Afro Yaqui Music Collective - Mirror Butterfly (Live) (2019)

Around the turn of the millenium, the humanitarian crisis through which we are passing tipped a threshold: climate refugees began to outpace war refugees. Some 25 million were displaced in 1999 due to famine, drought, and torrential storms. So enters Afro Yaqui Music Collective’s debut album, Mirror Butterfly: the Migrant Liberation Movement Suite, which dramatizes and musicalizes years of interviews and movement building with environmental and ecosocialist activists in Mexico, Syria, Kurdistan, and Tanzania. A 25-piece postcolonial big band delivers three portrait arias, woven in what poetic playwright Ruth Margraff calls “vocal art,” all accompanied by martial arts Afro-Asian choreography (Peggy Myo-Young Choy). The result been hailed as a “praise-song to the wretched of the Earth.” (Marcus Rediker, author, The Slave Ship) The staged work has travelled both activist and performing arts spaces: it has been presented at the Kennedy Center in DC, at the Mesopotamian Water Forum in Iraq, at the New Hazlett Theater in Pittsburgh (where it was incubated) and now, is available in this album form--a global siren call for a new world where many worlds fit.

Dozens of artists contributed to this production whose influences span four continents. Jin Yang (of Silk Road) is featured on pipa in an East-West string quartet; Hugo Cruz (formerly of Síntesis) is featured on congas, bata drums and timbales in a pan-African rhythm section; a saxophone quartet, featuring Ben Opie and Patrick Breiner (Battle Trance) and a six piece choir (led by soprano and co-bandleader Gizelxanath Rodriguez) trade rounds. The music, written by baritone saxophonist Ben Barson, defies expectation, reimagining the past four decades of jazz innovation from Julius Hemphill to Fred Ho. Barson, in fact, is the heir of Fred’s beloved instrument. Barson’s polyphonic, polyrhythmic approach is meant to communicate the vibrant diversity of the migrant experience. Chromatic and seductively jagged choral harmonies, Afro-Asian orchestration, lush voicings by the saxes, all thwart destructive primitivist cliches. Infectious grooves with 4½, 5, and 15 beats per measure formidably defy the oppressive geometry of western modernity.