Jazz bassist, Marcus Miller has a new album with an easily misleading titled: Afrodeezia. The uninitiated listener may be excused for confusing it with substances intended for sensual stimulation. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. I called up the American musician to talk about the new album and his work with UNESCO’s Slave route Project.
Miller, has been spending more and more time in, Paris where he’d been for a almost a month when I finally gets time to take my call. In fact, parts of his latest album were recorded in the French capital.

He says he likes Paris because, “it has such a variety of African peoples. At any given time you can get musicians from anywhere in the African world to work with. This means you don’t have to necessarily travel to Senegal, or Cameroon to work with musicians from there.”

Miller features Senegalese vocalist, Alune Wade, on the opening track, Hylife and on Preacher’s Kid.  Other musicians like Haitian trumpeter, Etienne Charles is featured on Son of Macbeth. Charles brings an unmistakable calypso feel to the music. It’s a sound that developed uniquely from the regions slave traditions, just as the blues grew out of similar conditions in the South of the United States.

Miller says the ideas behind the music of the new album started while he was working on his previous album, Renaissance, with the song Goree to be specific. It is named for the island of Goree in Senegal which is a historical site where slaves where first taken after being kidnapped from their villages before being taken to the new world.  “I thought I knew what the place was about. But nothing prepared me for the experience of standing in that place with all that history and energy,” he says. So the new album, Afrodeezia is a further exploration of this theme.

The album brings together the musical traditions from West Africa, South America, the Caribbean and Southern US. Miller has included musical styles from the regions that were affected by the historic trade in enslaved African peoples. However, he also says the album could not be finished if he didn’t deal with the current effects of the ideology that made slavery possible. A track titled I Can’t Breathe, which features Chuck D of the legendary hip-hop outfit, Public Enemy. The song reflects of the recent murder of unarmed black men by white law enforcement officers in the United States and the protest movement it has sparked.

Miller was recently named as one of the spokespersons of UNESCO’s Slave Routes project which is involved in preserving the memory of the historic slavery of African peoples and reaching out particularly to young people who may be cut off from that history. Miller says he didn’t just one to be a ceremonial ambassador for the project. “I wanted to really make a contribution. I didn’t want to be one of those people who are given the title and immediately go on with business as usually. I chose to create this album as my contribution to preserving that memory.”

It’s a way of paying tribute to the long journey of “my African ancestors” who became African Americans… the melodies and rhythms they carried with them from Africa exploded into a “dizzying” array of musical styles and genres that have changed the world. Everything from Jazz, Spirituals, reggae, R&B blues and hip-hop came from that suffering. That is Afrodeezia.

 

Percy Mabandu

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