Biography
Edward Wilkerson Jr. remained based in Chicago even as numerous fellow members of the AACM relocated to New York, and his relatively junior standing among those peers may also explain why the tenor saxophonist has received far less recognition than his abilities warrant. During the 1980s, while the New York–based saxophonist and bandleader David Murray earned widespread acclaim for his octet projects, Wilkerson’s 8 Bold Souls produced work of comparable depth. In fact, the ensemble surpassed Murray’s group in compositional rigor and ensemble precision, yet it attracted none of the critical notice lavished on that comparatively loose outfit. The group first assembled in January 1985 to present a series of Thursday-night concerts at the downtown Chicago venue Chicago Filmmakers under the title New Music for 8 Bold Souls, a designation that remained with the band. Wilkerson’s energetic tenor serves as the principal solo voice, yet 8 Bold Souls functions chiefly as a vehicle for composition; listeners seeking the leader at his most expansive in improvisation are directed to the three-piece Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. The ensemble highlights Wilkerson’s good-humored, ambitious, and multi-faceted approach to writing, drawing distinctive timbres from its unusual instrumentation, which favors the lower register through the pairing of double bass and tuba. Since its inception the band has performed only intermittently. It issued two albums on the Arabesque label in the early 1990s, but its subsequent recording, Last Option, did not appear until 1999 on the Chicago-based Thrill Jockey imprint. Around the turn of the millennium the group experienced a noticeable resurgence, issuing the new album and, in 2001, appearing at Chicago’s Symphony Center as well as several festivals, one of them in Lisbon, Portugal.
Albums