This week’s journey moves through soul, jazz, dub and deep house from Andra Day and Isaac Hayes to Chronixx, Kahil El'Zabar and beyond.
I also reflect on the legacy of the Gee's Bend Quiltmakers a powerful story of Black history, artistry and resilience, alongside an incredible exhibition of their work.
Locally, a few things worth tapping into:
• Phaedra Ensemble live at Stroud’s Brunel Goods Shed this Saturday 21st March.
• The Gloucestershire Printmakers Co-operative exhibition at Museum in the Park (running until 19th April)
Music, history and community woven together
#ElecSoul #DJMix #SoulMusic #JazzFusion #BrokenBeat #DeepHouse #GeeBend #BlackArt #TextileArt #StroudArts #LiveMusicUK #IndependentMusic #MusicDiscovery #UndergroundMusic
Tracks Played This Week: Andra Day - Tigress & Tweed
https://youtu.be/9n1Is2xHvdI?si=cLZkRfe2x8SbqrXO
Bohannon - Save Their Souls
https://www.discogs.com/release/978890-Bohannon-Band-Stop-And-Go-Save-Their-Souls?srsltid=AfmBOork6GKm9Bz4MSXQBJj-rOcLr4OblXB187ie4BckbhlKa7H75zhL
Isaac Hayes - Moonlight Loving
https://www.discogs.com/release/1195569-Isaac-Hayes-Moonlight-Lovin-Mènage-Á-Trois-Stranger-In-Paradise?srsltid=AfmBOoqsmcftodqeKnnEWM6nVLuvoPU5a0JitV5uwAEg5Q_bS59VEZO4
Chronixx - Survivor
https://youtu.be/kvLAGzdnaOo?si=ITX5FAn3Rgj0rq2-
Sweet Lord, Sweet Chariot - Women of the Gee's Bend Quilter's Collective singing - Sweet Lord
https://youtu.be/1IEE725l_aM?si=O5mBwGDoGB3uk6fh
Nona Hendryx - Paradise
https://youtu.be/Qfs3cXAIc_Q?si=DITjXRQ8RJbgMXMF
Gratts - Jour de Fête (feat. Ange Nawasadio) [Conrad Idjut's Quokka Pup Dub]
https://gratts.bandcamp.com/album/jour-de-f-te
Wayward - Ugestu
https://soundcloud.com/waywarduk/sets/ugetsu-ep
Michael Longo - Like A Thief In The Night https://www.discogs.com/release/6935875-Mike-Longo-Like-A-Thief-In-The-Night?srsltid=AfmBOopyllD_CQ8EvtV9wY1xDakEZWSvkkupuf5GzydGThG8kKbGZXzj
Zeitgeist Freedom Energy Exchange - Powers 2 (The People) https://sunnyside-up.bandcamp.com/track/powers-2-the-people
At Jazz - Put It On (AtJazz Remix)
https://atjazz.bandcamp.com/track/put-it-on-feat-ernesto-atjazz-remix
Close Counters - I'LL BE THERE FOR YOU (Mark De Clive-Lowe Remix) https://markdeclivelowe.bandcamp.com/album/day-by-day-close-counters-remix
Kahil El'Zabar - Our Time Is Now Ig Culture Remix https://soundcloud.com/kahilelzabar/our-time-is-now-ig-culture?si=076e96061b984389b642d45b673a4cb8&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
Fiyahdred - Got 2 (Let It Go)
https://wearerhythmsection.bandcamp.com/track/got-2-let-it-go
Fiyahdred is a South London-based artist, producer, and DJ, widely recognized for shaping the future of UK club music by blending UK Funky, Grime, and Caribbean sounds with Amapiano and 3-step. Known for a high-energy, percussive sound, they released their debut EP Anyway on Hyperdub and are celebrated as a key innovator in Black electronic music.
Daniele Busciala, Muzikman Edition, Earl W. Green - Sunshine (Remix) (Coflos Unreleased Underground Mix)
https://www.beatport.com/track/sunshine-feat-earl-w-green/20572629?srsltid=AfmBOoq3aC0RYiurB_TfCyWBg4jODt4oFsyMf6WSkOyq90qFC6r5Fkhe
MUSIC, SHOWS, GIGS AROUND STROUD
PHAEDRA ENSEMBLE
A London-based collective of like-minded performers, pushing the boundaries of contemporary chamber music in bold and creative ways. Known for our innovative performances, we curate cutting-edge new music alongside modern classics from the last 100 years. Creative collaboration is central to our approach, and over the last decade, we've partnered with exceptional artists from across the spectrum. https://www.visitstroud.uk/events/slow-change-performed-by-phaedra-ensemble
Slow Change performed by Phaedra Ensemble The Goods Shed Station Approach, Stroud GL5 3AP For Tickets www.sva.org
A London-based collective of like-minded performers, pushing the boundaries of contemporary chamber music in bold and creative ways. Known for our innovative performances, we curate cutting-edge new music alongside modern classics from the last 100 years. Creative collaboration is central to our approach, and over the last decade, we've partnered with exceptional artists from across the spectrum.
