Contour & Omari Jazz - Reflections Vol. 2: Black Decelerant (2024) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

Black Decelerant’s Khari Lucas (Contour, Niecy Blues) and Omari Jazz effortlessly and poetically smudge spiritual jazz to intoxicating, vaporous ambient arrangements on the 2nd in RVNG Intl.’s new collaborative series - RIYL Laurel Halo’s ‘Atlas’, KMRU, Wayne Phoenix.

Following the lead of Steve Gunn & David Moore’s initial Reflections volume, Khari Lucas & Omari Jazz join ‘Reflections’ (the successor to RVNG’s collaborative series, ‘FRKWYS’) with a lushly spirited, sanguine salvo that meditates on matters of “Black being and nonbeing, life and mourning, expansion and limitation, and the individual and collective.” Crafted remotely between their stations in South Carolina and Oregon over six months in 2020 as a remedy to pandemic stress, the process of improvisation naturally came to be informed by a world upended outside their studios, and is thus inflected with extra-musical influences of Trumpian fascism, the BLM movement, and an upswell of memories and emotions dredged from the depths of ostensibly still waters. They would fix and float their ideas around a reading of Aria Dean’s text ‘Notes on Blacceration’, which explored Accelerationism in context of Black being and non-being as a fundamental of capitalism.

Charleston’s Khari Lucas brings a decade of experience as solo artist and co-producer for Niecy Blues to the table, while Portland’s Omari Jazz (Lazydawg) lends an equal depth of nous as multi-instrumentalist, within an entirely beat-less, weightless framework. Fine-combed acoustic timbres are processed and rendered electronically with a tongue-tip thizz in frissons of neo-soul and ambient classical, whilst never falling fully into either category. Instead, they modestly pull back from any explicit references to hail a shared plane of interest that dreamily evokes aspects of heartical, spiritual jazz experimentation slowed down, dematerialised and swept outwards, teasing out the grain of their instrumental gestures with a time-slipping temporality and tactility that really wraps one up inside their world. Shape of Broad Minds’ Jawwaad Taylor lends trumpet to the 4th world bliss-outs ‘two’ and ‘eight’, but elsewhere its just Lucas & Jazz in deep, non-linear, instrumental dialogue, painting a range of glorious, but often subtly bruised, colours on the back of heavy lids.

Tracklist:
01 - three
02 - one
03 - six
04 - seven 1/2
05 - two
06 - five
07 - nine
08 - eight
09 - four


Thanks to the Original customer!