Jazz fans, lend your ears to Asher Gamedze

On 15 June, after four days of rehearsal and the day of the album’s recording, Cape Town was behaving like Cape Town in winter.

“That’s like one very strong memory of all of that time,” jazz musician, composer, leftwing activist, cultural worker and educator Asher Gamedze tells me on Zoom from Cape Town. “It was the rain — it was pouring.”

Constitution, the just-released double album on International Anthem Records by Asher Gamedze and The Black Lungs — Tumi Pheko (cornet), Garth Erasmus (alto saxophone), Jed Petersen (tenor saxophone), Ru Slayen (percussion), Athi Ngcaba (trombone), Tina Mene (vocals), Fred Moten (words), Nobuhle Ashanti (piano), Sean Sanby (bass) and Gamedze (drums) — was recorded almost as “live” on just that one day at Sound and Motion studios.

And never mind the weather. It was an intense day because, not only does setting up for 10 musicians take a lot of time and the studio closes strictly at 5pm, but there was the issue with fetching the lunchtime pizzas.

“We’re just getting some pizza from Bin Rashied’s in Grassy Park, which is like under normal conditions, five, maximum 10 minutes’ drive away,” Gamedze recalls with a chuckle as he takes me back to the day of the recording. “But then there were road closures. So, we ended up having to drive around and it took almost an hour.”

They ended up recording the last take of the track High Land. New Home literally at five to five.

This was the second iteration of The Black Lungs. The first was part of a research project back in 2022 in Chicago where Gamedze put together an ensemble of avant-garde musicians, including  SuRa Dupart, Ben LaMar Gay, Adam Zanolini, Xristian Espinoza, Angel Bat Dawid, Chér Jey and Julian Otis, under the same name.

“So that was really beautiful, we just did one night at a place called Elastic Arts [in Chicago] which is a home for various kinds of avant-garde expression.”

He got further funding this year and decided to do it in his home city of Cape Town. The 35-year-old convened some younger musicians and adventurous ones who didn’t have a history in freer sorts of music, but were open to it, into the local version of The Black Lungs.

“I really approached that as an opportunity to kind of bring a group of people together that I liked, had a good vibe with, hadn’t played with all of them, most of them I had,” Gamedze says. “And yeah, try to kind of build an ensemble from there, you know.”

This approach is not just one he took in the creation of Constitution. “The ensemble experience of study and struggle is the basis of my thought and everything I try to do in this mad world,” he says in the album’s liner notes.

Gamedze sent the musicians some of the recordings from Chicago and then taught them the compositions in the rehearsals.

I ask the musician whether he had in mind what it would sound like, or if he allowed some freedom for the music to evolve.

“I mean, there’s always that kind of tension I think between what you imagine something to be and then what it becomes,” he explains. “And I think I’m getting better and better at releasing myself from what I imagine something to be and being open to what emerges while at the same time holding on to things I want to be specific about.”

I ask him if that is scary.

“In terms of a musical idea that you have in your head and translating it, and the process of that becoming more people’s [music] … I guess it’s like you wanted it to be interesting, you wanted to hold it up as an idea, in the same way that it does to yourself, to all these other people.

“And I think the scarier thing always to me is like, ‘Oh fuck, is this music actually any good?’”

Gamedze’s fourth album as bandleader, Constitution is an expansive album — one hour 22 minutes long across nine tracks. It is also powerful, challenging (in the best possible way) political music. As noted on Bandcamp, it is “an elaboration of the possibilities of autonomous constitution in and through polyrhythmic, modal, large ensemble music”.

In the album’s title, there is the obvious reference to the South African Constitution.

“There’s specific connotations around that and things that would come to mind, at least among progressive-minded people,” says Gamedze, “is the failures of the notion and the form of the Constitution that we have, which is obviously billed as one of the most progressive in the world, but really has no bearing on the lives of the majority of working-class and black South Africans.

“So, I guess at some level, there’s an attempt to engage with that notion, but to put forward a different vision of ‘constitution’, one that starts from a collective of people and moves from there.”

Jazz is associated with breath and breathing while playing — most certainly on Constitution with four brass players and two vocalists.

“The concept of breath is very prevalent,” Gamedze adds. “And so, the idea of constituting an ensemble, particularly a musical ensemble through breath as a way of constituting a collective subject, is one notion through which I think about Constitution.”

After all, for Gamedze “everything is politics. From the way we gather, from the way we relate to each other as individuals within a musical context to the way we relate to the people working in the studio.”

 Gamedze’s approach with the album was for all the band members to “get as deep into the music as they can”. And that meant, even with the rehearsals, the band would play the full, nearly 40-minute version of the title track of Constitution.

“I remember that everyone was committed and spiritually very present,” he says.

On the day of the recording of this future classic, the band members gave it their all.

Gamedze says it reminded him of the story of the John Coltrane spiritual jazz masterpiece, Ascension (1965), which inspired him when he composed the title track of the new album.

In his book, The House that Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records, jazz historian Ashley Kahn recounts how Coltrane wanted another recording of the 42-minute track at the end of the second take. The drummer, Elvin Jones “flung his snare at the studio wall, signalling his decision that for him, the date was over”.

Gamedze giggles. He was never going to try that after the band was “on fire” for the 40-minute track because, to use the sports cliché, “everyone left it out there”.

“And yeah, we definitely, I think everyone, we did great in the sense that we left it all out there, you know.”

The title track is the album’s centrepiece.

“Members of the dispossessed, won’t you lend me your ears!” This subversion of Shakespeare’s well-known line from Julius Caesar is the repeated vocal call and the rallying chorus throughout the cut Constitution.

While all the compositions, concepts and arrangements are by Gamedze, the words are by the radical American cultural theorist, poet and scholar Fred Moten, who also contributes spoken word on the album — word-fragments and samples of poems written and recited by him.

“Fred’s incredible. So generous,” says Gamedze. For about four weeks they met regularly and discussed ideas for the album.

Moten’s beautiful deep voice is on several tracks.

“They’re all part of one [voiced] piece, which I cut up into these sections,” explains Gamedze.

“These various pieces that come back to Fred’s voice and become a theme in some way … even as the ideas are getting more and more expansive, disentangled and wrapped up in each other.”

On the track Destitution, which reminds one of The Last Poets, the revolutionary 1960s proto-rap jazz group, Moten asks: “Does the dialectician have a sound?”

Assuming he is asking that about Gamedze, having listened to Constitution with close attention, my answer is a resounding yes. I am expecting critical acclaim around the world as with the previous albums.

But, I ask Gamedze, who are your listeners?

“In the contemporary music world, through things like Spotify and data and all of this, there’s a real intense drive for artists to analyse which markets they’re penetrating … and kind of how to grow your market where your listeners are.

“And I try not to invest any energy in thinking through that so much,” he says.

For him it is important that the music resonates with its listeners wherever they are. But he hopes South Africans will lend him their ears, and that Constitution “resonates with people from home in a particular way, and that means a lot to me”.