Tuesday, May 21, 2019

New Music: Seed Ensemble - Driftglass; Billie Davies Trio - Perspectives II; Jamila Woods - Legacy Legacy


Seed Ensemble - Driftglass

A fantastic album by this up-and-coming spiritual group from London – an ensemble led by alto saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi, but definitely a unified group effort all the way through! Konishi composed all the music – and a few songs feature words by Langston Hughes – and the rises with a proud, vibrant spirit right from the start – full of bold modal rhythms, and risen to the heavens on a mix of two trumpets, tenor, trombone, and tuba – plus piano, Fender Rhodes, and some mighty nice bass and drums. All tracks are long, and very individual – not slavish spiritual jazz numbers trying to recapture the past – but instead a very bright vision for tomorrow. Titles include "Afronaut", "Wake (For Grenfell)", "Mirrors", "Interplanetary Migration", "The Dreamkeeper", and "The Darkies". ~ Dusty Groove

Billie Davies Trio - Perspectives II

This entirely improvised set was inspired by ‘the 7 perspectives of the musicians, the 7 words of the tunes’ titles and 7 chakra musical keys’ (this latter has a root A, rising in whole tones to G). As with Davies’ previous work, there is total commitment to musical improvisation and, as is also the case with so much of her work, the resulting sound has such unity of purpose that it feels as if all the players must be working from charts rather than spontaneously creating the pieces.  This is meant as a compliment to the way in which the pieces develop and work together so seamlessly. Given the melting pot that New Orleans continues to be for jazz, it is not surprising that Davies has based herself here, nor that the musicians she gathers around her are not easy to pigeon-hole into one style of jazz (or even one style of music in any wider sense).  This is another very successful experiment by Davies in mining the creative depths of improvised music making, producing a sound that cannot be simply labelled as jazz (even if it fully has the swing of jazz in all of the pieces brought by Davies and Watkinson in their dynamic partnership) and which really does respond to the cosmic dimensions of its inspiration.

Jamila Woods - Legacy Legacy

Jamila Woods already blew us away with her debut – but this second set has the singer ready to take on the world with a huge step forward in her style! Jamila caught us almost by surprise when she first emerged – a Chicago soul singer who wasn't on our radar, and who already had this fully-formed, completely unique style – but here, she embraces legacies of past musical and cultural inspirations, folding them into a instrumental settings created almost completely on her own, and which are topped by these shape-shifting lyrics that really live up to their references. The album shows a powerful, personal, and completely self-contained approach to the music – something that many of Jamila's contemporaries can hardly match – and titles include "Miles", "Baldwin", "Basquiat", "Eartha", "Giovanni", "Zora", "Betty", "Frida", "Sun Ra", and "Octavia". ~ Dusty Groove



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