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Source: Wonkavision
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His Name is Alive is unintentionally cryptic. Like how do you pronounce that album title? What are these locks of hair composed with sleeping gerbils (or are those little raccoons? I can’t tell) in the album art. What is this cartoonish bug-eyed monster on the back?

Lead instrumentalist War, or Warn Defever, clears up some of the mess with a nice explanation for each of the songs on the website. This features actually adds a lot to the album, and it’s something every band should do: explain what they mean. Coming out of Detroit, His Name is Alive has toured with Low and Arab Strap and create electronic folk pop with a dallop of 70s classic rock. Everything seems at the same level, though – so their quiet whispers in the orchestral “Youngblood” sound just as fierce as the pumping “Sangaree.” Or maybe vocalist Andrea Moriti just can’t be moved to excitement. David Bowie likes the band and compared Moriti to Karen Carpenter, which is as fair an assessment as anything else.

This really is as organic as electronic synths and organs can get. His Name is Alive has a hushed nature that is like a run-on sentence, but when they perk up, it rouses everyone to attention, such as with the closer, “Come To Me.” That’s one of the best funk beats to come out in awhile, but once again Moriti doesn’t quite do it justice, making it ripe for remix. “XMMER” is an album that demands a lot of time to explore and exploit to probe the full goodness that these depths have to offer. [By: Josh Spilker]

Rating: 3/5

Author: Trevor Tremaine
Source: Glamor Profession
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The occasional inspired detours aside, the venerable Detroit-area indie rock institution His Name is Alive are more commonly heralded for their playfully experimental, soulful dream pop. Taking heed, I presumed the “tribute” of the disc’s title to be of a more abstract nature, Marion Brown being the miraculous, under-sung free jazz saxophonist whose sides for ESP and Impulse! hold some of the most exploratory, expansive large ensemble improv since the most definitive dates of Ornette, Shepp, and Coltrane (whose Ascension features Brown’s visionary playing). Instead, to my profound perplexity and delight, this set could not be more reverent. HNIA chief Warn Defever rounded up members of Ann Arbor-based unit NOMO to tackle a number of Brown’s compositions (apparently with his blessing, judging from the sticker on the case: “It’s beautiful, thank you. You really understand me.”) in a joyous style that captures the spirit of late-60s free music without ever impinging on sentimentality, and the swirly, reverb-laden dueling Rhodes pianos and ecstatic lead electric betrays the namesake’s psychedelic roots. Every track is a killer, alternating between dense, moody soundscapes á la Alice Coltrane, and swinging, energetic grooves reminiscent of Joe McPhee’s Nation Time.

Author: mpardaiolo
Source: Audiversity

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“Ornette Coleman is the same as Charlie Parker, but he did it a different, the opposite way. Charlie Parker did everything that he did based on knowing harmony and chords. Ornette Coleman did everything he did based on knowing how to reach inside of himself and create music intuitively.”
—Marion Brown, 2003 in an interview with Fred Jung on allaboutjazz.com

Though John Coltrane is the well-established hero in Brown’s descriptive pairing of the quintessential bop saxophonist and the original avant-garde innovator, Brown himself, along with other sax players like Archie Shepp or Dewey Redman, have also brought vital blends of chordal improvisation and borderless imagination to jazz. Almost unanimously described as over-looked or under-sung, Marion Brown was an inside member of the mid-60s NYC vanguard jazz movement recording alongside and inspiring/drawing inspiration from Coltrane, Coleman and Shepp. In fact, after relocating from Atlanta to New York in 1965, his very first recording session was for Coltrane’s now legendary Ascension, which is often pinpointed as the moment the celebrated saxophonist emerged as the avant-garde spiritual leader. The other two saxophonists Coltrane brought in to help inspire his own sound in new, fresh directions, Shepp and Pharoah Sanders, went on to well-revered careers, but Brown, though he recorded a number of respected albums over the last forty years (nonetheless for the likes of Impulse!, ESP, ECM, Fontana, Freedom and Black Lion), has remained thoroughly under the radar. Would I have ever imagined Warn Defever’s genre-defying indie-pop outfit His Name is Alive to be the group to pay proper respects to Brown? No, but Defever is an underappreciated musician and composer in his own right, so perhaps it is only proper.

