ReRelease.net is privileged to present the early works of Arni Cheatham. Cheatham has been active in the Boston jazz scene for nearly 40 years. He is active in both religious and secular areas of musical performance, and frequently collaborates with Mark Harvey. He refers to the act of creating music as "at spiritual event," and describes making music as "getting to hold the horn while God plays." One of Cheatham's other passions is photography, and is frequently out at the end of the day to capture the "golden hour" of light. Cheatham's current group is "Smoke."

The rare album released by Cheatham's first group "Thing" consists of two sprawling songs of jazz tempered with bristly funk. Few points of comparison for the group exist in the Boston jazz world, then or now, but several influences predominate. The album certainly stands in the shadow of Miles; Vagn Leick's dark chords especially are straight out of "Live Evil" or "Agharta." The most aggressive moments on the album are on the last half of "Road Through the Wall," where Leick's keys and Saltman's bass are overdriven through amplifiers, resulting in a glorious wall of noise. Kiah Nowlin keeps the beat more than steady, culminating in a drum break on "Road Through the Wall pt. 3" that has to be heard to be believed.

This group effort led by Cheatham puts you in the audience of a powerful 1972 performance, providing a unique glimpse of the jazz scene at that time. As with many more innovative jazz forms, the recording was made at one of the many local educational establishments, Harvard University. The group borrowed the most innovative characteristics of jazz and rock, but never sounded derivative. This is early jazz-fusion of the highest order, before the term was taken to mean a light, commercially acceptable form of the genre.

The group had a set of cards made to drum up business, which read "a new direction." Cheatham was listed as the band leader, but if you asked him, he would say that he followed as much as led. Cheatham let the group play within boundaries, but he knew when to bring the song back with a nimble and expressive playing.

"The music is absolutely not about me," he says to explain a guiding concept. "I allow for maximum flexibility for the individuals. I'll explain the concept and if there is one, the story behind a piece of my music before we play a single note. I feel that if the players know the emotion behind or the statement that a piece of music is built upon, they will absolutely be better able to get 'inside' the piece and move around among the molecules of the music."

It is fitting that the group's name is ambiguous. In an interview from after he returned to Denmark, Vagn Leick recalls the source of the group's name. "We did a couple of those jam-sessions for a few Saturdays in a row, and slowly the group was formed, and it got the name Thing, because whoever was recording the tapes wrote "Arnie's Thing" on them."

Vagn Leick discussed how Cheatham's improvisational methods opened up new spaces for the group: "Arnie just told us to play," he said simply. "We came together with the attitude that no note was wrong if it felt right within the context. It gives you an enormous freedom in your musical expression when you have that level of acceptance and the limits of what you are allowed to play are very wide."