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The forthcoming album of David Murray and the Gwo Ka Masters called "The Devil Tried to Kill Me" will be out on November 2009!Check out Ishmael Reed's text written especially for the Next Gwo Ka Masters album in the blog.

you can listen to two exclusive tracks here, some others will follow soon...

DAVID MURRAY & THE GWO KA MASTERS

“Calling into question the notion of sameness is not a mere pastime for different communities.” This declaration from Caribbean writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant is particularly resonant for us. How can we fail to respond to its encouragement to travel and explore, an encouragement that becomes an imperative in Glissant’s majestic work Traité du Tout-Monde: “Open the field of your identity to the world.” This message in favor of forging relations with others, with oneself, with the world – relations that Glissant defines as poetic – has quite naturally struck a chord with numerous Afro-American musicians, whether they are from Brazil, Cuba, Guadeloupe or the United States. They all share the painful experience of exile; they have all had their memories of where they come from trampled under. Yet they all also share a cultural life that has grown up betwixt and between at least two worlds. Neither black nor white, the international Creole movement is extending its reach out across the world today, like a soundtrack accompanying what Glissant has called Creolisation. This historical process is giving form to a new and necessarily complex identity, an identity that Glissant defines as rhizomatic, which is gradually emerging from what Paul Gilroy has called The Black Atlantic. This identity escapes the categories and structures of traditional historiography. It is in permanent flux, a flux that the Brazilian Tom Zé has summed up well in his neologism: unimultiplicity.

One man in particular has been a vital companion on this journey. The percussionist Klod Kiavué from Guadeloupe has been both a guide and a teacher, introducing Murray to some of the “hidden” sounds of his island. For him “the drum is the very affirmation of our identity,” that is, the identity of the runaway slaves or marrons, from whom he draws inspiration, while himself resisting any slavishness. He is the very symbol of an independent spirit, which has been held back for too long. Now he has come right back into the public eye, buoyed up by a movement that reaches further than Guadeloupe alone. He was responsible for the beat that inscribed itself between the lines on the previous CD, which featured Guy Konket. He’s back on this album, appearing on all the pieces, playing the tambourine along with François Ladrezeau (both of them also make good use of their vocal chords). Also present is the guitar virtuoso Christian Laviso, who should (finally) achieve the recognition he deserves with this album. The force of the ka drums, with their commanding resonance, is channeled here towards the contributions of other musicians, who bring new dialects and accents to the mixture. The rhythm section is made up of Jaribu Shahid and Hamid Drake, who together form a hard core that is as solid as it is supple. Nothing is beyond these two musicians. The young guitarist from Dakar, Hervé Sambe, also joins the line-up, as well as contributing a composition. His finger-work should soon be well known to a wide audience. The crisp brass section is brought to us courtesy of Havana, revealing the brilliant syncretism of Caribbean culture. Senegal and Cuba represent two major moments in Murray’s journey, two countries he has visited lengthily in recent years, two places where he has embarked on equivalent musical adventures. They are still very much part of the sound on this album, but the sound is driven by a new synthesis, with sophisticated arrangements and more-polished production. Funk is definitely in the air, and jazz has got totally carried away.

Next Gwo Ka Masters’ album caled “The devil tried to kill me has been recorded in 2008 with Taj Mahal and will be released in November 2009. David Murray’s music sounds like never before; it’s alive with a dangerous sensuality, with something like a telluric response to the “prophetic” writings of Ishmael Reed, another free thinker from the Americas, who dubbed the fever of gumbo groove the Djeuze Grou – “that latent fever that is becoming a veritable epidemic,” contaminating new work today, provoking new questions and resulting in forms close to the alchemic formula that Carl Jung cherished: “I am the black of white, the white of black, the red of white and the yellow of red.” This declaration calls into question the very nature of the world. We take it as an invitation to dwell further on this remark taken from that Creole manifesto the Eloge de la Créolité: “To live a question is already to gain insights that the answer does not offer.” We feel sure this relates to the very meaning and essence of jazz.

STUDIO ALBUM OF "THE SISYPHUS REVUE" TO COME IN 2010...

As part of the history of the United States, there is a sort of recurring and laborious movement of time endured by Blacks. Every time they win a battle, they lose it again a few years later. Like an eternal starting over…

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois calls that the Sisyphus Syndrome. Dubois, a major African-American activist known for fighting all forms of racism and discrimination and a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP – the largest and oldest civil-rights organization in the United States), said that the struggle for the liberation of Afro-Americans could be defined in the same way as the Greek myth of Sisyphus. In that tale, the son of the Wind God, Sisyphus of Corinth was condemned to death, but when deal came to find him, he resisted, claiming he saw no reason why he should have to meet that end when he was still young and strong. The Gods then punished the impetuous Sisyphus. The famous king, too avid and greedy, was condemned for eternity to push a heavy rock towards the top of a mountain that he could never reach, because the rock would always fall back down before it reached its goal.

“Dubois was saying that every time Black Americans succeeded in rolling the rock of what is represented by civil-rights equality to the top of the mountain, the cruel gods always pushed that rock down the mountain, so that Sisyphus’s people had to start the struggle over and over again.” As if “the gods” added to the weight of this rock segregation, discrimination, the Jim Crow laws (which strengthened the old slave culture of the Southern States) and the Ku Klux Klan.

I therefore tried to isolate the historic tendencies of the struggle movements acting positively and those marked by tragic defeats for black people. So the end of the anti-slavery struggle is logically a part of an ascending tendency, while the founding of the Ku Klux Klan or the Jim Crow laws are part of a backward movement. I envisioned this work through the history of African Americans in the United States, using key movements, events and characters in this history.”

Amiri Baraka and David Murray explore the contemporary aspects of the Greek allegory of Sisyphus, symbolizing American society’s constant struggle to maintain and develop the democratic space, and more generally representing the fight of the “many” against the “few”…

Working on a selection of ten poems by Baraka, Murray has composed music that complements and gives life to this work.

The project was first presented at the East Side Center in Oakland, California, in May 2008, with the composer and the poet in attendance.

A musical review was inspired by this initial stage, adding a chorus out of the great singing tradition of the very Baptist Church of God of Christ, which for the occasion will trade in its holy repertory for these inspired by the poems of Amiri Baraka. The famous meeting of the sacred and the profane.

LINE UP :

Amiri Baraka – poems and readings
David Murray – composition / direction, tenor sax, bass clarinet
Boots Riley – MC
Aamil Islam - Skeleton
Ranzel Merrit – drums
Jamaaladeen Tacuma – bass
Longineu Parsons – trumpet
Mingus Murray – guitar
Thorston Hudson Jr. – organ
The Deep River Gospel Choir – choir

The Sisyphus Revue OFFICIAL EXTRACT "Reflection on insurrection", A Bop opera by Amiri Baraka, Music by David Murray
With Amiri Baraka, David Murray, Boots Riley, Aamil Islam, Renzel Merrit, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Longineu Parsons, Mingus Murray, The Deep River Gospel Choir…