Tone Glow 036: Kahil El'Zabar
An interview with Kahil El'Zabar + album downloads and our writers panel on Nonlocal Forecast's 'Holographic Universe(s?)!' and Sun Ra Arkestra's 'Swirling'
Kahil El’Zabar
Kahil El’Zabar, born Clifton Henry Blackburn, Jr., is a Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist and composer. He joined the Association of the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) when he was 18 and became its chairman in 1975. He founded the Ritual Trio and Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, both of which have released albums since the 1980s. El’Zabar released an album, Spirit Groove, earlier this year and it featured longtime collaborator David Murray. His newest album, America the Beautiful, contains previously unreleased music from more than a decade ago along with new recordings. Joshua Minsoo Kim talked with El’Zabar on October 16th to discuss the most important lesson his mother taught him, AACM, his newest albums, and more.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Hello!
Kahil El’Zabar: Hey, how are you?
I’m good! How are you?
We’re hanging in there. My son’s over in the bike shop today so I was buying some gridwall where they can hang skateboards and merchandise off of.
That’s exciting. Where’s the shop? Is it in Chicago?
Yeah, the shop is near Theaster Gates’s experimental studio on 55st and King Drive. Their shop is called Natty Bwoy Bikes & Boards, right in the L on 51st Street.
That’s cool, I’ll stop by sometime. I’m not a huge skateboarder but I do bike every now and then. It’s getting colder now, but when it’s warmer I like to bike. I just wanted to say thanks for doing this interview. Thank you for taking the time out to do this.
Thanks for doing it as well!
How have you been this week? Where is your mind nowadays?
Well, you know, this is a time when you have to think. Hopefully you don’t get your feelings cut off while you try and figure things out so you don’t get really set with certain manipulations that are—I believe—in public behavior at the moment. You don’t want to get locked in that particular grid, and we’re not moving around so you have to be in your head a lot more. For me, it’s been good in a way. It’s kind of depressing that I can’t play with other people—I can’t tour and that kind of stuff. I’ll be close to 80 at the end of this decade. If I hadn’t stopped for a minute, I would have never thought about that because I have been very active the last couple of years since I signed with Spiritmuse Records. We’ve been touring nonstop for pretty much the last two years.
Now, for me, you have to think about when you can’t really drive for eight straight hours, or get on a plane real quick with cymbals and percussion and run to a hotel. I’ve enjoyed it for 50 years. I don’t want to be all bent over and running around like that, so this has been a good time for me to think about my transitions. I’m painting more—I’ve been painting for 30 years and I’ve had the chance to paint a lot more. I’ve been doing a lot more writing. I couldn’t have done a project like America the Beautiful because I’m usually on the road, so I don’t have time to really sit and work on a project like this in the studio with more than three or four instruments to work on live orchestration. The money was there to spend to go into CRC. Usually I don’t use studios—they’re expensive.
Then I bought a building—a 13,000 square foot building in Little Village—and I’m building out the floor, redoing the foundation, the wall had to be rebuilt on the outside, and then started the interior so that my partner Lucy [Slivinski] and I can move in at the end of this month, on [October] 31st. We’ll have her sculpture studio, my rehearsal/recording studio, an event space, and a living space—I’m usually not here for five months in a row.
It was kind of a divine thing for me that happened in having the time to think about the transition of my career, and my age, to secure a home that I own rather than paying two grand a month for a loft. I’ve also had more time to spend with my kids. They see me. But I’m also looking forward to getting back out and seeing whatever the new world looks like.
How has painting and writing been? What do you feel like you get out of painting and writing that you don’t get out of performing or making music?
With the artistic expressions that I’ve been blessed to explore, I get a certain transcendence out of participating in all of them. My most euphoric moments are in my practice—people never actually get to hear what I do. I’m a great live performer, but when I’m spending 6+ hours a day [practicing], it takes me to a different place personally.
I paint late at night. I usually don’t start painting until maybe 10PM, until after dinner. Then I’m listening to ‘trane, or Dolphy, or the Art Ensemble, or whatever. I go until two or three in the morning by myself. It’s dark, so I have a light on the canvas—it’s very transformative for me.
When i’m scoring, I’m old school. I don’t really use the computer, or any of the apps—just pen to paper. I’m a drummer, so I’m slow because most music out here doesn’t really focus on writing for percussion, they’re just like, “You know what to do.” So I’m not as quick as some of my peers that are constantly reading music. I read and I write, I’m educated in [music] theory, but I'm slow. When I do a piece like America the Beautiful, maybe [Henry] Threadgill or Edward Wilkerson or somebody like that can do it faster than I could. I don’t think they can do it any better (laughter), but they’re more adept in the facilitation.
If there hadn’t been a period like this it would have been hard for me to get to it because I need those four, five, six, seven, eight hours of the day over [the course of] a month to work on something that might take one of those guys days. But I get it done. I know how to convey my ideas really well to players that work with me. My concepts seem to adapt to all kinds of players, so that part is good. But you still have to put the document down so they have the grid to work with. That’s why I was happy to have this time, so I could go ahead and sketch until I had these ideas where I wanted—the kind of harmonies that I thought would work to make a very original voice.
I had time to be with the players so we could sit in a studio like CRC and really work on this. For me, the end result—the phonetic relationship of how the composition formed, but also the harmonic relationships that are there. Spiritually, I wanted it to have an energy where it was nothing like “I hate the world, I hate America”—nothing like that. There are crucial issues that need to be addressed, and creative voices need to speak to these in a different way than the didactics of politics.
At this point I’m an elder, I’m a mature artist, so my views are a little different than the youths’. I can look back at the ’60s that I was a part of, and I saw what happened. As young people, it was a very, very positive rebellion to the status quo, but because we were only 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, we didn’t have the long term institutional knowledge of what to supply after we rebelled against what was counter to the values that we wanted to be about. So you have a baby boom generation that is disconnected to the formative kinds of institutional structures that their parents were able to put in place. My generation didn’t figure out how to put the YMCA or the Boys Club or the jazz venues back after all of that was gone.
What I try to share with my kids—who are young adults—and young people, is that we need a full cross-generational relationship with the idea of change; we need wisdom and insight from those who have the experience that still has the value it had 3,000 or 4,000 years ago. We can’t allow popular society to allow us to only be in what we think is our existing moment of reality without any connectivity to things that happened before, as well as our aspirations for the future. That’s where I’m at now, I’m trying to look at these things and acknowledge the criticism of the negatives but at the same time being open to those negatives translating into positives, because if they don’t, we have no future.
This dialogue, this cross-generational relationship, this communal aspect of working together for a better future—what do you feel like is something that young people don’t know that you feel like they should know based on the experience you’ve had? You said all these places shut down, you didn’t get them back until later; what do you wish—
They never came back, actually! 50 years ago, there were all kinds of institutions in this society that my generation rebelled. As we rebelled, we tore them down, burned them down, we reacted. And they’ve never been rebuilt 50 years later. That’s part of the problem with regentrification; communities had established long term 20, 30, 40-year institutions that existed that served the community in a variety of ways. After the ’60s, when things were torn down or burnt down, or whatever, they never came back! (laughs). That’s something that only a person that lived [through] that can say. First hand, this is what we did. At the time, we thought we were doing the right thing—but only to a certain perspective. I don’t want you to make the same mistakes that my peers and I made. As you tear it down, think about what you want as the alternative.
What do you feel like the alternatives should be? You can give examples of things that you experienced in the ’60s, in the ’70s. What do you wish, in retrospect, that you and your peers did?
I wish that we had understood more about some of the models that we were trying to apply, and where the infrastructure that we had developed could happen. Martin Luther King was a very strong, proactive leader at that time of the civil rights movement, and we looked at him as a young man, but most people don’t really understand that the history of the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]—everything that happened with the civil rights movement—was actually constructed by his father and his father’s peers. They’re the ones that actually started that. They didn’t send him to school, you know what I mean? He and his peers became spokesmen for their generation that people much older actually put the funding together for, had the strategies of how to engage communities and how to look at these issues, gave advice in terms of whether it was more necessary for non-violence, so that the confrontation of losing lives didn’t become more predominant than the ability to change policy.
