By Marisse Cato

What does it mean to transfer political ideology into musical aesthetic? B.H.A.M
(Black History Arts Movement) starts firmly in the London jazz scene sound-world with the track “M.O.V.E.”. Sounding influences from afrobeat and highlife, the head is simultaneously liberating and accusatory. This insistent call to attention is matched with a preceding ideological and spiritual intention set by the group’s starlet producer and Ivors-nominated composer and bandleader Arowah Cleaver with “P.R.A.Y.”.
The album is made up of interludes and tracks that draw a sonic lineage backwards through time. Starting with incriminating basslines that soar, angular, punchy and daring solos from Jay Phelps on trumpet and Lorenz Okello-Osengor takes us to church with soulful organ resonating over the band and pews. We are carried through vocal echoes that bend time – poking and prodding us to MOVE, beyond dance, toward collective action.
Drawing from so many aspects of contemporary and historical Blackness, the
essence of Sankofa (Twi)– to learn from the past to inform the future – continues to run throughout. We hear numerous roll calls and references to 60s and 70s activism in the tracks, reminding us of these legacies. Their continued relevance is felt in the note-bending cello solos from Gary Washington that cut through the texture with Queen-like rock ‘n’ roll dramaticism.
Through funk, soul, gospel, blues and eventually toward the abstract in free jazz, the music keeps daring us to dream, to think beyond our current condition toward what liberation might be. This sentiment resonates somewhere between Jacques Attali’s assertion of noise-making as a deeply political act that the sound of hegemony seeks to silence and Audre Lorde’s critical assertion in her 1977 essay “Your Silence Will not Protect You”. To make a racket, is to refuse a pre-determined future that excludes your dreams. B.H.A.M pushes us to sound and move with integrity against forces that dare to prescribe imagination and possibility.

The album is a sonic representation of the mobilisation of a community of voices who are dreaming, visualizing, sounding and acting on the dreams of ancestors and continuing to build upon them. Cleaver’s acute sense of musical styles entwined with her research has brought together an album that radiates its own unique and poignant aesthetic structure that sounds its messages both with and without words. This type of music necessitates activity and begs the question, what might we do the day after we are liberated?
Instagram: @arowahsounds
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