The last time saxophonist/composer Darius Jones issued a recording under his own name was 2015's Le Bébé de Brigitte (Lost in Translation), an album-length tribute to groundbreaking vanguard singer Brigitte Fontaine, recorded in collaboration with French vanguard composer/vocalist/pianist Emilie Lesbros. Since then, Jones has remained busy performing solo, with his trio, and in various groups as a sideman. Raw Demoon Alchemy (A Lone Operation) is a live solo saxophone outing, drawn from a deeply emotional 2019 live performance in Oregon. Its five tunes include four covers by "world-building" Black artists -- Georgia Anne Muldrow, Ornette Coleman, Roscoe Mitchell, and Sun Ra. The other selection is a moving reading of a 1930s-era jazz standard that is closely associated with Doris Day and, later, pianist Bill Evans.
Jones was processing the end of a decade-long romantic relationship when he performed this concert. There is something unspeakably vulnerable in these performances. His unhurried approach discovers and rediscovers creative possibility to crystallize at the moment when an ending and a beginning interact simultaneously. His reading of Muldrow's "Figure No. 2" offers the core lyric line as a mutant blues. Though his delivery is seemingly stoic, it gains emotional depth and dimension with every succeeding chorus. Ornette Coleman's "Sadness" grinds on the high note in the first phrase; it fades amid pregnant spaces. Jones holds single elongated notes until he literally runs out of breath, and they decay naturally as he delves into the horn's lower register, unhurriedly underscoring both melody and emotion. "Beautiful Love" opens with a quote from the Addams Family theme before Jones engages its lyricism. He finds the tune's melancholy backbone by adding adorning fragments from "On a Clear Day," "The Sheik of Araby," and even the bridge of "The Star-Spangled Banner" before registering knottier, more exploratory runs. The reading of Mitchell's "Nonaah" -- one of the composer's most enduring tunes -- commences at mid-honk as economical blips and bleats emerge via breath control. About two and a half minutes in, Jones begins to explore the notes in the tune's well-known vamp, and brings them closer and closer to one another until the vamp -- raging, raw, and unruly -- reflects the seemingly inexhaustible creativity inside the melody, and he juxtaposes a range of colorful possibilities. Sun Ra's "Love in Outer Space" clocks in at nearly 14 minutes. Jones throws himself into its modes and tones. He adopts the blues and the liberating freedom with which Ra imbued it. Jones reaches across the horn's registers, following both the literal and expressed intention of the lyric, and hovers about the tension before turning it inside out without losing sight of its spacious, haunted beauty. Raw Demoon Alchemy (A Lone Operation) is presented utterly unfiltered. Jones grabs on to what drew him to these tunes, seeks out the composers' intentions, then imbues their creativity with meaning from his life experience as a collective past meets the prophetic spirit of the future.