‘New Black music is this: find the self, then kill it.” The US poet Amiri Baraka wrote these words in the liner notes to the 1965 live album The New Wave in Jazz, and through listening to the ferocious works of featured improvisers like John Coltrane, Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler, Baraka argued that we could radically reestablish ourselves. We could understand and then creatively efface who we were, allowing for something unexpected to take its place.
South African drummer Tumi Mogorosi takes this as the central concept for his latest album, Group Theory: Black Music, seeking to produce that same supplanting power through the voice, as well as instrumentation.
