The song “Go Down Moses” may be familiar, but the New Haven-based Afro-Semitic Experience’s take on it isn’t. It starts with the rhythms, stretching through the Caribbean and back to West Africa, the sense of the interlocking drums propelling everything. And above the impassioned vocals, there’s a trumpet drenched in effects, creating its own small universe of sound. It feels new but drenched in history — which is fitting for Freedom Seder, the Afro-Semitic Experience’s latest album and one that has a history of its own.
“We all have our pandemic stories,” said David Chevan, bassist in the Afro-Semitic Experience alongside Jocelyn Pleasant on congas and percussion, Saskia Laroo on trumpet and electronics, Alvin Carter, Jr. on drum set, Warren Byrd on piano and lead vocals, and Will Bartlett on reeds and percussion, with everyone contributing background vocals. The live album is “a reflection of the pandemic,” Chevan said, both in how it happened — and what didn’t happen.
In early 2020 the long-running Afro-Semitic Experience had plans to record a new album and had begun rehearsals for it. The album was shaping up to be multi-generational, featuring original members of the band playing alongside newer members — particularly in the percussion section. “We were flying Baba David Coleman in, and we were going to have tracks with Baba and Jocelyn Pleasant and Abu Carter, and my son Jesse. We were going to have some specific moments where we had at least four percussionists playing.” Coleman and Carter began playing with the band at its founding in 1998.
The band had booked time at a recording studio in Springfield, Mass. for March 2020. “I’m driving home from rehearsal and I get a call from the engineer that everything’s shutting down,” Chevan said. “I called Baba and told him he shouldn’t take the plane flight and we all hunkered down.” The shutdown, of course, lasted for over a year, and Coleman died of cancer in March, before the band had a chance to record.
“We had a lot of material that was ready to go,” Chevan said, now calling the project “the album that never will be.”
“I don’t know if I would say I was depressed, but I was incredibly saddened, and it was hard to get my brain out of that hole,” Chevan said. But during the shutdown, the New Haven-area members of the Afro-Semitic Experience managed to keep playing together, and performed at Congregation Mishkan Israel’s annual celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as the services of other congregations.
“With each progressive session we realized that one of the things we are is a good live band,” Chevan said. “In the minds of many people who listen to the Afro-Semitic Experience, we’re a message band, but we’re also a band that can cook and jam.” That held true for Freedom Seder, a program commissioned by the Tucson Jewish Community Center that meant the Afro-Semitic Experience did a livestreamed program from Firehouse 12 in Febuary. Developing the program allowed the band members to reflect on the shared sense of heritage and exploration that brought them together.
“Warren and I have a lot of conversations before we put the set together,” Chevan said. “What does that mean to us? How much is a reflection of the Jewish Passover seder? And how much do we make it our own seder?” They decided to write the liner notes to the album in exquisite corpse fashion, meaning that neither was aware of what the other was writing until it was put together.
“The word seder means order and our Freedom Seder follows a particular order. The word seder is so strongly associated with Passover that for most people it’s synonymous,” the notes read. “Telling the story of Freedom is too vast for any one seder (maybe that’s why people have two). We decided to share a way of talking about Freedom that comes out of our years together as friends and road mates.”
They divided their seder into five sections, dealing with ancestral legacy (“we begin our seder by considering our common ancestral legacy. For the Afro-Semitic Experience, much of our shared ancestral legacy emanates from our emergence from slavery to freedom”), commemoration (“freedom has been hard won. It involved war, it involved movements, it involved a steady resolve over decades, even centuries, it involved violence, it involved love, it involved our people…. we ourselves must embody the principles strived for, becoming ourselves emblems — the most earnest way to commemorate”), community building (“as we each march to our own drummer, dance to our own piper, deal under our own set of stars, we can still honor the Creator and come to reconcile with and embrace mutual fellowship”), the journey and seeking wholeness (“the sum total of all this striving for transcendence may lead to moments of sublime grace or merely stark awareness … and a purposeful willingness to stand for right”), and reverence, humility and praise (“In respecting each other wherever each of us are on our journeys, sharing of our spiritual nourishment, building together; tapping into each other, and looking back to see from where we have come, how that has manifest in us, and accepting the work of which Freedom is comprised, we will have embodied Reverence.”)
The songs follow the path of these ideas. From “Go Down, Moses” and a rousing “Shout Out from the Mountain,” Byrd and Chevan take a duet together on the contemplative “Let Us Break Bread Together.” “Avadim Hayinu” puts the band in swinging musical territory, while “Unity in the Community” moves on its own strut. “If I Can Help Somebody” takes on New Orleans brass band vibes, and “My Feet Began to Pray” as a majestic swagger. The band takes its time with “Wise One,” letting it develop slowly from ballad to hip-swaying rhythm. And “Eliyahu Hanavi” closes out the set with a hard swing that gives all the musicians a chance to say whatever needs left saying.
“The album is entirely live. We didn’t go back and clean anything up. We allowed some of the moments that just happen when you play live.” But because the livestream happened to take place from Firehouse 12, under the able engineering of Greg DiCrosta, the resulting recording was quite high quality. “When I heard the performance, I thought, ‘except that there’s nobody applauding at the end of the tunes, this is a good live album,’” Chevan said.
And “at least two or three pieces that are on it are from the album that never will be,” Chevan said. “We still have a bunch of songs in the repertoire that we were planning for the album, and at least a few of them have now been documented.” But it also pulls from material that the band has been playing for years and years. Freedom Seder “reflects all of the stages that we’ve gone through as an organization,” from its beginnings to its plans for the future.
When Chevan listens to some of the music on Freedom Seder, “you can’t hear it — but I hear it — that Baba was supposed to be a part of that, even though it’s not that album,” he said. “Some album’s going to get made, but there’s a battery inside me that needs to be recharged. I want to do a new studio album at some point, but I have to get revved up first.”
Freedom Seder is currently available exclusively through the band’s website for streaming or downloading.