When we look at popular culture—media entertainment—we now pretty much have a ten year window. It used to be 20 or 30. Most actors, after they’re 30 years old, have no leading roles. In that area, when you look at the films, ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s—Humphrey Bogart didn’t really become a star until he was over 50 years old. It’s not about the amount of time as much as there was a society that was much more attracted to the idea of experience being of value for what was projected in the arts.
It’s natural: mastership isn’t only about technical facilitation. It’s about ingenuity of mistakes into the creation of an epiphany that responds to a unique expression that is authentic.
I like that. Thank you for saying that. I also like how you just mentioned the Martin Luther King story, understanding the context that preceded that. I’m wondering, with the AACM [Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians], there was a lot of important stuff happening with that. It has a very D.I.Y. spirit in terms of everything that was being done, in terms of self-producing concerts and everything. What sort of things were you and other people looking at as models to make AACM as successful as it could be?
Chicago just had this unique history of social construct with art based on working class people. When King Oliver brought up Louis Armstrong from New Orleans, they had had a relationship of mentor-mentee before he got here. We know historically that Louis Armstrong became this exceptional soloist, and translated in an entirely different way how to play, and how to listen to the music. There was a community around him that was creating events, connecting communities and developing cultural agendas. As important as Louis Armstrong is, there is never an emphasis on the value of King Oliver[’s influence] on Louis Armstrong to develop.
To follow my train of thought for a moment, Louis Armstrong was one of the real catalysts in investing in the Negro Baseball League. The first meetings for it were in Chicago. That idea of community-based, self-independent organizing is really an infrastructure sensibility in the city. It’s probably the most segregated northern metropolis, historically. It’s interesting that the first really significant major banks of African Americans came out of Chicago. The leading newspaper, The Chicago Defender, comes out of Chicago. You have all these early entrepreneurs from the ’20s and ’30s coming out of Chicago. The music also followed that same thing. The lineages passing down from generations. You have the great Albert Ammons, a boogie-woogie player, who has a son, Gene Ammons, who becomes a great tenor saxophone player. My dad was an amateur drummer—he knew everybody, Ike Day, Wilbur Campbell, who influenced Steve McCall, and later Steve McCall was my teacher.
That was there even before the AACM. When the AACM develops after Troy Robinson leaves Chicago for L.A. for an arranging gig—because he started the experimental band, and we all took it over. Chicago cats were always used to coming together on their own initiative to develop projects, finding and doing deals with clubs or socialite houses or whatever. The same things that the AACM did, Sun Ra had done 15 years earlier in Chicago—independent concertizing, taking artists from different genre styles and finding a way for cohesion. It moved to a more sophisticated sense of organization with the AACM. There were so many intelligent, articulate individuals that were able to respect a collective long-term vision.
I tried to absorb those things, because those were my mentors. I was very fortunate. If you look at my main band, Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, it’s a combination of concepts from Phil Cohran—who was a major mentor—and concepts from [Muhal] Richard Abrams. They were influenced by people that were doing the same thing, going all the way back to King Oliver and his band with Louis Armstrong. Louis marrying Lil Hardin, and developed into Hot Five—them going to check Jelly Roll Morton and see what they were doing, and what Sidney Bechet was doing—there was that cross between the jazz and the blues communities, which much earlier were much more synergistic and aware of one another.
When I see these young guys now—Corey [Wilkes], who plays with me, and Junius [Paul], and the younger guys like the Collier brothers and cousins [Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Micah], Angel Bat Dawid, and all of that. The same kind of energy is going on in their generation. For me, the difference was that in my generation—when we were 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 year olds—there was a different cultural correspondence to eldership than there is today. Popular culture has taken away the excitement for being older. It’s looked at almost like a curse, even though there’s nobody in physics that can get away from the duration through mortality. At one time, that physical duration was looked at as a wisdom-gaining experience. For me it’s very manipulative because if the media has a system of distribution to keep everyone excited about the shortest period of their life, they then have no ability to negotiate the other 40, 50 years that they will exist.
That’s a good point, I think it’s definitely not appreciated. Most people I talk to feel very reluctant, or they just feel sad at the prospect of getting older. They think the best years of their life are behind them.
Right, it’s a shame. When you look at Miles or Picasso or Coco Chanel, that was the whole point of the journey, how you expand through that. You grow. All of the conversations about the arrogance of Miles Davis—and to a certain extent, that may be true, I did have the pleasure of knowing him—but the other thing is, when you listen to the fragility of his power, you can only obtain that with humility. So there’s another energy about him using time, and being able to submit to vulnerability so he could take this beautiful trumpet sound, and by the ’70s and ’80s he’s picked up on all the guitar players, and he’s able to emulate an entirely new language through his instrument. You can’t do that without humility. You can’t do that with arrogance or ego, as people want to think. It’s a person who can submit—it’s knowing oneself into an abyss in order to be reborn with an entirely new understanding. For me, that’s one of the beauties of age. You choose to grow and not be afraid of what that’s going to be. You have this ongoing adventure, or journey, into epiphany.
I love the way you talk about everything, providing the historical lineage, and how you talk about this adventure towards epiphany. Were you born in Europe? I know you were in Europe early in your life.
Yeah, my dad was in the military. I was born on the Atlantic.
Do you know what city you were born in?
It was near Verdon, France. It’s where all the soldiers after World War II were placed.
Do you have any memories of your time in Europe? Obviously you were very young, I know you moved when you were five. But do you remember anything?
I remember this rubber doll I had called Dandi. It was a popular toy for little boys in France. I had a Dandi. I remember my babysitter, he was Moroccan. I remember his energy, we were together every day. He might have been 15 or 16. He took care of me for my parents. Later, as I got older and looked at pictures from that time, I was nine or ten when I asked my parents, “What was the difference, we look like the same complexion, why isn’t he an African American?” They said, “He’s not African American. He’s Moroccan, and he’s French.” That was an enlightening thing for me, in order to not experience humans in the marginal space of trained perception.
I know your dad was the one who got you into jazz. Can you share a memory or story that you feel like really helps paint a picture of the kind of person your dad was?
It was something to walk down 47th street, which was kind of the culture street for Chicago. You’d get dressed, you’d go to a restaurant there. There was a department store called South Center Department Store. We’d go to these places, my father would go get his hats, go get his clothes cleaned. We’d go to Scotty the tailor—the guy who actually invented the zoot suit for Cab Calloway. So we went to all these places, and everybody knew my father. That was an extraordinary feeling at six, or seven, or eight years old—everybody likes your dad! (laughter).
He loved music. He couldn’t play like my uncle, Leroy “Candy” Finch, who played with Bird, Diz, everybody. To have my uncle tell me how cool my dad was, even though he wasn’t a major player like Von [Freeman]—I’ve known all these people since I was a child. Von Freeman, George Freeman, my uncle Candy Finch, Jodie Christian, Eddie Harris. Chico [Freeman] and I, we grew up together from the beginning with these people. Gene Ammons—I grew up going to picnics where these were the guys playing softball, their wives cooking the chicken, them all talking about the music and my dad was always respected by everybody.
He would then take me around, and when I would start playing he was going over there and he would go, “Blah blah blah blah blah,” and the cats would check me and they’d say, “That’s Cliff’s son!” What a fortunate person I was! Later on, when George and I were in high school, Muhal would pick us up and take us home after rehearsals and concerts. My father would say, “Oh, how’s he doing?” “He’s doing alright, he won’t listen—I’m telling him he needs to go to school and learn this theory and be a drummer, he thinks he only needs to do all this, but he needs to do all that.”
My parents were involved in that whole thing. They didn’t want me to play avant-garde, so to speak. They wanted me to teach school and play straight, because they wanted to make sure their child could make a living. But they were totally involved in my development, artistically. It just gave me a certain security to pursue what I wanted to pursue.
Can you talk a bit about your mom? In what ways did she support you? In what ways did she help you feel secure in the ways you were pursuing your music?
Josh, there was a really interesting thing that happened when we first got back to Chicago. She took me to Marshall Field’s—which is now Macy’s—on State and Randolph. She wanted me to get acclimated quickly to this environment. We were on the fourth floor and she said, “I’m gonna go for a moment, and you go get your ice cream,” and she gave me a dollar. She came back about a half-hour later and I was too scared to go up and ask for the ice cream. She said, “Where’s your ice cream?” I was insecure, I was like (mimics nervous breathing). Then she said, “What you want in life, if you’re not willing to go get it, you’ll never have it. You go up there, you tell them that you waited in line, it’s your turn, and you want your ice cream. If you don’t, you’re gonna get a spanking.”
