Great Britain likes to think of itself as the country which ended slavery, what with Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce and all that. Yet a few years ago a BBC documentary pulled back the drapes, revealing the names and circumstances of the 46,000 slave owners who received compensation when the Slavery Abolition Act was finally passed after decades of campaigning in 1833. The government raised £20 million to redress the losses accrued by the slave owners upon the emancipation of some 800,000 African people, which amounts to almost £17 billion in today’s money, around 40% of the annual budget at the time and the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009. The largest single beneficiary was the plantation owner Sir John Gladstone, the father of a future British prime minister, while in the colonies slaves over the age of six years old were redesignated as apprentices and made to work for another five years.
The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was the second major piece of legislation which sought to tackle what had become a hot-button issue, aiming to end the practice of slavery throughout most of the British Empire while the Slave Trade Act of 1807 had specifically prohibited the trade in slaves. It was at least a timely remedy, as by the turn of the nineteenth century, the British had surpassed the Portuguese as the most profligate slave traders in the world. According to the historian Martin Meredith, in the decade between 1791 and 1800, ships bearing the British flag made about 1,340 voyages across the Atlantic to land almost 400,000 slaves, as the trade remained one of the country’s most profitable business ventures.
Britain’s role in the Atlantic slave trade, the terror and the cover-up and their tandem effects, serves as the theme of Moor Mother’s latest studio album The Great Bailout. Billed as a dissection of displacement, the spoken word artist contrasts the architects of death with the unheralded nation builders who even decades after their arrival on British shores might face deportation due to some change in public opinion or dubious administrative mix-up, hones in on the legacy of former slave ports like Liverpool, and conjures shipping routes with a sense of both the queasiness and sheer abandonment of a life all at sea.
On the caterwauling and ululating ‘Liverpool Wins’ she refers to an oil painting by Thomas Jones Barker from circa 1863, which is titled The Secret of England’s Greatness and has been variously described as an ‘apocryphal anecdote’ or a belated rendering of the visit of an Omani ruler, the Mombasa governor Ali bin Nasr, to London sometime between 1838 and 1842. In the painting, which was purchased by the National Portrait Gallery in 1974 and has since been exhibited in Manchester, Birmingham and at Tate Britain, Queen Victoria is shown at Windsor Castle receiving an ambassador from East Africa, to whom she is presenting an ornate Bible, closed which the kneeling dignitary reaches towards but does not touch. A contemporary anecdote provides the thrust of the image, stating that when the Queen was asked by a diplomatic delegate as to Britain’s power in the world:
our beloved Queen sent him, not the number of her fleet, not the number of her armies, not the account of her boundless merchandise, not the details of her inexhaustible wealth [. . .] but handing him a beautifully bound copy of the Bible, she said ‘Tell the prince that this is the secret of England’s greatness’.
The vocalist Kyle Kidd features on the track, their second appearance on The Great Bailout following the strained and elongated gospel cries of ‘Compensated Emancipation’, a harrowing post-industrial treatise on anti-blackness which sputters and chokes beneath the whirring of helicopter blades. ‘Guilty’ the album opener slops and sways like a sea shanty with celestial shivers as the Afrofuturist poet is joined by Mary Lattimore on the harp plus the trenchant voices of Lonnie Holley and Raia Was, while on ‘All The Money’ the British-Iraqi dramatic soprano Alya Al-Sultani offers smouldering echoes and despairing trills atop operatic washes of noise. The Great Bailout proves a great heaving mass of crackles and hisses and loping, menacing drones, offset by the occasional splintering string and warped music hall melody which has become something of a Moor Mother trademark, capturing a frozen moment in time while suggesting the imminent possibility of a rut or loop. Vocals seethe in consonance and snarl with a serpentine tongue.
