Musician Angel Bat Dawid has revealed a new way of making jazz. It's just that simple. On her extraordinary new album, The Oracle, out now via International Anthem, the Chicago-based vocalist and multi-instrumentalist sings all the vocal parts and plays all the instruments. Through a set of overdubs, Angel has managed to offer up a release with all the improvisation and musical call-and-response of a recording of a jazz ensemble, and yet it's one in which every player is her. It's a radical, conceptually-bold release, and the sort of thing that expands a listener's vision every bit as much as that superb Damon Locks - Black Monument Ensemble album from a few months ago did.
Opener "Destination (Dr. Yusef Lateef)" is as light as air, Dawid's clarinet and overdubbed vocals carrying a listener into the heavens, while "Black Family" is a tune that rides a subtle drum-beat towards a conclusion that is free jazz. If one comparison point here is likely to be the music of Sun Ra, another may be Oliver Nelson. "Impepho", for instance, is a neat blending of symphonic textures with woodwinds that are flitting over the surface of the melody with an inquisitiveness that suggests the large compositions of Nelson, or even Charles Mingus. The cut is the bridge between "What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black (Dr. Margaret Burroughs)" and "We Are Starzz", two of the real highlights here on The Oracle. The first selection uses a choral effect atop a simple, yet elegant musical pattern for a tune that's nearly a hymn, while the other track is looser, the vocals naturally searching. If "We Are Starzz" nods in the direction of Alice Coltrane, it also, delicately, points towards gospel, with Angel's overdubbed vocals massed in support of a deeply spiritual effort.
The second half of The Oracle finds Angel Bat Dawid joined by the only other musician on this record, Asher Simiso Gamedze on drums on "Capetown", an epic-length improvisation. The cut is the clearest example on this release of something that feels like free jazz, or at least what most will find familiar and easy to compare to works from the heyday of the form from the late Sixties and Seventies. Still, given that, the entirety of The Oracle is what felt transformative to me. Angel Bat Dawid has done something extraordinary here in terms of process, such that the very notion of what makes up improvisational jazz has been upended by her proof of how to do it all by oneself (should one be musically gifted). And on some other level, it's the way the record pushes at the edges of conventional jazz that informs and enlightens. The Oracle flat-out expands our definition of what contemporary jazz can offer, as well as takes a listener on a journey, one informed by a sense of Afro-Futurism and spiritualism. The Oracle is unlike much else you are going to hear this year, and it feels progressive in the best possible way. This is, really, the sort of album that feeds the soul as much as the ear.
The Oracle by Angel Bat Dawid is out now via International Anthem.
[Photo: Alejandro Ayala]