That was probably the biggest lesson in my entire life. As a so-called hand drummer who is supposed to be, by this culture’s analysis, an accompanist… to be a band leader or a composer [didn’t make sense]—I didn’t fit the normal mold of the so-called jazz star. But I never let that limit the idea of my purpose or my voice. I owe that to my mother.
Infinite Spirit Music is "Light" Henry Huff, Soji Adebayo, Mchaka Uba, Ibo, Kahil El'Zabar, Aye Aton, and Ka T'Etta Aton
That’s a beautiful lesson. How has that mentality informed something you did later in life? Can you give a concrete example of you really wanting something and going for it despite it being scary or there not being a clear path?
We lived here in ’76 with Edward Wilkerson, “Light” Henry Huff, Ben Montgomery as drummer, and Yosef Ben Israel on bass. The actual first concert The Ethnics played in ’73 had [Famoudou Don] Moye, Rasul Siddik—those guys. We got invited to Europe—we started out a quintet, Yosef left, and then it was a quartet with me playing hand percussion and Ben Montgomery on drums and Light and Edward on multiple reeds with a focus on tenors. So when we lost the bass player, everybody got afraid and said we needed to go back. I said “No, man, we’re here. If it wasn’t for us, we wouldn’t be here.” I looked at it spiritually. “Let’s figure out the sound with this.”
Then, Ben had some illness, and he had to go back. So then Light and Edward were like, “We gotta go back now, it’s just you and your big earth drum and us two tenors.” I say, “Well, that’s going to be the future of the band—someday people are gonna know we made important history.” Our first concert was a double bill with Joe Henderson and Joane Brackeen, with just what became known as two horns and a drum, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble.
We made it through maybe about a year and a half, we stayed in Europe. When we came back, my parents were like, “How did you do that? Did anybody like it?” “We just did it, some people did, yeah.” So my father says, “Well son, you’ve got to figure out something different because with that instrumentation, you’ll never make a living.” So about ten years later, in the ’80s, we had lost “Light” Henry Huff, and it was now Joe Bowie on trombone with Edward Wilkerson. We took him on a 12-country tour. One day he says to me, “Where are we?” I said, “We’re in Amsterdam, dad.” “Where were we yesterday?” I said, “We were in Harlem.” He called my mother and said, “Gwen”—her name was Gwendolyn—“they actually like this fool’s music!” (laughter). And he put his hand over the phone, but I could hear him telling her, “I think he’s gonna be okay, honey.”
That was a big moment in my life. Then it goes back again to getting my ice cream—I think probably one of my greatest assets is that I think I can accept my fears, and move on. Many people, they sometimes stutter, or even stop with their fears. I didn’t know how it was going to happen—I just gave it up to faith. I felt that these ideas were valid in the market, they were valid amongst my colleagues, and that I had a right to express things differently than what people assumed those things to be. If you work at it, you’re going to refine that idea into an epiphany.
What do you feel like was the biggest fear that you had in your life that you were able to get over?
I haven’t beat it—it’s heights! When I’m really, really high up, I can’t stand—I have to crawl. It’s been a fear that I’m still working on. In the music, it probably was a fear of rejection, because everyone wants to be accepted with some sense of appreciation. If I hadn’t learned how to deal with that, I probably would have stopped a long time ago.
That’s an interesting thing because you’re doing this music that isn’t necessarily the most marketable thing in the world, but then clearly you had to move past that fear of being accepted in order to make it. I wanted to talk about the new albums. You had Spirit Groove earlier this year. Can you talk to me about that album? What does that album mean to you?
One: my man David Murray, who I have been working with for over 40 years, we were able to express a reinvention of formulas, ideas and the energy that I think has been a strong representation over the last 40 years. Two: artists like to keep growing. I think that you can hear in that recording that there is growth in both of us. It’s not a regurgitation of our past formulas. We adjusted and retranslated in a current sensibility the idea of—I think David has said for years—let the music take you.
How do you feel like you’ve specifically grown with David throughout the years? What do you feel like he’s taught you in the time you’ve collaborated with him?
Commitment to a work ethic. He’s got vocabularies of Coleman Hawkins, of ‘trane, Albert Ayler, and he couldn’t have gotten all of those vocabularies instinctively. That’s from putting ten, twelve hours on that horn [every day]. He still has an extraordinary physical facilitation. He’s got enormous range—he’s got very low, he’s got very high. Those are different embouchures, so you’ve got to blow to get those kinds of things. He’s a very literary person, he reads a lot. He’s a super intellect. We’ve always had great conversations, not only about music but social, cultural, politics, visual art, literature—we’ve had all kinds of exchanges with one another.
We were both accomplished athletes in the early parts of our lives—he in football, and myself in basketball. We were at top-tier levels. We had these synergies based on that. I can never come to deal with him without me being physically prepared, in terms of my chops. If I wasn’t prepared, he’d blow me away… and that’s never happened! (laughter). It’s like, I get ready for him, he gets ready for me. We’re able to give each other the kind of space where we can celebrate our individual expression. But that individual is not bigger than the collective ensemble sense that you can get from two guys.
People are amazed by how big we are, just the two of us together. We’re able to let go, and not need the David persona, or the Kahil persona—we become something together. You don’t get that with everybody. There are not many combinations of percussion and tenor saxophone that get to the place that we get to that is in the spirit of ‘trane and Elvin [Jones]. We get to that. We’re not them, but we get to that kind of synergistic philosophy in the language and the vocabularies that we bring together.
You talk about what David has taught you—what do you feel like you bring to the table, that you can teach David? What have you taught him?
I’ve always been a student of the vernacular of claves. That’s what allowed me—I think—to be successful in performance without a bass player usually. You can really feel the difference in my cadence of swing versus my cadence of funk. You can feel the difference when I’m playing Latin grooves versus African grooves. Nothing sounds the same. There are things that I can do that are very funky with a kalimba, there are things that I can do that are very spiritual and sensual, like playing a ballad but with a different instrumentation of which you know a ballad to be. These palettes of expression give him a canvas for invention that comes from me.
Thanks for sharing all that, I really appreciate it.
Oh, with pleasure.
I loved the album, too. I love the new album as well.
Thank you!
So America the Beautiful, the music was for a documentary by Darryl Roberts, and you decided to release it now. I guess you had this in the vault, so to speak. Do you mind speaking specifically as to why you wanted to release it now? What about this album do you like and appreciate?
I knew that I was going to release these tracks—how could I not, at some point, release that solo from [Hamiet] Bluiett on “Freedom March”? It’s just this extraordinary baritone saxophone virtuosity and passion and emotional originality. Corey Wilkes is really one of the greatest trumpet players in the world today, combining technical facility that is like Clifford Brown and Miles Davis together. He can give you all the fast, triumphant type stuff, and he can give you all the ambient fragility he does on “How Can We Mend A Broken Heart.” That is like anything Miles had ever done in ballads, but it’s not Miles. It’s totally original Corey borrowing from things that are the bending notes from Lester Bowie, to embracing the fragility of Miles.
I had those four tracks from that, and then I have a project that’s coming out next year—for a film that Will Smith produced. I can’t say it until it comes out, but they rented CRC for me, so I had their studio and all these bad cats. Josh Ramos on bass, James Sanders on violin and his string quartet. I had Corey, drummer Ernie Adams, Baba Atiba. I had weeks to work, so I did everything that I had to do for this film project, and then I worked on this other music that I knew I could combine with the things I had scored for Darryl Roberts.
I didn’t have enough from the America the Beautiful film to put out—they were all these one-minute, two-minute vignettes that were scene-specific. I didn’t want to put out something that would just have these spurts to say that I put out something that had arranged compositional sensibilities different from my usual ‘play the head and improvisers’ thing with the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble. I had to put in more material, so I was like, “Whoa, timing is everything.” Here’s this COVID thing, here I’m in a studio every day for three weeks, I can listen to everything after I’ve done it, I can do it three or four times and let the cats get it right. I can conduct these strings. Then, the election is coming up. Then you have all these issues with the protests against all these unfair and unjust things, with George Floyd and everything else—let me go ahead and put out America the Beautiful now.
I was reading the little notes that you had for the album, and you said, “Can we create now our vision of what we would hope the world to be? If we the people were to inherit the governance of our communities, what would we want them to feel and look like?” I’m wondering what you think. What do you want our communities to feel and look like?
