Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

The Exploratory Instincts Of Shabaka And The Ancestors’ We Are Sent Here By History

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on Impulse! Records
Reviewed by Henry Cherry

Shabaka Hutchings, the London based musician behind The Comet is Coming and Sons of Kemet, had just  released a second recording with his South African based project, Shabaka & the Ancestors when Covid-19 canceled the promotional tour along with everything else in the world. Hutchings spoke with NPR about the illness, its impact on touring musicians and the financial hit the quarantine has put on those musicians. “Literally, all my gigs in the next two months have been canceled. And everyone I know is in the same boat.” Questions surround the entire world as markets crash, people lose jobs across every sector, and the illness continues to mount. Hutchings isn’t a doomsayer. “We have to make the best of the situation, or the situation will just be tragic. And all situations have the potential to be tragic, or the potential to be tragic and transformative.” [Read more…]

The ’10s: Best Jazz Releases Of The Decade

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by Henry Cherry

In the last decade of his life, Duke Ellington, probably America’s greatest composer, had a resurgence. Jazz was in turmoil, expanding and contracting at the same time, not unlike a star going supernova. In Ellington’s case, he was reincorporating various musical influences. He returned to the sacred music of his early life, to New Orleans, to the songbook of his musical foil, Billy Strayhorn, after Strayhorn died in 1967. But it is the sacred music that truly reinvigorated what would be the master’s last era. [Read more…]

Anthony Braxton’s Accessibly Antithetical Quartet (New Haven) 2014

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on Firehouse 12 Records
Reviewed by John Payne

This monumental four-CD box set photographs the one-time meeting of an avant all-star and super-like-minded foursome: The infamously abstruse saxophonist and conceptualist Anthony Braxton partnered with Nels Cline (guitar), Greg Saunier (drums) and Taylor Ho Bynum (brass). It is music that, because of the heavily theoretical predilections of its “bandleader,” might suggest a sound that reeks of a dry formality. It doesn’t. It does present a number of issues and questions. [Read more…]

Mythological Jazz Asteroids in the Afro Futurist Space Belt

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Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery: The Comet is Coming
on Impulse!

Reviewed by Henry Cherry

Experience by itself, the phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl said, is not science. In the hands of London band The Comet is Coming, experience is a strict adherence to improvisation and exploration that filters the scientific process into a musical call and response. It has purified their sound. So perhaps Husserl is only part right. Maybe some experience is scientific. Maybe some music is science. [Read more…]