Pulsing with Harlem's rhythms and sonic ambiance, Somi's
Petite Afrique is an homage to her New York City upper Manhattan neighborhood,
and one of the Meccas of the African diaspora.
In the village of Harlem, along west 116th Street from Malcolm X
Boulevard to Frederick Douglass Boulevard, African immigrants build American
lives. Populated predominantly by a Francophone, West African and Muslim
community, this is a strip of Harlem that locals call "Little Africa"
or "Petite Afrique:" a thriving corridor of hair shops and shea
butters, bistros and self-taught tailors.
Many of these working class residents -- immigrants-cum-citizens -- are
now taxi drivers zipping other New Yorkers through the city they've called home
since the 1980s.
Petite Afrique, Somi's sophomore effort for OKeh/Sony Music
Masterworks, is a daring, relevant, refashioning of what "jazz" and
"African music" mean. The album is a timely song cycle about the
dignity of immigrants in the United States. Equally anthropologist and writer,
Somi's songs both celebrate Harlem's black experience and lament
gentrification's slow erasure of the vibrant African immigrant population from
the historic neighborhood.
On her new album, Somi and her core bandmates -- guitarist
Liberty Ellman, drummer Nate Smith, pianist Toru Dodo, and bassist Michael
Olatuja -- perform with new emotional openness, sharp political insight, and
infectious groove throughout. A powerful horn ensemble featuring tenor
saxophonist Marcus Strickland, alto man Jaleel Shaw, and acclaimed trumpeter
Etienne Charles also appear on several tracks.
Charles also serves as associate producer on Petite Afrique,
arranging the horn and string sections. Producer Keith Witty calibrates and
binds all these musicians together into a finely textured, genre-bending sonic
collage. Having also co-produced her last studio album, Witty and Somi continue
to establish the standard for artfully interweaving modern jazz and African pop
sensibilities. Somi's commitment to storytelling is clear as she intersperses
poetry and "backseat field audio" drawn mostly from several
interviews she conducted with African taxi drivers who have lived in the
neighborhood for over four decades.
The album opens with "Alien," Somi's provocative
improvisation on Sting's "Englishman in New York." Here, she flips
Sting's playful critique of Britishness in America into a brooding blues about
Africans alienated from American life. "This album is, in many ways, a
love letter to my parents and the generous community of immigrants that raised
me," Somi explains. "Once Harlem started to change, I realized just
how much the African community there made the anonymity of New York City feel
more like home."
Somi's room-making blend of politics and voice is apparent
on stunning, anthemic tracks like "Black Enough" and "The
Gentry." On both recordings, Charles' assertive horn arrangements are
emphatic exclamation marks to Somi's fiery lyrics. "Black Enough" is a
layered exploration of blackness and the identity politics that has, at times,
pulled black people in the United States apart. Somi was inspired to write the
song while reading Yaa Gyasi's novel Homegoing. "It was the first time I'd
seen an African literary voice explicitly acknowledge the sameness of African
and African-American histories," says Somi. "It felt like a much
needed 'owning' of trauma and oppression. The Black Lives Matter movement was
already in the public consciousness, but I wanted to write something that
reminded us that we fail ourselves individually when we fail to acknowledge our
shared struggles."
A real-life legal battle between new Harlem residents and a
60-year-old drum circle tradition in Marcus Garvey Park inspired "The
Gentry," which features Aloe Blacc's earthy guest vocal. Here, Somi uses
deft lyrical play to talk explicitly about how gentrification is erasing black
culture from the Harlem scene. With the horn section underwriting Somi's
searing call and response -- "I want it black / I want it back" --
one might recall Abbey Lincoln's ardent performance in Max Roach's
"Freedom Now Suite." It's also not hard to hear the references to the
musical groups that Fela Kuti and James Brown once fronted, masters of Nigerian
and American political dance music, respectively.
The musicianship on Petite Afrique continues to be
overwhelming in its beauty and feel. Listen to Ellman's ability to make his
guitar sound like a kora on "Like Dakar." As Somi compares Harlem to
Dakar and Abidjan with lithe vocal phrasing, Ellman's lines blend with the horn
section's dulcet phrases to propel the track.
Even on Somi's songs about love like "They're Like
Ghosts," the down-tempo groove instigates movement and commits to the
narrative at hand. "It's a song about the longing for and romanticization
of people or things we once loved. The lover, in this case, is really a
metaphor for the lands that still haunt us as immigrants and the forgetfulness
of why we left that comes with time," Somi shares.
"Holy Room," an R&B-vibed praise song for
love's spiritual force, layers a lover's desire with the muezzin's call to
prayer as Somi sings "Allahu Akbar," letting her dynamic vocals ride
the sensual groove. "It is meant to be an explicit response to the rampant
and deeply disturbing Islamophobia that pervades Western society currently. The
choice to sing the phrase "Allahu Akbar" is my attempt to remedy
perceptions of terror that are unfairly associated with the millions of
peaceful, God-fearing Muslims in the world. After all, when the phrase is
translated from Arabic to English it simply means, 'God is great.' What better
way to counter and defuse hateful messages than with a love song?"
Ultimately this song reveals the artist's deep sense of humanity and the power
of
Petite Afrique; Somi is at the height of her vocal powers
and writing prowess.
The political messages of this album are timelier than she
could have ever imagined when she began writing it early last year. This music
is singular, gorgeous, urgent and profound.
Born in Illinois, the daughter of immigrants from Uganda and
Rwanda, Somi's American experience has always been infused with the African
diaspora's richest political and artistic traditions. And now Petite Afrique
combines the two facets of her life magically. A longtime Harlem resident, Somi
is also a true Africanist: she spent part of her youth in Africa with her
parents and now, with her band, tours the continent extensively. Famously,
Somi's dazzling 2014 album, The Lagos Music Salon, which debuted at the top of
US Jazz charts, was born from an 18-month "sabbatical" in Lagos,
Nigeria.
Founder of New Africa Live, a nonprofit championing her
fellow African artists, Somi realized some years ago that she was explicitly
segmenting her work for the communities she came from and the work that she did
as an artist. "I realized," Somi details, "that I could still
curate a sense of community in the same, and possibly larger, ways through my
music." Now a TED Senior Fellow, her career a refined merger of singing
and activism, Somi has entered a fascinating new phase herself: "New
Africa Live was about making room for our voices that might otherwise go
unheard. Hopefully, Petite Afrique starts larger conversations about immigration
and xenophobia and Blackness."
Upcoming Somi Performances:
April 8 / Transition Jazz Fest / Utrecht, Holland
April 10 / Duc Des Lombards / Paris, France
April 11 / Pizza Express / London, England
April 13 / Sala Radio / Bucharest, Romania
April 14 / Porgy & Bess / Vienna, Austria
April 17 / Moods / Zurich, Switzerland
April 19 / Unterfahrt / Munich, Germany
April 20 / A-Trane / Berlin, Germany
April 22 / Elbphilharmonie / Hamburg, Germany
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