The penultimate track ‘South Sea’ featuring Angel Bat Dawid and her fellow Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty serves as a recapitulation of Moor Mother’s major themes, as she intones ‘We in the present are constantly injecting ourselves into the past. The gaze of history shapes it. Crystallizes it. Collapses it upon the linear timeline’. Amid the humming swarm, cutlery rattles and pots whistle and woodwinds briefly suggest other dalliances before bubbling under, forced into a repatriation of sorts as they cohere as a clandestine orchestra submerged beneath the sea. ‘When and where do the ancestors speak for themselves’ she asks, to which T. S. Eliot looking out over London Bridge retorts ‘I had not thought death had undone so many’, as The Great Bailout proves less a history lesson than a séance, a summoning of spectres and the visceral sensation of shared trauma, wondering aloud whether and how it can ever be paid off.
Inspired by snatches of Thelonious Monk’s music, capturing and colliding its melodic twists and dissonances or offering extended iterations on a theme, the pianist Frank Carlberg’s long engagement with the high priest of bebop includes the big band album Monk Dreams, Hallucinations and Nightmares and Reflections 1952, where Carlberg alongside John Hébert and Francisco Mela paid homage to Monk’s early Prestige recordings which bore the first versions of jazz standards like ‘Blue Monk’ and ‘Bemsha Swing’. Now the Finnish-born and American-based artist picks up the baton, serving instead as the conductor on Elegy for Thelonious while Leo Genovese fingers the keys, embracing the shared changes between ‘Tea for Two’ and ‘Skippy’, reinterpreting ‘Trinkle Tinkle’ and ‘Locomotive’, and inhabiting a ‘parallel reality’ to ‘Gallop’s Gallop’ between more conventional covers, as the likes of John Carlson, Kirk Knuffke and Jeremy Udden provide deft solos while over stacked brass and woodwind sections, Christine Correa and Priya Carlberg’s forked vocals keep on trucking or offer a celebratory statement with a reverential take on the eventide hymn ‘Abide with Me’.
On her debut album for Deutsche Grammophon, the composer and pianist Marie Awadis blends the most melodious ballades and études of Frédéric Chopin with aspects of European and American minimalism, her own upbringing closely attuned to Armenian folk stylings and a breadth of world cinema imbued with a sensuous flair.
Kahil El’Zabar and his Ethnic Heritage Ensemble celebrate the group’s fiftieth anniversary with their sixth album in just five years on Spiritmuse Records, a rich seam for the artist who now at the age of seventy remains in some of the most prodigious form of his storied career. While the trio of El’Zabar, the trumpeter Corey Wilkes and the baritone saxophonist Alex Harding continue to explore the valencies of multi-percussion and voice plus two horns, for Open Me, A Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit the ensemble is rounded out by the addition of James Sanders on the violin and viola and Ishmael Ali on the cello, who add new timbral dimensions to the shared cacophony and staple swing.
The record opens with a winsome cover of the Miles Davis modal classic ‘All Blues’, a twelve-bar blues which El’Zabar previously handled on the 1989 duet album Golden Sea with the tenor saxophonist and bass clarinetist David Murray, offering a bronzed take on the piece with his mbira and ankle bells spurring some life out of Murray’s beautifully burnished, slow-burgeoning horn. Rearranging the context of the song, jettisoning its distinctive bassline with the overtones of Harding’s baritone filling in the gaps, and slowing the tempo down to a dazed or awestruck stagger, here the ensemble hew close to the Golden Sea version of ‘All Blues’, steeped and contemplative but still with a sense of fun, as El’Zabar thumbs his kalimba and utters vowelly interjections and Sanders twines his strings like a fiddle, before Wilkes’ bucolic trumpet brings the track to a languishing close.
A couple of weeks removed from their latest Fire! outing, the bassist Johan Berthling and drummer Andreas Werlin return for the second installment of Ghosted, which swaps out Mats Gustafsson’s chafing and careening saxophone for the utterly unique textures of Oren Ambarchi’s guitar. Judging by ‘tre’, the first exploit from their upcoming album, there’s a shimmer rather than a skank to this, with Berthling locked inside of an incessant bass groove while Werlin stalks the cage through shakers, bell chimes and all manner of percussion, leaving Ambarchi free to frolic with his six-stringed lyre, playing pizzicato and conjuring pools through the harp-like arpeggios of his instrument, alternately sun-dappled and speckled by a diaphanous light.
