After a fulsome embrace of jazz and roots music on her Blue Note debut The Omnichord Real Book – where she laid down her spear and traded sweet grooves with the likes of Joel Ross, Jeff Parker, Ambrose Akinmusire and Brandee Younger while the distinctive chimes of her harp-like instrument also stretched in the direction of seventies go-go and strung-out psychedelic soul – then compering The Magic City which was released earlier this year as the fourth iteration of the Red Hot & Ra project, for her second Blue Note album Meshell Ndegeocello pays homage to James Baldwin, on a record which is neatly timed to coincide with the centennial of the author’s birth.
Billed as somewhere between a celebration, a church service and a call to action, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin touches upon everything from our pleasure centres to collective catastrophes, honing in on Baldwin’s own struggles as an artist and civil rights activist, and carrying the baton into the present as Ndegeocello and her cast of collaborators repeatedly call out the legacies of slavery, police brutality, the prison industrial complex and the complicities of the justice system, with an intersectional understanding drawn all the way from Sojourner Truth to Audre Lorde and bell hooks of the violence and inequity which has hitherto been the lot of black women.
Meshell Ndegeocello, who in retrospect describes her breakthrough studio album Plantation Lullabies as a necessary catharsis redolent of a righteous youth, turned to the works of James Baldwin almost a decade ago when she read the ‘life-changing’ essays of The Fire Next Time then composed what The New York Times described as an ‘almost indefinable work of music theatre’ based on the texts for a production which played in the fall of 2016 at the Harlem Stage. Can I Get a Witness? The Gospel of James Baldwin already centered the voices of Justin Hicks and Staceyann Chin, with a segment entitled ‘Raise the Roof’, fragments from Baldwin’s notes on hatred and the phrase ‘No more water, the fire next time’ as a refrain, which also serves as the epigraph to Baldwin’s book.
Baldwin took the title and epigraph of The Fire Next Time from the popular spiritual ‘Mary Don’t You Weep’, a song first recorded in 1915 by the Fisk Jubilee Singers which has since been interpreted by everyone from Lead Belly and Bessie Jones to The Caravans and Aretha Franklin as the introduction to her bestselling 1972 live album Amazing Grace, to James Brown and The Famous Flames and the posthumous release of a 1983 piano and microphone session by Prince. ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time’ read the lyrics, and from the outset Ndegeocello infuses No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin with a kaleidoscopic sound palette even as her own snarling and susurrating vocals hiss behind the gospel harmonies of the leads.
Pressure is a constant theme on the album, whether it’s the vibration of bass and guitar strings or breath pushing through reeds, the weight of expectations self-imposed and societal, an atmospheric pressure or one’s gorge steadily rising from within. ‘Travel’ takes us inside the mind of a man on the verge of suicide, while ‘On the Mountain’ expands on an image from the poet Amiri Baraka, who described Baldwin upon his death as ‘God’s black revolutionary mouth’.
Staceyann Chin offers a spoken word rendition of excerpts from Baldwin’s famous speech on ‘The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity’, which segues into her own screed about police violence, ‘Raise the Roof’ which along with the opener ‘Travel’ was the first piece from No More Water to be released. In prose of gushing ferocity she states that white supremacy ‘must be in the fucking water, being force fed to the police, the prosecutor and the politicians who care nothing for black bodies falling like leaves in late August in Ferguson, in Cleveland, in Staten Island only minutes away from where my own child sits watching the Muppets take over Manhattan’, suggesting that we seem to moving backwards through history as she bears witness even with a ‘helpless bile rising angry in my chest’.
The first half of No More Water is defined by juxtapositions both signal and sonic, from private despair and fiery indignation to calls for a closer and more encompassing community. ‘Raise the Roof’ is immediately followed by a country-hued spiritual in ‘The Price of the Ticket’ and the bronzed neo soul and bass harmonics of ‘What Did I Do?’, which calls back to Plantation Lullabies and other genre-defining works of the nineties by the likes of D’Angelo and Erykah Badu, then climbs through rousing handclaps to become a sort of torch song in the manner of Irving Berlin’s near namesake, candlelit and anthemic, carried by the elliptical yet spellbinding voice of Justin Hicks.
Drum batteries and Afro-Cuban rhythms accompany the crunching guitars and synths of ‘Pride I’, with a spoken word passage from a French translation of The Fire Next Time serving as a bridge to the bass and organ and the bounding claves of ‘Pride II’, one of the funkiest tracks on the album which highlights Jake Sherman on the Hammond and Jebin Bruni behind the keyboards, with Ndegeocello’s roiling dub textures rubbing against the bold and militaristic hand of Abe Rounds as Justin Hicks provides another standout vocal and the versatile Chris Bruce, who co-produced the record, shreds away on the guitar.
