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raspberryjones · 4 years

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At This Time...

Sitting here paralyzed for days, trying to figure out what more I can do. Quarantined, distracted from grading these final papers by the fires in my feed, knowing that donating to activist organizations and RT’ing, on top of crying, shaking and cursing, is not nearly enough. Plus, just about anything I say/do on the socials feels like a f*cking performance. All of it — except the anger and the stream of information that continues to reassert the utter disdain that this country’s White supremacy (not just Tr*mp, but the whole friggin’ establishment) has for Black and Brown people, here and throughout the world. The insidiousness.

Even wallowing in my own exhaustion — jobless, hope on a tattered string, watching the powers that be f*ck the populace over in every way imaginable… All of it feels self-pitying, when I can recognize my privilege and be struck by the existential sorrow that, even before this week’s events, or the racial disparity of the pandemic’s victims, surrounds most Black American lives. When I hear my Black and Brown friends and colleagues express their own exhaustion, as so many have over the past five days, it has the weight not just of the moment, or a political term, but of history. Personal, familial, written in volumes, reaffirmed constantly — and running contrary to America’s dip-shit self-mythologizing.

And yet... Despite this horror-show past, with white supremacy’s attempts to subjugate them for generations, Black America’s ability to move society forward has been beyond fucking remarkable. The creation of culture, the strength of moral character, the depth of communal compassion. It is no overstatement that the moral and creative compass of not just Black excellence but of the African-American community I’ve known, has been among primary lodestars of my life in this country. And while I do not expect all other folks to feel the same way I do, I most certainly judge those who feel contrary — or those who dismiss the notion that, if anyone’s ever made this hard land great in the past, it’s been Black Americans.

And that in the struggle to understand the fullness of this account, you will find pretty much all contemporary crises. It’s incredible that, in 2020, a majority of people still don’t comprehend the connections between systemic white privilege and Black death in the headlines, between colonization culture and the overwhelming inequality rampant in American society, between the contemporary malaise of the Western imagination and the whitewashing of the media. For a person who does not simply work in/with culture founded on the Black experience, but gets their very lifeblood form it, this is a hard fucking pill to swallow. The big “YOU don’t get it!”

So, when thinking about WTF else I can do, as a writer who deeply supports Black American communities in the struggle against white supremacy, I thought it worthwhile to reiterate some of this historical record’s personal and social importance. Having just spent a semester teaching NYU sophomores about how we got here — while re-reading classic texts by LeRoi Jones and Ralph Ellison and Isabel Wilkerson, Nikole Hannah Jones’s massive new one, and discussing the contemporary settings of these ideas with DeForrest Brown Jr. and Angel Bat Dawid — what I believe should be our collective mission is fresh and clear in my mind.

This is where music comes in. It’s especially important that anyone who listens to contemporary music in the 21st century, also participates in reappraising these whitewashed texts, restoring Blackness back to the center of this culture. Not only to acknowledge the proper origins of the forms and ideas that are so important to it — and thus, acknowledge the people who developed these forms and ideas — but act accordingly in times of crisis, requiring us to use our white privilege to support pro-Black and anti-colonialist positions in a way that could actually lead to structural change. To “see something, say something” when companies belligerently monetize the (Black) people’s culture and do not recompense the community, or when cops act like overseers that treat Black lives as wanton boys do flies.

Because… Here’s the thing: blues and jazz are the basis of all great new music of the last 100 years — paving the way for the post-modern Black electronic music (hip-hop, house and techno and electro) which is the core of pretty much all popular sounds of the 21st century. And the Black experience is the DNA of these musics — meaning, in the clearest terms, that we don’t get to have this music without the burden that preceded it. This is at the core of the accusation that “loving Black culture more than Black people.” You do NOT get to do one without the other, and still call it “love.”

Unlike European art, that original Black music is not the product of some art-school- and conservatory-learned experiments. Or of commissions from a royal court. Or of direct updates on thousand-year folk forms. Oral traditional and molecular memory aside, Black American music’s past was almost completely — genocidally, is also a word — wiped away in the Middle Passage. So when it came to fruition in the years during and after Reconstruction, it did so as a personal Black expression of what to do and how to live in this new, foreign here-and-now, far from “home.” This music is, simultaneously, a lament and celebration, complaint and utopia, art and evidence, personal diary and modernist work. Nothing like that had been conceived before, and it was so revolutionary that almost no one’s been able to build a next-level to it since.

It was also the first musical art-form original to the United States. Now imagine: the engine of this art-form’s motivation was a desire to express oneself within a society that did not want to hear any of what you had to say. A society that, in many cases, did not regard you as fully human. And yet think of how Black music expresses the full spectrum of humane truths and emotions. Actually, fuck it, don’t read me telling you about it. Go listen to the Wesley Morris episode of the 1619 Project podcast, who does a far better job than I of narrating Black American music’s wonders. This is why remaining on the sidelines, or providing only cursory support to the uprising, does not sit well.

