Kholood Eid Photo
Kidambi.
There is a matter-of-factness to how vocalist, keyboardist, composer, and improviser Amirtha Kidambi sings the text “eat the rich or die starving” toward the end of the opening track of From Untruth, the newest album from her quartet Elder Ones. The group plays in support of this album this Friday, April 26, at Firehouse 12 on Crown Street.
Coming out of a buildup of almost doom-metal pace and heaviness, after a series of fiery solos amp up the tension, the group settles into a slower groove. Over this unfolds a glorious synthesizer solo, existing somewhere between Alice Coltrane and a synth-pop hook from the ‘80s. To find this text sung almost as a lament is sonically as bold a statement as when Kidambi pushes her voice to greater leaps, wider juxtapositions of timbre and color. There is a resignation here, but also a resilience. Here is the earned pragmatism of the seasoned activist, but also the sense of purpose of the spiritually driven.
“If there’s a commonality with the music I listen to, it’s that it is subversive, transcendent, or some combination of those things,” Kidambi said in a phone interview last week. “I’ve always been interested in the outer edges, not just politically pushing it, but sonically as well.”
Kidambi lists an impressively broad range of formative musical experiences. Her family is Hindu, from south India. She was born in Buffalo, N.Y. and grew up in California, listening to devotional music as well as Indian classical. At the same time, she sang and listened to jazz — “particularly the ecstatic, free jazz sound,” she said — and heavier, more transgressive music like punk and metal. She then studied western Classical, including some of the avant-garde vocal music of the 20th and 21st centuries.
When you hear these musical elements within the sound of Elder Ones, they appear not as conscious references to style or genre, but emerge on the surface, briefly, as part of a fluid stream of ideas.
“I didn’t have a preconceived idea of what the band would be before it started. I write the material through improvisation, and let certain ideas form, and then let those ideas shape the music,” Kidambi said.
The album has a clear structure, but there is a sense that electricity is being contained within that structure. This shows up not just in more traditional “solo” moments for herself or the other members of the band, but in moments of collective improvisation and creative renewal, even when a simple melody line is restated, reframed.
Kidambi assembled the band not just by instrumentation, but by the players involved.
“I knew that I wanted a band with drums and bass — to have groove-based repetition, loops, and rhythmic material, but also players who could play really open and free,” she said. On drums is Max Jaffe, who plays a traditional drum kit alongside the Sensory Percussion system, which allows the seamless incorporation of electronic sounds using triggers on the drumheads. On upright bass is Nick Dunston, taking over from Brandon Lopez on the group’s previous album. And on soprano saxophone, treating his instrument with Moog effects, is Matt Nelson.
“I wanted soprano saxophone specifically — a lot of the music that is a historical and sonic reference point for me is the late ‘60s spiritual jazz, where people like Pharoah [Sanders] and Coltrane were using this instrument — and also there’s an Indian double reed instrument, the nadhaswaram, which has a similar kind of ritualistic timbre to it. And I kind of just wanted Matt Nelson in the band — I like him as a tenor player, and he was willing to play soprano for this band. And there are moments where it feels like the harmonium’s range is extended by the soprano sax.”
One notable change between From Untruth and Elder Ones’ previous album, Holy Science, is the use of lyrics. On Holy Science, Kidambi sang using a personal vocabulary of syllables, a mode of improvisation not unrelated to scat singing, but less concerned with instrumental imitation. The repetition of syllables allowed Kidambi the opportunity to play with the timbre of her voice with full transparency.
Here, the syllables are supplemented by short bits of text that appear in each song. From the blunt anticapitalist statement of “Eat the Rich” to the concise wrestling with postcolonial thought on display in “Dance of the Subaltern,” the text is both an aesthetic choice as well as a communicative one. Often the phrase is repeated in a trance-like capacity, or used to frame a pattern of vocal movement within a song. In the conclusion of “Decolonize The Mind,” Kidambi repeats the phrase “you taught us your tongue and your God, the heel of your boot on our necks,” singing it four times over an angular melody. As the band breaks down into a more angular groove behind her, she repeats the phrase again, breaking down the phrase into abstractions of sound and language, her voice moving from soaring melody to a snarl, from choked, percussive attacks, to barely-suppressed screams.
“It was definitely a conscious choice to use lyrics on this record,” Kidambi said. “There was a sense of urgency. It was literally me trying to grapple with everything that was happening. It’s not a Trump record, but there are definitely ties. The title of the record, From Untruth, definitely refers to our very slippery relationship with truth right now. But it’s a general theme, where far-right fascists all over the world manipulate truth. It also refers to the concept in Hinduism, where ignorance is one of the greatest evils, and part of becoming in touch with your divine self is about banishing ignorance.”
This balancing of political reaction and spiritual development is significant, lending a searching quality to even the most fiery moments of improvisation, and a more universal thread even when the lyrics are addressing one subject specifically.
“For me, it’s very natural to look at this time that we’re living in, which is so fraught, and to look to this tradition of black American subversive music where [the players] are using this music as a tool to raise awareness, as well as to have catharsis for themselves and the audience,” Kidambi said. She is well studied on her jazz history, and it is no accident that the music of Elder Ones feels ideologically in the tradition with groups like the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, unifying aesthetic freedom with the desire for liberation. Kidambi points to the recent work done by guitarist Marc Ribot and vocalist Fay Victor, and to Matana Roberts, the genre-defying saxophonist who has “been doing things like this for her whole career,” as evidence that the political is never distant from the traditions of free music.
But as is sometimes the case with contemporary political music, you get the impression that this record, this project, is not about scoring points with a message, but quite literally about survival.
“To me, I feel like I have no choice. I am unable at this moment to write things that are not responding to what is happening,” Kidambi said. But her response, as evidenced by From Untruth, is not only about living to resist, but about resisting to live.
Amirtha Kidambi plays with Elder Ones at Firehouse 12, 45 Crown St., on April 26. Visit Firehouse 12’s website for tickets and more information.
