Jaimeo Brown
Transcendence(Motema 233715)
Work Songs(Motema 234152)

“POLITICALLY, this music is a warning to our generation. Global corporations and banks are destroying local cultures throughout the world.

“The same spirituals that gave strength to our ancestors need to give us strength today as we consider the very real possibility of modern global slavery and look in earnest for ways to avoid that unacceptable state.”

Not words you’d expect to find within the sleeve notes of modern jazz albums but Transcendence and Work Songs are unique and imperishable records, the eventual outcome of a master’s thesis by the New York-based drummer Jaimeo Brown.

While gathering research for his thesis, How the Black Church Affected Jazz, Brown came across the recordings of the Gee’s Bend quilters of Alabama, who sang spirituals while threading quilts.

Their renditions deeply affected Brown and inspired him to work with saxophonist J D Allen and guitarist Chris Sholar to create the album Transcendence which combines Brown’s contemporary sounds and reflections with evocative sampling of the music of the Gee’s Bend quilt-makers.

In doing so, he makes history speak to the present and the future from a rural southern location to the cosmopolis of New York City.

From the first lines of This World is a Mean World to Live In, sung by an anonymous quilt-weaver and interpolated by Allen’s blues-drenched notes and Brown’s crashing drums, the fusion radiates deep emotive meaning and moves through the haunting wordless vocal of Somebody’s Knocking.

Power of God brings in the Detroit pianist Geri Allen to find unison with her Alabama forebears.

As their voices fade, her keys talk on, fired by their company and the messages of their sound in a long and deeply moving coda.

History’s memory of Africa is in the very blood of this record.

Brown was in Ghana a week before it was made and his Accra, where this thunderous drums leave their storm across New York, precedes the album’s last two tracks of the Gee’s Bend choir.

In You Needn’t Mind Me Dyin’, Allen’s horn blows potent obbligatos to their words and in This World Ain’t My Home, Brown, Sholar and Allen are deeply and inseparably inside their singing.

In November 2014, three years after the recording of Transcendence, the trio were back in New York to cut Work Songs, using the songs of southern prisoners, coalminers, stonemasons, labourers, collected by the pioneer musicologist Alan Lomax. On several tracks they are joined by the young alto saxophonist of the Mingus Big Band, Jaleel Shaw.

On the opener, Hidden Angel, we hear the voices of Parchman Farm prisoners singing Stewball with Shaw’s sad-toned alto in the foreground. Sholar’s surging guitar accompanies the words of inland ship workers on Mississippi.

Allen’s tenor combines with Virginian workers singing the spiritual Lazarus, then suddenly there are the sister voices of Japanese safflower pickers and Shaw’s alto chorus ringing through Safflower as if the wings of his notes had taken him across continents and oceans. The exhaustion of the Parchman prisoners hollers through I’ll Be So Glad When the Sun Goes Down, before Allen’s pulsating chorus adds his compadres’ witness of 21st-century yearning and struggle. For Brown, singers like those of Gee’s Bend and Parchman Farm bring “a timeless message of hope.”

They are “a microcosm of a much larger universal community that had to use the highest forms of human ingenuity to survive and create.”

An attestation of the soul and brain of jazz of modern times too: tradition, change and struggle in new notes.

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