‘Eyes’ an emotive soul ballad opens with a fragmented reading from ‘Here be Dragons’, which is a critique of masculinity and a reckoning with our essential androgyny, as the Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza echoes Baldwin’s line ‘We all react to and, to whatever extent, become what the eye sees’. With the same sort of tone but more dolorous, ‘Trouble’ is a paean for change that reckons with the onerous and even stultifying difficulty of the task ahead.
Another voice enters the mix as ‘Thus Sayeth The Lorde’ interpolates the poem ‘A Litany for Survival’ and the essay ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House’ by Audre Lorde, before ‘Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without’ as another quotation from The Fire Next Time is bedecked in propulsive drums and doo-doo vocals, with a squelching bass and soaring lines from Hicks supported by Kenita Miller, then a few melodious guitar strums in the final moments of the track which prove redolent of so many late sixties and early seventies Motown classics.
The opposite of love, on the next track the duo of Hicks and Ndegeocello recite in unison Baldwin’s words on hatred, with an ache and an air of the prevailing fear or apprehensiveness saying ‘I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain’. Drum rolls and the vibrato of the Hammond organ imbue the track with a spectral quiver, conjuring a vast interstellar space as Hicks surfs those waves through a limpid vocal performance. The longest piece on the album, ‘Tsunami Rising’ features another poem from Chin who evokes the transatlantic slave trade through the eyes and experiences of black women, aided only by a few blurts from Josh Johnson on the tenor sax.
An intersectional reading which summons the horrors of a people captured and traded like loot and children tossed overboard, sometimes in acts of desperation, while with a smidgeon of irony casting the generations who have been cut off from their ancestral homes, ‘Tsunami Rising’ is also a cascading diatribe against the white patriarchy, honing in with specificity on their groping hands and protruding penises while both celebrating and critiquing the #MeToo movement, which was devised by a black women but continues to strike them from the contemporary discourse. Bearing disproportionately the weight of all this sexual violence, Chin summons a lineage of truth seekers and freedom fighters from Harriet Tubman to Winnie Mandela, Angela Davis and Assata Shakur, as she adopts Baldwin’s epigraph to make a vow on behalf of black women everywhere, repeating ‘No more water, the fire next time’ as saxophone flares and drones sustain a steady glow.
Red brown and gold brown in lyric and tenor, the plangent ‘Another Country’ with a grittier vocal from Hicks is a lush call for a do-over, with its verdant swirl of strings and keys making the song the closest thing to a contemporary smash on the record.
‘Baldwin Manifesto II’ returns to the artist’s struggle, and on the album closer ‘Down at the Cross’ it is Ndegeocello who shares vocal duties with Hicks over throbbing strings and keys which almost sound like plucks on the doson ngoni, a final phantasm which bends at the knee in the face of the byzantine and never-ending battle to live free of anger and doubt, our lives mere droplets in a fathomless pool of water, before the voice of the trumpeter and educator Paul Thompson offers a final course correction, as he repeats the words ‘Page by page, break the spine, slowly, until it is worn’ as a cut-up, suggesting that self-torment and other cycles of abuse can only be beat and our duties as artists and activists only be met through daily and painstaking acts of a conscious resistance.
Around the age of fourteen or fifteen when I began to spend every other high school lunch break on a discursion around town, scouring Borders and a plethora of secondhand record stores for CDs and other cultural bric-à-brac, my first introduction to the music of Billie Holiday came by way of Proper Records and their four-disc box sets. Whatever quibbles were to be had in the vein of rights and remuneration, these sets which sought to cover the back catalogues of old jazz, blues and country legends served as my inroad to the likes of Charlie Parker and Louis Jordan, Fats Navarro and Hank Williams and Édith Piaf.
None though received more playtime than the Billie Holiday set, especially the second disc subtitled ‘Strange Fruit’, which proffered a social history of so much of the twentieth century, yet which I cherished first and foremost for its sense of swing, as Holiday performed tracks like ‘A Sailboat in the Moonlight’, ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It’, ‘Fine and Mellow’, the title piece and ‘I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love With Me’ accompanied by Teddy Wilson, Lester Young and the Count Basie mainstays Buck Clayton, Jo Jones and Freddie Green. My favourite song was ‘You Go To My Head’ by John Frederick Coots and Haven Gillespie, with its winding music hall melody and haunting refrains, where Holiday teeters and tumbles over the course of less than three romantic and almost implausibly languid minutes, as the atmosphere shifts from spritzy zest to a hapless and world-weary stupor.