I would like to see Heaven on Earth—the idea of the imagination and the mythology. A place of universal acceptance, tolerance, and love. Through that, it incorporates a productive intellectual harmony with human beings. This is just my opinion, nobody else’s, but I don’t think they’re gonna be any jobs in the future.
Why is that?
With the advancement of automation and robotics, I think the value system of labor has to be readdressed. I see creatives—not just artists, there are scientists who are creatives. There are many walks of life that are what you could call right-brain cognitive and intuitive perceptions of information, and a translation of that into opportunity. As the technologies advance and take the place of physical labor through automated labor. We have to readdress the purpose of humanity, the purpose of living!
If you go back to the time of hunter-gatherers—if you were this great hunter, and you got all the deer, or the squirrels, or whatever, you don’t bring it back to the village and say, “It’s all mine because I hunted it.” That wasn’t the culture of any clan in the world! Usually the successful hunter-gatherers brought that back for it to be shared. As we look at capitalism and claim the idea of equal opportunity that says “if one gets more than the other, they have a right of proprietary ownership,” we look at the consequences of the ratio between the poor and the rich. For me, it doesn’t really make sense because any of the entrepreneurs, corporate syndicate magnates, the big wheelers and dealers—they have only been able to acquire their income from the so-called lowly consumers. That is the only way they got rich. We don’t really question what’s to be given back. We don’t have a concept of what the responsibility of the top 10% wealthy have to the rest of the 90% that they made their wealth from. They didn’t make the wealth from the deers, or the turtles, they made it from their fellow women and men!
We’re not even having discourse about the ethical distribution beyond the zealous sense of hoarding. We’re in this culture of everyone having an upmanship on one another. Whatever it is—economic currency, cultural currency, sexual currency, whatever these currencies are—if I have more than you, that makes me better than you, that makes me superior to you. The whole pedagogue is now a misinterpretation of higher human exchange. Heaven on Earth—and I don’t mean it in some pie-in-the-sky way, trying to be too mystical—the descriptions of the myth of the idea of a better place coming after we live… we actually have the pragmatic resources to achieve that by changing the value system of how we coexist.
In your time in AACM and Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, when you’re performing with these people, how has being in these musical contexts opened your eyes, or helped you learn about achieving this sort of Heaven on Earth?
When I have those moments of euphoria shared with others, it helps me realize how much I’m blessed. I’ve done a residency in Bordeaux for thirteen years now. When I first got there I had to figure out, “Why am I important?” I’ve come to find that out in a little town called Cenon, which is a twenty minutes drive from Bordeaux, where the first jazz club in France was opened by African American soldiers in World War I. Unless I was there, I wouldn’t have done that. Then I got to play with Basque musicians that are from that area, and Moroccan musicians, and Malian and Senagalese—there’s West African, there’s North African, Indigenous Basques that were in southern Spain and France. I got to connect all of those various cultures, and we’ve been friends for years at this point.
That same energy that I experienced with the AACM in Chicago, in terms of the collectiveness and the collaboration, I’ve been very fortunate. I did a project with performance artist Nick Cave about three years ago at Navy Pier, and Jeanne Gang, the architect. Us getting together to look at our concepts and figuring out how to synthesize a collective pedagogue from our various ideologies. These are the blessings, you know?
When we finish this interview, I’m going to my kid’s bike store. When I look at them as individuals outside of me—or their mother and I being their parents—to see that I’ve been blessed to be a part of constructing people that have their own ideas, and find that they are blossoming and contributing. Of whatever the criticisms people have of me, they can’t say that I haven’t been a contributor.
That is what I learned from all of this: how to better contribute, and also to receive. I was working with Edward Wilkerson, and “Light” Henry Huff, and Ernest Dawkins, Ari Brown—all these people, we’re all in the same age group. They’re my peers. The last, say, five years, I’ve worked mainly with juniors, Corey [Wilkes], Alex Harding the baritone saxophonist who is now with The Ethnics. Everybody is ten to thirty years younger than me. With Corey, I’ve changed my rhythms, where Corey and Junius [Paul], Justin Dillard, they’re all from the hip-hop generation. Their cadences are different, so I had to change with the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, and the way that I played with Edward [Wilkerson] and Ernest [Dawkins] and Joe Bowie to get into the nomenclature of language associated with a different generation.
I started maybe 15 years ago talking to lots of DJs about their concepts, how they engage. Osunlade, the DJ, and I are very close. I go to his performances and I see how he deals with the emotion of a crowd. I can see the artistic techniques of understanding time, using structure and sound. He’s able to slow things down, keep a tempo in his mind and change it. Henrik Schwarz from Berlin, he’s able to amalgamate composition in the moment between technology and live performance. For years I’ve been friends with Kerry James Marshall, I’ve been friends with Nick Cave, with Theaster [Gates], before they were famous. They were coming to my studio when they were kids.
Across all of these disciplines, to be here and to be able to learn and to allow yourself… as I said about Miles, what I picked up from him, regardless of what people say about his ego or arrogance and all of that, he was an extremely sympathetic individual. That’s the only way you’re able to create power through the fragility of nuances. It’s not about me playing my earth drum loud. I’m a big sound player, but I’m also a very, very, very quiet player. It takes more technique to play quiet than it does to play loud because you’re trying to articulate the same things without the pressure. Physically, no matter what instrument you play, it is much physically harder to articulate clearly playing soft than it is playing loud.
That makes a lot of sense. You mentioned how you can say that no one can say that you haven’t contributed. What do you feel like is the greatest contribution that you have made?
I would say the greatest contribution I have made is probably my kids. That I did take the time. I wasn’t like the best father in terms of being with them every day, but I usually had all of my kids on the weekends. From the ’90s until about 2007 I wasn’t really touring much. I was teaching at the University of Illinois [at Chicago] and I didn’t work weekends. I had to work during the week when I was playing in Chicago, and I just took my tours for two weeks or a month or whatever, and that was just twice a year. The rest of the time I was at school or dealing with the kids.
When I look at them now, I look at some of my peers who have very dominant personalities and I didn’t want to make my children subdominant personalities. Kahil El’Zabar didn’t have to be a star to his kids, he was just daddy. And that’s how they treat me, and sometimes it makes me feel bad, but to see that they are their own persons with a presence that is not defined by my presence I think is a major, major contribution.
I think in my work, I brought about a synthesis of the idea of African iconography and sound as a contemporary source for invention and compositional projection. The kalimba was not an accompanying instrument or just a color with me. There would be many people playing the so-called First World instruments, but I brought them into a greater compositional sophistication in my projects. I think I influenced a lot of other people to realize that they didn’t always have to be the simplistic color, they could be the tonic, and they could be the chordal, directional impetus for improvisational exploration.
Thank you for sharing that. I love everything you’ve said. I don’t have any other questions, is there anything else that you wanted to talk about that we didn’t talk about today?
It’s out of the spirit of Sun Ra: When we look at the kinds of travesties that have gone on recently, that the world has reacted to globally with empathy, the fact that everyone is connecting to readdressing more humane, loving ways of engaging with one another… What I’m very interested in and committed to is the dialogues that prepare the intergalactics to reenter this planet. And we have to find more productive behavior with one another before that happens. Because we are not the only intelligent beings in the cosmos.
Purchase America the Beautiful at Bandcamp. Purchase Spirit Groove at Bandcamp.
Download Corner
Every issue, Tone Glow provides download links to older, obscure albums that we believe deserve highlighting. Each download will be accompanied by a brief description of the album. Artists and labels can contact Tone Glow if you would like to see download links removed.
Regrelh - Cants dels trobadors: La douceur d’un son nouvel (Ventadorn, 1979)
This is simply one of my all-time favorite albums. Spearheaded by future IRCAM composer Thierry Lancino, La doucer d’un son nouvel revolves around a series of medieval folk songs from the Occitan-speaking region of southern France. Rather than traditional instrumentation, however, the songs are generally accompanied by washes of severe, bracing musique concrète. Although rebec and vielle—two Medieval instruments which look like lutes but play like violins—are featured, they are always undercut by deep synth drones, icy digital clicks and taps, and even some psychedelic and heavily-flanged guitar.
