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 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ All Music Guide Review
4.5 / 5
Arthur Jones had one of the warmer and more romantic styles in "energy music," making this, his debut as a leader, a highly enjoyable set. While the late-'60s avant-garde jazz scene is typically associated with heated and furious solo flights, Jones managed to fuse his love of older bop and blues players with the prevalent tendencies of the day. In this way, Jones was as adept at caressing a ballad as he was at shredding apart a fast one. Both of these sides are in evidence -- quite literally -- on this disc. The searing "C.R.M." opens the session with a relentless frenzy of notes; cutting and slashing everything in it's path. It is one of four Jones originals. The evocative and gritty ballad "Sad Eyes" begins the second on a much different note. This piece as well as the opening bars of the album's closer, "Brother B," provide a wonderful example of an avant-garde player digging into his blues roots. Where Archie Shepp incorporated a soulful Ben Webster swagger into the New Thing, Jones applies the style of another elder statesman, particularly that of Johnny Hodges. The result is also reminiscent of Ornette Coleman's mid-'60s trio sessions with David Izenzon and Charles Moffett, only Jones had the tendency to employ more squeaks and growls than did Coleman. Bassist Beb Guerin and drummer Claude Delcloo round out the trio and both are given a good amount of solo/duet time on each side's opener. Scorpio was recorded only a month after the trio supported Jacques Coursil on his first Actuel date, the quartet session, Way Ahead. This is a very warm and firmly rooted free jazz record. Highly recommended. ~ Brandon Burke, All Music Guide
• Claude Delcloo
• Drums
• Beb Guérin
• Bass
• Arthur Jones
• Sax (Alto), Main PerformersideA: 18:15 sideB: 20:30____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________  Chris May (aaj):Like "rarely performed" operas, "hard to find" recordings are often obscure for a prosaic reason: they're no good. Here's a monumental exception to the rule. The Black Ark—released in small numbers on the Freedom label in 1969, out of print almost overnight, and a holy grail for collectors practically ever since—is forty minutes of passionate and thrilling music, new-thing free jazz as great as practically any that came out of the late 1960s without saxophonist John Coltrane's name on it.
Seventeen years younger than Coltrane, alto saxophonist Noah Howard arrived in New York in 1965, aged 22. He formed a quartet, made a couple of albums for ESP, and—before moving to Europe in 1970—put together the septet which made The Black Ark. By 1969, Howard was terrifyingly good: as a player, composer and bandleader.
The four originals which make up The Black Ark—a mutant blues, a free jive samba, a cod-Japanese "ying-tong" melody and a wonderfully lyrical ballad—are catchy and hummable, at a time when most free jazz rejected tunes and structures (or was too untutored to create them). Howard brings a similar degree of form to his band: theme statements bookend each track, solos are taken individually ("Mount Fuji" contains the only section of extended collective improvisation), and the length of each player's solo is precisely pre-determined, with Howard taking the longest spots.
As an alto player, Howard is often tagged with Ornette Coleman. In fact, he sounds more like a tenor saxophonist, bringing to his smaller instrument much of the tenor's weight and booting force. He's a hefty player. The closest contemporary comparison is perhaps with tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, another musician balancing ferocity with trippy melodicism, to their mutual advantage.
For unrelenting screaming banshee saxophone, the septet includes tenor player Arthur Doyle. As the original album's liner notes have it, in words that can't be bettered, Doyle is "propelled throughout by an almost incoherent rage, a chaotic and murderous sound." Howard's deft trick as leader is to keep Doyle's eruptions strictly time-constrained—a couple of choruses of sonic excess per solo, and out. Trumpeter Earl Cross, another furiously intense soloist, though a less tonally monolithic one, is similarly under manners. The result: neither player outstays his welcome and you don't have to be a smack head to enjoy them.
The rest of the band is a blast too, particularly the agile, powerhouse bassist Norris Jones and drummer Muhammad Ali (the younger brother of Coltrane's post-Elvin Jones drummer Rashied). Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock conga player, Juma, doesn't just add color, but working with Ali brings real propulsion to the music (the duo's interaction on "Mount Fuji" is a delight).
Almost forty years after its original release, undimmed by familiarity, this reissue is like a really, really late, really, really exciting birthday present.
Kurt Gottschalk (aaj):
Noah Howard's 1969 album The Black Ark has, in an unintended way, lived up to its name in recent years. It has become, to free jazz obsessives, a sort of Ark of the Covenant, a fabled and much sought after grail and jazz message boards lit up when it was announced that the British label Bo'Weavil would be putting the album out on CD.
Recent years have also shown a renewed interest in Howard's career, with new recordings on CIMP, Cadence, Ayler and Boxholder and an important reissue on Eremite pairing his 1971 album Patterns (by a sextet that included Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg) with an unreleased 18-minute track from 1979 called "Message to South Africa" (with Johnny Dyani, Kali Fasteau, Noel McGee and Chris McGregor), recorded for Mercury in France but unissued because of its perceived militancy.
The Black Ark was Howard's third record as a leader. Released by Polydor after two ESP titles, it should have been his breakthrough. Instead it broke him. Unhappy with the lack of support for free jazz in the states, within three years he had left for Paris, eventually moving again to Belgium where he still lives. Record labels at the time were scrambling to figure out what was going on in jazz as well as rock and many worthy albums didn't get the proper promotion and distribution and were lost in the shuffle.
But The Black Ark was one that should have risen to the top. It is, in a sense, the missing link between Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp. Simple yet insistent melodies scream through the twin saxophones of Howard and, on his recording debut, Arthur Doyle before breaking down into strident, freeform marches. Like Ayler and Shepp, Howard here favors tunes that feel like work songs, or even nursery rhymes. With a third horn (Earl Cross on trumpet), the front line flies over the rumbling rhythms of Leslie Waldron (piano), Norris Sirone Jones (bass), Mohammed Ali (drums) and Juma (conga). Compared to the mountains of recordings released in today's market, the discography of revolutionary (politically and musically) jazz from the late '60s is rather small and it's fantastic to hear another piece of the picture. sideA: 19:17 sideB: 21:14
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I like it. I also have the Soviet E.P. 