For the last seventeen years, Defever has been experimenting with His Name is Alive’s dream-pop sound, from the found sound and tape loop obsessed 1990-debut Livonia to last September’s Xmmer, in which the band explores a myriad of styles from Afro-pop to folk that shimmer with pristine production. No matter his stylistic interest of the moment, Defever’s music in any of its concoctions is underpinned by the experimental and spiritual aesthetic established by Brown’s mid-60s jazz scene. Music should never be paint-by-numbers or intently confined to a specific genre’s framework to express an idea; it should be the artist’s expression of feeling regardless of predetermined principles, melodic, atonal or otherwise. Maybe Defever is inspired by Brown’s particular idiom in the same way Coltrane was back in ’65 and set out to use this vernacular to push his own musical expression in new directions. Or perhaps he is just a fan who wanted to bring attention to the overlooked saxophonist. Either way, Sweet Earth Flower is one of the most inspired and interesting albums I have heard all year.

Originally intended as a one-off concert at the University of Michigan Art Museum to pay tribute to Brown, the success of the evening sparked follow-up recording sessions from the talented ensemble. Including members of NOMO and Antibalas, this concoction of His Name is Alive pulls songs from both Brown’s initial mid-60s period including cuts from 1965’s Marion Brown Quartet on ESP and 1966’s Juba-Lee on Fontana along with his mid-70s reemergence on Impulse! after relocating to Europe, including ‘73’s Geechee Recollections, ‘74’s Sweet Earth Flying and ‘75’s Vista. Three of the eight tracks are from the original concert, while the other five tracks include two studio renditions of the live tracks and three other interpretations from the nine-piece band.

I would go into the particular approach for each song, but Thom Jurek’s review on the All Music Guide is more knowledgeable and on point than I would ever be able to do, so I respectfully nod in you in that direction. The music is that of delicately toned, almost ambient-leaning non-linear jazz. The players mesh seamlessly: Defever’s guitar work rarely takes spotlight (nor does any instrument really), restraining instead to a barrage of differently approached ostinatos or hypnotic chords; Defever, Elliot Bergman and Erik Hall’s electric and acoustic keys paint lush, detailed and poignant images with their sensual melodic improvisations; tenor saxophonist Bergman, trumpeter Justin Walter and alto saxophonist Michael Herbst accentuate and solo with subtlety, driving each track with modality akin to the more reflective and melodic momen

Author: Troy Collins
Source: All about Jazz
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Sweet Earth Flower: a tribute to Marion Brown is His Name Is Alive’s meditative ode to the work of the under-sung free jazz saxophonist. Veterans of the American rock underground, His Name Is Alive has been exploring various musical tangents since the early 1990s, slowly moving closer and closer to a more improvisational, jazz-oriented base.The brainchild of Michigan-based, multi-instrumentalist/producer Warren Defever, His Name Is Alive was initially signed to the illustrious British label 4AD, a relative rarity for an American band. Ethereal and spacious, the band’s sound has grown gradually over the years, incorporating funk, soul, R&B, folk, garage rock and world music into their expansive sound.

Collaborating with members of the Afro-beat horn ensembles Antibalas and Nomo, His Name Is Alive blends atmospheric electronic textures with reverberant horns for a sensitive tribute. Shuffling along simmering rubato grooves and psychedelic soundscapes, the assembled forces congeal in a wholly organic fashion. Electronic piano washes refract over arco bass drones and shimmering percussion, while plangent horns drift in and out of the mix.

Drawing stylistic inspiration from Brown’s introspective 1970s period lends a serene and exploratory feel to the session. His Name Is Alive brings a sense of respectful admiration to these pieces, honoring Brown’s spirit while making its own subtle mark on the work. Only on Harold Budd’s “Bismillahi ‘Rrahmani ‘Rrahim” does the band break out with a cathartic electric guitar feedback and multiphonic sax duo that reaches for the heavens.

An ideal introduction to jazz for the novice, Sweet Earth Flower is less turbulent than Brown’s earlier and more readily available music, capturing the spirit of Brown’s later oeuvre with considered restraint and focused determination.
Visit His Name Is Alive on the web.
Track listing: Sweet Earth Flying; Juba Lee; Capricorn Moon (live); November Cotton Flower; Bismillahi ‘Rrahmani ‘Rrahim; Geechee Recollections (I); Geechee Recollections (II); Sweet Earth Flying (live).