Attempts to fuse ‘new’ and ‘old’ musics often end up doing disservice to both, sounding at best like two unrelated records in the same room, and at worst like, well, this. La doucer d’un son nouvel treats its materials with such care, using clever and interesting arrangements to make its medieval source material sound positively modern. Perhaps it is in part because the troubadors’ songs were largely composed in the 1100s, centuries before the development and ossification of the same Western classical paradigms which 20th century composition sought to break. In this way, though separated by almost a thousand years of musical, cultural, and technological development, the two musics stand sufficiently outside the Western canon, for Lancino and company to discover unexpected and delightful consonances between them. —Mark Cutler
Download link: MP3
Gota Wakabayashi & Kensuke Mitome - Selene Museum Moon Forest (セレネ美術館, 1993)
On the back of Selene Museum Moon Forest, you see an illustration of part of the Kurobe Gorge Railway, a privately owned rail system that services part of the Toyama Prefecture. Originally constructed to aid the construction of the Kurobe Dam—which was completed in 1963—the rail is popular with tourists in the late summer to early autumn months, providing passengers the best way to view the scenic Kurobe Gorge. The Shin Yamabiko Bridge is an iconic landmark of the area, stretching across the Kurobe River and standing as a symbol to the locals of the ways that the man-made and the natural can work together to create breathtaking scenes of beauty.
Near the departure point of the railway, Unazuki Station, the Selene Museum of Art resides. Its permanent collection consists entirely of art relating to and inspired by the Kurobe Gorge—a love letter to this small corner of the world. Seven contemporary Japanese artists were invited to provide their own take on the valley of luscious greenery and sparkling blue water. The music on this disc—by Kensuke Mitome and Gota Wakabayashi, two composers belonging to a production music library company, and who composed the music heard at the Kurobe Gorge Railway stations—is meant to be heard while viewing the exhibitions. The composers aim to evoke the feeling of Kurobe’s changing seasons across the twelve tracks, three for each quarter from spring to winter. The album serves double duty as an educational document for a small slice of a small town’s history and a sound map of a place most people will never lay their own eyes upon. I might never see the Kurobe Gorge myself, but in a small way, Selene Museum Moon Forest makes me feel like I’ve been there. —Shy Thompson
Traditional Music Ensemble of the Beijing National Music Academy - Buddhist Music of the Ming Dynasty (Zhihuasi Temple, Beijing) (JVC, 1993)
While many forms of older Chinese music have survived to the present day, the excellent liner notes here explain how a scarcity of readable notation has greatly limited musicologists’ understanding of pre-19th century Chinese music. The music performed on this CD would have been unreadable until it came to their attention in the 1950s that a certain temple in Beijing had been performing music for 500 years and 26 generations in an unbroken line, and were so accurate and faithful in their interpretations of the compositions in their possession that it allowed these musicologists to decode other works written in the same, previously unreadable notation. Performed by musicians from the Beijing National Academy of Music from a newly translated composition written almost 300 years prior, Buddhist Music From The Ming Dynasty is one of the first examples of “authentically performed” ancient Chinese music.
The first impression is probably one of surprise. Anyone familiar with Gagaku will recognize the woodwind section used in this ensemble—flutes playing counterpoint to double reed pipes while free reed mouth organs play harmony—the timbral variation from the combination of differently reeded instruments is unmistakable. This all makes a certain historical sense as Gagaku originated from 8th century Chinese music brought over from Buddhist missionary delegations. Unlike Gagaku, which is court music with a slow and regal feel and a distinctly Japanese approach to ornamentation, the music here is full of driving melodies and lively counterpoint, blown passionately and punctuated by distinctly Chinese percussion. I confess after multiple listens the overall form of the suite—which apparently involves iterations and combinations of multiple melodies with each instrument playing a carefully segmented role—eludes me. But on a moment-by-moment level this is nothing less than rich and intoxicating music, clearly comparable to any Western symphony or chamber piece of equal antiquity in its musical sophistication and charm. —Samuel McLemore
Writers Panel
Every issue, Tone Glow has a panel of writers share brief thoughts on an album and assign it a score between 0 and 10. This section of the website is inspired by The Singles Jukebox.
Nonlocal Forecast - Holographic Universe(s?)! (Hausu Mountain, 2020)
Press Release info: In keeping with the songwriting palette established on Bubble Universe!, Marcloid’s work on Holographic Universe(s?)! centers on labyrinthine MIDI programming of harmonically sophisticated synth arrangements and rapid-fire networks of electronic drums, all tethered to the unpredictable, metrically shifting rhythmic grids laid out as foundations. While the last album presented a clear contrast between the more jazz-inspired, percussive compositions and nebulous tracks focused on new age-inspired drone voices and ambient exploration, Holographic Universe(s?)! avoids drawing a clear dividing line between these two vocabularies.
Every piece of Marcloid’s puzzle comes together here within multi-segmented tracks that find room for delicate interludes performed on acoustic guitar, washes of synth drift, and bouts of metal-inspired intensity animated by double kick drum runs and bursts of heavy shredding. Far from existing as instrumental works devoid of meaning or underlying philosophy, the pieces that Marcloid presents on Holographic Universe(s?)! draw direct inspiration from self-guided studies in quantum theory and physics.
The album’s title alludes to the Holographic Principle — the theory that 3D space is a virtual reality that is coded onto a 2D surface. The (s?) parenthetical within the title references the Multiverse Theory, or the idea that infinite universes could exist, and the Many Universe Theory, which imagines that the universe we perceive is just one of many parallel branching universes each created by the collapse of a quantum waveform. The notion of divergent universes ties into the overall arc of Marcloid’s many musical projects, each of which seems to sketch out its own topography with clear rules and limitations to define their discrete compositions.
Purchase Holographic Universe(s?)! at Bandcamp.
Marina B.: Holographic Universe(s?)! is the second album from Angel Marcloid under her Nonlocal Forecast moniker. Much like on her previous release Bubble Universe!, she explores the sounds of the ’80s and early ’90s: Joe Sample style smooth jazz, DOS soundtracks played through a Roland MT-32, broadcast television bumpers, The Weather Channel music, and even a little bit of Frank Zappa’s Jazz from Hell.
What sets Angel’s music apart from the many vaporwave artists attempting this is that her music feels like sincere homage rather than it’s dripping with irony; there’s clearly a lot of love and care put into emulating and expanding on that particular aesthetic that raises it above pure kitsch (see also her Mindspring Memories album The Binary Ocean, which blows most vaporwave out of the water. The title track is absolutely transcendent.) The music here is often genuinely affecting, and I’ve found myself putting it on during late night insomnia sessions.
The big highlights are “The Bubbling Up of Duality on an Autumn Night by a Forest Stream,” a gorgeous ballad full of chiming FM synth sounds that reaches a crescendo with a great delay-soaked guitar solo, and “Space-Time = Infinity-Eternity Objectified,” a drifter which manages to make Kenny G sax sound ethereal and hypnotic. Whether you love or hate it, nobody is doing this sound better than Nonlocal Forecast right now, and you have to give her props for that.
[8]
Eli Schoop: One of the best things about Angel Marcloid is the way in which she implements all of the firing nodes of her brain into her music. She carries many personas, of course, but also impressive is her ability to make each alias intertwine with one another. This applies to Holographic Universe(s?)!, a tour-de-force of jazz-fusion sensibilities that builds on Bubble Universe! with particular aplomb. Her synapses effortlessly showcase the influences on her compositions, with the likes of Christopher Guest, Weather Report, V/VM, and the Alan Parsons Project likely nodding approvingly in bringing the new-age game to such thrillingly powerful heights. Poptimism has demanded respect for the most popular music, but it has also ushered in a respect for the corniest music of yesteryear, and Nonlocal Forecast gives us the utmost in reverence for these past accomplishments.
[8]
Sunik Kim: This moves with the same jolts, reversals, and sudden cuts of the headiest jazz fusion/prog, but everything lands softly, almost delicately—the drum fills, masturbatory in other contexts, here simply move things along in a pleasant fashion, fading into lovely Great Fairy Fountain fingerpicked interludes and sighing chords that, in an engaging way, pause indefinitely at certain moments, allowing the built-up momentum to dissipate: a safety-valve that keeps things at an average level of… cool. I can only describe this as the StarCraft soundtrack (especially the Terran themes) in a world without war, where all alien beings simply get along, chill, listen to Steely Dan, etc. This admittedly lovely concept wears a little thin over the course of this 42 minute disc, and most of the songs blur together in my mind,but this is undeniably a fun mood lifter—and sometimes that’s all I need.
