Composer, flutist, vocalist, playwright, and multimedia artist Nicole Margaret Mitchell has been turning heads in the jazz world with her wildly innovative and ever-evolving Black Earth Ensemble. Hope, Future and Destiny is a kind of departure from her previous two outings in that the music here constitutes the score to a larger cross-disciplinary theater presentation that has been wowing audiences and critics alike in her hometown of Chicago. The work boasts over 50 performers. The band performing her score numbers no less than 15 and includes such Windy City luminaries as saxophonist extraordinaire David Boykin, violinist Savoir Faire, trumpeter Corey Wilkes, vocalist Aquilla Sadalla, and the fine trombonist Tony Herrera, just to name a few. The music found on this disc is ambitious. Despite the work's sprawling reach, the music is deeply focused; its center is poetic, lyrical, and swinging. Her compositions reach across sound worlds, the African continent, and jazz genres. The set opens with "Wondrous Birth," and makes beautiful use of Abdullah Ibrahim's folk-inflected South African jazz. "Curbside Fantasee" is in the pocket, gutbucket funky as it melds blues, post-bop, and a loopy angular groove that is dissonant in places but never leaves a lyric harmonic center. "For Daughters of Young Love" uses Mitchell's vocal in choir fashion to create a layered harmonic chant. It evolves toward "Journey for 3 Blues Stones," which employs multivalent percussion, a languid, loping front melody line for the horns, and syncopated guitar fills to accompany a gorgeous, half-sung/half-spoken vocal by Mitchell into another dimensional world where dream, vision, and reality commingle and kiss. "Message From the Mothergoddess" commences with modal horns and strings before Sadalla's vocal begins to wail, a gospel-blues moan in testimony to destiny and nurture. One of the recording's finest moments is the lush and haunting "In the Garden." Led by Tomeka Reid's cello, it winds around Tim Jones' whispering guitar fills, until Brian Nichols' piano and Mitchell's flute fill in the middle space. Mitchell carries the melody, but never steps away from the sweet, nocturnal ambience of the band. When Boykin enters with his bass clarinet, the effect becomes one of sheer yet subtle sensuality and grace. The bluesy swing erupts again in "Skating," which immediately follows. This suite closes with an instrumental reprise of "Journey for 3 Blue Stones" that carries the project off into the silence with a finger-popping minor mode groove. The CD also contains a four-minute video of excerpts from the performance, offering the listener a painfully short glimpse of the vision of this entire project. No matter; the music found here is not only satisfying, it's brave, fully realized, and underscores Mitchell's seemingly limitless talent.
© Thom Jurek /TiVo