Requiem for jazz

"The Chicago composer and clarinetist's latest album interrogates the supposed "death" of jazz. Structured as an Afrofuturist requiem, it offers an impassioned look at the genre's role in Black history ... Requiem for Jazz is a complex record, requiring sustained attention and careful thought. Though it lacks the fiery rage and visceral immediacy of 2020's LIVE, its nuanced critique of jazz's role in Black history is an important and necessary continuation of the conversation that [Edward] Bland began over six decades ago. The concert is as much an exorcism as a funeral rite, an attempt to free the participants from the ugly ghosts of America's racist past in order to make a different future possible".

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"Angel Bat Dawid's third album is inspired by the 1959 film The Cry of Jazz, an audiovisual essay that, among other prescient comments on race and appropriation, makes the case that the art form is dead but its spirit lives on ... Dawid responds to this idea with the radical vision of time traveller Sun Ra, who composed the film's soundtrack. The result is a potent ancestral jazz-classical suite linking past, present and future ... It's highly theatrical, sometimes bracingly so, and Dawid has further added beat-driven intermissions in post-production and a track recorded with Sun Ra Arkestra's Marshall Allen and Knoel Scott. The usual downside of a live recording is that you're left with a somewhat faint imprint of the feeling in the moment. But this album elevates the form, and further marks Dawid out as one of the most vital avant-garde artists of her time".

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"Taking her cues from dialogue and music in Edward O. Bland's once-obscure but now available on YouTube 1959 film "The Cry Of Jazz", [Dawid] delivers an infectiously enraged 24-track meditation on the origins, provenance and unlimited scope of the music which has always refused to be constrained within the four walls of the four-letter word, jazz. Live recordings of the Requiem's premiere (...) have been expanded by their composer/arranger with additional electronic beats, vocal interludes, and a climactic cameo from Sun Ra's cosmic inheritors Marshall Allen and Knoel Scott contributing to what is, by any standards, one hell of a director's cut".