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Financial Time – 8 January 2019

Vocal Classics of the Black Avant-Garde, Café Oto, London — a taste of the age of experimentalism

The band captured the genre-bending energy of the 1960s and 70s

Mike Hobart

“The band captured the genre-bending energy of those times without imitation and added emotional force to the songs presented. (…) Mitchener was a syllable-stretching, sound-crunching force of nature throughout.”


From left, Elaine Mitchener, Dante Micheaux, Jason Yarde, Mark Sanders and Byron Wallen at Café Oto © Roger Thomas

The songs presented in this ebullient two-hour performance ranged from declamatory operatics to beautifully read poetry; the delivery was a close cousin to the riffs, rumbles and bursts of collective improvisation of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The band entered snaking through the full-to-bursting crowd clapping off-kilter rhythms led by Jason Yarde’s ear-piercing kazoo. Once on stage, vocalist Elaine Mitchener whooped and growled, drummer Mark Sanders confirmed the New Orleans beat and Alexander Hawkins’s percussive piano abstractions exploded over Neil Charles’s malevolent and purposeful bass. The piece, written by Jeanne Lee and appropriately called “Maximum Capacity of the Room”, featured the full range of Mitchener’s gravelly sonics, pure-toned sustains and dramatic vibrato-laden swoops in an uplifting maelstrom of rhythm and brass. Lee’s apocalyptic “In These Last Days” came next, here transformed into a showcase for Yarde’s alto sax and self-sampling electronica, followed by the operatic Eric Dolphy composition “Jim Crow”. Mitchener assembled the project to re-interpret the racially conscious experimentalism that characterised 1960s/70s African-American expressionism. Lyrics, either deconstructed by Mitchener or delivered through Dante Micheaux’s dignified oratory, painted a graphic and articulate picture of day-to-day cruelty. Joseph Jarman’s “Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City” stood out for its provocative juxtapositions, Archie Shepp’s “On This Night” for its dignified melancholy, and Jayne Cortez’s “Lexington/ 96 Street Stop” for its wry observation of the subway stop “where all the white people leave the train”, as Micheaux said. But it was not just the words that made this evening special. The band captured the genre-bending energy of those times without imitation and added emotional force to the songs presented. A triptych of readings inspired by Caribbean migration to the UK was set up by off-kilter reggae, gained extra focus when recited over solo double bass and played out with Yarde’s loops of electronica. Mitchener was a syllable-stretching, sound-crunching force of nature throughout and trumpeter Byron Wallen’s muted glissandi and razor-sharp stabs consistently dovetailed with Yarde’s full-toned alto and baritone sax. The raucous finale, a cover of Mary Lou Williams’s “Zoning Fungus”, had features for all, Hawkins’s warp-factor stride fracturing into abstract tinkles and Mitchener introducing each member of the band in song. A final burst of band improv grew to a peak, faded into a solitary sustained note, and the long single set was done. ★★★★☆

10 January 2019

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