The trumpeter Jacob Wick has performed and recorded with a diverse array of artists from Claire Rousay and Katherine Young to Matana Roberts, Gerald Cleaver and Brad Henkel, yet his own musical world increasingly revolves around the burgeoning alternative scene of Mexico City. His current sextet features the drummer Gibrán Andrade, the cellist Mabe Fratti, the violinist Alina Maldonado, the bassist Saúl Ojeda and the guitarist Federico Sánchez, and has set itself the task of exploring and recuperating a distinctly personal collection of popular and lesser-known songs culled from the past hundred or so years. Those familiar with Mabe Fratti will recognise the name of Andrade and perhaps Wick’s too, as his billowing puffs and smeared trumpet fanfares left their mark on her album Sentir que no sabes earlier this year.
Wick says that his work is dedicated to and informed by queer feelings and queer politics. His last album with his sextet sought to embrace the ‘sentimentality, overt sexuality, teasing, laughter, nostalgia, deep sadness and direct emotionality’ of queerness through a set of personal jazz standards, which covered the delicious rot and notorious complexity of ‘Lush Life’ by Billy Strayhorn and the ‘Grass Roots’ of the pianist Andrew Hill plus other compositions which pulled at conventional notions of jazz in the form of the sexually fraught ‘I’m on Fire’ by Bruce Springsteen and ‘Stop the World (and Let Me Off)’ which was conceived and performed by Carl Belew then swiftly covered by Johnnie & Jack and Patsy Cline, but is perhaps best remembered today as an early hit for Waylon Jennings.
His new album Something in Your Eyes is even more eye-catching and eclectic as Wick and his ensemble draw out songs by Emmylou Harris, Alice Coltrane and Kylie Minogue before settling in on that intoxicating classic by Billie Holiday, one long last sip of sparkling burgundy brew. Over the tumbling of Andrade’s percussion and a surging drone of violin and guitar which captures a distinctive country ache, their take on ‘Rough and Rocky’ from Emmylou’s traditional turn on Blue Kentucky Girl immediately foregrounds Wick’s vocals, a kind of staccato baritone which sometimes carries the intonation of a coarser Stephin Merritt, as he barrels in his doleful and expressive monotone right into a tale of choppy heartbreak. The song reaches its climax through a tortuous tangle of brass and strings, careening into the emotional morass which defines the lyrics, its wide waters and chasms fathoms deep.
Their cover of the title track from Alice Coltrane’s third solo album, the oft-quoted ‘Ptah, the El Daoud’, is more stately and restrained as Wick’s trumpet fills in amply for the tenor saxophones of Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson on the original recording, while also proving redolent of Miles Davis’s tone and manner circa In a Silent Way. It sacrifices swing for something more sonorous and fragrant, sandy and even a little bit haughty or monolithic until the whinnying climax which features the same rattlestick drums and plucked strings which vibrate with the haste and limpidity of mallet percussion, making for one of the sextet’s most stirring and successful interpretations of a jazz standard to date.
Less easy to distinguish is their version of ‘Hey Lonely’, from the deluxe edition of Disco by Kylie Minogue. A bubbly dance song which verges on electropop, and seems to place the singer on an underwater stage while pressing down on the fast-forward button, Wick pulls out the submerged handclaps and hones in on a little hook from the chorus, repeating the phrase ‘My love, my heart, my sweetness and devotion’ in exultant tones over the folksy strings, bounding bass and brushed drums which provide a quickening accompaniment. As the song splinters into its constituent parts in the second half of the track, the result winds up somewhere between free jazz, flamenco and Roy Orbison, with an unusual insistence as Wick repeats the line ‘I see something in your eyes that I recognise’ over the canyon resonance of an echoing kick drum.
Finally their rendition of ‘You Go To My Head’ carries only the faintest trace of Billie Holiday’s cherished 1938 version, more queasy from the outset as Wick’s trumpet carries a semblance of the melody in the middle distance, butted out by the restless wailing of the strings. There is a sense of foreboding here which plays alongside the tipsy and carbonated quality that Holiday and her orchestra managed to conjure up way back then, and when Wick’s voice enters at the halfway point of the song between the shredded strings and lurching rhythm section, it sounds almost absurdly drowsy and rumpled, less tipsy now than totally sloshed and glazed.
