Journey to Nabta Playa documents the collaboration between Chicagoan clarinetist-vocalist-multiinstrumentalist Angel Bat Dawid and Swedish, London-based keyboard player-interdisciplinary artist Naima Nefertari (aka Karlsson, the granddaughter of Don Cherry, daughter of Neneh Cherry, and the niece of Eagle-Eye Cherry). Nefertari is the archivist and coordinator for the Estate of Moki Cherry and Cherry Archive. She has studied piano and music in the tradition of Don Cherry, with her uncles Eagle-Eye and the late, eldest son of Cherry, David Ornette Cherry. This project began when Nefertari joined Dawid and fellow Chicagoan double bass and multi-instrumentalist (and the director of Elastic Arts) Adam Zanolini to continue the creative exploration begun in 2021 with Ornette Cherry, engaging the music of Don Cherry and finding new directions in composition, improvisation, community, and participatory music.
The album is a spiritual jazz journey in sound and sisterhood through sacred time and space, a powerful meditation on memory, mythology, and ancestral science. The album reflects an imaginary cosmic story, from desert summoning and ritual procession, to astral ceremonies, burial, and liberation. The music is rooted in Dawid and Nefertari’s historical exploration of an ancient, sacred stone circle in Nabta Playa, an astronomical site in the remote, ancient Nubian deserts of southern Egypt, dated to circa 7500 BC. One of the pieces in Journey to Nabta Playa, «Procession of the Equinox», marks their alignment with the Spring Equinox (on March 20), reflecting a deep relationship with celestial cycles and sacred time. The album was also inspired by the late American children’s books author Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales.
The music corresponds with the expansive aesthetics of Don Cherry, thinking and rethinking the legacy of jazz as a dynamic, inclusive entity, or as a vivid continuum that the players and composers always shape, and speaking about our current human experiences through the language of sound. Dawid and Nefertari mention that African folk tales suggested that once people could fly, they knew magic and could walk up in the air like climbing up a gate. Dawid and Nefertari’s music radiates that kind of liberating, positive cosmic energy.
Journey to Nabta Playa sounds timeless and fuses cleverly and organically elements of modern and free jazz, including Don Cherry’s iconic and playful «Bishmillah» (originally from Complete Communion, Blue Note, 1966), contemporary music (with David Ornette Cherry’s untreleased before «Burial: String Quartet in E minor», transcribed by Dawid), leftfield electronica, traditional Eastern music, and, obviously, African music. The album was recorded at Don Cherry’s home studio in Tågarp schoolhouse in rural Sweden, using many of Don and Moki Cherry’s instruments, including African percussion instruments and vintage analog synths, and at Elastic Arts, CoLabyrinth (the studio of Chicagoan percussionist Kahil El’Zabar, who released on the same label Spirit Gatherer • Tribute To Don Cherry, with Ornette Chjerry, 2023), and Soundmine Studios in Chicago, aiming at forging the strong connection with Elders and Ancestors, with community, lineage and sound as ritual.
The album features original art by Canadian interdisciplinary artist Nirbhai (nep) Singh Sidhu and El’Zabar, and texts by Neneh Cherry, Imani Mason Jordan, Tej Adeleye, and Zanolini.
Eyal Hareuveni
Angel Bat Dawid (clarinet, vocals, electronics, flutes, bells, auxiliary instruments, piano, Moog, mouth harp), Naima Nefertari (piano, flutes, vibraphone, balophone, bells, kalimba, Hammond B3 Organ, keyboard, vocals, harp)