ART TOPICS EXHIBITION
The folks from Gee's Bend (officially known as Boykin) are an intergenerational community of African American women and their families in rural Alabama, world-renowned for their distinct, modernist quilting tradition.
Gee's Bend Quiltmakers
Music Gees Bend Community
https://youtu.be/1IEE725l_aM?si=T1n3zgllWsKNKAOu
Ms. Mary Anne Pettway and Ms. China Pettway of the Gee's Bend Quilter's Collective in Gee's Bend, Alabama.
Gee’s Bend is a small community made up of resilient, soulful, and brilliant African American people. After the Civil war, formerly enslaved people were moved from around the Black Belt (region of Alabama) across the river into Gee’s Bend as a way to continue to disenfranchise the people.
For travelers interested in leaving Gee’s Bend, there are two ways to escape/leave. One can either drive an hour plus or one can take a commuter ferry across the river. On normal days, this ferry runs many times a day. GLIDE has learned in our multiple visits, and witnessed first-hand that on election days, the ferry that would other-wise shuttle people from Gee’s Bend to polling places on the other side of the river shuts down…as a way to systematically disenfranchise African-American voters. As one of our teachers on the ground in Wilcox County said to us, ‘Brown vs. Board of Education never made it here to Alabama.'
The organized oppression that the people of Gee’s Bend have experience for generations continues, virtually unabated. One of the astonishing gifts of visiting Ms. Mary Anne Pettway and Ms. China Pettway is to see how their souls continue not only to live, but somehow bubble with life, even in the face of such doggedly determined and brutally systemic racial terrorism.
The other-worldly welcome they give us each year, the heavenly songs that that bathe us in, the luminous quilts they fashion in front of our eyes are all a testament to the souls' capacity to make it through seemingly impossible situations. The brilliance, the strength, the resilience of these Black women that we witness on the ground in Gee’s Bend, and in so many other places in Alabama is an indispensable ingredient on and needed soul-fuel for GLIDE’s Alabama Justice Pilgrimage.
The Gee’s Bend quiltmakers are a group of women and their ancestors from the Gee’s Bend area of Alabama’s rural Black Belt, whose quilts are celebrated as some of the most significant artistic contributions to American art history. Earning international recognition and acclaim, exhibitions showcasing their work have been held in museums and galleries across the U.S. and beyond. Through Souls Grown Deep’s Collection Transfer Program, Gee’s Bend quilts are now part of the permanent collections of more than 40 museums across three continents.
The area’s rich quiltmaking tradition dates back to the nineteenth century, born out of a need to keep warm in unheated homes during the winter months. Due to the scarcity of resources, the majority of quilts well into the twentieth century were made out of old work-clothes and other used materials such as fertilizer and flour sacks. Despite a wider variety of cheap fabric becoming available in the second half of the twentieth century, the recycling of old materials continues to be a central tenet of quilting in Gee's Bend.
The practice of reusing old materials has resulted in a proclivity for improvisational approaches to quilt design. Many Gee's Bend quilts can be called improvisational, or "my way" quilts as they are known locally, in which quiltmakers start with basic forms and then follow their own individual artistic paths ("their way") to stitch unexpected patterns, shapes, and colors. The transference of aesthetic knowledge and skills from generation to generation has been fundamental to the continuation of the Gee's Bend quilting tradition to this day.
A History of Gee’s Bend
How curious a land is this—how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past and big with future promise.
—The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois
Gee’s Bend takes its name from Joseph Gee, a North Carolina enslaver and planter who, in 1816, acquired 6,000 acres of land along a horseshoe bend in the Alabama River and established a plantation with 17 enslaved people. The Gee family operated the plantation until 1845, when, to settle significant debts, they relinquished ownership, including 98 enslaved people, to Mark H. Pettway, a relative, enslaver, and then sheriff of Halifax County, North Carolina. The following year, Pettway relocated to Gee’s Bend, transporting his family and furnishings in a wagon train while 100 enslaved men, women, and children were compelled to journey on foot from North Carolina to their new life in Alabama.
While Gee left his name on the land, Pettway left his on the people. In Gee’s Bend, as on plantations throughout the South, enslaved people were forced to assume the owner’s surname, a fact that can obscure otherwise diverse family backgrounds. Speaking of his great-grandfather, Hargrove Kennedy observed,
"What his name when he came here [from North Carolina], I don't know. A heap of people think that all these folks here was Pettways, but that ain't what they started with. They ain't even no kin, hardly.” American Museum have a wonderful exhibition running up to June 2026
https://www.americanmuseum.org/whats-on/kith-and-kin-the-quilts-of-gees-bend-exhibition