Angel Bat Dawid & Naima Nefertari – Journey to Nabta Playa

The opening track from Angel Bat Dawid and Naima Nefertari’s big double album Journey to Nabta Playa finds the two musicians amid a sandstorm whose whorling winds are accompanied by their own impish aerophones and the scattered patter of rattling cans and clinking chimes. Grainy and buffeted on ‘Neptune Desert Sounds’, those chimes feel more hallowed and personal on the short and hunkered-down second piece ‘Nabta Calling’, resounding like gongs as the duo begin to embrace a deeper ritual even though those swirling winds continue to cause a ruckus outside, with the effect of dwelling within while a corrugated steel roof panel repeatedly flaps open.

Then on ‘Bishmillah’ we shift away from flutes and bells for a first taste of Nefertari’s piano and Dawid’s distinctive clarinet, as they introduce a fine vamp which hints at the encompassing fracas as their melodies by turns become more wild and sinuous. An elliptical take on a rarely heard Don Cherry composition, the untrammelled duo recorded their album between Dawid’s home base in Chicago and Tågarp Schoolhouse in the south of Sweden, where Cherry and his wife, the painter and textile artist Moki, made a home after returning from the United States at the turn of the seventies.

Dawid and Nefertari aren’t the only ones this spring to successfully tap into the essence of Cherry’s music, as the debut album by Cosmic Ear, a project helmed by the Swedish jazz veterans Mats Gustafsson and Goran Kajfeš plus the influential Cherry collaborator Christer Bothén is due out in a matter of weeks, drawing upon the trumpeter’s Organic Music Theatre of the seventies and his Codona trio with Collin Walcott and Naná Vasconcelos which incorporated the donso ngoni and berimbau as they fused free jazz with regional forms under a banner of world music.

Described as ‘a powerful meditation on memory, mythology and ancestral science’, Journey to Nabta Playa is named for the archeological site in the Nubian Desert which was once a seasonal settlement and home to one of the earliest astronomic devices on record, a 7,000-year-old stone circle or ‘calendar circle’ which was used to track the summer solstice.

And indeed on Journey to Nabta Playa the duo appear to be engaged in a practice of tracking or circling as they use a diverse array of reeds and winds, small percussions, keys and electronics to resolutely defy expectations and stalk out the borders of their compositions, heralding the wind without being swept away by it and finding spiritual succour on the margins or in the rushes without charging headlong into the heart of the matter. They also drew inspiration from the author Virginia Hamilton’s retelling of black folktales in The People Could Fly, citing a passage which reads:

They say the people could fly. Say that long ago in Africa, some of the people knew magic. And they would walk up on the air like climbin’ up on a gate. And they flew like blackbirds over the fields. Black, shiny wings flappin’ against the blue up there.

‘Procession of the Equinox’ – the first single from the album which the duo released in accordance with the spring equinox on 20 March – seems to expand on the theme from ‘Bishmillah’ as the head is hammered out on the piano accompanied by shakers and Dawid’s moaning or ululating cries. Nefertari comes in on another set of keys and starts elaborating around the theme, which recedes into the background like a flickering shadow on the walls of a cave as a plethora of small percussions including shakers and chimes plus the springy and suctiony sound of the mouth harp or tempered mallet percussion continue to add texture in the manner of slubbed fabric.

The murmuring vocal line gives way to more elaborate trills before Dawid’s clarinet comes in and echoes the crooked course of the percussions, with glimmering keys and high-pitched flutes also joining the fray as the duo engage less in a process of transformation or development than doubling or coupling. Then just before the seven-minute mark a meditative and trance-like hum takes over as all of these other elements begin to drop out or fade from view. Vetivery and sylvan, the clarinet remains along with shakers and what sounds like gourd percussion or castanets, maintaining a sense of time during this long burnout which is finally reduced to just the embers in the form of a hollow mantra and a synthetic buzz, a bassy reverberation which blinks orange in the enveloping darkness.

