Photo: Eric Ryan Anderson
Prodigious jazz trumpeter and composer Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah will return with a new album, Ancestral Recall, on March 22. It’ll be the 35-year-old’s first full-length record since 2017, when he released three staggering and sprawling records: Ruler Rebel, Diaspora, and The Emancipation Procrastination. Where those albums sought to commemorate the birth of jazz recording, Ancestral Recall more pointed. It is, Adjuah explained when announcing the record last month, an attempt to “de-colonialize sound; to challenge previously held misconceptions about some cultures of music; to codify a new folkloric tradition and begin the work of creating a national set of rhythms; rhythms rooted in the synergy between West African, First Nation, African Diaspora/Caribbean rhythms and their marriage to rhythmic templates found in trap music, alt-rock, and other modern forms.”
The latest single from the album is “Forevergirl” (premiering below), a hypersyncopated but blissful love song featuring jazz vocalist Chris Turner and rapper Mike Larry Draw. In an email to The FADER this morning, Adjuah explained that the song was rooted in cubism, abstraction, and the desire to see romantic love from as many angles as possible.
I wanted to sonically mirror some of the things I had seen in an analytic cubist rendering of two lovers. In that form an object is taken apart and reassembled in abstraction to depict the object from as many perspectives as possible. Essentially giving a more global viewing of what the object is comprised of. I wanted create in sound what I was seeing. So there are a multitude of parts/voices collapsed onto one another to stamp out ambiguity in the composition, to help focus a more clear reading through sort of encapsulating the sentiment in sound into a confined space. You can hear this in the many layers of trumpet, muted and non-muted, and in what I wrote for Chris Turner. A different take on constructing a love song. As my brother Terrace Martin says “there’s a thousand ways to say I love you.” I wanted to channel that in this one.”
Listen to “Forevergirl” below. Ancestral Recall is out March 22 via Ropeadope.