In fact their take on the song bears as much comparison with Holiday’s later version, which was released in 1952 as the penultimate track on Billie Holiday Sings, then pushed up the pecking order when the eight songs were reissued in 1956 with four additional tracks under the title Solitude. On this occasion the Clef and Verve founder Norman Granz served as producer, with the pianist Oscar Peterson leading the accompaniment besides Flip Phillips on the tenor saxophone and Charlie Shavers on the trumpet, while Barney Kessel adds these warm almost flamenco-inspired licks on the guitar.
Over a much slower arrangement, Holiday’s vocals carry little of the lusty romance or headlong ardour of the earlier version as she instead toys with the words, almost as a kind of retort to the lover who seems to linger just out of grasp. The result is aloof rather than desirous or abashed. At moments Wick’s take on this particular song as well as the tenor of the entire project call to mind a similar act of recuperation and entanglement by the pianist Cory Smythe, who recently issued an album of oblique renditions for ensemble and solo piano of the Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach standard ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, which he described as ‘an object lesson in the transmutation of weather and grief into sound’.
Whatever as the screen tilts and those fizz bubbles rise to pop on the surface of the composition, Wick and his sextet seem to embrace their own stupor, finding a sense of solace inside the beige or burgundy liquor of a half-spilled cup or flute. If the original song is a metaphor for the headiness of romance, here the body is intoxicated at least as much as the soul, there is no space left for coyness, and if desire exists beyond the impulse for another ’round’ or order it is transmitted only through a pair of glassy eyes.
Dedicated to the memory of his maternal grandmother, on Flores para Verene the miniatures of the Brooklyn bioinformatician and brass-and-reeds instrumentalist Tomin Perea-Chamblee are so brief and whimsical that it might take a few listens for their evocations and homages to seep in, as he plays bite-sized trumpet and clarinet renditions of compositions by the likes of Mal Waldron, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, the ‘Come Sunday’ of Duke Ellington, the ‘Spirits Rejoice’ of Albert Ayler and ‘The Inflated Tear’ of the beautiful Rahsaan Roland Kirk. As a kind of epilogue on Cantos para Caramina four original pieces pay tribute to his older sister, with the horns swapped out for keyboard sine waves on songs with a kind of drawing room quality yet held aloft by their sense of humble and delicate hope.
For the centrepiece of his debut solo album, billed as a journey of self-discovery which meets the listener at the end of a series of experiments in heartbreak, the composer and multi-instrumentalist Darian Donovan Thomas reimagines the Mexican ranchera classic ‘Volver, Volver’ which was written by Fernando Maldonado and made famous by the great charro Vicente Fernández. The song has been covered by everyone from Rocío Jurado to Linda Ronstadt to Nana Mouskouri, and from Ry Cooder to Harry Dean Stanton in the contemporary Western poem Lucky, the actor’s final starring role on film, but here over chirping birdsong and sustaining synths Darian really lingers and relishes over the words, rolling his tongue as he unfolds with sometimes ecstatic aplomb the tale of tempestuous love, on a track which is burnished in the middle section by Kalia Vandever’s yearning and enveloping trombone solo.
Bill Frisell, Andrew Cyrille and Kit Downes make for a winning trio, as on the closing track of their upcoming album Breaking the Shell they handle deftly the folk stylings of the great Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. In 1931 as he began to arrange some of his early piano pieces for orchestra, he composed his Hungarian Sketches as a suite of five movements beginning with ‘Este a Székelyeknél’ from his Ten Easy Pieces of 1908, which has been variously translated as ‘Evening in Transylvania’ or ‘An Evening in the Village’.
An evocation of the Székely folk music which Bartók transcribed and later recorded on his travels around Romania and Hungary, his orchestral composition is impish and sprightly with a buffed nostalgia, as woodwinds play the melody buttressed by a string section. For their rendition, the unconventional trio lead with Frisell on the electric guitar before Kit Downes and his reedy pipe organ take over the melody, alternating support while Cyrille tinkers on the drums, a nocturne full of dark and misty wandering while train whistles sound in the distance.
On baritone and tenor saxophones plus homemade winds, Steve Baczkowski captures a cold November night with a lunar eclipse limning the skies of his Buffalo hometown, on a bluesy record which rasps and rattles like so many tool shed dalliances, with ‘Low Orbit’ sounding like all of the air being squeezed out of a whoopee cushion as Baczkowski turns his instrument into a machine for separating wheat from the chaff.
