I was first introduced to Belgium’s five-piece hybrid jazz combo Black Flower in 2017 with the release of ‘Artifacts’. Led by saxophonist and flautist Nathan Daems, alongside their trippy excursions and influences, which included ‘father of Ethiojazz’ Mulatu Astatke, sax giant Getatchew Mekurya and the principal innovator of Afrobeat, Fela Kuti, resulted in a unique energetic blend, that Strut Records’ Quintin Scott described as “super-tight” with raw production.
Kinetic is their latest offering on Sdban Records (out now); while there are traces of that dream-dance voyage through the gardens of their Abyssinian Afterlife, the philosophy and drive of this album seems more urgent and intense. The accompanying notes suggest it offers a bold, dynamic statement on breaking free from life’s limitations. Kinetic is a call to dance through life’s chaos and to harness the power of movement as a tool for liberation.
While killer tracks like the finale, Particles serve as an instrumental reminder to shatter confines, the real wake-up call comes in the form of the vocal track, Monkey System (also our Song of the Day), featuring Meskerem Mees. It immediately resonated with me, both musically and lyrically. In a chapter of Noam Chomsky’s A Liveable Future is Possible1, he talks of the neoliberal class war, and how the term “class war” is by now insufficient and that the victims now include the perpetrators: “As the class war intensifies, the basic logic of capitalism manifests itself with brutal clarity: we have to maximize profit and power even though we know we are racing to suicide by destroying the environment that sustains life, not sparing ourselves and our families.” He likens it to a tale on catching a monkey: “Cut a hole in a coconut of just the right size for a monkey to insert its paw and put some delectable morsel inside. The monkey will reach in to grab the food but will then be unable to extricate its clenched paw and will starve to death. That’s us, at least the ones running the sad show.”
Monkey System uses the same analogy – a wake-up call to the current state of humankind, where the level of greed continues to perpetuate itself in an unstoppable cycle. “Survival becomes your rival…”
While we may need more than music to get out of our hole, music has always served as a catalyst for social change, liberation and given a voice to the voiceless.
Kinetc is out now on SDBAN Records
Bandcamp: https://blackflower1.bandcamp.com/album/kinetic
- Chomsky, Noam; Polychroniou, C. J.. A Liveable Future is Possible: Inspiring insights into the most pressing issues of our time (p. 91). Penguin Books Ltd. ↩︎