The visionary percussionist and veteran bandleader Kahil El’Zabar guides his Ethnic Heritage Ensemble and special guests on a rhythmic tour de force in celebration of the legendary jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, figured here as an urban shaman and spirit gatherer whose music continues to serve as a healing balm through troubled times. With El’Zabar on balafon, kalimba and cajón, Corey Wilkes on trumpet, singing bowls and other percussive instruments, and Alex Harding on baritone saxophone the heritage trio are joined by the Los Angeles leader and Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra vocalist Dwight Trible and by David Ornette Cherry on melodica, doussn’gouni and piano, as the expanded ensemble wade deep through a series of originals while embellishing spirituals by Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Pharoah Sanders and the great fusion pioneer Cherry himself.
Cleveland Tapes co-owners and Mourning [A] BLKstar members LaToya Kent and RA Washington create an immersive world full of whirring percussion and washes of live instrumentation, with wriggling guitar lines and swooning vocals over sparely-plucked descending bass. Grimy and gnarled and politically conscious, unfurling embedded memories of a historical past while revelling in the ebullience and ardour of youth, abounding in a do-it-yourself punk ethos as gauzy electronics call to mind the peaks and lulls of avant-rock and illbient music, on Field Tapes In Der Trash it is the voice of Kent which provides the tonic, as moist reminiscences vie with words of concealed warning, like on the title track where through woozy warbling and nighttime persuasions she sings ‘lay down your weapons, my tongue is my knife’.
Improvisational icons and 577 Records mainstays Daniel Carter, Leo Genovese, William Parker, and Francisco Mela unite for the first time galvanised by the interminable motion of New York City. Leaning into the concept of foreign bodies, the Paralaxe Editions founder Dania who divides her time between life as an emergency doctor in the wilds of Australia and the experimental margins of Barcelona uses vocal loops, modular synths, and collaged samples of Iraqi musicians in an effort to weave and unweave those ties that bind. Now based in Barcelona and brought up in Tasmania after being born in Iraq, on her first release for Ecstatic the producer and vocalist conjures wistful choruses amid a brackish soundscape of fraying strings and pellucid synths, exploring feelings of estrangement and the interminable quest for something which might resemble a place to call home.
An outlier on his new album Trinities, which commemorates the life and work of his friend and mentor Milford Graves and explores triplet forms as a foundational rhythmic principle, the minimalist electroacoustic percussionist Jake Meginsky composed ‘2521’ as a celestial lullaby in the birthing room of a hospital as he welcomed his daughter into the world and watched over her while she slept. Still raw from the screeds of $/he Who Feeds You…Owns You which drew from the words of the Pan-African revolutionary Thomas Sankara through blistering calls for food sovereignty and land rights, Siyabonga Mthembu and his six-piece jazz ensemble The Brother Moves On plus Shabaka Hutchings on saxophone issue a single which seeks new forms of resistance, where the long arc of shifting consciousness competes with the desire to give bullies a bloodied nose no matter the cost.
Armed with a magnifying glass, contact microphones and camcorders, the multidisciplinary artist Peter Walker delved into the Costa Rican jungle to embark on a site-specific study of a certain species of ant. Using these field recordings of the zompopa leafcutter as the basis for his sonic ecosystem, Walker emerged to orchestrate an improvisational live-score session in Los Angeles with David Ralicke and Mia Doi Todd, whose crackling and meditative drones were mixed by Eva Reistad to form the second in a series of Changing Landscapes. Sublimating her classical training in the medieval and baroque, the violist and musicology scholar UCC Harlo pays homage to the aliases of Elysia Crampton while evoking through woodsy rhythms, choral harmonies, and stealthy electronics her own childhood obsession with the ocelot.
From a mesa in Lamy, best known as a railroad junction eighteen miles south of Sante Fe, the folk songwriter Jude Brothers dwells at the intersection of heartbreak and psychodrama over nine freeform compositions on tenor guitar and Celtic lever harp. Cinder Well returns to a major key buffeted between Laurel Canyon at the misty heart of California and County Clare on the craggy Atlantic coast. Josiah Steinbrick offers a delicate rendition of a recording by the Quechuan folk musicians Leandro Apaza Romas and Benjamin Clara Quispe. Tracks by Lil Gotit, Walter Smith III, and Bendik Giske also feature, while Laura Cannell under the guise of the Hunteress embraces moonlit electronics, here bathed too in a fiery afterglow as ten synth-clad torch songs draw inspiration from the destruction horizon left by the ancient Iceni queen Boudica, whose failed uprising left a permanent scar on the landscape in the form of an embedded layer of burnt clay and red-brown ash.
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Hunteress – ‘SOLITARY MOUNTAINS’
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Dania – ‘Adult Third Culture Kid’
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Jude Brothers – ‘practicing silence / looking for water!’
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Arthur King – ‘March Into Colony’
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Josiah Steinbrick – ‘Green Glass’
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Daniel Carter, Leo Genovese, William Parker, and Francisco Mela – ‘Shine Hear’
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Marc Miller & Se Jong Cho – ‘04.22.18’
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Lil Gotit – ‘Lustin’
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Me:You – ‘the current history of blue’
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The Brother Moves On – ‘New Resistance’ (feat. Shabaka Hutchings)
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Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble – ‘Harvest Time’
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