On October 14th, 2025, the fiercely eclectic bassist, composer, and producer Melvin Gibbs—whose career spans decades in avant-jazz, punk, electronic music, and more—will release his new album, Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2, via Hausu Mountain. Described by the label as “a perfect nexus point” of his digital production and jazz fusion sensibilities, Amasia serves as a powerful culmination of Gibbs’s wide-ranging craft. The Grammy-nominated artist, mentored by legends such as Ornette Coleman and Gil Evans, and a veteran of groups like Defunkt and the Rollins Band, anchors this project in the spirit of ’70s Miles Davis, specifically drawing primary inspiration from the landmark album Agharta.
Amasia is not a conventional album; it’s a meticulously crafted “avant-jazz odyssey” that defies the boundaries of space and time. Gibbs, working in the many-tendriled roles of composer, collagist, and bandleader, merges performances recorded as early as 2006 with contemporary contributions from 2024–2025. This allows for stunning temporal displacements, such as the inimitable, late guitarist Pete Cosey (recorded in 2006) ripping his signature distorted leads alongside the organ of John Medeski (also ’06) over a drum performance by current bandmate Greg Fox (recorded in 2024). This composite method, inspired by the boundary-shattering production of Teo Macero and Miles Davis on albums like Bitches Brew and On The Corner, highlights Gibbs’s work as a producer and remixer, transmuting the ’70s fusion aesthetic into a modern, Afrocentric, “hoodoo” form of transhumanism.
Gibbs explains that the album is an effort to “recenter the ancestral Afrocentric view of transhumanism,” bridging the gap between the living and the unliving. The performances of dearly departed collaborators—Cosey, keyboardist Onaje Allan Gumbs, and multi-instrumentalist Casey Benjamin—are inserted into the current musical zeitgeist, ensuring their “vibration contributes an energy to this album” that maintains a dialogue with Black cultural evolution.
To date, there have been three electrifying singles that offer a glimpse into the album’s stylistic breadth. Felonious Monk opens the album with a propulsive fusion of Gibbs’s beat programming—which injects contemporary hip-hop flavour—into a multi-layered jazz context. 16 Dimensions of Underwater Light shifts gears, building a twilit ambient atmosphere with swirling electronics, glitchy percussion, and the soaring trumpet of Chris Williams. His third single, Gullah Jack Style, is a workout in what Gibbs calls “hoodoo funk,” animated by Cosey’s towering guitar solo, recorded in 2006 and given a thrilling new context here.
These dynamic tracks stand in contrast to the 13-minute centrepiece, Luigi Takes a Walk, a sprawling jazz fusion odyssey driven by the kinetic drums of Greg Fox and the post-Macero arranging and chopping work of Gibbs himself.
Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2 is available on LP, CD, and digitally on October 14th, 2025, with limited clear vinyl, CDs, and merch available on Bandcamp.
Gibbs’ forthcoming new book, How Black Music Took Over the World, is to be published on April 14, 2026, by Basic Books.