Album Review: Ancestral Recall by Christian Scott

Coming off his ambitious 2017 trilogy (Rebel Ruler, Diaspora, and the Grammy-nominated Emancipation Proclamation), trumpeter Christian Scott delivers yet another ambitious, cross-pollinated epic with 2019's Ancestral Recall. Along with producing and playing a cadre of distinctively named brass instruments (among them his reverse-flügelhorn, Siren, and Sirenette), Scott also plays pretty much every other instrument here, including keyboards, synth bass, synth percussion, and what he calls "sonic architecture. " That enigmatic term most likely refers to the overall production, but could easily describe the genre-defying music Scott has crafted on Ancestral Recall.

Full Review >>

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah has been working toward a unified, multicultural idea of improvised music for much of his career. But the New Orleans-raised, Berklee-trained trumpet prodigy could hardly have known that the concept he dubbed "stretch music" (on a 2015 album of the same name) would be so well timed to jazz's reemergence into mainstream consciousness. What he has called an attempt to "stretch--not replace--jazz's rhythmic, melodic and harmonic conventions to encompass as many musical forms/languages/cultures as we can" coincides with an erosion of boundaries that is central to the current jazz renaissance.

Full Review >>

With Ancestral Recall, New Orleans born-and-bred jazz missionary Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah is out to free your mind with a mission to decolonize sound and eliminate cultural and sonic barriers while exploring the unity between West African, Indigenous and African/diasporic rhythms and their roots in trap and hip-hop.   It's ambitious, to be sure, but given that this is the trumpeter who gave us Stretch Music, it's no surprise that Adjuah pulls it off. Far more textured, and with a deeper rhythmic foundation than Adjuah's previous ….

Full Review >>