Jamila Woods - Heavn - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

On her expansive new album Water Made Us, Chicago musicianand poet Jamila Woods shines anew as she asks the question, what does itmean to fully surrender into love? Across Water Made Us, Jamila embracesnew genres, playful melodies, and hypnotizing wordplay, as she wadesthrough the exhilarating tumult of love's wreckage and refuge. While 2017's HEAVN saw Jamila celebrating her communitywithin a lineage of Black feminist movement organizing, and 2019's Legacy!Legacy! Reframed her life's experiences through the storied personas of iconicBlack and brown artists, Water Made Us is self-revelatory in an entirely newway, making this her most personal album yet. Made together with LAbased producer McClenney, and boasting features from longtime friendsand Chicago natives such as Saba and Peter CottonTale, Water Made Us isa sprawling and intimate portrait of self-reflection, cleverly designed to echothe different stages of a relationship the early days of easy compromising,flirtatiousness, and fun; the careful negotiation through moments of conflictor hurt; the grieving of something lost; and the tender realization at the end ofit all that the person who is gone never really leaves, but stays with you as youfind yourself ready to try again, refreshed and reassured. The album's title - taken from a line in album highlight InchGoodNewsInch - is a subtle reference to the famous Toni Morrison quote InchAll waterhas a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.Inch It'sthis sentiment - of memory, place, and returning - that acts as a pillar for thealbum's arc. Water Made Us reminds us that at it's best love is a warm, stillocean. Deep, shimmering, and endless in it's wonder. And at it's worst love canbe a riptide that takes us so far away from ourselves we can hardly find ourway back, hardly even remember how to swim. And yet Jamila surrenders tothis surf - eve

In 1614, Lodovico Grossi da Viadana (1560-1627) published his most important collection of monodies. A truly monumental contribution to the vocal solo repertoire, it comprises one hundred motets with basso continuo, twenty-five for each of the four main vocal registers. This collection survives today in only two copies of it's 1615 German print with the title Centum sacri concentus ab una voce sola.Overlooked in modern times, it has so far remained in the shadow of Viadana's earlier publications. With this project, the nine soloists of the Viadana Collective explore these forgotten motets and present them alongside organ improvisations and works for four, five, six and eight voices and instruments. The beauty of this music is revealed through sonically varied and richly adorned renditions making the most of the magnificent acoustics of the Basilica Palatina di Santa Barbara and the glorious radiance of it's 16th-century Antegnati organ.

Jamila Woods has a voice and lyrical sensibility that transcends generations, and so it makes sense to have this rich and layered album that bounces seamlessly from one sonic aesthetic to another. This was the case on 2016's HEAVN, which found Woods hopeful and exploratory, looking along the edges resilience and exhaustion for some measures of joy. Her new album, Legacy! Legacy! Is the logical conclusion to that looking. From the airy boom-bap of InchGiovanniInch to the psychedelic flourishes of InchSonia,Inch the instrument which ties the musical threads together is the ability of Woods to find her pockets in the waves of instrumentation, stretching syllables and vowels over the harmony of noise until each puzzle piece has a home. The whimsical and malleable nature of sonic delights also grants a path for collaborators to flourish the sparkling flows of Nitty Scott on InchSoniaInch and Saba on InchBasquiat,Inch or the bloom of Nico Segal's horns on InchBaldwin.Inch More than just giving the song titles the names of historical black and brown icons of literature, art, and music, Jamila Woods builds a sonic and lyrical monument to the various modes of how these icons tried to push beyond the margins a country had assigned to them. On InchSun Ra,Inch Woods sings InchI just gotta get away from this earth, man / this marble was doomed from the startInch and that type of dreaming and vision honors not only the legacy of Sun Ra, but the idea that there is a better future, and in it, there will still be black people. Soul music did not just appear in America, and soul does not just mean music. Rather, soul is what gold can be dug from the depths of ruin, and refashioned by those who have true vision. True soul lives in the pages of a worn novel that no one talks about anymore, or a painting that sits in a gallery for a while but then in an attic forever. Soul is all the thi