By Ferruccio Martinotti
There’s no point in denying that the 2024 forum’s final playlist was suffering for the lack of one of the year’s aces, There is a garden, by Beings, the group that saw Zoh Amba (saxophone, vocals, acoustic guitar, harmonium, piano) along with Steve Gunn (electric guitar), Shahzad Ismaily (bass, synth) and Jim White (drums). The blog’s rules of the game are crystal clear: no database/no review, no review/no playlist: fair and simple, “dura lex sed lex.”*
Beside such small, negligible personal regrets, the reason to remember and to quote the above mentioned record is because the affinities with Sun, the one reviewed here, are pretty consistent, even though the musicians involved are totally different and Zoh’s pastoral Sandy Denny-esque voice is set beside. This time, the sublime Tennessee-born New York-based musician is teaming up with Caroline Morton on bass, Lex Korton on piano and Miguel Russel on percussion and decided to release the album on Smalltown Supersound, as a connection to the late titan Peter Brotzmann, who was both a spiritual mentor to Amba and issued several records on the label. For Amba the human cotè of the music is the architrave of her artistic outcome, so building up personal bonds among the band members before the recording process was a cornerstone of the whole project: “We spent days just playing together and I was trying to mentally take notes of what naturally wanted to exist in this band, before giving instructions or handing out sheet music, I wanted to see where we were all standing in life, right at that moment. From there, I started carving out the process with them”, she says. The final result shows a collection of nine compositions, three of them solo, and is absolutely quintessential of her music and of her peculiarity on the jazz scene: free, taking-no-prisoners outbursts (“Interbeing”, “Forevermore”, “Like the Sun”), interspersed with suffused, nightly atmosphere (“Ma”, “At noon”) and poignant textures (“Seaside”, “Champa Flower”).
Here is another adventurous chapter in the astonishing biography of an artist who, at the age of 25, already crossed the blades with the likes of Sorey, Corsano, Orcutt, Zorn, Parker, Mela, Haino, Iyer, Drummond, Edwards, Shipp, Perelman and got covers and profiles, not only by every jazz magazines all over the globe but by The New York Times or The Guardian as well. It would be a huge mistake considering Amba flirting with the mainstream: we, keen on “lateral” (euphemism…) kind of music, often are fundamentalist in our judgments and pretty suspicious to see shadows of sell out or betrayal beyond every corner, but here there is really no reason at all. While listening to her music, it’s really difficult to wipe out the imagine of this young musician playing in the middle of nowhere woods of Kingsport, Tenn. before heading northeast, ending her path in New York with David Murray. As the British writer Geoff Dyer wrote: “One can envisage seeing Amba half a century from now, playing a selection of ballads at Carnegie Hall or the Village Vanguard. But who knows where she will end up, what twist and turns her career might take? Tradition in jazz has to be a springboard into the future though one can rarely tell what this future will sound like”. We let to Amba the final words that touched us from the very deep: “Heart takes its course. That feeling merges to silent sweetness. That is this journey. Reflecting and feeling my heart overpour.
Knowing this is only the beginning of the journey and what was captured on this recording will never exist again and the next song will be closer and closer to the center of the heart. My heart sits in the deep light dear Peter Brotzmann shared to this universe. I hear his spirit each morning. This music is only a reflection of a soul that is ever changing and trying to reach beyond the sun”.
Foot note: Zoh, Mette, Ava, gabby, Kris, Anna, Tomeka, Moor, Savannah, Angelica, Sylvie, Mary, Sofia, Valentina, Matana…it seems that nowadays the most challenging projects belong to a pack of fearless she-daredevils that through an unashamed, brave, loose, untamed approach shattered the crystal ceiling and have begun to demolish the floor. Keep on going, ladies: Jamie left but, with you, the building is in super safe and reliable hands.
*editors note: these are almost the rules, the album does need to be reviewed on the Freejazzblog or by the lister somewhere in order to be eligible for listing in the end of year lists