Black Art Jazz Collective – Armor of Pride (HighNote)
The metaphorical catchphrase “young lions” has been floating around jazz circles for nearly sixty years. Its earliest appearance was in the service of embodying the community of hard-boppers that came of out Philadelphia, Chicago and New York that included Lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons and Wayne Shorter. An eponymous album on the Vee-Jay cemented the sobriquet. Several decades later, Wynton Marsalis and those in his orbit assumed the mantle both as homage to their predecessors and as an encapsulation of a neo-classicist agenda. Armor of Pride presents players from another generation, arguable all-stars in their own right, whose music mines jazz tradition, but with ears open to associative idioms of later provenance. Young lions could also loosely fit their aesthetic, but they opt against metaphor for the more explicit appellation of the Black Art Jazz Collective.
All six members of the sextet are HighNote/Savant recording artists either as leaders or sidemen on a host of other projects with trumpeter Jeremy Pelt and tenorist Wayne Escoffery remaining the most prolific. Here they fit naturally into a flexible frontline with trombonist James Burton III while pianist Xavier Davis achieves a similar synergy with bassist Vicente Archer and drummer Johnathan Blake. The studio set is short, but concentrated, with tunes from all but Archer starting with Blake’s “Miller Time”, a coy tune title containing some cool-toned extemporization by Pelt and Davis. Escoffery’s title piece launches from a tenacious unison horn motif and a churning stop-start beat stamped by individual statements while Pelt’s “Awuraa Amma” steers the band into tranquil ballad straits that bring to mind Herbie Hancock’s classic “Maiden Voyage” through an analogously lush blending of instrumental voices.
Pelt’s spouse Cheryl pens an essay that in conjunction with a pithy Langston Hughes quote espouses the ensemble’s fealty to African American cultural preservation and propagation. That degree of defensive focus may feel a little redundant in this age where jazz is still revered as one of America’s only indigenous art forms, but questioning the complacency that can come with that kind of assumed canonization also seems to be the point. The arts writ-large are under attack on both overt and ulterior fronts and the BAJC’s (to coin an acronym) mission to assert themselves a stop-gap to any erosion makes perfect sense in such an antagonistic environment. Such efforts would be instantly ineffective without the musical merit to back them up. These players have stores of that credibility to spare and the creative capital they invest in this ego-deferring venture is well spent.
