The Free Jazz Collective
80
By Martin Schray
In some of my recent reviews I pondered about the question whether jazz can still provide some kind of relevant function for the African-American community or whether it has completely given up on that approach just to leave it to hiphop (Archie Shepp has suggested that, for example). There is indeed some evidence that this might be the case, especially if you have a look at the audiences, which mainly consist of older male white guys. Then again, there are musicians/bands that try to keep the political and musical fire from the 1960s burning, e.g. Irreversible Entanglements , Matana Roberts and Damon Locks (just to name a few). In Great Britain, tenor saxophonist and clarinettist Shabaka Hutchings has worked on this line of tradition with different ensembles like Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming and Shabaka & The Ancestors for quite some time now and he’s been relatively successful with it.
With The Ancestors, an ensemble of South African musicians, he released Wisdom Of Elders in 2015, until then the most ambitious attempt to connect history and new tendencies he had made. On the album, Hutchings was able to test out his free and spiritual jazz expeditions in a different, historically grown musical language, an approach which culminated in the outstanding track “Nguni“. We Are Sent Here By History takes these experiences even further. The eleven tracks are like an endearment of sound and vision, which ignores times and places of origin. The band - Siyabonga Mthembu (vocals), Mthunzi Mvubu (saxophone), Nduduzo Makhathini and Mandla Mlangeni (trumpet), Nduduzo Makhathini and Thandi Ntuli (piano), Ariel Zamonsky (bass), Tumi Mogorosi (drums) and Gontse Makhene (percussion) - tries to concoct something like a current state of spiritual jazz, which is enforced by the fact that the album is released on the relaunched Impulse! label. Based on the polyrhythms of the two percussionists the saxophones create floating melodies, which are flanked by keyboards and sometimes the piano tears the tracks into splinters like in “You've Been Called“ - a visit inside the space machine that Sun Ra once turned on. In general, Afrofuturism is a topic on the album. In the words of Siyabonga Mthembu, the Afrofuturists have arrives in the present: “We are here on history’s call“.
In a swirl of sound, Shabaka & The Ancestors conquer that attitude that seemed to have already
been lost to jazz: It is about music as a dynamic, subversive force. Although the first piece “They Who Must Die“ strongly reminds me of Sons of Kemet, the album is not as irreconcilable as Your Queen Is A Reptile , on which the guest rappers rant against Great Britain’s political class. Instead, Hutchings displays a vision of the future here. Outstanding tracks are “You've Been Called“, with its Sun-Ra-ish space scenario and apocalyptic lyrics and “We Will Work (On Redefining Manhood)“ with its dark and beautiful clarinet. The music is ready to embrace us warmly, to show us the way into the light.
We Are Sent Here By History is a record knee-deep in African tradition, it looks back in time from a near future. The fact that it was released at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic almost seems like dramatic irony: it’s an album about the apocalypse, a sonic time capsule which was supposed to be rediscovered by some future anthropologist. It reads as a statement of fact, a record of the failures that led to our own decline.
We Are Sent Here By History is available on vinyl and as a CD. You can buy it here:
http://www.shabakahutchings.com/ancestors/
Watch the video to “Go My Heart, Go To heaven“ here:
Thu Apr 23 04:00:00 GMT 2020