Personnel: Warren Defever: guitar, piano; Elliot Bergman: tenor saxophone, Rhodes; Jamie Saltsman: double bass; Justin Walter: trumpet; Jamie Easter: percussion; Dan Piccolo: drums, percussion; Michael Herbst: alto saxophone; Erik Hal: electric piano; Olman Piedra: congas, cajon.

Author: FRANKLIN BRUNO
Source: Boston Phoenix
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In 2006, His Name Is Alive songwriter/guitarist/recording whiz Warn (once “Warren”) Defever used a modest arts grant to hold a “peace conference” in New York City. Called “Come Out the Wilderness,” the proceedings included one “normal” HNIA show (though there’s really no such thing), an orchestral performance, a noontime meditation session in a Brooklyn park, and a come-one-come-all midnight jam. Not exactly Yalta, but the event’s mixture of pretense, play, and utopian hope sheds light on the wellsprings of Defever’s surprising recent music.

The title “Come Out the Wilderness” — shared by a James Baldwin short story and a memoir by poet Estella Conwill Majozo — resurfaces on HNIA’s Xmmer (BMG/Silver Mountain). The album isn’t a massive swerve from 2006’s Detrola, the band’s first with singer Andrea Morici, but listeners who haven’t checked in since HNIA’s gauzy ’90s records for 4AD, or the more recent trip-hop ventures, may be shocked. Much of Xmmer is a non-æthereal collocation of earthy percussion and elements of folk and pre-war blues. “Come Out the Wilderness” itself moves through a half-chanted tune, simple as a field holler, a long breakdown on the words “your light,” and a gentler out-chorus, all built on anxious martial snare and statically riffing guitars. The lyrics are less protest than plea: “Can’t you hear me calling out/Lord I think it’s time.”

This is a restless album: “Come to Me” touches on Afrobeat, whereas Apples in Stereo could have penned “Go to Hell Mountain.” The constants are Defever’s multi-instrumental gifts — he’s the meanest electric-thumb-pianist this side of Konono Nº 1 — and Morici’s pretty but chilly vocals, HNIA’s vestigial tie to indie rock. The best tracks worry the seam between her disengagement and his troubling, increasingly politicized lyrics. However it’s sung, the line “What did you see/Miss Eliza Jane?” sounds less quaint when you learn that the song (“What Color Was the Blood”) concerns a violent mass arrest in Eliza Howell Park, a perennial drug meet in Defever’s beloved Detroit.

Sweet Earth Flower (High Two), released just weeks after Xmmer, mines an even less expected source. It’s subtitled “A Tribute to Marion Brown,” and the selections originate with post-bop, pre-free altoist Brown, who’s widely known as a sideman with Archie Shepp (Fire Music) and John Coltrane (Ascension) but undersung as a bandleader/composer. Brown once wrote, “I don’t play about Religion, or the Universe, or Love. . . . I don’t play words,” but his ’60s and ’70s work has more to do with Trane’s spirituality than with Shepp’s rage. His playing has a self-reflexive reserve that helps explain his cult status — his music can be a hard sell to listeners seeking expressive catharsis.

Open-eared rockers often pay lip service to outré jazz figures, but this HNIA exploration is deeper and more selfless than the usual soundboy dabbling. Morici is absent, Defever’s guitar is mostly sidelined in favor of electric piano and congas, and the ad hoc band line-up includes most of Detroit compatriots Nomo. Elliot Bergman (tenor), Michael Herbst (alto), and Justin Walter (trumpet) ably extrapolate from Brown’s contemplative, sometimes pastoral written heads. (Herbst shines on “Bismilahi ’Rrahmani ’Rrahim,” a 1978 Harold Budd piece that featured Brown.)

Not everything works: the rhythm section falters on occasion, and several cuts (“Juba-Lee,” “November Cotton Flower”) are shorter and less exploratory than their models. Although one misses the disciplined inventiveness of dedicated jazz players, the ensemble is empathetic and respectful. Sweet Earth Flower argues for something Defever would surely like to believe: whenever people gather to play music as searching and uncynical as Brown’s, it’s always a peace conference.

