López and Cleaver have long been recognized as some of the most vital voices in contemporary experimental improvised music, each with dozens of recordings and frequent performances in New York and abroad. They are joined here by Fred Moten, the inimitable poet, theorist, critic, and 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Moten’s presence, voicing poetry in an improvisatory syncopation with the instrumentalists, raises the music to third plane, putting the record in a broader collection of legendary spoken-word jazz records from Gil Scott-Heron and Amiri Baraka to the contemporary energies of Moor Mother and Irreversible Entanglements.
MOTEN / LÓPEZ / CLEAVER⤬
A new and eminent improvising group of three singular artists: Fred Moten (voice), Brandon López (double bass), and Gerald Cleaver (drums).
"Moten/López/Cleaver’s collaboration feels a fundamentally social creation. Not just in the improvisation between the trio, but also with the listener. Moten’s words, the musical interactions, and the listener’s interpretation feed into each other. It finds simplicity in the complex, and brutal complexity embedded in the everyday. Triggering a shared processing of an uncomfortable reality, of the ongoing present, and all our places within it." — QUIETUS