Suns of Mothers (Live) 12-29-2024
The second installment of the trio I’m part of with Tommy Guerrero and Nino Moschella. Performing live at Little Hill Lounge, El Cerrito California 12-29-2024. (Free)
We spent two days in the studio last week to record some ideas and shape together some songs. It has been quite liberating to play in a small ensemble with so much space for texture, silence, and rhythm. We just started playing together a few months ago but we have spent decades drinking from a lot of the same musical fountains and when we get together, things just flow.
Videos: Sulah Jordan “Museé Melancolique” & "Jasmine"
The Sulah Jordan “Ladybug” album came out a little while ago. I was invited to perform tenor saxophone and flutes on some songs. It was fun to record and a delight to listen to. Now there are videos. Enjoy.
Suns of Mothers: Debut Performance
Improvisations at Little Hill Lounge. (Video: Haldun Morgan)
Suns of Mothers is a new improvisational music trio me 🎷🪈Tommy Guerrero 🛹🔥🎸and Nino Moschella 🥁🎙️ put together.
We played our first show 11-20-2024 at the Little Hill Lounge in El Cerrito, California. It was a jam. We were joined by vocalist Destani Wolf who took us and the music to a whole other dimension.
I regret we didn’t record the whole set as it turned out to exceed my wildest expectations, but some friends fortunately shot a few clips. We are hoping to do this once a month at Little Hill- next one late December or early January. Stay tuned IG: @sunsofmothers
This happened....rocking with Togetherness Ensemble at Gray Area Mission SF
My plan was to have had this post up before this happened, but it was a crazy week. So it’s in past tense. On 10-26 I performed with the Togetherness Ensemble as part of an emergent composition in four movements. the first three movements featured eight different musicians and we all got together for the fourth. You had to be there. I met a lot of really wonderful people, most of whom for the very first time. It feels good to be part of a musical community again.
The Togetherness Ensemble is convened on occasion by Zekarias Musele Thompson to hold space for communal resonance through collective improvisation. Prompted by the historical and contemporary creative sensibilities of African and African diasporic peoples, and the possibilities of emergent composition as the scaffolding for recognizing ourselves as free.
The Togetherness Ensemble made its debut interpreting James Weldon Johnson’s Lift Every Voice and Sing, during closing performance of Possible Dialogues: Vol 1 in July 2023 at the BAMPFA.
For this fifth iteration we will explore Togetherness in three parts with a new composition titled RE-EDUCATION. Inspired by the current moment, the ecstatic motions of Alice Coltrane’s 1972 epic Lord of Lords, as well as Floating Points' and Pharoah Sanders' 2021 collaboration, Promises.
RE-EDUCATION
Movement 1: A Curiosity
Movement 2: A Recognition
Movement 3: A Promise
with: Salimatu Amabebe, Matt Brownell, Gabriele Christian, Roco Córdova, B Dukes, Christopher Robin Duncan, Mary Graham, Cat Lauigan, Phillip Laurent, Amina Malika, Micah Morris, Maya Nixon, Jasmine Nyende, Martin Perna, Justin (Hongry) Robinson, Benjamin Rodgers, Joel St. Julien, Zekarias Musele Thompson, David Wilson, Josh Wismans, and Gaia WXYZ.
Song collaboration: DJ Platurn : "Give a Damn"
I was honored to get loose with the flutes on this song by DJ Platurn from his latest album “Through Storm and Grief.” also available on Bandcamp.
New album: Martez “Goodbyes”
“Goodbyes” is the sixth album in my series of grieving rituals called LAMENTOS. This year I lost my father, an aunt and an uncle, all while bearing witness to the intensifying barbarity around the world. Take time to grieve.
Stranger Sounds: Curated Playlists from Around the World
Over the past few years I have curated over a dozen Spotify playlists for ASME Award winning travel and literary magazine Strangers Guide. Each one has been a deep and profound musical journey into the city, state, country or region covered in each issue. Enjoy.
A few years back, Strangers Guide magazine invited me onto their Editorial Board. Among other things editorial including research, story ideas, and connecting writers with story editors, I curate the Stranger Sounds Spotify music playlists for each issue.
Each issue is about either a region, a country, a US state, or a city which presents a unique and formidable challenge. Where to begin? How broad or deep should I go, knowing that far more great music will be left out than can be included? With this in mind, I asked myself “what artists, songs, and styles—famous or unknown—serve to collectively form to the soundtrack of that place or the myth of it, what do I personally dig, what is available on the streaming platform, and what is the middle ground between these worlds.
I hope you enjoy listening to these as much as I enjoyed researching and curating them.
NEW ALBUM: Martez "DRONE POEMS" out 2/17/23
The Drone Poems series represents meditations, feelings and moods expressed through expansive breathy textures. These pieces reflect a radical aesthetic departure from the Lamentos series, which primarily features wind instruments (flutes, saxophones) as the primary engines of sound.
I composed and recorded Behind the Veil and the other pieces on Drone Poems over the summer of 2022 and early 2023 in Oakland and Berkeley, California during what we now call fire season, when a barbecue spark, a misguided bottle rocket, or a random lightning strike can set off a chain of ignitions to poison every breath with smoky air for days on end. Fortunately last year wasn’t that bad, but each day nonetheless began with the anxiety and dread and the question: “Is today gonna be the day?”
The daily news: Russia brutalizing Ukraine, government fuckery, ongoing plagues, colonization of space, schools shot up, cops gone wild, catastrophic storms and everyone stressing about money.
Drone Poems is the effort to bear witness to the world while remaining connected to the eternal.
Thirteen New Songs with Antibalas
Last November we did ten days of writing workshop in New York, played the songs over the past year live at stages across the world, and gathered at Studio G in Brooklyn to record as many of them as were ready.
These recordings will compose the next two Antibalas albums. Expect to hear the first in a few months, around mid-2023.