MUSIC

 

OVERWHELMED WITH REVERENCE

a review of Immanuel Wilkins' Blues Blood

by Alyssa Bardge

An album as wild as its cover

On October 11th, 2024, Immanuel Wilkins released his third studio album, Blues Blood, a multilayered 57-minute suite co-produced by Meshell Ndegeocello. With stunning musical and compositional technique, Wilkins masterfully and gracefully explores collective and personal memories within Black diasporic communities. He employs his regular quartet, consisting of Micah Thomas on piano, Rick Rosato on bass, and Kweku Sumbry on drums, along with four featured vocalists (June McDoom, Ganayva, Yaw Agyeman, and Cécile McLorin-Salvant) who push the album past conventional experimental, free-form compositions. Wilkins places both his quartet and the singers in a community of equals and no one voice, including Wilkins’, takes precedence. That’s one of the many brilliant aspects of the album. It is as if the whole experience is one long conversation, a connective tissue to bloodlines past, present, and yet to be discovered.

With an aesthetic rooted in Black American churches, traditional jazz compositions, West African drumming, and Tamil singing, Blues Blood, in sound and approach, has an Afro-futuristic quality that’s reminiscent of Archie Shepp and Pharaoh Sanders. Yet, it has deep roots in everyday life: a balm for wounds not yet healed, a mosh pit to headbang in, a praise break, and a familiar tune to hum while cooking. Wilkins engages in an unwavering investigation of the breaks between the past and the present and what they mean for our future selves.

In the first track, “MATTE GLAZE,” McDoom delivers the first lines of the album in a breathy whisper. But don’t let that fool you, she sings with a conviction that boldly states the album's mission:

Luster on my skin

Viewers watch us shine freely

Saints pray for matte glaze

Blues blood

Inside this vessel

Lawd, build me

A home dwelling

I will not refuse

Thomas traces McDoom’s voice with single notes on the piano. Like footsteps in the dark, she sings each word as if she were alone, praying silently. McDoom’s voice turns metallic with the phrase 'blues blood'. It's a declaration, an acknowledgment, an invocation, and, most importantly, a call that needs a response. The piano swells as she prays for divine protection and ends with a devastatingly dissonant chord. Sumbry nestles into the pocket and Wilkins seamlessly mirrors the piano’s driving chords with fragmented bursts of notes, as if he were mimicking spirits in flight. You feel the whole of life, like the way a tear approaches a tear duct, subtly and without a doubt. That McDoom’s call is answered by Agyeman’s raspy tenor completes the complex sonic environment Wilkins is beginning to imagine for us.

June McDoom

The next track, “EVERYTHING,” conveys an understanding and acknowledgement of the world that “Matte Glaze” begins to lay out. As a choir director would, Thomas presents the melody in languid chords. We hear a small child singing alongside the piano and reciting lyrics that represent another call that should be answered:

Branch to trees

Roots to leaves

We, you are me

We are everything

An unidentified narrator talks about contributing something real and sustainable through artistic creation, while acknowledging the cyclical nature of our lives. These thoughts are digitally intermixed with the instrumentation. As the piece builds, Agyeman’s voice rises above the music, shouting, free. The music stops, and Agyeman’s voice disappears and Ganavya’s emerges. Singing in traditional Tamil, she comes in lightly and gradually we feel the full power of her voice. Wilkins’ sax gorgeously swirls around her singing, evoking a sense of connection and familiarity across cultures and memories. Again, connection, both familiar and unlikely, is the key.

“DARK EYES SMILE” is the heartbeat of Blues Blood. The lyrics, written by McDoom in memory of her grandfather, are a heartfelt tribute to loved ones passed on, now ancestors, watching over us. Wilkins has described the presence of voices in the album as a “jam session” and “having a bunch of folks over in a living room” to share space, time, and memories. At the beginning of the track, the quartet is playing steadily, surely, and tenderly. And then McLorin-Salvant gracefully sings this poem:

Far out, I still hear the noise

Ring softly

Like your words that

never fade in my mind.

I remember you now!

Your starlight. Yesterday, 

sitting in your best chair, 

Always on time

And on my side, 

Dark eyes smile.

And now as they cry, 

I dream of years with you in my life.

In my best and worst times,

My reflection will resemble you.

Rosato has a dazzling moment here, where his upright bass sounds as if it stretches out its legs and begins to walk about the song. He plays curiously, sometimes letting each string plucked knock and reverberate, as if waiting on the other side of a front door. Wilkins joins in, taking his time gliding up and down scales, swirling within Sumbry’s hi-hats, letting his saxophone slightly shriek as Thomas plays chords that echo the melody.

