By Stuart Broomer
I first listened to Onilu on Blue Monday, January 20th, 2025,
the most depressing day of the year, at least according to a notion
invented by a British travel company a few years ago. In Toronto, the high
temperature for the day was -6° Celsius, the low -11°.
There was some snow and an Arctic chill coming from the North. There was a
different chill coming across Lake Ontario from the South. Fortunately,
Canada had just ended a mail strike, so there was new music in the house:
Onilu immediately warmed things up.
“Onilu” is a Yoruba word for drummers and the band consists of three
percussionists from three generations: Joe Chambers, Chad Taylor and Kevin
Diehl. They’re best known as drummers, but percussion here extends to
keyboards as well – pianos, vibraphones and marimbas, crucial melodic
components in this invocation of African music. There are also “ideophones”
(“an instrument the whole of which vibrates to produce a sound when struck,
shaken, or scraped, such as a bell, gong, or rattle,” OED).
The credits are expansive: Joe Chambers plays conga, drum kit, idiophones,
marimba, shakere and vibraphone; Kevin Diehl,
batá drums, cajóns, drum kit, electro-acoustic drum kit
, Guagua and shakere; Chad Taylor: alfaia, clave, clay drums, drum kit,
mbira, marimba, piano, tongue drum, tympani and vibraphone. Tracking down
descriptions of some of those instruments might resemble work, but
listening to Onilu is an extraordinary pleasure, a world of resonant
instruments that seem to vibrate, shimmer and transmit light, sounds that
might suggest a waterfall of fire, something both benign and impossible.
Here one feels the materiality of instruments, and the processes of their
making, whether from steel, wood, clay or skin.
The eight tracks, ranging from 4’32” to 7’25”, are mostly compositions on
traditional patterns by one or two members of the band. The exceptions will
immediately suggest the trio’s range. “Nyamaropa”, with mbira (“thumb
piano”) played beautifully by Taylor, is an ancient melody that appeared on
an extraordinary collection in Nonesuch’s series of field recordings over
fifty years ago:
The Soul of Mbira: Traditions of the Shona People of Rhodesia
by Paul Berliner, most recently available on CD as
Zimbabwe: Soul of Mbira.
At the opposite pole is Bobby Hutcherson’s “Same Shame”, with Chambers (who
played drums on the original 1968 recording) turning to vibraphone, Diehl
on drum kit and Taylor on tympani.
The same levels of virtuosity and flexibility manifest themselves in
different ways on every track. On the Diehl/Taylor composed “Estuary Stew”,
the group stretches instrumentation to have Chambers on ideophones, Diehl
on batá drums and electro-acoustic drum kit, and Taylor on marimba,
creating a complex mix of acoustic resonances and electronics. Taylor’s
“Mainz” (previously recorded in two different versions by Jeff Parker) is
particularly tuneful, with Chambers on marimba, Diehl on drum kit and
Taylor on piano and drum kit. For sheer rhythmic energy and complexity,
there’s “A Meta Onilu”, with everyone playing drum kits, Chambers adding
vibraphone and Taylor, mbira.
Onilu is consistently declarative work, emotionally open,
sonically generous, three masters of different generations celebrating a
shared musical passion.