It seems unlikely that an obscure yet influential avant-jazz album made in 1970s Manhattan would be performed live for the first time ever in Toronto in 2012, but that’s the case for House of Spirit: Mirth. The mesmerizing product of Pheeroan akLaff’s fertile mind, the record is a solo drums and percussion tour de force, drawing from Afro-centric modes, radical jazz and, however unintentionally, the burgeoning sound of embryonic NYC hip-hop.
Toronto’s Music Gallery has partnered with the city’s Manifesto Festival to bring akLaff to town for a show on Dec. 1 with local hip-hop/spoken word artist Ian Kamau. The occasion marks the first time this material has ever been performed live and follows a reissue of the 1979 LP earlier this year on England’s Soul Jazz Records.
“Perhaps it would have been difficult to explain, and an affront to religious conservatism,” akLaff replies when asked why it’s taken 33 years for the record to get its proper due. “Perhaps I would have been embraced too soon or dismissed immediately. Those are my own projections, and a bit whimsically smug."
“Really, it is because I never wanted to perform it until I was asked,” he adds. “I am like that with most things. I was asked to do the record by [composer/boutique label owner] Oliver Lake. I was asked to re-release it 33 years later by Soul Jazz Records, and I was asked to perform it by [Music Gallery artistic director] David Dacks upon its re-emergence. If I am asked to do something I charge fully into making myself available to the forces to make it good. Not the horn blower am I, but the channel to usher in the sun to sea and earth to sky. Excuse me; I am feeling poetic this morning.”
For his Music Gallery performance, akLaff has been paired with two unique artists in Kamau and video director Felix Kalmenson. While Kalmenson will directly accompany akLaff with visual interplay, Kamau is playing his own set, which he says will feature music he normally doesn’t perform live. Something about the setting and playing with akLaff has inspired him to experiment.
“I get the impression that he’s a socially conscious and political artist,” Kamau says of akLaff, whom he hasn’t yet met. “He was in a genre that could’ve been fairly straightforward and he made a couple of decisions to be more directly socially and politically conscious, as well as experimental in his approach to jazz and percussion. In the past I’ve predominantly considered myself a hip-hop artist but have recently been going in all sorts of different directions and I think that’s why I was asked to participate.”
Kamau is not off the mark in describing akLaff’s adventurous route, which led the jazz innovator to make House of Spirit: Mirth with modest intentions, though he ended up with something else entirely.
“I was attempting to make my first recording of distributable music, one that reflected my newly found enjoyment that placed drumming in a category of spiritual revelry, and associate my work with a lineage of shamans,” akLaff explains.
“Not only does it hold up, it surpasses what I have been able to accomplish in some ways,” he admits, when asked about the LP’s legacy. “If someone asks, House of Spirit: Mirth will have more incarnations.”
See Pheeroan akLaff with Ian Kamau at the Music Gallery (197 John St.) on Saturday, Dec. 1.
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