The quartet

In a similar register, Wilkins creates a hauntingly immersive soundscape in “Apparition.” He captures the sounds of bodies being held in the bow of a ship during the Middle Passage. Wilkins sprawls across the track, intermingling with a persistent clinking of what sounds like glass bottles or a cowbell. That ringing calls attention to Agyeman’s voice singing, “Open up the bruise” and “I will show them the bruise.” Reminiscent of Daniel Hamm, one of the Harlem Six falsely accused of murder in 1964, who refused to hide his bruises inflicted by the police. Hamm said, “I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the blues (bruise) blood come out to show them.” This track shifts the listener’s perspective from one calling out for protection to an active confrontation against the many stories of injustice in Black life.

Throughout Wilkins’ career vesselhood is a consistent theme. Whether it’s being a vessel to carry the pain and joy of Black life in America, which is such a prominent part of his stunning debut, Omega (2020), or as a conduit for spirits to travel through, which surges through his towering sophomore effort, The 7th Hand (2022), you can’t miss the care and concern that vesselhood requires of his music. It’s certainly a demand that he takes on freely and with great verve and imagination.

vesselhood held

I recently interviewed him and he spoke of his embrace of the unknown and improvisation, which he surprisingly compared to calligraphy. He said, “I just wanted to be careful,” attributing that carefulness to “letting go of the binary of good and bad” and having a “radical belief in the mission.” When asked whether he drew on any musical or visual references while writing Blues Blood, he cited ceramic artist Theaster Gates and his thoughts on vesselhood as “the spirit of things.” Wilkins added to his answer, saying that when he wrote the music and produced the album he was thinking of “nothing.” I took a brief moment to process his response and asked him again, repeating back his answer, “Nothing?” He somewhat humorously doubled down on his position, but I could tell he was serious. He repeated, “Nothing.” We talked it over and agreed that nothing, in fact, is. And nothingness, as an unexplainable knowing, as everything and nothing at all. He says that nothingness, or his imagination and inner knowledge, has allowed for a “magic to take place” while writing. Despite my initial reticence, I believed him.

“AFTERLIFE RESIDENCE TIME”, the first single of the album, is an eight-minute and forty-second moment. That might be a strange word to use, but it is a moment and you can feel Wilkins’ compositional framework take flight. Imagine Judith Jamison’s white skirt spinning across the stage. Imagine pulling a wretch out from the earth and seeing their legs flung, swelling, overflowing, rivers deep. Wilkins catches this sense of flinging in the way that he has Salvant and McDoom take turns singing lines that express the need for love and care:

Spinning

Fall to the beat

Carry me

Dancers dark n free

These are my dreams

Running

Down the street

My time bleeds

Letting our voices ring

These are my dreams

You can feel the resolve of the experience in the final verse: “little one, you know you can have it all/so I sing your love.” Ganayva sings this line with incredible command and force. She calls out for a mother, father, and roots. Wilkins places her voice almost everywhere: the depths of the Atlantic, traveling down the Delta, feet stomping on the wooden floorboards of churches across America. Listen to Rosato’s blues-like guitar licks on bass, the way the quartet anchors the hypnotic force of Ganayva’s voice, and the way Wilkins slices through it and takes over the melody. His sustained, long, steady notes sound like he is rising from beneath the earth, synthesizing all the sonic elements into one sound, one force. The contracting-and-releasing quality of his playing, the way he creates circular, swerving sounds, the sheer force of his breathing catapults us to the end of the track. It’s an amazing performance.

An incredible imagination

“BLUES BLOOD” is the final track, and with an almost eleven-minute run it stands tall and mighty, a wild conversation about tradition, convergence, and imagination. The late, great D’Angelo’s song, "Africa," from his Voodoo album, comes to mind in the way that it courses through time, memory, and experience to return to the present. Wilkins moves through Black musical traditions, crossing genres and timelines. It's a non-linear track, not trying to give a comprehensive lesson on the history of Black people, but instead centering the experiences that gave life and energy to a moment in time. The genres and traditions Wilkins explores include classic Blue Note Jazz quartet arrangements reminiscent of Coltrane and Ellington, Nina Simone-type vocalizing, Sumbry’s percussive breaks, guitar licks (on the bass!) that evoke Jimi Hendrix's 1967 rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and Ganayva’s mind-bending vocal acrobatics. At the end of the piece and the album, the quartet has one more run that, without a doubt, is a nod to musical arrangements in Black churches. Wilkins arranged this final moment of surrender to involve the entire band, musicians and vocalists, to say thank you, and to offer a moment overwhelmed with reverence.