[6]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Angel Marcloid has carved out enough of her own niche and is prolific enough that it’s easy to be hyperaware of the exact things you want from her projects. Holographic Universe(s?)! doesn’t quite hit a sweet spot for me, primarily because it’s wholly instrumental; it’s less frantic and surprising than the Fire-Toolz albums. The more straight-ahead vaporwave records, on the other hand, succeed by being on the other end of the spectrum, setting me up for a moody, relaxed listen that can be engaged with passively. Here, MIDI-prog bombast only becomes a heightened confectionary experience because of the drum programming, guitar solos, and an amusing sax feature from Bhob Rainey (of The BSC, Nmperign, and Prants). I just wish there were more excess here; I want the glossiness of stock music combined with the giddy showmanship of NAMM presentations, and for my experience of these two things combined to exceed my general distaste for either. As is, Holographic Universe(s?)! is merely pleasant and occasionally thrilling. It’s okay, though: Marcloid will shoot is into another one of her universes soon enough.
[4]
Mark Cutler: This is Angel Marcloid’s second album under the Nonlocal Forecast alias, and I must admit to not having heard the first—or for that matter, probably 90% of her maniacally rapid output. So, I’ll leave it to others to say how this fits into the Fire-Toolz-verse((s?)!), and just say I found this a quite pleasant listen. Moments here recall the MIDI-as-transcendence gospel of OPN’s R Plus Seven and the feel-good noodling of Grateful Dead jams. As the Hausu Mountain Twitter account recently remarked, Grateful Dead are more of a feeling than a band, and despite a totally different sonic palette and compositional approach, that feeling really oozes from the music here. It sometimes sounds like a vaporwave-inflected recreation of the proggy, sax-laden easy-listening which vaporwave originally parodied with its conceptual-mall-music, bringing something full-circle, although I’m not sure what. The only track that really drags for me is the slow-jam “Space-Time = Infinity-Eternity Objectified,”,\ which ratchets the momentum way down, for more than six minutes, right near the album’s end. It’s the point where Marcloid leans most heavily into earnest, goopy new-age music, and consequently feels the least like herself. It’s the rare dull moment on an otherwise dizzying, dazzling album.
[7]
Maxie Younger: Holographic Universe(s?)! is an album that’s difficult to hate—its lush palette of warm synth pads, bouncing percussion, and the occasional shredding guitar evoke the kind of amniotic, inviting background music that would accompany an early morning weathercast or an educational VHS tape—but it’s one that I found even more difficult to love. Angel Marcloid’s decision to consolidate her piecemeal approach to genre from Bubble Universe! into a more unified, cohesive sonic experience is one that I believe does this release a disservice; it turns the Nonlocal Forecast project from a fun, varied grab-bag of new age and jazz fusion influences into an indistinct expanse of featureless mush. The comforting vibe of the album becomes obdurate as it progresses, like trying to run through a waterfall of marshmallow fluff.
Certain moments still stand out, of course: the epically chintzy, funk-laden groove of “Extended To Disparate Fields,” a highlight of the record, had me nodding my head to the beat with glee; “The Bubbling Up Of Duality On An Autumn Night By A Forest Dream” morphs from an acoustic campfire jam into a spacious arena rock ballad, buoyed by its own relentless incandescence. There are plenty of good elements to be found across the rest of Holographic Universe(s?)!, too, but for whatever reason, they rarely coalesce into something I find compelling. Ultimately, I feel as though I have less of an understanding now of what exactly Marcloid wants to accomplish under this moniker; whatever it is, it isn’t something I’m particularly interested in.
[5]
Samuel McLemore: I don’t like to read too much into cover art when trying to parse a musician’s artistic goals—especially when the, ahem, house style of a label’s art is as uniform as Hausu Mountain’s, but the prominent dab rig on the back cover of Nonlocal Forecast’s Holographic Universe(s?)! was the real key to my understanding of the intentions behind it. This is music to get zooted as heck to, made by people who were almost certainly high as fuck the entire time they made it.
Most of the conceptual decisions fall into place after this insight: the tracks are all colorful sketches referencing a variety of prog-jazz-lite—Windham Hill-esque acoustic guitar on one track, Bhob Rainey doing his best Pete Christlieb impression on another—and are strung together by intuitive pleasure as much as deep theoretical insight. It doesn’t always hit the mark, and the more you rely on a referential aesthetic like this, the more likely you are to open yourself up to comparisons with the originators of the forms you are aping, rather than synthesizing new and exciting new ideas from old parts. But it’s mostly just good solid fun for a certain kind of music fan in a ‘stoned-out-of-your-damned-gourd’ kind of mood.
[4]
Jinhyung Kim: I spent most of my time with this album imagining what listening to it might be like for someone else: the jolt of satisfaction each swoosh and swirl of candy-coated synthesizer would provide, an irresistible propulsion emerging from one syncopative groove after another; the pure aww, yeah! an impeccable solo coasting on the music’s gossamer sheen ought to elicit, from overdriven glam guitar to billowing smooth-jazz sax. My friend said it sounds like every ‘90s sitcom theme playing at once—a solid (and enticing) high-concept pitch for what Angel Marcloid, known best for her work as Fire-Toolz, does. But there’s rather little to Holographic Universe(s?)! beyond that pitch: given a basic concept of or exposure to the Fire-Toolz sound, it’s exactly what you’d expect it to be. I have no problem identifying the particular itches that it scratches (and it does so flawlessly); it’s just that in being so calibrated to satisfy, it feels devoid of excitement or surprise. I’m reminded of a quote by Rudy Tambala (of A.R. Kane fame) in an interview with the Quietus: “So-called perfect music, whatever genre - aims to remove [its] flaws… [but t]he flaws leave a space, where the listener can still add something of her own, where she can sit and be.” With Holographic Universe(s?)!, there’s simply nowhere for me to sit.
[4]
Shy Thompson: A couple of months ago a friend of mine sent me a video on YouTube of music from the Weather Channel—a song that played during their storm alerts in 2006. I was floored by this track for a variety of reasons: the first of which, as many of the comments note, is that it sounds like it could be boss music straight out of an RPG like Kingdom Hearts; the second, that it is simply incredible; and the third, is that this is music composed for the goddamn Weather Channel. There went my entire evening; I was determined to find the composer of this track and found The Weather Channel Classics (dot com), a website that has obsessively cataloged every knowable piece of information about The Weather Channel since 1997. I spent the next several hours sampling their selection of mp3s—not even necessarily trying to find the source of the original track anymore, just having a good time getting lost in this niche I never knew I wanted to explore. I love the internet.
I ended up landing on a page with information about Trammel Starks, a composer whose works primarily featured on The Weather Channel in 1995. His tracks have stood out and endured to many people that heard them growing up, and it’s easy to see why. So many people have e-mailed him inquiring about buying his music that he started printing a three disc set of CD-Rs containing all the music he created for the channel. Naturally, I wrote to him and asked to buy them. They arrived in a barely padded bubble mailer, each of the discs contained in one of those thin jewel cases that the cheapest CD-Rs from your local office supply store comes in—all the cases were broken, but the discs were thankfully not harmed. Each disc has a label affixed to the front with a blown up and artifacted stock image of a sky—one at dusk, one during a lightning storm, and one with a rainbow arcing across a cloudy sky. Mr. Starks signed each disc with a metallic marker. These are unquestionably now some of my favorite objects I own, and I owe that to my fascination with the extraordinary ordinary—when something meant to melt into the background ends up being a little more amazing than you expect it to be, you can’t help but love it.
Nonlocal Forecast, one of Angel Marcloid’s many aliases, names The Weather Channel directly as an influence. It taps so directly into the same qualities that I hear in Trammel Starks’ music that I have to wonder if she’s also a proud owner of Music for Local Forecast. You get an appropriate mix of soaring synths, bouncy arpeggios, smooth sax, and shredding guitar that runs the gamut of summer sun to tropical storm. “The Missing Link Is Extremely Nonlocal, Extremely Scrambled” would sound not the least bit out of place as a storm alert—or in the new Kingdom Hearts DLC, for that matter. There’s a knowing wink that reminds you this is music made by someone channeling the energy of TWC rather than simply emulating it, and as someone perhaps bizarrely uniquely qualified to understand where she’s coming from, I’m winking back.
