By Neil Tesser
Angel Bat Dawid — clarinetist, pianist, poet, vocalist — produces hard-to-categorize works on an operatic scale, and not only musically. Dawid’s sprawling, episodic albums tackle grand themes, in this case the place and role of Black folk in America. Dawid says she is exploring “new Afro sonic realities and futures,” a phrase that conjures her Chicago precursor Sun Ra.
On
Requiem for Jazz, Dawid doubles down by using as her inspiration
The Cry of Jazz, the cult 1959 film that interspersed clips of Sun Ra’s band (among others) as part of a stagy mixed-race discussion about what jazz means to different audiences. For filmmaker Ed Bland, the dichotomy lay in white intellectualization of an art form vital to the emotional survival of the American Negro; Dawid aims to continue this “loving conversation that we need to have with each other.”
A fascinating mélange in 24 interconnected movements,
Requiem features a four-voice choir and Dawid’s 19-piece band Tha ArkeStarzz (another Sun Ra homage). The opening “Jazz Is Merely the Negroes’ Cry of Joy & Suffering” sets the tone; another title proclaims jazz “the one element in American life where whites must be humble to the Negro.” In the lustrous penultimate movement, starring nonagenarian Sun Ra saxophonist Marshall Allen, Dawid repeats, “The death of jazz is the first fake cry of the salvation of the Negro through the birth of a new way of life.” (In her expressionistic incantations, she summons Nina Simone and AACM elder Amina Claudine Myers.) There’s plenty else here, from field hollers to gospel, all of it highlighted by Dawid’s spoken-word intensity, as well as the quartet of powerful voices that appear throughout.
In reclaiming Black music from analysis that slights the “cry of jazz,” Dawid speaks to the vast majority of writers and critics steeped in jazz history but also the post-swing improvisation that has proliferated here. For me, Dawid’s redefinition of “jazz,” as a vast highway of many other idioms, may be a bridge too far, as much as I enjoy the overall result. But that doesn’t stop me from applauding
Requiem for Jazz as an audacious, often mesmerizing, and deeply stirring musical provocation — whatever label you prefer to use.
https://open.spotify.com/album/6mabcAFzeVQG34Fx8qRm79?si=H9sV2rvtRyKWnZ5Se-7nPA
