The Oracle (International Anthem)
Angel Bat Dawid
Released February 8, 2019
The Guardian Highest Rated Jazz Albums of All Time
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kmsJkH6gYCwOwvDhMEfRQyWAo2QWZN9Sc
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/4OCWb04P28RC9BSsuYboPQ?si=eScItkRTT264lFLwTaCfoQ
About:
Composer, clarinetist, singer & spiritual jazz soothsayer Angel Bat Dawid descended on Chicago’s jazz & improvised music scene just a few years ago. In very short time, the potency, prowess, spirit & charisma of her cosmic musical proselytizing has taken her from relatively unknown improviser to borderline ubiquitous performer in Chicago’s avant-garde. On any given night you can find Angel adding aura to ensembles led by Ben LaMar Gay, or Damon Locks, or Jaimie Branch, or Matthew Lux, or even, on a Summer night in 2018, onstage doing a woodwind duo with Roscoe Mitchell. For her recorded debut on International Anthem, The Oracle, we’ve chosen to release a batch of tracks that Angel created entirely alone – performing, overdubbing & mixing all instruments & voices by her self – recorded using only her cell phone in various locations, from London UK to Cape Town RSA, but primarily from her residency in the attic of the historic Radcliffe Hunter mansion in Bronzeville, Southside, Chicago.
Track Listing:
1. Destination (Dr. Yusef Lateef) 02:22
2. Black Family 06:18
3. What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black (Dr. Margaret Burroughs) 03:20
4. Impepho 03:39
5. We Are Starzz 04:23
6. London 02:46
7. Capetown (feat. Asher Simiso Gamedze) 15:36
8. The Oracle 05:23
Personnel:
Angel Bat Dawid: all instruments & voices
Asher Simiso Gamedze: drums (7)
Recorded & Mixed by Angel Bat Dawid
Mastered by David Allen
Cover Photo by Grandpa Rev. AJ Elmore Sr.
Review:
Describing herself as a clarinettist, composer and “spiritual jazz soothsayer”, Angel Bat Dawid is clearly a busy woman. She runs a record store in Chicago’s South Side, organises interdisciplinary events with the Participatory Music Coalition and often sits in with assorted musicians across Chicago’s music venues. She even wrote an opera last year inspired by the Song of Solomon, featuring dancers, puppeteers and dense orchestrations performed by her own Cosmic Love Arkestra.
The music she records under her own name, however, tends to be much more introspective and hymnal, multitracked on clarinet, piano, percussion and vocals. The Oracle, her first proper release (out on 9 February), was built up from fragments recorded on her phone, often backstage before gigs or while touring the world. Instead of sounding like clunky, lo-fi demos, the finished article resembles a series of spectral, reverb-drenched messages from the afterlife, passed through the dub chamber.
Dawid’s clarinet playing is garrulous and slightly wayward, with a wonderfully slippery quality that sometimes invokes Eric Dolphy, particularly on Cape Town, a freely improvised duet with South African drummer Asher Simiso Gamedze. Impepho is a polite freakout for clarinet and bass clarinet that sounds like Miles Davis’s On the Corner being played in slow motion; while a funky waltz for piano and clarinet called London shows that she can write tight, properly structured tunes.
But Dawid doesn’t really sing like an orthodox jazz vocalist, and often layers her oddly operatic voice to create disorientating effects, reminiscent of Steve Reich’s aural collages. On the haunting ballad What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black, she sings fragments of a 1963 poem by Margaret Burroughs in a quavering mezzo-soprano – as if performing a Victorian parlour song – endlessly overlaying the melody until we are left with a ghostly palimpsest of voices. On We Are Starzz she duets with herself; one voice sounding like an opera contralto, the other like the ecstatic babble of a gospel singer. This is an intriguing album, futuristic in tone but hardwired to an ancient and deeply spiritual vision of what music can achieve.
John Lewis (The Guardian)
