Though it was active for only a decade, Strata-East Records built a catalog representing some of the most exploratory and vibrant jazz of the 1970s. The label was founded in 1971 by the trumpeter Charles Tolliver and the pianist Stanley Cowell to provide a home for their own forward-looking big band work. But the artist-focused imprint soon attracted fellow musical seekers experimenting with inspirations gleaned from the era’s most outré sounds: adventurous soul, psychedelia, Afrocentric traditions and spiritual questing.
The label’s output was more influential than it was commercially successful, and after Tolliver and Cowell shuttered its office in 1980, its releases became collector’s items, out of reach of most listeners. But thanks to a new partnership with the Michigan indie label Mack Avenue, most of the Strata-East catalog is finally arriving on streaming services, bringing the music to a wider audience than ever before.
That long overdue exposure has raised more questions than answers for one name on the label: Shamek Farrah. The saxophonist has long been shrouded in mystery. One typical 2007 entry on an online forum praises his work before posing the question, “But who is this guy? Where did he come from? Is he still around? Why was he SO underrated and underrecognized?”
Farrah, it turns out, is living in Kingsland, Ga., a few miles from the Florida border, where he is known as the Rev. Anthony Domacase, the pastor for the last 17 years at the Jerusalem #1 Baptist Church. “I don’t toot my own horn,” he said in a phone interview. “I played saxophone with different Christian music groups down here, but I never said, ‘Do you know who I am? I’m Shamek Farrah!’ No, I just fit in with the scenery.”
More than half a century after the release of his debut album, “First Impressions,” Farrah is pleased that it is considered by many to be an undersung spiritual jazz classic. “When we made those recordings, I heard some technical things that I thought we could fix,” he recalled, his voice low and gently cracking. “I thank God that we didn’t, because that music transcended into a spiritual aspect in the way that people receive it.”
“First Impressions” was rejected by every record label that Farrah approached before Strata-East. Its rough-hewed, exploratory sound fits perfectly with the work of such better-known label mates as Pharoah Sanders, Billy Harper and Cecil McBee, but Farrah never enjoyed the same career longevity.
Born in 1947, Anthony Domacase grew up in Spanish Harlem, a neighborhood he described as “a mixed community of Italians, Hispanics and African Americans.” His father was a mechanical engineer who was friendly with jazz musicians like Sy Oliver and Cab Calloway.
Farrah started playing the clarinet in junior high school, until a “really pretty alto saxophone” in a music shop window caught his eye. “About three weeks later I came home from school and the saxophone was there,” he said. “My mother said, ‘If you don’t learn how to play this saxophone, I’m going to wrap it around your neck.’”
Through his connection to the trumpeter and bandleader Oliver, Farrah’s father arranged for his son to take lessons with Garvin Bushell, who he only later discovered had recorded with Ella Fitzgerald, Fletcher Henderson, John Coltrane and Gil Evans.
Farrah’s earliest performing experience came through Latin jazz bands. He was part of an early ensemble led by the salsa great Willie Colón, playing at dance clubs including the Palladium. On his off nights, he would frequent jam sessions, navigating the new pathways in jazz forged by influences such as Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley.
It was around this time that Anthony Domacase became Shamek Farrah. “Back in the ’60s,” he explained, “we as African Americans started identifying with our African culture. Shamek Farrah means ‘One who does rejoice.’ Listening to other artists uplifted me and made me feel good about myself, so I adopted that name.”
A mutual friend introduced Farrah to the pianist Sonelius Smith, a Southerner five years the saxophonist’s elder who sharpened his skills and helped make introductions. In 1972, the pair entered George Klabin’s Sound Ideas studio along with the trumpeter Norman Person, the bassist Milton Suggs, the drummer Ron Warwell and a pair of percussionists (borrowing from Farrah’s Latin jazz influences) to record “First Impressions.”
The four-track, 34-minute-long album is book ended by a pair of Farrah compositions. The curiously spelled “Meterologicly Tuned” features an off-kilter, almost taunting melody rendered as a discordant fanfare by the sax and trumpet. On the title track, his spidery lines sprawl over Suggs’s hypnotic bass, the horns entering as if from a distance in beseeching unison. Throughout the album, Farrah’s tone is tart and probing, glowing with an inquisitive flicker.
“What we did together, we could never do it again,” said Smith, who lives in Brooklyn and is still performing at 82. “It was something fresh.”
Tolliver agreed. The music on “First Impressions,” he said in a recent interview, “could be taken into the studio today, recorded exactly as it was 50 years ago, and still have import. The music reflected the times, and look at what we’re going through right now.”
In gratitude for his influence, Farrah shared credit with Smith on their 1977 follow-up, “The World of the Children,” which favors buoyant funk grooves over its predecessor’s more jagged edges. For his third and final studio album, “La Dee La La” (1980), he reunited with friends from his earliest musical experiences as Shamek Farrah & Folks, which he described as “a celebration of buddies and pals getting together and just having a good time.”
Another Farrah album wouldn’t arrive for 42 years. In 2022, the British label BBE issued “Shamek Farrah & Norman Person Live,” a compilation of concert recordings captured between 1988 and 1991, including jazz standards by Wayne Shorter and Benny Golson, that was originally sold on cassette at the pair’s shows.
Farrah was still performing, often with Person and Smith, until he left New York in 2003, though he hinted at personal and professional struggles that prevented him from continuing to record. After arriving in Kingsland, he played with a Christian band called the Anointed Vessels until arthritis and other health concerns put an end to his performing nearly a decade ago.
Farrah pointed to his late wife, Shirley, whom he married in 1986, as the driving force behind his new life. “When I met her, I believed that there was a god but I didn’t subscribe to any specific religious denomination,” he said. “It was my connection with her that drew me closer to the God that I serve now.”
During the later years of his career in New York, Farrah and Shirley made frequent trips to Kingsland, where she had grown up and where her family still lived. After retirement, they relocated there full time, and found a community centered around the Jerusalem #1 Baptist Church, though the move did require some adjustment for the lifelong New Yorker.
“It’s not as busy, no question about it,” Farrah said in a laconic near-whisper.
The sobriquet Shamek Farrah, which he’d always considered a stage name, fell away as he settled into his new home, though he kept in regular contact with Tolliver, Smith and other acquaintances from his old life.
“Sometimes in our careers we are derailed,” Smith said. “I think Shamek moved down South to start a new life, and he found the spirit in ministry. He told me that he translated the same technique that he used playing jazz to his vocal delivery as he preaches.”
Farrah the pastor hasn’t turned his back on the music he made in his earlier days, but he also has no regrets about his lack of fame. “In the movies, there are the main actors who get all the accolades, but then there are the character actors, and they can win Academy Awards too. I consider myself more of a character actor.”
He chuckled at the thought of his long-ago recordings fetching such exorbitant prices, and has wished more than once that he had a few more copies of his own to profit from. But mostly he seemed humbled by the fact that his music continues to compel new generations of listeners.
“I don’t consider myself one of the greats in jazz,” he said, “but I am grateful that what I did reached many around the world.”
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