A beautifully evocative, documentary compilation of anonymous spontaneous performances and field recordings from descendants of slaves in a northern section of the city of Mobile, Alabama, one of the last places in the US to receive slave ships. It’s put together by Italian-Rwandan film-maker Marilena Umuhoza Delli and her husband, Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan, who has worked with Tinariwen, and the Zomba Prison Project, the anonymity of each voice a decision to operate as a whole experience. The 18 short tracks are a mixture of songs and talking heads, poetry, even birdsong, sometimes set in the backdrop of industrial sounds, jazz saxophones, car and ship horns (such as on Family Secret). The music regularly captures folk and church traditions with ghostly African echoes, sometimes with thumb pianos, hand drums, plucked strings, and the gospel of Kept Me, Do You Hear Me Now and Walk With Thee. On the gentle opener Run, If You Can (Don’t Go Down That Road) that gorgeous, bluesy, rich, deep husky voice is accompanied by a single string melody on the Ghanaian kologo lute, with some echoes of the intonations Blind Boys of Alabama. Another highlight is the beautiful piano-accompanied Do You Hear Me Now? Elsewhere we hear voices describing segregation, or the curiosity of a American teenage soldier on the way back from the Vietnam War when glimpsing the southern tip of African from a ship, or the dark recollections and of Haunted By Her Capture. All the way to final, breathy, gentle track The Blues Returns (Taking Flight), this is a vital, rather moving, transportive release of poetic documentation. Out on PM Press.
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