Author: John DeFore
Source: San Antonio Current

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This month’s most surprising jazz-pop blend comes from the uncategorizable (and hard-to-find-in-stores) group His Name is Alive, whose latest, Sweet Earth Flower (High Two) centers on compositions by little-known avant-garde saxophonist Marion Brown. A lovely, atmospheric disc that mixes live performances with studio recordings, Flower takes the work of one cult artist and makes it available to another (barely overlapping) cult.

Author: Derek Taylor
Source: Bagatellen
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Marion Brown survives as one of the few among the New Thing circle to have secured financial solvency in his advanced years. Sadly, the source of his income is not widespread recognition and consumption of his music, but instead a financial settlement in a medical malpractice suit. Brown’s music continues to exist on the fringes, treasured by aficionados, but invisible to the majority of music listeners. The longstanding experimental rock collective His Name is Alive takes important initiative to combat that condition with this new tribute album to Brown. Rather than focus on his Sixties work for Impulse and ESP, the nine piece ensemble taps the altoist/composer’s later Seventies work, a rare and ruminative songbook now generally available only as downloads on music blogs and high-priced vinyl in boutique shops.

Lush rhythm and a rich amount of modal atmosphere factor prominently into the ensemble’s readings of Brown’s already spacious compositions. “Juba Lee Brown” sounds like mid-Impulse period Coltrane, specifically “Alabama”, in its somber dirge structure. The version of “Capricorn Moon” riffs off vintage Fela, a referent not surprising given leader Warn Defever’s decision to populate the band with members of the Michigan-based Afrobeat outfit NOMO. An undulating vamp serves as spinal column for sinewy statements by horns and Defever almost seems to be channeling a more subdued side of his inner Eddie Hazel on guitar. “November Cotton Flower” and “Bismillani ‘Rrahmani ‘Rrahim”, the only non-Brown piece of the set, involve ample use of Rhodes and Wurlizter to drape the music in a cottony incense-scented haze. The second piece also contains one of the rare passages where the group plumbs conventional free jazz territory with keening saxophones and strident guitar.

A percussion section of Jamie Easter, Dan Piccolo and Olman Piedra keep the rhythms porous and enveloping and avoid more rigidly defined beats. The gentle rustle and click of small shakers and hand drums weaves with the plaintive strains of birdcalls on “Geechee Recollections” and “Sweet Earth Flying”. The combination of live and studio settings further varies the surroundings, the applause on the former pieces. If there’s one drawback it falls back to the Fela comparison in that a couple tracks stretch circuitousness to a fault.

It’s difficult to imagine Brown not being intensely pleased by the thoughtful attention accorded his music. A quote included on sticker affixed to the disc confirms it: “It’s beautiful, thank you. You really understand me.” The odds of the affirmation extending to listener impressions appear extremely favorable.

Author: Jason Ferguson
Source: Orlando Weekly
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Author: By Jon Dale
Source: Dusted Magazine
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His Name Is Alive – “Sweet Earth Flying” (Sweet Earth Flower – A Tribute To Marion Brown)

On Xmmer, as with other His Name Is Alive albums, head prefect Warn Defever builds a model of his universe, populates it with musicians and melodies, and then goes on roundabout travelogue. Often, that world will unerringly reflect a particular popular genre, as Defever’s omnipotent, magpie eyes always survey surrounding terrain before lifting both appropriate and incongruous elements. There’s often a touch of the absurdist to Defever’s desires, and he’s possibly the modern artist most sympathetic to Pop Art’s fondness for both making-popular and making from the popular, though the outcome doesn’t really tally with received wisdom of what constitutes a Pop Art statement.

Xmmer is modular and cyclic compared to other His Name Is Alive records, working through rhythms and patterns in much the same manner as certain kinds of African music. These simple, recurring riffs are generally played on glittering acoustic guitar, clanking, distorted mbiras or martial snares, and their snowball effect propels Xmmer to its conclusion in “Come to Me,” where the album’s various threads meet in a kind of hypnotic chewing-gum pop that masticates obsessively over its own texture, but without losing its flavor. There are breaks in the continuum – despite its title, “Go to Hell Mountain” is the sunny face to Detrola’s “I Thought I Saw,” another angle on Defever’s revisiting of the 1970s singer-songwriter, a field also explored on “Put It in Your Mind” – but Xmmer is mostly single-minded. In a final nod to the album’s circularity, the opener “Young Blood” shares lyrics with “Come to Me,” but the former sets them in shifting layers of gilt-edged strings.