[6]
Average: [5.78]
Sun Ra Arkestra - Swirling (Strut, 2020)
Press Release info: The planets align as the mighty Sun Ra Arkestra, under the direction of the maestro Marshall Allen, are releasing their first studio album in over twenty years, Swirling. “We truly hope that this recording brings much joy to a planet which is so deeply in need of a spirit sound and vibration,” states saxophonist Knoel Scott. “We hope it contributes to a change in the ominous direction of man’s journey through the cosmos.” “This new release is the Arkestra’s love offering to the world,” concludes Marshall Allen. “Beta music for a better world.”
Recorded at Rittenhouse Soundworks in Philadelphia, the new recording represents the continuation of a heartfelt rebirth of the Arkestra under Allen’s guidance since Sun Ra left the planet in 1993, gaining new generations of followers from their regular touring across the globe. With a big band line-up featuring long-standing Arkestra members including Danny Ray Thompson (RIP), Michael Ray, Vincent Chancey, Knoel Scott, Cecil Brooks, Atakatune (RIP), Elson Nascimento and Tyler Mitchell, the album is a full-blooded celebration of Sun Ra’s legacy.
Purchase Swirling at Bandcamp.
Vanessa Ague: With Swirling, the Sun Ra Arkestra brings its untamable energy to a neatly packaged, 13-track recording of unapologetically celebratory music. The collective of 22 virtuosic artists is known for its high-octane performance style—cartwheels on stage match the music’s fervor—and its charismatic, joyful brand of jazz. And while Swirling is their first album in 20 years, throughout that time, they’ve maintained a somewhat active live performance schedule (pre-pandemic, of course).
Listening to Swirling immediately transported me to the time I was sitting in the middle of the Hunter Center at MASS MoCA, watching the Sun Ra Arkestra make magic on stage. The room was full with the air of possibility; experiencing the music live was like dancing in the cosmos, away from the mundanity of everyday life on Earth. I left the room with a bounce in my step and a smile on my face, elevated from the pure energy that emanates from the Sun Ra Arkestra’s world. Like seeing the Arkestra live, Swirling is a full-on experience. The sounds of big band-style, toe-tapping jazz blend with gospel singing and chaotic extended techniques. Each piece is a microcosm of a larger celebration, vibrating with vivid, unfailing energy. It’s a feat to bring the exuberance of Sun Ra Arkestra’s live performance to recording, but Swirling is up to the task. It’s ready for you to get up and dance, even if you’re alone in your bedroom.
[7]
Marshall Gu: I find little to fault here: the Sun Ra Arkestra, led by long-time member Marshall Allen (now in his 90s!), offer a more-than-generous collection of Sun Ra deep cuts played with impossible reverence, as if they knew the spaceman was listening in. (In a way, all Sun Ra songs are deep cuts.) The cover, depicting just that, is beautiful. It swirls. But I listen to songs like “Rocket No. 9” and “Unmask the Batman,” songs that I know very well—both were part of the immense Singles compilation released in 2016—and I can’t help but compare them to their originals. The former has the piano leading the charge instead of horns, which I like, but it’s been polished up (and expanded to twice its original length) and rendered less special as a result, while the latter plays up the instantly-recognizable cartoon theme but doesn’t have the endearing vocals that made the original one of Sun Ra’s most instantly-likeable songs. Elsewhere, “Sunology,” from Super-Sonic Jazz (the first album to be released on Sun Ra’s own label, El Saturn Records), is bigged up and brightened up for vocalist Tara Middleton to take center stage.
Thus, my expectations burden the band. Deviation from these non-standards is dangerous territory, and yet, there’s not enough deviation to make it worthwhile for me—but isn’t that always the case when jazz (and even non-jazz artists) look back at their old material? “Seductive Fantasy” is a little lumbering in its three-note big band theme, but the horn playing is beautiful and bright, and the synths are very Sun Ra—first pretending to be stars, they zap down before fading into their home in the galaxy. The playing is uniformly good, and Swirling is more rewarding than many of the archival releases under Sun Ra’s own name since he left earth, but with a cult act as beloved as Sun Ra, this feels like it was made for a cult within a cult, and I’m unfortunately orbiting outside that inner circle.
[7]
Mark Cutler: Under Sun Ra’s guidance, the Arkestra maintained a blistering release schedule for several decades. After his death, their pace barely diminished. Though this is touted as their first studio album in twenty years, it is roughly the forty-third album overall since the year 2000. The album features some of Ra’s most famous classics, as well as more obscure compositions from across his career. If the arrangements here are generally less adventurous than Ra’s spaciest and most abstract explorations, they nevertheless show that the band has still evolved in the years since its founder’s death. In particular, the Arkestra sometimes veers away from jazz entirely, toward the fringes of psychedelic rock. At times, they almost recall groups like Acid Mothers Temple, who, in all probability, would not have existed without Ra. The album does venture into free jazz as well, most notably on the raucous epic “Infinity / I’ll Wait For You”. While I can’t say I particularly understand why this material compelled the Arkestra to return to the studio for the first time in twenty years, I’m not complaining either. Swirling is an enjoyable, wide-ranging, slightly exhausting testament to the power of Ra’s life and vision.
[7]
Chloe Liebenthal: The juxtaposition between our humble lives and the mythical grandeur of outer space has long captivated humanity’s collective imagination; the Sun Ra Arkestra, now led by saxophonist Marshall Allen, have long been among the most daring artistic explorers of the way these two worlds connect. Swirling bears the familiar, comforting marks of the Arkestra’s historic work: a rich blend of doo-wop and both traditional and far-out avant-garde jazz, call-and-response vocals whose optimistic sci-fi lyrics reflect an Afrofuturist quest to bring the hoped-for unity, love and wisdom of the world of tomorrow into the concrete reality of today, and the sheer power of the band’s impossibly precise instrumental performances. The Arkestra’s masterful deployment of these elements makes the whole album strikingly reminiscent those long-lost live Arkestra records that keep popping up every so often.
That said, the very best songs on Swirling are those that transcend this old-but-new-again appeal to explore even further-flung reaches of the Arkestra’s expansive sonic imagination. “Seductive Fantasy,” which fans will recognize as a reinterpretation of an Arkestra classic that entered the band’s repertoire on their 1979 album On Jupiter, appeared back then as a laid-back jam. Here, the band reinvigorates it with driving saxophone riffs and shimmering vocals performed by singer/violinist Tara Middleton, whose foretellings of heavenly vibrations in every color of the rainbow effectively rework the song into an invocation of a bright and glorious world. This technicolor spirit suffuses the album’s peaks; the titular Allen composition “Swirling” and the previously unrecorded “Darkness” are also standouts for this reason. At their very best, the Arkestra prove to be far more than a legacy act— they’re a band of astral travelers just as forward-thinking now as they were under the guidance of Sun Ra.
[9]
Sunik Kim: In another time, on another day, in a past life, caught in the embrace of the Olatunji Concert, I might’ve been frustrated by the steady, deliberate pace of things on here: with a couple exceptions, the band generally revolves around a steady, mid-tempo, almost languishing beat, one that rarely exceeds a resting heart rate (full inhales, full exhales). To extend the analogy further, this deliberate approach has a literally relaxing effect—breaths are seen to the end of their cycles, air in the lungs is fully expelled and replenished (versus Coltrane in the Olatunji Center of African Culture on April 23, 1967, pushing through physical, mental, spiritual boundaries at a decidedly...feverish pace). I’ve definitely used these words before, but—there will always be room in my heart, and in my day, for truly patient and generous music, even if it ultimately doesn’t push things forward, sit on the bleeding edge, or even make a singular, memorable impression. Swirling stands solidly in that camp: I probably won't return to it with great frequency, but—versus many other albums—I value the experience I had with it, and am glad it exists.
[6]
Leah B. Levinson: When presented with new work by a legacy artist or ensemble, my typical gut reaction is a mix of skepticism and concern. Maybe this is misplaced cynicism or maybe it’s a well-informed, healthy defense. Swirling strikes my prejudice and exceeds expectations altogether, standing as a formidable work in its own right.
