Tumi Mogorosi - Group Theory: Black Music CD/LP

"Group Theory: Black Music" is a stunning new statement from South African drummer and composer Tumi Mogorosi.

Standing in the lineage of South African greats such as Louis MoholoMoholo, Makaya Ntshoko and Ayanda Sikade, Mogorosi is one of the foremost drummers working anywhere in the world, with a flexible, powerful style that brings a distinctive South African inflection to the polyrhythmic tradition of Elvin Jones, Max Roach and Art Blakey. Since his international debut on Jazzman Records in 2014 with Project ELO, Mogorosi has been in the vanguard of the South African creative music scene’s burgeoning outernational dimension, taking the drummer’s chair in both Shabaka Hutchings’ Shabaka and The Ancestors formation and with avant-garde noiseniks The Wretched, who featured on Brownswood’s acclaimed South African showcase, Indaba Is.

Where "Group Theory: Black Music" moves an established format dramatically forward is in the addition of a nine-person choir. Their massed voices soar powerfully above every track as a collective instrument of human breath and body, and enter the album into the small but significant number of radical recordings to have used the voice in this way, such as Max Roach’s It’s Time, Andrew Hill’s Lift Every Voice, Billy Harper’s Capra Black and Donald Byrd’s I’m Trying To Get Home.

Tracklist:

1. Wadada
2. The Fall
3. Panic Manic
4. Where are the Keys? [feat. Andile Yenana and Lesego Rampolokeng]
5. Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child [feat. Andile Yenana and Siya Mthembu]
6. At the Limit of the Speakable
7. Thaba Bosiu [feat. Andile Yenana]
8. Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child [feat. Gabi Motuba]

About this product: this release is available on CD and LP formats.

The LP is pressed on black vinyl, housed in a reverse-board gatefold sleeve.