A trance or fugue, ‘Procession of the Equinox’ might seem to augur some kind of breakdown or even a romp or a blowout. Instead the twenty-minute centrepiece ‘Exorcism: Clearing the Electromagnetic Field’ utterly confounds musical expectations, just like the title suggests paring everything back and serving more like a chasm or ellipsis even as it holds the listener rapt. The composition abounds in dial tones or alien transmissions, small sequences of blips and beeps which play out over the hoary rasps or husky drones of a Korg. Wispy flutes air out like panpipes and the plucked tines of a kalimba briefly vie with the strings of a harp before pinging synth sounds with short envelopes flit over a more staticky drone, which plummets into nothingness around the halfway mark.

The second half of the piece then through a combination of oscillating synths, percussive blips and other abrasions seems to attempt some kind of takeoff, whose helical ascents barely get off the ground, making for a stalled flight. When those rotor blades finally start whirring, the staggered keys of an organ make a striking appearance and cutlery is doled out or swept up like the sloshing of sea shells. ‘Exorcism: Clearing the Electromagnetic Field’ circles the drain before chimes and Nefertari’s kalimba restore a bit of musicality on the way out.

By contrast ‘Heru: The Oasis’ is more verdant and copious, a jungle scene which teems with life as exotic birdcalls chirrup for space between the clarinet and contemplative keys of a Hammond B-3. ‘Black Stones of Sirius’ sustains the atmosphere but introduces the first pronounced beat of the record, a programmed trip hop rhythm which grooves nicely alongside the organ, Dawid’s winnowing clarinet and the swell of gospel music sampled from a church in Georgia, as the duo add a bit of soul jazz to their spiritual voyage.

Meanwhile a solitary ‘Prayer’ featuring Dr. Asar Hapi, a yogi who dabbles in various modes of physical and spiritual health, foregrounds spoken word vocals by Dawid and Nefertari who plead for wisdom and guidance amid a wash of audio distortion whose waves find a mirror in the pluckings of a harp. Hapi’s casual insights and metaphors – which involve a trip to the gas station and ‘a whiff of ether’ – are buried within the mix as kalimba and mallet percussion momentarily buttress the harp.

Angel Bat Dawid is coming off a Requiem for Jazz, a cosmic orchestration which took as its jumping-off point lines of dialogue from Edward O. Bland’s seminal 1959 documentary The Cry of Jazz. The acclaimed clarinetist, composer and improviser also contributed a trio of songs to the Sun Ra tribute project Nuclear War and has featured alongside Moor Mother, Odd Okoddo, Lonnie Holley and her Spiritmuse Records labelmate Surya Botofasina, an Alice Coltrane disciple who last fall released his transcendent sophomore album Ashram Sun. Naima Nefertari combines her improvisational piano practice with her work as an archivist and curator for the Estate of Moki Cherry and Cherry Archive.

Together they produced, recorded and mixed Journey to Nabta Playa while composing all of the songs aside from ‘Bishmillah’ and the penultimate track ‘Burial: String Quartet in E Minor’ which was transcribed and arranged by Dawid from a David Ornette Cherry original. Unreleased at the time of his death, the song makes Journey to Nabta Playa something of a family affair as the composer and multi-instrumentalist was Nefertari’s uncle, part of a clan of musicians and artists which includes Don and Moki, Eagle-Eye and Neneh Cherry, who contributes to the album’s liner notes.

Both a tribute and an act of regeneration, Dawid and Nefertari call upon a youthful foursome with Olula Negre and Ishmael Ali on cellos, Michelle Manson on the viola and Efuru Hawa Kilolo Harmon-Miller on the violin, as they offer an ornate, gilt leaf rendition of ‘Burial: String Quartet in E Minor’, a song whose final moments are characterised by a sense of spiritual uplift.

That leaves the album closer ‘Chariots of Expansion (People Could Fly)’ whose legato keys seem to roll forth and gather momentum, joined by the drifting tones and overtones of the Hammond B-3. In the middle section the piano bangs out a few chords and then shifts between tone clusters, arpeggios and glimmering glissandos, which prevail into the final third of the composition as Dawid’s orgiastic voice strains for expression. The last plunking chord stretches out into a beckoning silence, at last punctuated by a deep sigh of appreciation and some applause for the journey undertaken and a job well done, with Dawid exhaling ‘My my!’ and ‘O Lord have mercy!’ as Nefertari adds ‘I literally just flew on an eagle’.