Partially inspired by the technological rampage of Jennifer Egan’s latest novel The Candy House, which plays out as a series of interrelated vignettes, Kim Gordon and the producer Justin Raisen update electroclash with lashings of trap and dub, as through tripwire electronics and a blown-fuse stream of consciousness the former Sonic Youth frontwoman turns the swarm into an album-length statement of intent. On the latest piece for her small string ensemble, the violist Jessica Pavone with Aimée Niemann and Abby Swidler cuts through the murk of pitched minimalism with the swirls and cascades of ‘Three Trees’ showing some spirited interplay as the first unfolding of Reverse Bloom.
Three of the most intrepid improvisers in the game – the drummer Max Jaffe of the refracted art rock band JOBS and the James Brandon Lewis power trio, the Darkside guitarist Dave Harrington, and the saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi who has teamed up with everyone from his fellow squallers Camila Nebbia and Marta Tiesenga and the percussionist Tony Lugo to the immigrindcore collective Chepang and the metal-singed noisemakers Agriculture and Samuel Goff – scrabble for land on the Californian experimental outcrop AKP Recordings, with an exercise in deep listening which was recorded on the first afternoon of their coming together as a trio.
‘Staring Into The Imagination (Of Your Face)’ which opens the album Speak, Moment finds the trio ambling down a trough valley like the memory of a glacier, embracing a lazy day adorned with vestiges of the past, or pondering marketplace bric-à-brac as Shiroishi’s saxophone shuffles down alleyways while loosely carrying the melody, Harrington playing loping, rambling guitar lines while Jaffe on the drums lingers in the background, summoning a sort of languid kineticism which slowly animates its surrounds. Fittingly for a record with such a Nabokovian title, butterflies flutter through each scene while the trio stay keenly in the present, playing with a clarion consciousness which harbours fond remembrances in the manner of flashbacks.
‘How To Draw Buildings’ rumbles forth with a little more grit and force, characterised by drum rolls and plangent guitar lines with overtones that whittle the wind. Picking up the tambourine, Shiroishi sounds like a succession of birds as they burst and then flock out from variegated trees. ‘Dance Of The White Shadow And Golden Kite’ meanwhile is an arabesque, the shifting sands of Shiroishi’s saxophone giving way to a wild water rapid with a percussive froth and foam and the occasional punctuating kerplunk. The relatively brief ‘Ship Rock’ serves as a free-funk freakout which resolves in scorched embers, while ‘Return In 100 Years, The Colors Will Be At Their Peak’ is a dazed and staggering march, as Speak, Moment draws to a bluesy close amid loping horse-shoe percussion and skronking horns, a stalled engine leaving Jaffe, Harrington and Shiroishi stranded out in the wilderness as they loop the bend and embark on the long route back home.
A return to roots, the installation artist and electronic excavator Marta Forsberg hunkers down beneath the train tracks of Härnösand, a coastal town in northern Sweden, with a melody for five male voices in which all of the parts are sung by her brother Tomasz. Somewhere between a liturgy and threnody with a steeped, solitary arc, the long piece which is presented as four parts plus an intro and outro comes buttressed by conversational snippets and electronic reveries, stretched strings and clangorous rattles of shattered glass and other percussive noise, undercutting the cossetted atmosphere as the voice of Tomasz emanates from inside a tunnel. The sauntering bass of Pablo Menares introduces the latest echo by Melissa Aldana’s quintet, bronzed and yearning, Julian Lage bounds headlong into a sun-kissed, gratified and still slightly wistful omission, and the sitar player Anoushka Shankar shares the second installment of a trio of mini-albums with Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before Dawn.
* * *
Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble – ‘All Blues’
* * *
Frank Carlberg Large Ensemble – ‘Out of Steam’
* * *
Jessica Pavone – ‘Three Trees’
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
Anoushka Shankar – ‘In The End’
* * *
Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werlin – ‘tre’
* * *
Kim Gordon – ‘Psychedelic Orgasm’
* * *
Moor Mother – ‘SOUTH SEA’ (feat. Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty)
* * *
Marta Forsberg – ‘Part 4: Singing for each other’
* * *
