Lowcountry: Lowcountry
Ropeadope
Lowcountry's self-titled debut qualifies as a jazz release, but the label feels woefully inadequate. Yes, the performances are rooted in the jazz idiom, and bebop references, improvisation, and jazz musicians do appear (including voluble tenor saxophonist Chris Potter), but the album's anything but a blowing session laid down by a leader and recruits in a single day. In fact, in being a project methodically developed over a number of years, Lowcountry is less a conventional jazz album than a novelistic tapestry enriched by history, storytelling, and southern folk traditions.
How did such a project come about? After completing his Doctorate in Musical Arts at the University Miami, trumpeter/composer Matt White accepted a position at Coastal Carolina University in 2012 where he augmented teaching with managing the campus recording studio. It was there that he met and began working with Dr. Eric Crawford, who brought White with him to St. Helena to record the songs and oral histories of Gullah Elders. As their songs are passed on through the oral tradition, White felt an urge to collect the material (a 2019 return to St. Helena added to the earlier recordings) as an act of conservancy but also a desire to present the material in a fresh manner that would give the recordings new life. In doing so, the material would pass on once again, albeit in a radically different form.
At the music's core are White on trumpet and drummer Quentin E. Baxter, a Charleston native and sixth-generation griot in the Gullah community. The two co-produced the album, with White, currently chair of jazz studies at the University of South Carolina, credited as composer and arranger on eight of the nine tracks, the outlier a narration-only intro. Fleshing out the ensemble are the St. Helena Island Singers (Gracie Gadsen, Rosa Murray, Joseph Murray), narrator Ron Daise, and instrumentalists Michael Thomas (alto sax, bass clarinet), Mark Sterbank (tenor sax, clarinet), trombonist Jerald Shynett, guitarist Tim Fischer, pianist Demetrius Doctor, and bassist Rodney Jordan. The Charleston Symphony String Quartet sits in on six tracks, as do trumpeter Charlton Singleton on one and South Carolina native Potter four.
As mentioned, Lowcountry opens with a brief narrated piece, with St. Helena-born Daise's poetry on “Forgotten Moments” celebrating the preservation of “precious memories” and laying the groundwork for what's to come. With Baxter, Jordan, and Doctor kicking the groove along, “Welcome/Buzzard Lope” follows personal introductions by the St. Helena Island Singers with vibrant expressions by White and Thomas, the two serving up the album's first rousing solos in a call-and-response form before uniting ecstatically. At the start of “Aye Neva,” Murray clarifies that the phrase (which translates as “Hey Neighbor!”) was used to greet the morning sunrise; consistent with that, the tune itself jumps with gospel-tinged fervour, its jubilant tone goosed by Potter's swinging acrobatics and Baxter's infectious thrust. White thereafter uses Gadsen's singing of the hymn “Were You There?” as a springboard for heartfelt string writing and memorable turns by Potter and Fischer.
Being a tribute to Dizzy Gillespie's hometown, “Cheraw” includes allusions to a number of pieces by the trumpeter, some of them naturally bebop-inflected. It's the only track on which Singleton appears, and he and tenor man Sterbank (stepping out from Potter's shadow) make good on the opportunity with powerful statements. The focus is likewise primarily on the music in “Prayed Up,” the group pared down to a quintet and powering dynamically through soaring turns by Potter, White, and Doctor. The project's vocal and instrumental forces are abundant, but they're deployed with circumspection and taste, making for an album that's ambitious in scope but not bombastic. Like a multi-faceted film or novel, the presentation changes throughout, at one moment featuring a punchy improv-driven passage and in another an elder sharing a story against an instrumental backdrop. One comes away from the album enriched, the impression created of a sweeping journey successfully undertaken and the experience well worth the time and effort.September 2023