2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
It’s at the beginning of opener “All Blues,” when Kahil El’Zabar starts groaning alongside Alex Harding’s baritone sax line, that you realize there’s something solemn and profoundly sacred at play on Open Me, A Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit. Lots of jazz albums bear such lofty and evocative titles. This one, marking the 50th anniversary of El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, begins living up to it within 20 seconds.
A drummer and percussionist—he also plays the bells and kalimba heard on “All Blues,” and the cowbell and cajón heard elsewhere—El’Zabar uses his voice as a tone-setter. Even as Harding, trumpeter Corey Wilkes, guest violinist James Sanders, and El’Zabar’s own kalimba dive into down-home blues, his ululations (which sometimes rise to a falsetto wail) command a kind of reverence from the listener. More pointedly than words, they announce, “the spirits are here, with us. We are communing.”
The unspoken message is a powerful one, and it carries through even when El’Zabar’s voice does not. He doesn’t have to utter a sound for the groove-driven “Return of the Lost Tribe,” the rousing “Passion Dance,” or even the hard swinger “Kari” to carry stately and sanctified undercurrents. In fact, the holy feeling is so palpable that when El’Zabar does sing, indeed belts, the title phrase of “Can You Find A Place” (“Can you find a place where there’s peace?”), it cuts through the somber motion of Wilkes, Sanders, and cellist Ishmael Ali with the weight of a spiritual paroxysm.
These descriptions might suggest that the album is all gravitas and ponderous meditation. It isn’t. The piece “Great Black Music,” though rendered quietly and even gingerly, has a direct connection to the listener’s neck and hips: They move to the beat almost in spite of themselves. “Hang Tuff” is as urgent a call to dance (with Sanders, in particular, all but screaming us out of our seats) as has ever been laid on record, and the pounding rhythms of “Ornette”—especially when Wilkes’s trumpet solo compounds the accents—aren’t just danceable, they verge on pugilistic. It sounds nothing like its namesake, free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, but at the end, when El’Zabar begins chanting Coleman’s name to the tune’s rhythms, it’s as if he’s been doing so all along.
Open Me’s finest moment is the one that combines all of these elements: a rendition of Eugene McDaniels’ soul-jazz anthem “Compared to What.” At its core is El’Zabar’s stomping foot and rattling bells (with his kalimba syncopating); Harding, Wilkes, Sanders, and Ali focus their attention on that pulse to create a kind of spare but strident funk. El’Zabar grunts, groans, and hums along, but also sings the protest lyrics in a low croon that seems to gather in soul as it continues. It’s got groove, it’s got raw emotion, but it still inspires a kind of hushed awe.
