Gwen Laster and New Muse 4Tet
Keepers of the Flame
(Independent)
Evolutionary, entropic improvisation is deployed fluidly on Keepers of the Flame, summoning tonal imagery of almost synesthetic vividness—channeling the grief, loss, and injustice that has relentlessly, insidiously pervaded the African American diaspora and remains, infuriatingly, an inescapable part of the Black American experience and its fabric. Burdened by this oppressive history, Keepers is mournful, even lugubrious at times—with a transcendent arc. Violist Melanie Dyer and cellist Teddy Rankin Parker are cocredited as composers alongside Beacon-based bandleader, composer, and violinist Gwen Laster, forming an imposing triad with riveting support by percussionist Andrew Drury, who swerves intuitively between punctuating, resoundingly primal bass drum and delicately nuanced tom and snare textures and is subtly authoritative throughout. These tracks bleed into each other like movements in a suite: discrete, yet holistically engaged and symphonic. Keepers is laden with bop’s effervescence, but bluegrass seeps into its fabric, too. “Drishti” is a tone poem gone scherzo, a jocular contrast to the somber, contemplative pair of opening tracks. It’s chimeric: at once a strings-enlaced hootenanny, languid hoedown, and freewheeling jam evoking Manhattan’s ’70s loft jazz scene. “Asamondo’s” MENASA-esque exoticism has a sultriness not heard elsewhere on the record. “Shoreline” stills Keepers’s fulminating tumult but also embodies its elusive dichotomies, its measured, hushed outer layers are a barely contained mask for its roiling, agitated essence, which recalls John Cage. Darkly elegiac, its fleeting-yet-pronounced moments of negative space leave room for Laster to enter the frame, murmuring imploringly with an incantatory presence that oscillates between resting comfortably, undulating mellifluously within the music’s contours, and jarring it loose from its moorings.
This article appears in September 2025.
