Drummer Sunny Murray was crucial to the New York free jazz scene of the early 1960s. He first made his name playing with Cecil Taylor, where his powerhouse style perfectly matched the pianist’s highly percussive, baroque approach to the keyboard. Murray wasn’t interested in timekeeping so much as creating a continuous avalanche of percussion, which included relentless hi-hat, slashing cymbals, and a thunderous kick-and-snare rumble. The overall effect was more apocalyptic than rhythmic, and it forced the horn players who worked with him to up their game, erupting in screaming, cathartic solos that seemed to abandon melody in favor of pure sound.

Murray’s sole ESP-Disk release, a self-titled album from 1966, is as ferocious as anything in his catalog. It features trumpeter Jacques Coursil, alto saxophonists Jack Graham and Byard Lancaster, and bassist Alan Silva. The album’s four tracks are sustained explosions, with Coursil and Lancaster taking fiery (and, in the trumpeter’s case, florid and lyrical) solos and Graham pairing up with the other saxophonist for fanfare-like riffs that recall the horn blasts on early Little Richard singles. Silva does a lot of work with the bow, taking a terrific, mournful solo at the end of the opening track, “Phase 1,2,3,4.” Murray’s drumming is itself one long solo; he never stops, never lets the energy flag. Listening to this album is like running up four flights of stairs.