Sara Serpa
Photo: Heather StenIn late May, during a festival that, like all else, had been moved online, vocalist and composer Sara Serpa explained the genesis of her multimedia project, “Recognition” (Biophilia Records).
First came an invitation from John Zorn, for a series about music and film. Ms. Serpa decided to create an original documentary, about Portuguese colonialism in Africa and legacies of oppression and racism throughout the Western world. Her film would be silent, she decided, its narrative carried by images and an original score. Her research led her to the writings of Amílcar Cabral, a key figure of African anti-colonial activism, whose harsh yet elegant words yielded Ms. Serpa’s onscreen text and the lyrics to one song. And there was an unexpected discovery: Super 8 footage from the 1960s, shot by her grandfather, a Portuguese settler who had moved to Angola. (Ms. Serpa was born in Portugal, and moved to the U.S. in 2005.)
In Ms. Serpa’s film, created in collaboration with Portuguese director Bruno Soares, images linger and repeat. Trains arrive, planes depart. A salt harvest, the product of forced labor, accumulates in tall mounds. Nationalist fervor grips a stadium during a celebration of Dia da Raça (Day of the Portuguese Race). Quotes from Cabral address “the destruction of African society” and “the multi-racialism myth.” The effect is hypnotic and disorienting, intimidating.
Those same qualities come across through the music itself, through 12 tracks that are spare and elegant, tender and tough. There are no overt references to African or European musical traditions but rather a teasing out of universal emotions. Ms. Serpa’s unconventional quartet includes three distinctive instrumentalists. Like her singing, Mark Turner’s tenor saxophone playing is remarkable for its transparent tones, its sure pitch, and for an improvisational style that balances lyricism with logic. Pianist David Virelles and harpist Zeena Parkins play with rare blends of earthy intensity and unearthly grace. The painful history Ms. Serpa confronts was, she said, unspoken in her home and her schools. Perhaps, then, it makes sense that she considers it mostly through wordless vocals.
Her album begins with simple descending figures. It ends with “Unity and Struggle,” featuring lyrics drawn from Cabral’s writings, sounding somewhere between a protest anthem and a lullaby about justice; the song soothes but haunts as it winds down more so than ends.
Ambrose Akinmusire
Photo: OgataWith his latest release, “On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment” (Blue Note), trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire wrestles with those same troubling transnational truths, from the perspective of his life as an African-American. He, too, mines inheritances, from an extended musical family. In a liner note, saxophonist Archie Shepp (who worked notably alongside John Coltrane) likens Mr. Akinmusire’s commitment to Coltrane’s legendary discipline. The fruits of such rigor are evident in the brilliant trumpet soliloquy that opens the first track, “Tide of Hyacinth,” and in the cohesiveness of Mr. Akinmusire’s quartet (including bassist Harish Raghavan, drummer Justin Brown and pianist Sam Harris). As both a player and a bandleader, he is by now an essential voice in jazz’s continuing story.
Another track, “Mr. Roscoe (Consider the Simultaneous),” explores the multi-layered approach of reedist and composer Roscoe Mitchell, with whom Mr. Akinmusire has worked. “Blues (We Measure the Heart With a Fist)” builds gradually, idiosyncratically, into a satisfyingly bluesy release, in much the way the Art Ensemble of Chicago, which Mr. Mitchell co-founded more than 50 years ago, often ends its concerts.
Jesus Diaz’s percussion and chants add force to one track and Genevieve Artadi’s vocal lends tenderness to another. Yet this music relies mostly on the complex webs of harmony and rhythm woven with seeming ease by this quartet. Still, the best moments are the sparest, most often owing to the sound of Mr. Akinmusire’s horn: the lovely, expectant long tones and throaty curls of “Yessss”; the reverent phrases of “Roy” (dedicated to the late trumpeter Roy Hargrove); the ringing notes on “Reset (Quiet Victories & Celebrated Defeats)” that glimmer brightly but dissolve into whispers and pained moans.
That pain is not abstract. On “My Name Is Oscar,” from his 2011 Blue Note debut release, over a drum solo, Mr. Akinmusire read aloud accounts of the shooting of a young black man, Oscar Grant III, by a transit officer in his hometown, Oakland, Calif. On “Rollcall for Those Absent,” from a later album, a child recited the names of those killed in similar circumstances—Amadou Diallo and Trayvon Martin, and on—with accompaniment on Mellotron, an electro-mechanical keyboard. In January, when Mr. Akinmusire recorded the new album’s final track, “Hooded Procession (Read the Names Outloud),” he had not yet heard the name George Floyd. But he knew that list would grow, and he sensed active participation (his instruction to read the names out loud) might be in order. Here, alone, playing glistening chords on a Fender Rhodes electric piano, Mr. Akinmusire takes his time, as in a church processional, moving nearly imperceptibly from minor key to major, finding fleeting resolution.
—Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz and Afro-Latin music for the Journal.
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