Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones is an experimental free jazz ensemble made up of composer and vocalist Amirtha Kidambi (Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl), saxophonists Matt Nelson (Battle Trance, GRID), bassist Lester St. Louis (Jaimie Branch’s Fly or Die, Nate Wooley’s Mutual Aid Music), and drummer Jason Nazary (Anteloper, Little Women).
The ensemble’s instruments form an intricate landscape for Kidambi’s voice to traverse; she battles against its mountainous heights before sliding speedily down its slopes. Truly making an instrument of her vocal chords, Kidambi’s syllabic, frenzied, and powerful utterances weave into the alluring, hypnotic, and confronting jazz melodies of the ensemble. Dealing with issues such as power, capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and violence, Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones are not shy to confront and resist systems of oppression and control through their music. As such, a sense of ancestral energy pulses through their performances; it feels as though they are not alone on the stage, but are rather carried along by an old knowledge buried deep within the music.
Amirtha Kidambi is invested in the creation and performance of subversive, anti-hegemonic music, from free improvisation and avant-jazz, to Indian carnatic and devotional, experimental bands, noise and new music. She is an educator, activist and organizer working to challenge systems of white supremacist, colonial, capitalist, patriarchy, and is co-founder and co-organizer of South Asian Artists in Diaspora and Musicians Against Police Brutality.
That subversive spirit of collective dismantlement and reassemblage serves as the catalyst for the longform cuts that comprise ‘New Monuments’, Kidambi’s third full-length recording with her band Elder Ones. As their leader writes in its accompanying liner notes, the title summons the “tearing down of old colonial and racist monuments and vestiges of power… in order to build new ones to the martyrs of struggle.”
Tracked at Figure 8 Studios above Prospect Park, the album is the work of an artist concerned with numerous interconnected sites of global conflict: among them, the farmers’ protests over agricultural reforms in India and the evolution of the Iranian women’s rights movement following the death of Mahsa Amini.
jazzexzess w/ Amirtha Kidambi’ s Elder Ones
Saturday, 13.4.2024 | Doors: 20:00 / Starts 20:30 CET
House of Music | Revalerstraße 99 in 10245 Berlin