This expansive hour-and-a-half set is more than a timely ode to the ensemble’s namesake composer and bandleader. The ensemble—under alto saxophonist and longtime member Marshall Allen’s direction—freshen up the works of their guiding light with new arrangements, textures, performances, and production. What these recordings lack in candid charm and rusty edge (when compared to earlier renditions), they more than make up for with their heft and warmth, igniting compositions once brackish-if-intergalactic and illuminating just how one takes flight.
“Seductive Fantasy” is wistful and exuberant, with mobile-like harmony and emancipatory leads, espousing a defiant joy over a bass-range osteñato. The ensemble’s arrangements of “Angels and Demons at Play,” “Darkness,” “Rocket No. 9,” and “Door Of The Cosmos” all make a similar use of repetition-and-build, maintaining an unabating drive to ground further studies and catharsis. The integration of fuzzed-out, processed, and sweeping guitar as an interstellar spice alongside creative mixing and editing and a satisfaction to sit still shows the Arkestra acknowledging and embracing their own influence of and legacy within more recent incorporations of jam, kraut, and post-rock affects into jazz and large ensemble formats (reminiscent, for me, of work by Matana Roberts, theBABAorchestra, The Thing, Fire! Orchestra, Funkadelic, Vinny Golia, Robert Wyatt, Otomo Yoshihide’s New Jazz Orchestra, and Matt Robidoux’s recent Brief Candles). This effectively puts the work in conversation with those that have followed, carrying a stamp of approval for its composers intents and desires through the work and study of his disciples.
Swirling fulfills Ra’s proclivity for reaching ecstasy via structured play and spectacle. Mid-album, we receive “Astro Black,” a spacey a cappella hymn with a squelching guitar counterpoint. Its general atmosphere and resolving lyric—“astro black and cosmos die”—could be otherwise drenched in mourning and manufactured self-seriousness, but instead, vocalist Tara Middleton achieves a sort of theatrical camp that exemplifies the album as a whole (I picture her centerstage under a spotlight in a spangled, shimmering dress, surrounded in darkness and backdropped by a deep, starry curtain).
Others songs strut along. “Swirling” makes use of a wide mix to highlight a cacophonous wind counterpoint to the vocal melody, which enlivens and estranges what is an otherwise standard swing number, bringing depth and adding a shot of energy for its duration. Middleton provides a steady and affable guide throughout, cool and collected, never overbearing, she remains reserved and warm even when the floor beneath her feet has crumbled.
“Infinity / I’ll Wait for You” presents one of the album’s most sonically astounding moments about halfway through the track, a moment when a whole ecology of free jazz is swallowed up in a spacial vacuum, clearing way for a vocoderized gibberish to enter with as good an auditory cartoon-representation of emergence as I can imagine. Similarly rendered is the “eternal sea of darkness” posited on the album’s fifth track, which becomes not quite as unpleasant or dire as one would suppose. This biblical meandering in the existential dark is musically dissonant and polyvocal, but vibrant and inexplicably brief: the wandering of the Israelites is reduced to a bite-sized comic montage. But the golden horizon that is “Sunology” preaches to remind that the glowing orb isn’t an omniscient and almighty being capable of judging or smiting as a biblical god might. Instead, he is a provider of light and warmth, beauty and grace.
This all takes place as a spectacular, barebones production, letting the music speak in its time, distant from the untouchable mythos surrounding its original creator. Rather than fabricating a devout meaning-stuffed ode to their namesake, the ensemble crafts a legitimate moment for celebration and wonder.
[8]
Eli Schoop: Just sheer nonsense. Unbearable kumbaya shit that belies none of Sun Ra’s best work.
[2]
Marina B.: Swirling is just fine. It doesn’t sound bad at all. Occasionally, it sounds pretty good. Everyone in the Arkestra is a consummate musician, but I’m not gonna lie: this album is kinda boring as fuck. Even the crazy free jazz parts sound like they don’t want to bother you too much. The energy present in the original compositions is nowhere to be found; there was a certain spiky weirdness to those Sun Ra recordings that is sorely lacking in these anodyne interpretations. If Ra was an alien from Saturn, this iteration of the Arkestra is very much of Earth. Swirling clocks in at over an hour and a half, time better spent watching the classic 1995 adventure comedy film Tommy Boy.
[5]
Samuel McLemore: I’m firmly in the camp that believes Sun Ra was one of the great musical geniuses of the 20th century. His fearless pursuit of new sounds coupled with his rare talent for reinventing old forms marked him as one of the biggest visionaries in 20th century music (one of my favorite anecdotes in music is Sun Ra searching for a singer who could make impossible sounds, saying, “The possible has been tried and failed; now I want to try the impossible”).
He has one of the most byzantine discographies in the history of recorded music. This prolific output was born partially out of artistic fertility, and partially from economic necessity. When the Arkestra traveled overseas, Sun Ra would carry with him a suitcase full of tapes from throughout his career, not only to review for inspiration but so he could sell them and cut a record right then and there if they were in a bind and needed extra cash. Sun Ra’s extensive output provides us listeners in the 21st century a rich corpus to draw upon if we ever feel in the mood for his music. I’ve heard about forty records Sun Ra has performed on, and looking at the above linked list, I’d estimate I have about three or four times that waiting for me still.
ThIs is to partially explain why the main thought that kept occurring to me while listening to Swirling, the Sun Ra Arkestra’sfirst studio album in 20 years, was a nagging suspicion that I would just be better off listening to one of the Arkestra’s old records instead. It’s a hard proposition to argue with considering those old records contain some of the best and most forward thinking music ever released. The fact that aside from its title track Swirling is almost entirely renditions of some of the most popular and well-known tracks in the Arkestra's history doesn’t help. Did you want to hear another version of “Rocket Number 9” or “Door of the Cosmos?” Then this record is for you. Have you never heard any Sun Ra records before at all? Well this record is probably aimed at you, but I argue you would be better off digging into the rich history of Sun Ra’s Arkestra rather than starting off with the legacy act version.
[3]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Despite living the most healthy life of anyone I knew over the age of 70, my grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer in July this year. She was 93, lived a long and fulfilling life, and died peacefully yesterday morning. In conjunction with reflecting on memories of her, I kept thinking about interviews I’ve done where artists talked about their parents. I think about how the best parts of these elders are present in their own lives. When someone passes away, one of the best ways to remember them is to take on the characteristics that made them so lovable.
I keep coming back to this thought as I listen to Swirling, an album I consider enjoyable but mostly uninteresting compared to the Sun Ra records I adore from yesteryear. Still, it’s a beautiful document for what it represents: a community of people continually enriching others and themselves by playing with the same spiritedness as the Arkestra’s namesake. And that’s enough, really. I don’t expect anyone who didn’t know my grandmother to care about her, but I’ll try to be a little more compassionate and grateful because of the way she lived her life. Honoring someone, carrying on their legacy, and letting them inspire you can manifest in the everyday or in something larger and concrete. Either way, inserting yourself into a supportive and impassioned community—which, in some ways, should include those no longer living—feels like the best way to live life.
[5]
Jesse Locke: I’ll never forget the time I saw the Sun Ra Arkestra. Dancing with a small crowd in the middle of a field at the Paris, Ontario fairgrounds for the 2018 Strangewaves Festival, the squadron of intergenerational spaceways travellers performed two sets of joyful, transcendental jazz music. I don’t consider myself part of any formalized religion, but this experience felt communal and spiritual in a way that church could be, lifting everyone in attendance beyond an earthly plane.
Sun Ra is back on many people’s minds this week thanks to a powerful clip from the 1979 documentary Jackie McLean on Mars making the rounds on Twitter. In a tense classroom confrontation, the alto saxophonist and educator faces off against a student whose square (and, let’s be frank, racist) academic views left him unimpressed by Sun Ra wearing a cape onstage. McLean, rightfully agitated, argues that the performance was made by a master who has every right to present himself in whatever majestic fashion he likes. “Can’t he be a god and a king?”
Sun Ra himself has long departed to Saturn, but the work of the Arkestra to continue spreading his interplanetary love offerings is one of the most beautiful traditions in music. These days, the group is led by 96-year-old alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, who plays like a man one quarter of his age on their new album Swirling. The chanted vocals, swinging melodies, and freewheeling instrumental interplay between these 15 musicians is a gift that feels too good for this world. Listening to it immediately flashes me back to that glorious evening on the field of a fairground in small-town Ontario, when the satellites were spinning and the doors of the cosmos were swung wide open.
[10]
Average: [6.27]
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