It is crucial that people around the world know this history when they hear a variation of these musics being described as “global phenomena” or “universal,” or divided into “genres.” Such terms might seem neutral, or even complementary to its creators; but at their core, they move to dilute the role that the Black experience played in its birth. And distancing the music from the people who made it (and why), mitigates the music’s values. What was once specific becomes conditional — out goes the particularity of its expressions (feelings, words, citations), and in come market-democratizing generalities, like capitalization and trends, elements that tend to be elevated by whoever controls mass communication. This is how a local culture becomes a global genre, and how some people who make “techno” or “jazz” music in [insert European city here] can’t comprehend why “neutrality” towards George Floyd’s death is a betrayal of their creative work.

But... They will do as they will do. And, as I said before, we will judge them - because it is on these very decisions and proclamations that the intention of the art-work (a crucial aspect in the value of the art-work — its contemporary “aura” some might say), that artists and their audiences are judged. And when I mis-step, my Black friends and colleagues will also judge me, and the humility and self-reflection with which I handle this will say volumes about what my cultural intentions are. Because for the rest of us, there never has been nor will continue to be a disconnection between the culture we have sworn allegiance to, and the need to change society’s norms, to speak about the need for social justice, and to continually reassert that #BlackLivesMatter and #BrownLivesMatter.

And that if you continue to engage with the words and ideas that I hope to continue putting out into the world, this is their starting point. That music — for all its glory and hope and joy and wrenching feeling and fuck-you energy and let’s-love energy and all that — is neither the beginning nor the end. It is one narrative of history’s arc. That chapters of this history are being written all the time, some quietly and some in push-notifications, and that what’s going on outside our windows at this moment, is a major scene of the permanent record. To be quiet is to be complicit. I choose not to be complicit. I hope that you make that choice as well.

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#blacklivesmatter #brown lives matter #how to be an ally #jazz #techno #House Music #black music #hip-hop #sister rosetta tharpe

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jazzviewswithcjshearn · 4 years

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Ambrose Akinmusire: on the tender spot of each calloused moment (Blue Note, 2020)

Ambrose Akinmusire: trumpet; Fender Rhodes: Sam Harris: piano; Harish Raghavan: bass; Justin Brown: drums; Genevieve Artadi: vocals (track 3) Jesus Diaz: vocals, percussion (track 1)

Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire has been on the scene for over two decades, first debuting with Prelude... For Cora (Fresh Sound, 2008) but really making a splash with his Blue Note debut, When The Heart Emerges Glistening in 2010. For that recording, he enlisted Walter Smith, III on tenor saxophone, pianist Gerald Clayton (soon to make his own Blue Note debut), Harish Raghavan on bass and Justin Brown on drums-- what was immediately apparent on that recording was the striking individual trumpet sound, quite heady writing which shared a lot in common with the jazz tradition both American and European, the provocative, poetic tune titles that also dealt with the experience of being black in America. With on the tender spot of each calloused moment, the trumpeter makes perhaps his deepest statement to date, finding him back in the quartet format that dominated 2017's double disc A Rift in Decorum: Live at the Village Vanguard and eschewing the more album length concept of Origami Harvest last year.

Before anything is said of the music which is excellent, haunting, and relentlessly challenging the album speaks to the trouble social climate that our world is currently in. Not only is the society dealing with COVID-19, but the senselessly brutal May 26. 2020 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, in which the officer drove a knee into Floyd's neck for an appalling 8:46 and killing him. The riots in direct response to this atrocity have lead America to a breaking point, no longer are people dealing with racial injustice, and with a gleam of hope Americans, black, white, Asian and Latino are joining together to say enough is enough. Akinmusire appears on the cover in a stark black and white portrait, his hair in cornrows, shadow and light playing off each other, bearded, and in a black hoodie, bringing to mind Trayvon Martin. The trumpeter has always aimed to present his music in extremes, on Origami Harvest the use of cliched misogynistic hip hop phrases, at times in completed random places were rendered with an almost darkly humored absurdity, but on the tender spot of each calloused moment serves as a not so frank wake up call to society to look at what it's doing.

