Heavy Rotation

Jazz adjacent

A collection of new(ish) releases with experimental leanings

By Caitlin Rockett

‘Black Treasure,’ By Zara McFarlane

BRITISH JAZZ SINGER Zara McFarlane explores her Jamaican heritage in this pulsating track that blends Jamaican folk traditions with the futuristics beats of London-based producers Kawake Bass and Wu-Lu. McFarlane wastes no time calling out European colonization: “First you see something you like / An X that marks the spot / On a quest to find / What you have not got ... You tell me that I’m lost / How can that be when you cross the world to find me? / I will not be a reflection of your reality.” By the end McFarlane celebrates: “Yes I’m black treasure / Yes I’m made of precious stones.”

‘Fire Is Coming,’ By Flying Lotus, David LynchH

FLYING LOTUS (Steven Ellison) released a deluxe version of his 2019 album Flamagra in May of this year, giving us a chance to revisit FlyLo’s sixth studio album. David Lynch narrates this spoken word track that morphs from menacing to foot-stomping in under three-and-a-half minutes. Ellison’s penchant for free jazz and shuffling percussion is built in: his great aunt was the late, great jazz pianist Alice Coltrane and his grandmother was singer-songwriter Marilyn McLeod.

‘Nebbia,’ By Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile

THIS TRACK COMES as a follow-up to the Grammy-winning The Goat Rodeo Sessions, with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, multi-hyphenate string player Stuart Duncan, bassist Edgar Meyer and mandolinist Chris Thile. The new album — Not Our First Goat Rodeo — is named after an aviation term for a situation in which myriad things must go right to avoid disaster. Nebbia is an Italian word for a thick fog or a haze. You move in and out of the fog as the track progresses, but you never feel lost. These musicians — like trained fighter pilots — know exactly where they are going.

‘Hope She'll Be Happier,’ BY Nick Mulvey

Bill Withers would love this elaborately picked version of his 1971 song “Hope She’ll Be Happier.” In Nick Mulvey’s hands the track becomes darker, building to an ominous fever pitch by the end. Where Withers’ track is gospel-tinged, Mulvey’s leans into progressive folk. Both versions reflect the narrator’s deep pain and introspection, but Mulvey’s noir track amps up the remorse all the way to 10.

‘CHAPTER,’ BY PENGUIN CAFE

NPR’S BOB BOILEN has called Penguin Cafe’s music “a universal dream state,” built on the foundations of music from around the world, and on the dreams of band leader Arthur Jeffes’ late father, Simon (who led an outfit called Penguin Cafe Orchestra prior to his death in 1997). This track, from Penguin Cafe’s 2019 album, Handfuls of Night, is inspired by The Terra Nova Expedition, officially the British Antarctic Expedition, led by Robert Falcon Scott. In 2005, Arthur Jeffes scored a BBC documentary about the expedition. Frantic strings and scattershot hand percussion open this track in true cinematic fashion, evoking images of dog sleds crossing a vast tundra.

Podcasts

The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

— James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers,” 1963.

Here are a few podcasts to continue your education and deepen your examination.

‘Unlocking Us With Brené Brown’ — Ibram S. Kendi On How To Be An Anti- Racist.

IBRAM X. KENDI, the bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist, and the director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, discusses racial disparities and the policies that have enshrined these disparities since Reconstruction. “Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy,” Kendi writes in his book. “It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.” It’s inadequate to merely not be racist, Kendi says: we must be anti-racist, willing to confront our inherent biases and dismantle racial inequality from within and without. — CR

'Good Ancestor,’ EP. 023 — Kimberley Seals Allers on Birth Without Bias.

THE HOST OF THE Good Ancestor podcast, Layla F. Saad, is an East African, Arab, British, black, Muslim woman who was born and grew up in the West, and lives in the Middle East. The intersectionality of her identities has driven Saad to explore “one burning question: How can I become a good ancestor? How can I create a legacy of healing and liberation for those who are here in this lifetime and those who will come after I’m gone?” Saad’s podcast gives voice to change-makers and culture-shapers who are exploring anti-racism, personal transformation and social justice. In this episode, Saad speaks with journalist Kimberley Seals Allers, who has researched — and experienced first-hand — the socio-cultural and racial disparities of birth, breastfeeding and motherhood in America. — CR

The Daily — The Sunday Read (June 7, 2020): 'The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning.'

CLAUDIA RANKINE IS A Jamaican-born American poet, playwright, educator and multimedia artist. In this essay for the New York Times, Rankine reflects on the reality of repetition in the systems of institutionalized racism, from Emmett Till to Michael Brown, from those who died in the hulls of slave ships to those who died at the hands of law enforcement: “The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness,” Rankin writes. “Mourning then bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives. Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation, Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us. If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.” — CR