At first it sounds like a simple request to the sound engineer, but it soon becomes more like a plea for salvation. “Pick up Brother Julian. That bass needs to hit,” Angel Bat Dawid exhorts early on her new album LIVE, a documentary of a concert she and her band Tha Brothahood gave during JazzFest Berlin in November 2019. “Turn it up! Fuck off!” she continues, her voice quickly reaching the edge of frenzy, as if she's wandering in the desert and the prospect of a lower end is an oasis on the horizon.
Her screams join the rhythmic flow of syllables she uses to introduce the tune, a rootsy rendition of 'Black Family', from her 2019 debut album The Oracle. “Black, Black,” he repeats, sometimes cutting the word to emphasize its percussive quality, sometimes letting it flow like a lilt, sometimes adding a long rolled “r,” like a rapper imitating the sound of automatic gunfire. When she starts adding “Up, up,” — as in “Turn up the bass” and perhaps also “up with Black family” — her apparent outburst takes on a different color, as another element in a melange that sets the unity and music as salves for black pain. You might be wondering: was it really the mix-up, or was the whole episode on purpose, somehow part of the make-up? Could both be true?
A clarinetist, singer, composer and keyboardist with roots in the Chicago jazz scene, Dawid has been featured in The Oracle as an idiosyncratic auteur. She composed, performed, recorded and mixed the album almost entirely on her own, layering instruments and vocals into a multitracking smartphone app. The OracleIts hermetic quality was part of its appeal, but Dawid's vision was always more communal and participatory. In a 2019 interview with the Chicago Readersaid that she originally thought of the solo tracks as demos for the Brothahood to learn and play with her.
LIVE is something of a manifestation of that original vision, using her compositions as vehicles for ecstatic group improvisation, featuring a diverse ensemble of multi-instrumentalists and vocalists. It features plenty of the instrumental work you'd expect from a free jazz album, but it also seems intent on capturing the full expressive range of the human voice. Members of Dawid and Brothahood, Deacon Otis Cooke and Viktor Le Givens, deliver beautiful and wistful singing, chilling sci-fi vocal chants, impassioned monologues, playful free associations. Often, a melody begins with a phrase repeated like a mantra, which they gradually destroy and rebuild into dazzling new rhythms, much as an instrumentalist might construct a solo by twisting and reshaping small bits of the written melody. On “The Wicked Shall Not Prevail,” all three improvise vocals in combination over a polyrhythmic bed of percussion and electronics, which Dawid occasionally augments with pointillist clarinet melody and shards of dissonant electric piano. It is an overwhelming display of musical and verbal invention.
from our partners at https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/angel-bat-dawid-tha-brothahood-live/