Natsuki Tamura and Satoko Fujii are sometimes watching birds in flight on Aloft and sometimes making bird calls of their own through an aerated blend of trumpet, bells and piano. At other times they are busy pushing through the scrub for a better vantage point or more tangential ends, as Tamura humps and hisses or sputters and squawks, punctuating the lyricism of Fujii’s keys, or perhaps after all they are the birds themselves and with plenty of time on their hands when they’re not all aflutter? Susanna takes a forthright approach to self care ahead of the impending release of Meditations on Love, while Brian Leeds probably best known as Huerco S. returns to his deep house monicker Loidis for the roiling dub grooves of One Day.
Born and raised in the grasslands of Xinjiang, the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Mamer first gained some degree of renown as a dombra player who could summon up and reconfigure the traditions of his native Kazakh folk music.
As an aspiring artist he moved to the Xinjiang capital of Ürümqi, where he took up the guitar and some of the conventions of rock and roll, performing with an eighties cover act before establishing Jonggar, his first band which was named after the Junggar Basin, an area of semi-desert bounded by the Tarbagatai Mountains of Kazakhstan, the Altai Mountains of Mongolia, the Tian Shan or Heavenly Mountains to the south and the Irtysh river.
Setting up camp in Beijing, he became a key figure in the city’s burgeoning alternative scene, with his band IZ coming to specialise in an idiosyncratic brand of country-flecked Kazakh music, using traditional instrumentation such as the dombra alongside the kobyz and Jew’s harp. This phase of his career culminated in the release of the album Eagle on Real World Records in 2009, which brought Mamer to international acclaim, yet he baulked at the sterility of the studio sound and chafed under the encompassing label of ‘world music’.
Mamer made his way to Shenzhen and the bookstore and record label Old Heaven Books, which has released the bulk of his music over the past decade. Wildly experimental while still boasting a deft touch, Mamer is equally comfortable reinterpreting Kazakh folk songs or deconstructing Han Chinese musical scales, while from the outset his style has been permeated by American forms, as he consumed dakou cassettes starring everyone from Television, King Crimson and Pink Floyd to the scuzzier guitar shreds of Sonic Youth and the industrial noise of Einstürzende Neubauten.
In turn Mamer has picked up everything from the classical guitar and electric bass to the Jew’s harp, bouzouki and Dolan rawap, dabbling in preparations and open tunings, fashioning ramshackle noise out of barbed wire and other makeshift percussion, while at the end of 2021 ahead of a live performance by his psychedelic folk band Mask, he cut what is probably the first album for solo sherter, an ancient Kazakh instrument which is typically used as a tenor dombra, featuring three strings, a shorter fretboard and fewer frets.
His new album Desert, billed as an extended guitar solo for a series of reel-to-reel tape recordings, immediately conjures two vistas. The first is that of the Dolan, who inhabit the banks of the Yarkand and Tarim rivers, and refer to their own dizzying style of muqam – the name for a set of melodic formulas which are used to guide improvisation in Uyghur music, which often take the form of sprawling epic suites – as ‘Bayawan’, which translates to ‘the desert and the wildland’. Old Heaven Books released an album by the Mekit Dolan Muqam Group at the beginning of the year, while Mamer paid tribute to Tursun Matia, his longtime friend and the late master of the group, a few months later on Uyⱪesez (Sleepless).
The other vista belongs to the Sahel and the desert blues pioneered by Ali Farka Touré and popularised more recently by the likes of Mdou Moctar and Etran de L’Äir. On his own desert collection, Mamer certainly embodies the same rollicking sound on his electric guitar, at first hewing to these and other familiar forms including the angular post-hardcore or minimalist rock of Shellac and the primitive guitar of Robbie Basho and John Fahey.
What distinguishes his playing as Desert progresses is his capacity to weave all of these influences into something truly his own, plus the sheer ferocity and extremity of his instrument, which breaks apart over the course of fifteen tracks into so many splinters and shards, scurrying between the punkish thrashings and caterwaulings of early Boredoms shows and the outer margins of free jazz, both punctured and interlaced throughout by the strains of ear-piercing feedback.
It is difficult to imagine a rowdier or harsher record being released this year, even as rippling distortions bury his harmonies and swirling raga motifs are discernible particularly on the long tenth track, before after all of this white light and white heat, after scampering over so much hot sand, Mamer rests his singed feet as Desert closes with one lengthy burnout.
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Jacob Wick Ensemble – ‘ptah, the el daoud’
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Susanna – ‘I Took Care of Myself’
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Darian Donovan Thomas – ‘Volver, Volver’
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Steve Baczkowski – ‘Natural Satellite’
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Tomin – ‘Rahsaan Is Beautiful’
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Natsuki Tamura & Satoko Fujii – ‘On the Flyway’
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Bill Frisell, Andrew Cyrille and Kit Downes – ‘Este a Székelyeknél’