For the album which Akinmusire considers a sequel to his initial Blue Note offering, he brings back his long standing quartet. The group includes pianist Sam Harris (not to be confused with 80's Star Search winner and 80's pop, R&B singer) Harish Raghavan on bass, and drummer Justin Brown whom appeared on 2017's A Rift In Decorum, augmented by special guests including Knower's Genevieve Artadi and percussionist Jesus Diaz. The trumpeter presents perhaps his most ambitious social and artistic statement to date, that pulls on subtle touches of contemporary pop production, new music, R&B and the avant garde into a mixture purely his own. While the music does indeed feel a bit similar in tone and mood to When The Heart Emerges Glistening, it draws more upon the uncompromising nature that marked the double live album, which is in no small part to how in tune the quartet is. As they embark on the suite like “Tide of Hyacinth”, they deftly demonstrate how the trumpeter works at extremes. The first section of the three part tune is a busy, roaring collective avant improvisation, the trumpet spattering Jackson Pollack like fragments into the atmosphere, with Raghavan's extended bowing techniques, and Brown's treated cymbals and thwacking dead toms. The second section is more driving, Brown's cymbals acting as flowing waves, with Akinmusire's intense winding melody setting the stage for Harris' piano, focusing on color and texture. The third section throws something that at first seems like a non sequitir, but makes complete sense when one keeps in mind the concept of extremes. The voice of percussionist Jesus Diaz joins the fray, singing in the Yoruba dialect that initially the trumpeter wanted his father to sing. Diaz' section adds a grooving, joyous Afro-Latin element, the 2-3 clave an intriguing feature, and the piece closes on this joyous note. “Yessss” seems to be a reflection on the history of the African American struggle, Akinmusire's varying vocal inflections and deep blues undercurrent lament the seeming progress, but the longing in his tone appears to be saying “What progress have we made really? there's much more to be done”. The gradual solo build over synthesizers and a back beat from Brown's dead snare bring the track into a more contemporary vein reminiscent of D'Angelo, and a nice send off.

“Cynical Sideliners” with Akinmusire on Rhodes, and the child like vocals of Genevieve Artadi, is a bizarre lullaby. The track could be seen as a subtle indictment of those who are sitting and complaining about the current social upheavals but ultimately doing nothing. Artadi delivers the lyrics with a detached naivete that is disconcerting against the pillowy Rhodes chords, but it also is because of this exact mood that makes it such a striking piece on the album. “Mr. Roscoe (consider the simultaneous” is a reflection on the great Art Ensemble of Chicago co founder, multi instrumentalist, Roscoe Mitchell, and in this piece, Akinmusire who was a member of Mitchell's quartet balances the essence of the unique composed and improvised structures the multinstrumentalist oft employed.

Still, Akinmusire's aim through all the music with trademark poetic titling is to reach for the heart. Harish Raghavan's double stops and extended solo set the mood for “Interlude (that get more intense) featuring Harris' tornado of pianism, and another deeply emotional trumpet solo, that finds Akinmusire considering the thematic possibilities of a triplet repeating in morse code as the tumult dies down. What really touches the emotions deeply however is the closing “Hooded Procession (read the names aloud) which continues a series beginning with “My Name is Oscar” on the first Blue Note. The pieces evoke serious thought about the horrors of all the black men and women falling victim to police violence as well as the senseless mass shootings over the past decade. The “Hooded Procession” of the title is almost an answer to that of “a blooming bloodfruit in a hoodie” on Origami Harvest, and the trumpeter's solitary Rhodes chords this time, with no spoken word as the listener thinks of names like Ahmad Arbury, George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, Elijah McClain, the list goes on and on is heart wrenching and chilling. The tribute to Roy Hargrove, simply titled “Roy” is also a sobering reminder of one of the greatest trumpeters of the modern era, and the fostering of talent that he so nurtured. Ambrose Akinmusire now carries the mantle for those of his generation.

Sound:

on the tender spot of each calloused moment is very realistic tonally, Akinmusire's trumpet is full of body, with a warm glow. Listening to the album using the Schiit Modius DAC enhances the stereo image, and the Modius' warmer than neutral character is an advantage. On pieces like “4623” which use effects, the bathroom tile type reverb is quite palpable. Occasionally though, Raghavan's bass is so rich in depth of tone that it occasionally fights with Justin Brown's resonant bass drum, in the audio space. Brown's effects treated toms with their thudding attack and dead snare have a particular presence, and Sam Harris' piano is weighty, realistic and accurate.

Concluding thoughts:

Ambrose Akinmusire is a true artist whose work challenges the viewpoints and thoughts of the listener. As an improviser he remains fearless creating lines that grab attention, and with his quartet, he has a band that is so in tune with his aesthetic, that it's clear from the first note it can be no one but Akinmusire, his tone and ideas so distinctive. on the tender spot of each calloused moment is the most realized chapter to date in the trumpeter's discography from his political and societal stance, to the group interplay and impassioned improvisation.

Music: 9/10

Sound: 8/10

Equipment used:

HP Pavilion Laptop

Focal Chorus 716 Floor Standing Speakers

Schiit Modius DAC

Musicbee (for WAV file playback)

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#ambrose akinmusire #jazz trumpet #Blue Note records

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