By Ferruccio Martinotti
It touched us a lot, discovering, some years ago, that a band was named
after one of the legendary figures of the anti-slavery movement, Harriet
Tubman. A runaway slave who, despite being physically disabled by the
terrible conditions of segregation that she was forced to endure, didn’t hesitate
to help dozens of women and men like her on the road to freedom via the
legendary Underground Railroad. Our band was formed in 1998 and features
Brandon Ross on guitar, with previous collaborations with, among others,
Archie Shepp, Henry Threadgill, Cassandra Wilson, Arrested Development; J.T.
Lewis on drums (beating for Lou Reed, Don Pullen, Herbie Hancock) and the
legendary Melvin Gibbs on bass, a trusted longtime partner of Bill Frisell,
Henry Rollins and Arto Lindsay.
Raised with Miles, Funkadelic, Hendrix and
the sounds of the New York streets as their soundtrack, Tubman aim to
contribute to African-American culture through a clear and focused mission
statement: “Our music reflects the essential impulse of the wave of energy
that entered and embraced the world in the 1960s: depth, creativity,
communication, spirituality, love, individuality, determination, expression,
revelation. We feel that the choice to perform Open Music has a value and
relevance that connects with re-awakening, the new search for restored
meaning that we see and experience wherever and whenever we perform.” This
Open Music, which we can easily translate as Great Black Music, is fittingly
contextualized in the present, with the Ghosts of the past clearly in the
room but not as intruders rendering it a dusty museum practice. So the blues
fades into noise, electro and free take on psychedelic nuances, doom and dub
have no dividing lines, in an ongoing free and powerful flow.
After I am a
man (1998), Prototype (2000), Ascension (2011), Araminta (2017) and The Terror End of Beauty (2018), here is finally the new work, Electrical
field of love. Alongside the three aces, this time we find the voice of
Georgia Anne Muldrow, a true, disruptive novelty of the album. With a solo
career of around twenty albums behind her and a series of prestigious
collaborations (Yasin Bey, J Dilla, Madlib, Erika Badu), Georgia obtained a
Grammy nomination in the Best Urban Contemporary Album category in 2018,
while in 2020, under the moniker Jyoty (given to her by Alice Coltrane, a
family friend), she recorded Mama you can bet, hailed by the NYT as one of
the 20 best albums of the year. In 2022 their paths crossed at the Detroit
Jazz Festival when Muldrow was invited to jump on stage: “it was the gig of
my dreams. When Brandom called me later to do the recording, I almost
fainted”, is the memory of Georgia who adds in relation to the studio work:
“I love to play free. I grew up in this music so it’s my comfort zone.
Brandon and I always seemed to be in spontaneous unison, it felt so natural
to echo each other harmonically. Melvin synthesized everything beautifully.
I didn’t even need to explain myself, they already knew. And I call JT
‘liminal trash’, like someone who screams and whispers at the same time”.
According to Maestro Melvin: “When people get with Tubman, they enter our
world. Georgia Anne has a multidimensional mind and she jumped right in like
she’s one of us.”
A final note to the role of producer Scotty Hard,
essential as in the group’s two previous albums. A protégé of Teo Macero,
Hard applied the production technique used on “Bitches Brew,” “In a Silent
Way,” and “On the Corner,” distilling and reassembling over six hours of
material before arriving at the finished product. “Two days of summoning the
gods and finding inspiration in each other’s creative flow,” Scotty said.
Benevolent gods and inspiration through the roof, we say.