Was Miles Davis’s In A Silent Way the first known example of what we now call ambient jazz? It has all the hallmarks: electro-acoustic improvisation that sets a sustained mood, running over an extended period without being overly hung up on rhythmic or harmonic changes, and which can serve as soothing background ambience while also meriting closer listening if the urge strikes.
You could also make a case for some of Don Cherry’s work with Collin Walcott and Nana Vasconcelos in the trio Codona, whose albums for the ECM label created pristine soundscapes using a variety of non-western instruments. And there’s Paul Horn, whose groundbreaking 1976 solo flute recording, Inside The Great Pyramid, established him as a leading figure in the nascent New Age movement.
In recent years, a new crop of musicians has been marketed as ambient jazz, who also lean heavily into the New Age vibe, incorporating soft-focus synth sheen into meditative vistas while maintaining elements of jazz-adjacent jams. Unsurprisingly, the New Age-friendly West Coast of America has been the main area of activity, with Los Angeles serving as the epicentre of this quiet earthquake.
Chief among LA’s practitioners has been percussionist/producer Carlos Niño. Though active in music for decades, he’s gained visibility with recent albums like More Energy Fields, Current (2021) and Extra Presence (2022), both credited to Carlos Niño & Friends – a catch-all name for his ever-revolving cast of close collaborators from the fertile LA scene. More recently, he’s played on and co-produced the most controversial addition to the ambient jazz canon, André 3000’s opinion-splitting 2023 solo flute joint, New Blue Sun and, just this year, he released Openness Trio – alongside guitarist Nate Mercereau and saxophonist Josh Johnson – on the Blue Note label.
This new live date brings the idea out of the studio and into an outdoor setting where musicianship is nakedly paramount. It was recorded in LA’s Coldwater Canyon Park on the grounds of longstanding conservationist organisation TreePeople and features a seven-piece group of LA-based musical Friends, including Mercereau and saxophonist Kamasi Washington. By and large, the music they make does little to dispel the notion of ambient jazz sounding like the soundtrack to a bougie yoga retreat. Shakers and gongs. Chimes and cymbals. Hand drums quietly clopping. Breathy flutes and sinuous twin sax lines chasing their own tails. Ethereal tuned percussion. Wafting electronic tones. You get the idea.
But it doesn’t matter, because this session is entirely dominated by the voice of poet, writer, actor, filmmaker, rapper and all-round Renaissance Man, Saul Williams. As Williams’ spoken recitation unfolds, the improvised background subtly – almost subliminally – mirrors his words but never intrudes or distracts. Gentle rhythmic figures occasionally arise, with tuned percussion suggesting minimalist cycles. Rarer still, the saxes rise up in a brief crescendo. But, for the most part, it’s a hypnotically continuous bed of sound that gives Williams centre stage – a position he occupies with grace and authority.
Slowly and deliberately, he repeats the opening incantation of “Land back” three times, imparting a hushed, ceremonial feel, while instantly setting an anti-colonial agenda. From there, he begins to paint an unsettling portrait of 21st-century evil. As befits the setting, he sketches a ghoulishly complacent, climate-denying administration, staffed by “President of archaeological indifference / … Minister of the deteriorating sky / … Bishop of the great Climate War.”
A sudden switch conflates colonial atrocities in Gaza and the US: “The voices beneath the rubble / the bones beneath this stage.” Then we’re confronted with the incomprehensible horror of genocide: “I had not imagined the bloodshed / I had not imagined the screams / the recorded sounds of children’s voices … I could never imagine such deviance.” Faced with such entwined atrocities, despair is inevitable: “Look what they did to the land / what they did to the people / it was an impossible time / there was no way out of it / no way around.” What to do in a world so horribly out of joint? “How to harmonise the planet?”
But there are ways of coping with trauma, of not letting it consume you: “Air it out / Let it breathe.” And, gently, Williams begins to emerge as an avatar of coming change, with a liberatory incantation: “I speak a new language / as is always the first sign / of a new age.” Now we’re moving into Burroughsian strategies for taking back control: “Hack into the rebellious gene / … Hack into doctrine / … Hack into God.” Pretty soon, we have a psychic guerilla movement: “… fully aware / of the world that we are stepping into / the times that we are walking into / unafraid.”
Williams delivers a concise lecture on how the Dutch East India Trade Company – “the first multinational corporation” – swindled the Lenape people out of the island of Manhattan, building a wall to keep them out on the site that is now Wall Street, where once slaves were rented daily. It climaxes in a desperate manifesto of letting go and transformation – “Dozens of genocides later / and we find ourselves / … rooting for the end of empire / I’ve seen enough” – with the saxophones reaching for a stark crescendo.
The poet Aja Monet briefly takes the mic, taking aim at “the hush money / howl of advertisements / electoral politics of greed / godless truths,” and assuring us that “the water is rising / … money perishes in the face of the flood.” Then Williams returns with a crystalline parable about a firing squad with one member who “holds his fire / his dilemma / was my system of belief” – offering us a glimpse of resistance, an example of doing the right thing.
These are stirring and urgent dramas, powerfully delivered. Though both Williams and Monet identify as poets, it’s scarcely relevant how their words might appear on a page. With an emphasis on raw performance, these bars owe more to the spoken word scene and slam poetry – something Williams helped to popularise with the 1998 film, SLAM, which he wrote and performed in.
But it goes deeper than that. Williams is pushing back past hip hop, past the Black Arts Movement, past Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance, to the root of African American oral traditions. Back to the use of speech as a way of maintaining identity and resisting oppression. Of finding ways to survive. Together.
It all comes together in Williams’ last, exhortatory address to the audience, after the performance has ended: “I see no reason really for us to… wallow in any sort of fear in terms of what lies ahead. I think we have to actually bask in community…we have to make a change … Prepare yourself for the transformative work and the transformative healing that this nation needs.”
Right now, these are the kinds of optimistic, pragmatic and inspiring words that everyone – and not just America – needs to hear.
