I recently, purchased a copy of Organic Music Societies, a Blank Forms publication that explores a collaboration that started in the 1960s and went on for a decade between the American trumpet player and free jazz pioneer Don Cherry and Swedish visual artist and designer Moki Cherry. That collaboration was driven by a desire to remove their music from the commercial realm into a total art and life project that not only broke with convention but seemed to imbue the very essence of musical free will, collaboration and leaves you rethinking the very purpose and nature of music creation.
I felt similar seeds were present when reading about Acorn, the new LP from Trippers & Askers, the folk and spiritual jazz project of Jay Hammond. Recorded primarily in Durham, North Carolina, it features an impressive array of musicians from the area. They include Andy Stack (Wye Oak, Joyero), Joseph O’Connell (Elephant Micah), Joe Westerlund (Califone, Megafaun), former Sun Ra member Ken Moshesh. While this article is longer than usual for a single premiere, it just felt wrong to ignore the important background and focus behind it.
The album is inspired by the dystopian novel “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler and ‘poses fundamental questions about the nature of “American” music.’ While ‘Parable of the Sower’ was written in 1993, it was set in an apocalyptic 2020’s US which sits uncomfortably close to where we are heading …a society that has grown unstable due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed.
The novel’s protagonist is a teenage African American Lauren Olamina who is raised in a gated community away from the poverty of the outside world where they are resented for their affluence. They use their resources carefully to get by such as making bread from acorns. Power or curse, Lauren has the ability of “hyper-empathy” and is able to feel the sensations she witnesses in others. Aware of the fragility of her community she travels north in search of haven and creates a new belief system – a religion called Earthseed which comes from the idea that the seeds of all life on Earth can be transplanted, and through adaptation will grow, in many different types of situations or places.
The accompanying press notes that Earthseed is a way of seeing the world that many contemporary black feminist activists and musicians such as adrienne maree brown, Toshi Reagon and so many others have taken up as a spiritual roadmap toward liberation from an increasingly unacceptable present.
Side A of “Acorn” deals with the childhood of humanity on earth, with the discovery of Earthseed ushering us to the stars. Side B deals with a “sweet, sad and terrifying” adulthood that is oriented toward the creation of the first Earthseed community, “Acorn.” An album based on the second novel “Parable of the Talents” – a novel that tests Olamina’s radical hope in devastating ways that directly evoke the history of racialized violence and religious fundamentalism in the U.S. – is in process.
Below, you can hear the album closer ‘Making Forests‘, the second single to be released (out June 29th). Songwriter Will Stratton, also a ‘friend and fellow traveler’ of Jay provides some great insight into the album noting that, of all Jay outputs under the ‘Trippers and Askers’ name, Acorn contains the group’s finest recording and songwriting to date. “Hammond’s melodies and playing subtly draw on folk traditions from all over the world, sounding more like synthesis than fusion. His lyrics are often in sharper focus on this record than in previous work, and are evocative of the strangeness and turbulence of these times, but full of a sense of hard-earned wonder. Unlike most folk music (at least in its strictest definition), the care and attention paid to crafting entire worlds of recorded sound feels vital to the heart of this music.”
‘Making Forests’ is a mesmerising album closer with the words drawing on the central verse of Earthseed:
All that you touch
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
Jay Hammond on ‘Making Forests’:
I started writing the music for Acorn when I was living with my partner in Rome. Her research there is with political refugees who live in and/or pass through Italy. Shortly after my arrival in the summer of 2017 she introduced me to Bako Jaf – an Iraqi Kurd, political refugee, and ripping saz player. The saz is a seven-string Kurdish instrument, sometimes also called the Baglama. I spent many days that summer improvising guitar/saz duos with Bako. We would meet up and sit on a ledge by Tiber river with our instruments and play for hours. Italian was our common language, neither of us particularly fluent, so we just played and played. The sound and feeling of those days playing with Bako are the core sound of this record. He appears at the end of the record on the song “Making Forests.”
The core idea of the record is change, specifically the idea that “God is Change”, the tagline of a fictional religion called Earthseed created by Octavia Butler in her “Parable” novel series. It’s an understatement to say that Butler was ahead of her time, she was straight-up prophetic. Written in the 1990’s and set in 2020’s U.S. when society has collapsed for everyone but the super wealthy due to climate change, wealth inequality and corporate greed. It sounds dramatic, but reading those novels while pushing myself toward a daily practice of writing the music for this record during that summer was how I overcame not just a fear of failure, but the internalization of a societal message that art & music & creative expression don’t have social, political or economic value. Butler taught me that creative production is at the heart of political and societal change, something that any good artist probably already knows, but that I really needed to be reminded of.
Making Forests is also our Song of the Day.
With cover art from acclaimed comic artist John Jennings – whose work includes multiple graphic novel adaptations of Butler’s work – this concept album ushers the listener through the narrative of the novel as it pertains to the very real political and emotional challenges of the present.
Pre-Order Acorn (out 16 July) via Sleep Cat Records: https://www.sleepycatrec.com/scr014-acorn
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