Jazz percussionist Sarathy Korwar was born in the US, grew up in India and is now part of the UK jazz scene. These diverse backgrounds all play a part in the eclectic style he brings to jazz music. On “Birthright,” tabla playing, street sounds and chanting greet the listener. Then comes in a powerful deadpan vocal delivery from poet Zia Ahmed with some wonderful minimalist keyboard lines. He intones, “‘Mi casa es su casa,’ says the man who stole your land… Does the land stitch itself back together? Do people stitch themselves back together?”
The charged lyrics illuminate the hypocrisy of the entitlement of people living on stolen land. The pressure of the song builds as the hypnotic keyboard lines stay relentless, the lyrics become more pointed and more singing voices are introduced. Suddenly, most elements drop out and we are left with only percussion and a repeating line referencing our rising seas: “Higher and higher / water on fire.” This incredibly poignant song takes on so many of the issues the world faces today. Though the title “Birthright” first brings to mind the Israeli propagandist group offering free trips to Israel, the song’s targets range from all settler-colonial states to the entitlement of those who destroy our environment. Hopefully all land torn apart by borders can soon be stitched back together.
Check out Sarathy Korwar’s 2019 album More Arriving here.
Tag: jazz
Ancestors: Alice Coltrane – “Transcendence” (1977)
Unlike most artists that will be covered on this site, Alice Coltrane is someone who dedicated all of her discography to the topic of liberation, albeit mostly on the spiritual side rather than the political. Despite her single-pointed focus, her body of work has an incredible diversity to it. Her music ranges from aggressive chants to slow hymns, from avant-garde classical to her brand of spiritual jazz. The song “Transcendence” is a powerful combination of those last two genres. It begins with a modernist string section swelling in ascension as Coltrane’s harp slides up and down underneath. The harp then takes over for a solo, only to have the strings intrude with a loud glissando. The strings fluctuate between European and South Asian influences as she maintains these impressive runs on the harp. There’s some great use of extended techniques in the strings to bring a certain amount of grit to counterbalance the beauty of the harp.
The interplay between the harp and the other strings seems to create a sonic story, one of a persistent transcendent force (the harp) persisting through the violent shifts of rebirth and Samsara (the strings). Her Hindu belief system of Advaita Vedanta plays heavily into her music. She describes it as going “to your fullest and highest potential and not [being] limited by some tenets of some doctrine that says we come here, here’s the minister, and we pay our tithes and go back to our home or our job or business or whatever and do everything you want.”
This liberation from dogma is important to the philosophy, so much so that it does not require a renunciation of any other faiths and instead seeks a goal of interfaith understanding. This religious freedom comes up later in the album as well, with a chant dedicated to Sri Nrsimha, who is an avatar of Vishnu who comes to Earth to destroy evil and end religious persecution. Alice Coltrane was a woman who dedicated her life’s work to spiritual liberation in a time where negativity was the most pervasive tone in musical culture. While both positivity and negativity have their place, I think people underestimate how radical it is to put forward a positive vision of the future. I hope that Alice’s music can inspire those positive visions and that we can materialize them here on Earth.
Shabaka and the Ancestors – “You’ve Been Called”
Shabaka Hutchings returns with Shabaka and the Ancestors, one of the many bands that he has been making waves in. This song opens with atonal swirls reminiscent of Herbie Hancock’s avant-garde Mwandishi era. That music is accompanied by the cries of both babies and other animals. The vocalist sets the tone with spoken lines like, “Burned the mortgage, burned the student loans… An act of destruction became creation.” Eventually this chaos dissolves into a more structured jazz song with a refrain that appears throughout the album: “We are here / Cause history called.” Clearly this project looks to the past as a source of inspiration to liberate ourselves. Let’s heed that call!
You can support the band and buy the full album We Are Sent Here by History here.
Freeing Music 