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.
Also out this month
Do Not Be Afraid is the second LP by Vula Viel, a London trio featuring Jim Hart on drums, Ruth Goller on bass and Bex Burch on a giant Ghanaian xylophone called a gyil. All three interlock very satisfyingly – as if plotted on graph paper – to create a geometric African minimalism, sometimes with appealingly naive vocals. Highlights include I Learn, where Goller’s fuzz bass adds a thrilling post-punk edge to proceedings. And Works on Paper, a collaboration between Venezuelan composer Gil Sansón and Canadian painter Lance Austin Olsen, is a series of spooky and deeply immersive field recordings, spoken-word interludes and electronic drones.
