Saxophonist, flutist, and composer Zoh Amba’ s music is full of folk melodies, mesmerizing refrains, repeated incantations and powerfully executed Avant-Garde—but silence, from a youth spent in the in the forests of Tennessee, may be the real root of her wellspring, one she’s drawn from over and over again, even while studying in New York with David Murray and at the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music and the New England Conservatory in Boston, coaxing from her horn a music unburdened by convention or habits of mind. And at times, as in the opening notes of Bhakti, her new album on Mahakala Music, that wellspring gives rise to the very opposite of silence, the beguiling, stuttering phrases of her solitary horn seeming to speak a lost language as if her survival depended on it — like the frenzied incantations of one trying desperately to roll back a looming stone. The tale told by every saxophone cry or sigh, every shuffling snare, every pianistic cascade, isn’t fiction—It’s an autobiography, filled with hymns that push and tear into the deepest place in the heart of avant-garde improvisation.
Zoh Amba: Bhakti Record Release
Zoh Amba: saxophone
Zoh Amba: Bhakti Record Release
Saxophonist, flutist, and composer Zoh Amba’ s music is full of folk melodies, mesmerizing refrains, repeated incantations and powerfully executed Avant-Garde—but silence, from a youth spent in the in the forests of Tennessee, may be the real root of her wellspring, one she’s drawn from over and over again, even while studying in New York with David Murray and at the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music and the New England Conservatory in Boston, coaxing from her horn a music unburdened by convention or habits of mind. And at times, as in the opening notes of Bhakti, her new album on Mahakala Music, that wellspring gives rise to the very opposite of silence, the beguiling, stuttering phrases of her solitary horn seeming to speak a lost language as if her survival depended on it — like the frenzied incantations of one trying desperately to roll back a looming stone. The tale told by every saxophone cry or sigh, every shuffling snare, every pianistic cascade, isn’t fiction—It’s an autobiography, filled with hymns that push and tear into the deepest place in the heart of avant-garde improvisation.