Burnt Sugar - Black Sex Y'all...

BURNT SUGAR
Black Sex Y’all Liberation & Bloody Random Violets
Trugroid

Burnt Sugar are a funk/rock/jazz/turntablism/world/improv collective led by guitarist and sometime writer Greg Tate. He conducts the band’s music in a Butch Morris fashion, though it’s hard to tell – the performances are seamless and unhesitating. The inspirations seem to be electric Miles from 1969-1975, Funkadelic, hip-hop (no rapping, though), metal, and some 20th century classical. (They recorded an album "inspired by" Stravinsky’s Rite Of Spring.

Black Sex Y’all… is a 2-CD set, each disc getting its own subtitle (Disc One is "The Nightmare Of Nubian Subjectivity" and Disc Two is "Nomadology"). The track titles (there are lyrics occasionally, but I haven’t paid much attention to them) are a wilfully obfuscatory hash of Afro-pomo references – this is probably where Greg Tate’s influence is most strongly felt, since that’s what most of his writing is/has been. When he remembers to decode himself for an audience larger than his circle of friends and fellow travelers, he’s brilliant, but when he doesn’t, well, it’s no surprise he writes for the Village Voice.

Anyway, the set is great. The music is thick and funky, aware of hip-hop but feeling no obligation to put rappers on the mic (a quality that’s refreshing enough all by itself), keenly aware of the (partially self-determined) lineage that’s led up to itself but ready, willing and able to transcend all that at a moment’s notice and create something genuinely new, yet warmly familiar. There are some cover tunes – Miles Davis’s "Mtume," from Get Up With It, and Max Roach’s "Freedom Now" paired with the old work-blues song "Driverman." This piece is particularly brilliant, as the vocals work a call-and-response with a drum ‘n’ bass "amen break" instead of a line of blues guitar. This despite the fact that Vernon Reid is the guitarist on the track.

There’s some free jazz skronk mixed into the grooves, sort of bridging Ascension and Agharta. The improv aesthetic at work is rooted in jamming, not the (comparatively) drier Euro improv, which has its own virtues but which has no real place in Burnt Sugar’s soundworld. This is post-African music, and yeah, there’s some rhetorical baggage and some romanticization of Blacknuss, but it’s all overcome by the stomping rhythms (occasionally chopped up by the turntables and computers of Egyptian female DJ Mutamassik) and the raw thrill of guest guitar by Pete Cosey.

This is Burnt Sugar’s fourth release, and the first one I’ve heard by them; I’ll definitely be scooping up the others.