape at this time), breakfast and then a drive to his job. Nights usually were spent playing gigs in town, usually with him playing whatever sax was available (usually alto or tenor), whatever electric guitar that was still holding together under his assault, and Fender Rhodes keyboard.

The rest of the band was usually me on keyboards, Otto Gardner, bass and Hal Miller, drums.The remainder of the music you hear on this Sunjump release was recorded at the Downtown Athletic Club in Albany, NY in 1981 and was our first gig with Hall Miller on drums.

There are a good number of recordings of Arthur’s live performances, which unfortunately were made on inexpensive cassette recorders intended just for our own learning purposes. A few studio recordings exist. There was a WKCR session broadcast with me, bassist Mark Johnson and drummer Catherine Christer Hennix. I have plans to release more of this archive and to fill in some of the blanks during the period 1982-85. There are a bunch of very revealing recordings of lessons he gave to pianist Bob Murad and guitarist Steve Raleigh. I’m sure there are other recordings out there waiting to be discovered.

Both of the gigs recorded on these CDs come from early on in my collaboration with Arthur. I played with Arthur pretty consistently from mid 1980 to the spring of 1985 when most of my energy turned to putting together music for the band Second Sight with Dave Douglas, Jeff Marx and Jeff Siegel. Arthur and I kept in touch during the next few years when I was living both in Woodstock and on Dean Street in Brooklyn. Arthur was scuffling, paying dues as a security guard. He would stop by Dean Street to update me on things, listen and comment on my Second Sight recordings and tell me about his jams with Jaco Pastorius and Rashied Ali.

During this period of setbacks and anonymity, Arthur still practiced hard and played whenever and wherever possible with the never ending goal of moving his music forward. Surely, that was why he was chosen to join Alice Coltrane, Reggie Workman and Rashied Ali in concert in 1987 at the twentieth anniversary of the passing of John Coltrane at the Cathedral of Saint John The Divine in NYC.

In recent conversations with Otto Gardner and Jeff Siegel, there was a shared conviction that despite the poor recording quality of the performances presented here, it is important that Arthur finally be heard with his working quartet, playing the repertoire he used to develop his concept. We all agreed that during the beginning of our work with Arthur we all experienced the same feeling of “What the hell am I doing on this bandstand?” We had all held our own working with great Mainstream musicians like Nick Brignola, J R Monterose, James Spaulding, John Stubblefield, Carter Jefferson etc but (with respect to them) playing with Arthur demanded much more. Arthur had internalized that music and moved on through John Coltrane’s thinking and on to his own vision. All at an incredibly intense emotional/energetic level and all of that on three instruments.

Over time, with Arthur’s constant encouragement, our playing improved because we came to understand the commitments required to meet the challenge that Arthur’s music posed. Drummer/artist/mathematician/philosopher Catherine Christer Hennix described it as “an orderly progression towards ecstasy”. I couldn’t agree more. Arthur and his music remain an inspiration to me and many others to this day. Thank you, Arthur.

John Esposito 2025