In a recent interview with Joel Calahan in Signal to Noise, Defever explains one reason why a tribute to Atlanta, Georgia-born saxophonist Marion Brown was so appealing: “He does something few other similar improv musicians do, which is [that] he redoes the same songs. So there’s a fluid notion of albums, of the recording process.” His Name Is Alive have followed that model since they begun, as their releases are populated with mutant re-takes, visions of versions, similar songs travelling under several different names at once. Defever is also fond of the melody head that blossoms through permutation, as such songs as Last Night’s “Someday My Prince Will Come,” his Afrobeat lift, attest.

But Sweet Earth Flower is more a re-imagining of Marion Brown’s music than mere ‘tribute.’ Defever and his cohorts, made up of members of Antibalas and Nomo, among others, bolster Brown’s songs with new energy while taking them at an easy clip. There is intimate consort here between sax, Rhodes/Wurlitzer, guitar and drums, and the moments where acoustic and electric keys duel, as on “November Cotton Flower,” are breathtaking. Indeed, most all the playing on the set is absolutely beautiful, particularly on live cuts like “Capricorn Moon,” and the new takes on “Geechee Recollections” are as warm and open as the original recordings. This reinforces the kernel of Brown’s music: it is free and spontaneous, yet it admits great structural integrity, something Sweet Earth Flower reinforces. These new versions also tap into a vein of quotidian mysticism in the air among American free jazz players of the 1970s. Sweet Earth Flower might be His Name Is Alive’s most straightforwardly appealing album yet, testament to both this particular line-up’s resilience and fluidity, and the strength of Brown’s originals.

Author: Peter Margasak
Source: Chicago Reader
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Over the years Warn Defever, the native of Livonia, Michigan, who’s been the brains behind His Name is Alive for nearly two decades, has demonstrated an almost schizophrenic array of musical directions, using his group to enfold his interests in pop, soul, country, folk, rural blues, and electronica, among many other things. I’m always a bit skeptical about such eclecticism. It’s natural for people, and especially musicians, to be interested in lots of stuff, and curious about things they haven’t experienced, but there’s a big difference between being interested in something and deciding to practice it. Defever is a dilettante with a capital D, and sadly, lots of his cross-cultural endeavors have come up rather empty.

For this reason I was pretty leery of the forthcoming Sweet Earth Flower: A Tribute to Marion Brown (High Two). HNIA planned the homage to be a one-off event, a 2004 concert at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, but Defever was so happy with the results he decided to record the music (three of the eight pieces on the album are taken from that performance). Brown is one of the more peculiar figures to emerge during the 60s free-jazz explosion, perpetually overlooked despite killer albums for ESP, Impulse, Fontana, Freedom, and ECM. He’s always been a deeply lyrical player—coming out of an environment that frequently stressed energy and raw emotion over well-considered melodicism—but he could also go out with the best of them. His work in the 70s leaned toward more meditative terrain—hell, he even collaborated with Harold Budd!—and it’s this material that HNIA focuses on (although they do also tackle mid-60s gems like “Juba Lee” and “Capricorn Moon). Defever wisely enlisted the help of some of his friends in the Ann Arbor Afrobeat band Nomo, for whom he’s produced some records: leader (and saxophonist) Elliot Bergman and trumpeter Justin Walter do a nice job handling much of the solo activity, but the star of the show is Erik Hall, with his warmly undulating electric piano parts.

Brown loves to use ostinato figures—repetitive little licks casting an air of hypnosis for the soloist—and HNIA transforms them into something warmer and more spellbinding, albeit less rhythmically interesting. The rhythm section here doesn’t mix things up very much, which sometimes gives the music a static quality. Still, the album is much better than I expected it to be, and it does manage to shine a different, yet deeply empathetic light on Brown as a composer and conceptualist. A portion of the album’s proceeds benefit the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation.

HNIA plays Schubas tomorrow night, but I expect they’ll draw far more repertoire from a new album of original material, XMMER (Reincarnate)—which I haven’t heard—rather than the Marion Brown tribute.