LP - 140g Black Vinyl inside a reverse-board gatefold jacket, with custom inner sleeve.
A bold new project by feted South African drummer Tumi Mogorosi (Shabaka and The Ancestors, The Wretched) – his first recording as leader since 2014’s Project ELO. Dramatically powerful compositions played by Mogorosi’s quintet alongside a nine-person choir, creating spiritualised choral music in the tradition of Max Roach, Andrew Hill and Billy Harper.
Group Theory: Black Music is a stunning new statement from South African drummer and composer Tumi Mogorosi. Standing in the lineage of South African greats such as Louis MoholoMoholo, Makaya Ntshoko and Ayanda Sikade, Mogorosi is one of the foremost drummers working anywhere in the world, with a flexible, powerful style that brings a distinctive South African inflection to the polyrhythmic tradition of Elvin Jones, Max Roach and Art Blakey. Since his international debut on Jazzman Records in 2014 with Project ELO, Mogorosi has been in the vanguard of the South African creative music scene’s burgeoning outernational dimension, taking the drummer’s chair in both Shabaka Hutchings’ Shabaka and The Ancestors formation and with avant-garde noiseniks The Wretched, who featured on Brownswood’s acclaimed South African showcase, Indaba Is.
Where Group Theory: Black Music moves an established format dramatically forward is in the addition of a nine-person choir. Their massed voices soar powerfully above every track as a collective instrument of human breath and body, and enter the album into the small but significant number of radical recordings to have used the voice in this way, such as Max Roach’s It’s Time, Andrew Hill’s Lift Every Voice, Billy Harper’s Capra Black, and Donald Byrd’s I’m Trying To Get Home.
Tracklist:
A1. Wadada
A2. The Fall
A3. Panic Manic
A4. Where Are The Keys? (Feat. Andile Yenana & Lesego Rampolokeng)
B1. Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child (Feat. Andile Yenana & Siya Mthembu)
B2. At The Limit Of The Speakable
B3. Thaba Bosiu (Feat. Andile Yenana)
B4. Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child (Feat. Gabi Motuba)