By Lee Rice Epstein
In the context of the previous six chapters in Darius Jones’s
Man’ish Boy
epic, the cover of chapter seven,
Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye)
is most striking for its black-and-white portrait of the artist looking out
towards the listener, eyes wide open, welcoming, inviting, asking, also
demanding to be seen. Previous covers showcased Randal Wilcox, Justin
Hopkins, and Risha Rox, featuring bold colors and dense imagery. Oh yeah,
and then there’s the music. This is a necessary album, a heartbreaking and
passionate collection that explores self, trauma, healing, affirmation, and
community.
It’s been 15 years since the first album in this series was released,
Man’ish
Boy (A Raw and Beautiful Thing) , and one of the more
striking elements of Legend of e’Boi is how Jones’s performance
has evolved and grown in that time. From the jump, he played with such a
clear vision it could be easy to skip over the cleverness and openness of
his compositions, especially when songs like “Roosevelt” and “Chasing the
Ghost” were revisited on subsequent albums, where a listener could zoom in
and hear more of his ideas at play. Arguably, Legend of e’Boi
reaches a mighty high peak; throughout the album, Jones plays with the
lushness of Arthur Blythe, the lyricism of Julius Hemphill, and the
compositional range of Oliver Lake—oh, how he swings, how he skronks, and
all with one of the most beautiful alto tones.
Joined this time by drummer Gerald Cleaver and bassist Chris Lightcap,
Jones premieres five originals—“Affirmation Needed,” “Another Kind of
Forever,” “We Outside,” “We Inside Now,” and “Motherfuckin
Roosevelt”—alongside an adaptation of “No More My Lord,” one of
many songs recorded by Alan Lomax on February 9, 1948, atParchman
Farm (theMississippi State Penitentiary)
in Parchman, Mississippi (about 20 miles from the Mississippi River), in
two performances by Henry (Jimpson) Wallace: first
accompanied
by an anonymous group of men, then
performed
solo. With Lightcap playing a drone and Cleaver improvising
alongside Jones’s melody, “No More My Lord” is a potent, vital plea,
seemingly drawing from his personal history, as well as the song’s and the
history of Parchman Farm, known as an abusive prison that was run like a
pre-Civil War plantation.
All this history feeds into Legend of e’Boi, which, per the liner
notes, acts as a means of acknowledging and processing trauma and
overcoming the stigmatization of so-called poor mental health. In the
enclosed booklet, following Harmony Holiday’s liner notes, Jones asked
several artists to listen to the album and reflect on what they felt and
heard. In this way, every moment on the album is a revelation and
invitation—going back to the portrait on the album cover—asking us to
reflect, listen, and to also participate.
There’s no true center of the album, but the couplet “We Outside”/“We
Inside Now” might be closest. In 20 minutes, Jones, Cleaver, and Lightcap
lean way in, then pull back, a patiently swaying rhythm gradually settling
into one of Jones’s most (least?) unvarnished solos that will pierce
whatever shell surrounds you and slowly hopefully support your peeling it
away, not leaving something behind as much as baring yourself to yourself.
Maybe perhaps, you’ll listen to all this music and come away thinking, “It
inside me now.”