Evento
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2022
Hamid Drake’s Turiya: Honoring Alice Coltrane
Ndoho Ange dance, spoken words
Sheila Maurice-Grey trumpet, vocals
Jan Bang electronics
Jamie Saft piano, keyboard, fender rhodes
Pasquale Mirra vibraphone, percussion
Joshua Abrams bass, guembri
Hamid Drake drums, percussion, vocals
In recent times it became more frequent than in the past to hear intellectuals diagnosing a crisis of spirituality in the western world; today, in many levels, that same crisis seems, regardless of the causes one may assign to it, fully installed and explicit. Simultaneously, however, as it usually is the case in phenomena of this nature, we are also witnessing a counter-movement of return to more profound meanings than those that prevail in the world of the non-transcendent. The fact that Alice Coltrane’s legacy has dwelled into our collective imaginary and that her music is perhaps more known now than at the time of its creation may be perhaps one of the many symptoms of this urgency to rediscover an art that aspires to higher states of conscience. It is therefore an absolute pleasure and honour to present at Guimarães Jazz the project “Turiya: Honoring Alice Coltrane”, conceptualized and led by remarkable percussionist and improviser Hamid Drake, a practitioner of spiritual music in sync with the spirit of the great North-American harpist and composer who, together with her art and life partner John Coltrane, has decisively contributed to shaping jazz in its hindmost incarnations.
After almost fifty years of intense creative activity, Hamid Drake is currently regarded as one of the most important jazz musicians and improvisers of contemporary music, a reputation he achieved due not only to his technical skills but also to a unique musical identity, at the same time intellectually sophisticated and spiritually driven, in which groove and polyrhythms peacefully coexist together. On the basis of the percussionist’s identity is the aesthetical and ethical matrix of free jazz (Drake’s first musical affiliation and a musical movement of which he is considered one the most distinctive followers) a matrix that he expands and sublimates by incorporating elements proceeding from several musical and cultural sources (Afro-Cuban percussion, Indian music, reggae, among others). Hamid Drake began his path in music under the influence of his first mentors, Fred Anderson and Don Cherry, who introduced him to the jazz circuit of Chicago, a city that at the time was energized by the musicians involved in the revolutionary collective AACM. Since then, the drummer ad percussionist has been pursuing a remarkable artistic trajectory manifested in an extensive discography and an almost incessant activity collaborating with some of the most influential figures of contemporary jazz – from historical names such as Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp to seminal names of the post-millennial musical landscape such as Ken Vandermark or John Zorn. Of all the countless manifestations of an eclectic and challenging artistic work, we should however highlight Drake’s long-term creative relations with bassist William Parker, saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, drummer Michael Zerang (with whom, since 1991, he annually celebrates the equinox) and more recently with the avant-garde rock trio Mako Sica.
Hamid Drake’s tribute to the music of Alice Coltrane, which was fortunately recorded for posterity in magic albums such as “Journey in Satchidananda” or “Universal Conscience”, features an instrumentally idiosyncratic ensemble composed of European and North-American musicians, expanded by the performance of dancer and singer Ndoho Ange. Of this project, in which the encounter between two great explorers of the inner dimension of music and of its transformative properties is materialized, the audience may expect the transfiguration of the work of an immortal artist through the imagination and sensibility of a group of magnificent musicians who generously volunteer to be one of the vehicles to its perpetuation in time.