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Posts tagged ‘Amina Claudine Myers’

Aug 16

Tunes of peace

Earlier today I closed the last page of Regime Change, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s epic dissection of the first 15 months of Donald Trump’s second term at president of the United States. It’s a close-quarters observation of megalomania operating in real time, reaching its climax as the US/Israeli attack on Iran founders in the Strait of Hormuz, a hubristic miscalculation which one profoundly hopes will eventually define Trump’s reputation in the eyes of history. One can only wonder at the identity of the source who gave the two New York Times reporters such extraordinary material.

Now I need something to listen to, and here at hand is Peace Anthems, a new album of 10 short pieces by artists associated with Red Hook Records, the label founded five years ago by the producer Sun Chung, whose first release was Hanamichi, by the late pianist Masabumi Kikuchi. The new release, timed to coincide with the anniversary, is specially commissioned by Chung from the artists, who were invited to contribute pieces inspired by the theme of peace.

The trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and the pianist Amina Claudine Myers, whose album Central Park made many best-of-the-year lists in 2024, provide two sketches, “Sonic Requiem X” and “Reflections on Palestine”. Smith also appears on “Three Years Later” with the drummer Andrew Cyrille and the modular synthesiser player Qasim Naqvi, whose solo piece, “Al Badawi”, opens the album. Moor Mother’s invocations and BlankFor.ms’ electronics combine on “Imaginary Lines”. The singer Martha Deribe and the pianist Simone Maggio are heard on “War Is Over”. The guitarist Taylor Deupree, the trombonist Kalia Vandever and the bassist Thomas Morgan contribute Deupree’s composition “Wither Light and Airy”. Kit Downes gets two chances to demonstrate his skill with a pipe organ on “Into the Woods — Three Weary Calls” and “Closing Meditation for OM”, the second of which concludes the sequence.

The mood is restrained and reflective, as if the performers agreed that the message would be allowed to find its way gently into the listeners’ ears. These are little tone poems whose delicacy is their strength. And nowhere is that more apparent than on a piece called “The River of Imjin” by the Korean saxophonist and composer Sungjae Son (photographed above), whose previous release, Near East Quartet, appeared in 2016, at a time when Sun Chung was an in-house producer for the ECM label.

“The River of Imjin”, bearing a name made famous by a battle between Chinese and UN (predominantly British) forces during the Korean War in 1951, finds Son overdubbing his tenor, bass clarinet and pump organ on two choruses of something that sounds like an old Methodist hymn tune. If you have fond memories of Thelonious Monk’s “Abide With Me”, John Surman’s “Doxology” or Don Cherry’s “Desireless”, then this fits right alongside them. After 414 pages describing Trump’s attempt to drag the world into his own darkness, sometimes two minutes and 15 seconds of music is all it takes to switch the light back on.

* Peace Anthems is out now on Red Hook Records. All proceeds will go to the International Red Cross: https://redhookrecords.bandcamp.com/album/peace-anthems

Jun 10

A point of stillness

There is a balm in Gilead, according to an African American spiritual whose lines were borrowed from the Old Testament Book of Jeremiah, and there is a profound sense of healing in Solace of the Mind, the new solo album by the pianist and organist Amina Claudine Myers.

Born 83 years ago in Blackwell, Arkansas, Myers moved to Chicago after graduating from music college and became a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in 1966. Ten years later she moved to New York. Before this new album, her last one was as a duo with the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, a dedication to Central Park, released a year ago. Her early albums for the Leo label, Song for Mother E and a tribute to Bessie Smith, recorded in 1979 and 1980 respectively, were recently made available on Bandcamp.

She is a musician of great sophistication, rich in imagination and technical resources, but in this recital she pares everything back to the essence and what we hear is her soul. Like Abdullah Ibrahim, she can take an ancient structures and allow it to glow from somewhere deep within. The simpler the hymn and the more straightforwardly it’s played, the great the inner strength it exudes. As long, of course, as the playing is done by an Ibrahim or a Myers.

There are nine original pieces here, starting with a delicately surging reinterpretation of “Song for Mother E”. Others include the brief and stately “Hymn for John Lee Hooker” — more hymn than Hooker — and the rhapsodic “Twilight”. On “Ode to My Ancestors”, recorded at her home, she moves to her Hammond B3 and recites a poem over sustained organ notes which, thanks to a phasing effect, seem to be fluttering in a breeze. The only non-original is the lovely spiritual “Steal Away”, which gently summons a whole world of African American culture; the whole recital seems to pivot around it. The closing benediction is a study in patience and exquisite phrasing titled “Beneath the Sun”.

What you won’t find here is anything remotely resembling a display of virtuosity. What you might discover, amid an increasingly maddened world, is a welcome point of stillness. Highly recommended.

* Amina Claudine Myers’ Solace of the Mind is released on June 20 on the Red Hook label (redhookrecords.com). The uncredited photograph is borrowed from Myers’ website.

Jun 17

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A stroll in the park

Although Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers are both longtime members of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, they had never recorded together before going into the studio to make Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens. Both are originally from the South — Wadada from Mississippi, Amina from Arkansas — but here they are in a suite of duets for trumpet and keyboards whose title refers to Manhattan’s 843-acre green space.

All but one of the pieces were written by Wadada, who likes to tie his compositions to specific sources of inspiration. In the past, these have included Rosa Parks, Thelonious Monk, Emmett Till, Billie Holiday, Martin Luther King and America’s national parks. His six pieces on Central Park find the two musicians conjuring solemn meditations, perhaps informed by the knowledge that part of the vast acreage was seized by compulsory purchase from the inhabitants of Seneca Village, a largely black settlement on what is now the Upper West Side, with a population of just over 200 (some of them Native Americans and Irish immigrants) in about 50 houses when it was taken and razed in 1857.

Individual sections are named after the Conservatory Garden — formal gardens located near 105th street — and two water features: the Harlem Meer, a man-made lake in the north-eastern corner, created at the confluence of three streams, and the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, a little further south, between 86th and 96th Streets. Two others are titled “Albert Ayler — A Meditation in Light” and “Imagine — A Mosaic for John Lennon”. Ayler lived mostly in Harlem between 1963 and his death in 1970. Lennon died outside the Dakota building, where he and Yoko Ono lived, on Central Park West.

There’s nothing programmatic about these pieces, nothing to provide an explicit reminder of Jackie O, Ayler, Lennon or large expanses of water, although I suppose “Central Park at Sunset”, the sixth piece, could be described as a tone poem, at a push. But there is a sense of weight and contemplation to them all, and a powerful continuity of mood. These are veterans — both are 82 — but their playing is poised, firm, probing and heartfelt. Variations are provided by Wadada’s occasional use of a mute and Amina’s switch to a Hammond B3 on the Jackie dedication. And at the midpoint of the album she gets five minutes to herself for a solo called “When Was”, the piano ringing with echoes of hymns and ragtime airs until she gathers them up and and shakes them out in a terse, pounding finale.

From Louis Armstrong with Earl Hines through Ruby Braff with Ellis Larkins to Arve Henriksen with Harmen Fraanje, trumpet and piano duets are a precious jazz tradition. This, from two of the elders, is a very special one.

* Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens is on the Red Hook label. The composite photo of Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers is by Luke Marantz.