It’s been a while since someone bragged that a work was the result of a drug intoxication. The drugs often didn’t go well, which is why they have long ceased to be a distinguishing feature of the subcultures. So it might not matter that the English trumpeter Emma-Jean Thackray on her debut album “Yellow” (Movementt) processed a psychedelic high, which – as she says – was an experience that changed her life. Or at least their view of the world. The record could stand on its own anyway. With its musical density and depth, it is currently one of the most successful releases on the London jazz scene. Much of Thackray’s own story lies in the music that began her musical life in Yorkshire, where she grew up as the first female trumpeter in a brass band.
The force of this traditional British brass orchestra is much more frenetic than that of an alpine brass band and is more reminiscent of New Orleans and Serbia. It’s also much more archaic than the big band music she later studied at Trinity College London. She then layers Afro-Beat, Disco, Grime, electronic experiments and spiritual jazz on top of it. The fact that the listener is sometimes suddenly torn out of a flow in which one feels comfortable has to do with the psychedelic experiences mentioned at the beginning, which fill the term “acid jazz” with life again.
Thackray, with her psychedelic escapade, clearly refers to a historical chapter in cultural history. Besides the fine arts and films by Quentin Tarantino, there are only a few art forms that work with as much historical awareness as jazz. Always has. But it is not just the forms, it is above all the attitudes that this generation anchors in their music. The political anger of the Black Power, the return to one’s own roots, the spiritual search for meaning of the Aquarian Age. And this is where psychedelics comes into play, which is also experiencing a renaissance in therapy. Because it can create a feeling in your mind that you are part of a much larger whole that played a major role in the spiritual jazz of the late sixties and early seventies.
When Thackray now packs this into a contemporary sound with all the electronics and a fireworks display of the groove, she docks very clearly with a widespread view of the present, in which the problems of this planet and societies can only be overcome with a tremendous collective healing process. When she claims unity, attitude and a certain cosmic awareness with her music and her lyrics, these are not just quotes from a time when jazz and spirituality were at the forefront of the emancipation movements. It is the echo of a very contemporary mood.
Nobody can avoid the Coltranes. Above all, Alice is known as the godmother of a spirituality that is musically soaring. And just as her husband John became the base for all tenor saxophonists who came after him, she shaped the harp, which is admittedly much more exotic in jazz. Brandee Younger is the new virtuoso here. After her minimalist duo album with bassist Dezron Douglas from last year, she makes her debut on the Impulse label with the lavishly produced “Somewhere Different”. Not only that she can assert herself against massive hip-hop beats because she compensates for the natural delicacy of her instrument with the radiance of the arpeggio and glissando runs. She is also so virtuoso that she makes the very own flow that a harp creates the dominant rhythm element of the album. How broad the genres are, shows, as so often, the guest list, on the bass legend Ron Carter next to the drummer Marcus Gilmore and the Tank-and-the-Bangas-Singer Tarriona Ball is standing.
As brilliantly as Thackray and Younger deal with historical references, it becomes clear that such quotes alone do not go far. The multi-instrumentalist and producer Adrian Younge has long been traded as a retro child prodigy in America. Together with the A Tribe Called Quest-DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad has been running the label Jazz Is Dead in Los Angeles for four years, on which the two publish an impressive number of albums full of retro quotes from the super hipster jazz years. For some time now they have also been hiring a legend from the 1970s, either from political jazz or from the heyday of bossa pop. Roy Ayers and Gary Bartz have already been guests, as have Marcos Valle and João Donato. You always know what the two were actually up to. However, the eighth episode in the series is with Brian Jackson, the former companion of the political lyricist Gil Scott-Heron, is an example of the weaknesses of a project that mainly comes from the historical hipster feeling for retro cool and hardly from musicality. A dull echo remains.