Week of April 5: This week, songs by Sons of Kemet and Rosanne Cash wrestle with history; and Esperanza Spalding opens her musical apothecary. Plus, L'Rain releases a new single, along with Chicago-based Damon Locks & Black Monument Ensemble.
Sons of Kemet Go “Black To The Future”
Sons of Kemet is one of the bands led by Shabaka Hutchings, the wind player and composer who has established himself as one of the centers of London’s new music scene. They’ve just released the first single from the upcoming album Black To The Future; it’s called “Hustle,” a collaboration with rapper Kojey Radical, and in a bit of luxury casting, Lianne La Havas on backing vocals. Tuba virtuoso Theon Cross and the band’s dual percussionists, Edward Wakili-Hick and Tom Skinner, set up a slinky propulsive groove, and Hutchings adds layers of sax, clarinet and flute to suggest a dreamy take on Afrofuturism. Kojey Radical’s lyrics are rooted in the Black struggle but focus on the road ahead, and the importance of creativity. “I go make nothing something,” he raps at several points, which, when you think of it, is the very definition of art.
Black To The Future comes out on May 14.
The Musician Will See You Now: Esperanza Spalding’s Musical Apothecary
The idea of music as a healing practice is both ancient and widespread, from traditional Gnawa music of Morocco to the musical therapists at the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function. Grammy-winning bassist, pianist, singer, and composer Esperanza Spalding has begun a new project called the Songwrights Apothecary Lab, which aims to create music for specific healing purposes. The Lab, done in consultation with music therapists and neuroscientists, comes on the heels of Spalding’s last album, 12 Little Spells, where each track was associated with a part of the body. Now, Spalding and friends are focused more on mental and emotional health. The first effort in the Songwrights Apothecary Lab is a trio of linked works called “Formwela.” All of them were done with the Chicago producer/musician Phoelix (pronounced Felix), but with other guests coming and going: jazz legend Wayne Shorter is on “Formwela 3,” and a thunderstorm plays an important sonic role in “Formwela 1.” This piece, “Formwela 2,” features vocals by the Indian-born, American-based singer Ganavya. The website offers the “ingredients” of each piece, and for this one, it’s a repetitive, predictable musical structure; a mostly descending melodic line; and female voices in their lower register. All of these things together are supposed to help release what Spalding describes as “the clench of interpersonal woe, grief, and/or aggression.”
Future songs from the Lab will be made in a kind of sonic pharmacy where Spalding and her band can respond to what they’re hearing from listeners. One Lab will be in her hometown of Portland, OR; but the other will be in Lower Manhattan in June. Watch this space for details, when available.
Rosanne Cash Wrestles With “My Southern History” In Powerful New Song
“The Killing Fields” is the name of Rosanne Cash’s new single. Written during the protests of last summer, it is a bleak yet beautiful song that reckons with the history of lynchings in the South, and which benefits the Arkansas Peace & Justice Memorial Movement. Husband John Leventhal is in his usual role as lead guitarist and producer, while Rosanne Cash sings of “the blood that runs on cypress trees” and “my southern history” before ending with a potential way forward: “all that came before us/is not who we are now.” It’s nothing like the Esperanza Spalding project; but, in its own way, this is healing music too.
New Song From The Black Monument Ensemble Tries To Dial Back The Crazy
Damon Locks began The Black Monument Ensemble as a kind of sound-collage/beat-making project, that quickly expanded into a communal music-and-dance project featuring a cast of Chicago musicians, singers and dancers – both highly trained professionals and amateurs. “Keep Your Mind Free” begins with a cautionary bit of found sound (“the whole world… go crazy”) before launching into a soul-jazz excursion that includes everything from a video game’s bleeps to a solo by noted trumpeter Ben LaMar Gay. The singer, clarinetist and “spiritual jazz soothsayer” Angel Bat Dawid, a central figure on the Chicago improvising scene, leads the way, but the community spirit is evident in the gospel-style choral singing and the layers of percussion. Locks’ musical intuition has led him to some of the same conclusions as Esperanza Spalding’s more science-based Lab: the combination of solo voice with group vocals, for example, reflects the ebb and flow of human interactions both in “Formwela 2” above and in this song; and both of these songs are concerned with keeping ourselves, and each other, mentally healthy. “Keep Your Mind Free” ends with a tricky hocket effect, where the voices toss the words of the title back and forth.
Damon Locks’ Black Monument Ensemble releases its new album, NOW, on Friday, April 2.
A New Single Shows Two Faces of L’Rain
Brooklyn singer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Taja Cheek records under the name L’Rain, and her music has always been an improbable mix of spiritual jazz, R&B, and various species of electronic music. It’s been several years since her last album, which was also titled L’Rain after Cheek’s mother, Lorraine, who died while the album was being made. Now she is back with a new song and a full album, called Fatigue coming in June. The single is called “Two Face,” and it seems to refer to the fact that emotions are not simple things, and that real life can provoke conflicted feelings. So the song features her melodic, baroque-pop vocals, and almost sunny harmonies in the chorus; but that’s counterbalanced by an unrelenting rhythm that’s too fast to truly be called dance music, but which looks to things like German kosmische, UK jungle, and perhaps IDM (so-called “intelligent dance music” – not really for dancing). There is more than a hint of psychedelia in “Two Face,” too, and the video that L’Rain has released with it doubles down on that aspect.