Chicago-based artist, musician, educator, and activist
Damon Locks introduced his
Black Monument Ensemble with 2019's
Where Future Unfolds, a complex, sprawling work splayed across vanguard jazz, gritty soul, funk, and poetry. Now, its follow-up, was recorded during the global COVID-19 pandemic as the killings of unarmed Black citizens George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and a consequential presidential campaign captured the global imagination.
Locks and his collaborators responded to these societal and cultural tensions with jarring sounds and fully coherent narrative expressions of emotion ranging from anger and grief to relentless hope. Through the spring and summer of 2020,
Locks composed music and created samples as protests roiled on the streets. In August, he assembled clarinetist
Angel Bat Dawid, cornetist
Ben LaMar Gay, and a chorale of vocalists --
Phillip Armstrong, Monique Golding, Tramaine Parker, Richie Parks, Erica Rene, and Eric Tre’von -- behind Chicago's Experimental Sound Studios and cut the new material in single takes, accompanied by cicadas in the surrounding trees. A month later,
Locks, drummer
Dana Hall, and percussionist Arif Smith added beats, samples, and loops.
The title-track opener commences with a chorus of tribal drums and the choir offering an Eastern-tinged spiritual soul melody testifying that power resides in the undefined historical present.
Dawid's spidery clarinet moves across jazz history from
George Lewis and
Sidney Bechet to
Alvin Batiste and
John Carter, as
LaMar Gay's cornet stridently joins her, the singers, and the buzzing cicadas. "Keep Your Mind Free" begins with the sampled film dialogue: "Did anything interesting happen today?" amid hypnotic, zig-zagging percussion, sampled brass, and electronics. Across the narrative foreground, a narrated incident of street vandalism warns of apocalyptic reckoning.
Lamar Gay's muted horn guides the drums through bluesy Afro-funk and modal improv as the vocalists exhort listeners to stay vigilant. Assembled, it speaks to the place of imagination as the locus point for change as
Hall and Smith lock onto a groove attenuated by vocal polyphony and contrapuntal winds and brass. "Barbara Jones-Hogu and Elizabeth Catlett Discuss Liberation" and "Movement and You" are two short cues -- both under two minutes -- that offer a grounded context for the ten-and-a-half-minute closer "The Body Is Electric." This spiraling jam weds Caribbean and African polyrhythms to free, hard-swinging improv from
Dawid, smoothly chanted and sung choral lines, jagged samples, and undulant group pulses. At four minutes, the vocalists lead a rhythmic shift toward carnival funk as
Dawid wails joyously through the grain of her instrument. She exchanges center stage appearances with the drummers and the chorus as
Lamar Gay's horn and
Locks' samples effect a swirling tapestry of steely affirmation and hopeful resolve. Based on the profundity of its content and the jagged beauty in its execution, Now belongs in the pantheon of culturally important works that include
We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite,
Eddie Gale's
Black Rhythm Happening, and
Sun Ra's Nuclear War; they all successfully join socio-political polemics to spirituality and kaleidoscopically expressive art in edifying all who encounter them. ~ Thom Jurek