Music Monday: Griots and Saints

More book layout, more listening this past week. 

I’ve very much enjoyed Christian Scott/Chief Adjuah’s recent release, Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning. It is a great example of the continued vitality of the New Orleans improvised music scene. Not that this was in doubt, of course, but sometimes the city gets associated with traditional music and the contemporary masters get lost in the glow of patina. 

Christian Scott/Chief Adjuah is a scion of a New Orleans musical family, but also a tremendous innovator who introduced the concept of “stretch music” to describe his efforts to extend musical traditions and also expand them to embody the sounds of the “Black Atlantic” (including the full range of African, Caribbean, American musics et c.). On this album, as the media has breathlessly reported, he abandoned the trumpet and played a wide range improvised and self-designed instruments that similarly blended American and African forms.

Whatever its conceptual framework, the album is really good, but it is not casual. It embodies complexities, the lyricism, the diversity, and the hopes of contemporary America and offers a solution that is both part of a recognizable tradition and a firm demand that we “stretch” our understanding to create a more inclusive present.   

The other album that’s been on steady rotation in my home office is Billy Harper’s Black Saint (1975). It feels like another of the 1970s album that had it been released a decade earlier would have had a greater impact (it’s certainly up there with Woody Shaw’s Blackstone Legacy from 1970).

It’s a fantastic example of post-Coltrane jazz (or musicians who explicitly operate in the post-Coltrane tradition) needn’t be reduced to riotous, atonal, spiritualism. Billy Harper’s Black Saint is gorgeous offering with a decided balance between rhythm, melody, and saxophone pyrotechnics. The album was the first from the Black Saint label which for over 30 odd years released improvised, free, and experimental music.