It first sounds like a straightforward request for the soundman, but soon becomes more like a plea for salvation. “Turn brother Julian up. That bass gotta hit,” urges Angel Bat Dawid early in her new album LIVE, a document of a concert she and her band Tha Brothahood gave during JazzFest Berlin in November 2019. “Turn it up! Turn that shit up!” she continues, her voice quickly reaching the edge of frenzy, as if she is a wanderer in the desert and the prospect of more low end is an oasis on the horizon.
Her cries join the rhythmic stream of syllables she’s been using to introduce the tune, a radical reimagining of “Black Family,” from her 2019 debut album The Oracle. “Black, Black,” she repeats, sometimes truncating the word to emphasize its percussive quality, sometimes letting it flow like palilalia, sometimes adding a long rolled “r,” like a rapper imitating the sound of automatic gunfire. When she begins adding “Up, up,”—as in “Turn up the bass,” and maybe also “up with Black families”—her apparent outburst takes on a different color, as another element in a melange that posits togetherness and music as salves for Black pain. You might wonder: was the mix really off, or was the whole episode intentional, somehow a part of the composition? Could both things be true?
A clarinetist, vocalist, composer, and keyboardist rooted in Chicago’s jazz scene, Dawid introduced herself on The Oracle as an idiosyncratic auteur. She composed, performed, recorded, and mixed the album almost entirely by herself, layering instruments and voices on a multitracking smartphone app. The Oracle’s hermetic quality was a part of its appeal, but Dawid’s vision was always more communal and participatory. In a 2019 interview with the Chicago Reader, she said she’d originally considered the solo tracks to be something like demos for the Brothahood to learn and perform with her, “But the recordings actually sounded kinda good,” so she released them that way.
LIVE is something like a manifestation of that initial vision, using her compositions as vehicles for ecstatic group improvisation, featuring a sundry ensemble of multi-instrumentalists and singers. It features plenty of the bracing instrumental work you might expect from a free jazz album, but also seems intent on capturing the full expressive range of the human voice. Dawid and Brothahood members Deacon Otis Cooke and Viktor Le Givens deliver gorgeous and fractured singing, chilly sci-fi vocoder chants, impassioned monologues, playful free associations. Often, a tune begins with a phrase repeated like a mantra, which they gradually break down and rebuild into dazzling new rhythms, the way an instrumentalist might construct a solo by twisting and reshaping small fragments of the written melody. On “The Wicked Shall Not Prevail,” all three improvise vocals in tandem across a polyrhythmic bed of percussion and electronics, which Dawid occasionally augments with pointillistic clarinet melody and shards of dissonant electric piano. It is an overwhelming display of musical and verbal invention.
Across LIVE, Dawid explodes the boundaries of her role as jazz bandleader, turning it into a suggestive and multivalent kind of performance art. She frequently implicates her audience along the way—sometimes as co-conspirators, other times as antagonists. The studio version of “Black Family” is almost mechanistic, with looped drums and throbbing sub-bass; on LIVE, it is lithe and funky, with exuberant soloing over an ominous two-chord vamp. In its stunning final minutes, Dawid entreats her listeners to join her in delivering the refrain: “The Black family is the strongest institution in the world.” The rhythm section gathers force, but the German crowd evidently declines to oblige Dawid. Again, a cliche of live concerts and recordings—the cathartic audience singalong—is suddenly fraught with racial and political implication, conflicts Dawid makes inextricable from the music itself. She shouts, admonishes, demands, preaches, begs, even seems to weep: “It will really help my people. It’s so simple, y’all. Can you just say it with me?” Two minutes later, she sounds drained of all energy as the band churns on behind her: “What’s wrong with me? You don’t love me. You don’t love my family. We need you to affirm us.”
At moments like these, Dawid seems to take the unchained improvisation of free jazz as a guide for all aspects of her performance, turning seemingly extraneous details—like stage banter, or instructions for the soundman—into vital components of her art. (One thing LIVE doesn’t capture is the visual element: witness an incendiary early 2020 performance of “Black Family,” captured on video, in which Dawid slams her electric piano keyboard with open palms, gets up and headbangs, and crouches on the floor in front of audience members, clarinet held high in her raised fist.)
In her conception of a jazz concert as a vividly multisensory experience, her ensemble’s ragtag instrumental eclecticism, her defiance of stylistic orthodoxies, and her emphasis on the group dynamic over individual solos, Dawid is clearly in the lineage of Sun Ra, as well as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the seminal out-jazz organization formed in her hometown in the 1960s. (She pays tribute to both with “We Hearby Declare The African Look,” an Afrofuturstic mashup of quotes from Ra and AACM affiliate Phil Cohran; Adam Zanolini, who plays bass and several other instruments in the Brothahood, is the AACM’s current treasurer.) Her multi-instrumental excursions and streams of dialogue with the audience can recall Rashaan Roland Kirk, and her use of her voice as a free improvisational instrument sometimes reminds me of Linda Sharrock. But her particular alchemy of these elements, and her ability to transmute everything that happens onstage into music, are blazingly original.
Dawid frames LIVE with two arresting field recordings taken in Berlin before the concert. The intro documents a confrontation between the artist and a hotel employee who’d told her to stop playing a piano that was on display in the lobby. The final track is a collage of remarks Dawid made on a JazzFest panel on the afternoon of the concert, in which she expounds on anti-Black racism in the world of European jazz festivals and more generally. In a note accompanying the album on Bandcamp, Dawid writes of several racist incidents she experienced while in the city, and the pain and exhaustion in her voice in these recordings are viscerally palpable.
She has said that she was “protesting” the festival and the audience during the concert, and the music of LIVE is often densely confrontational. But it is also tender, and full of solidarity. A 14-minute rendition of the Oracle highlight “We Are Starzz” accompanies its elegiac melody with sampled birdsong and exploratory leads from Dawid’s clarinet and Xristian Espinoza’s tenor sax. As it winds down, Dawid again addresses the crowd, sounding more conciliatory than she did during “Black Family,” but no less urgent: “Hold on to this memory right now. Seal it in your heart. We have an agreement, alright? This is called unity. This is what it feels like to be unified.”
“I’m a black woman—there’s no turning that off,” Dawid told a Guardian interviewer last year. “I look at the totality of the black experience. I don’t see my sister who has a crack addiction for 40 years as not being successful. Because of the lineage she’s coming from, this is the best she can do. When you’re black, being alive is a success.” Dawid’s use of the stage as a pulpit on LIVE makes it difficult by design for a white listener to simply lose themselves in the music, forcing us to confront racism and its effects in every note. To Black listeners, perhaps, Dawid offers another message, embedded in the title, not as a descriptor but an imperative: live.
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