10/28/2022 0 Comments Fly or die![]() ![]() The band is all improvisers, that's a really key thing. “The trust means no one's going to drop the ball. “So much of what the band is about is the trust between the players and the rapport on stage,” says branch. Louis replaced original Fly or Die cellist Tomeka Reid, who departed the band to concentrate on her own myriad of commitments.) In the years since, this quartet had grown into a powerful unit, adept at conjuring musical environments that could be forceful and rhythmic one moment, and fragile the next. Louis was working at the Spectrum club where branch played on occasion. Louis met in 2015 after jaimie first moved to New York, while St. When Fly or Die made its debut at Brooklyn’s Manhattan Inn in 2016, they made up three-quarters of the band. branch and Ajemian had been playing together since the mid-’00s in Chicago, and admiring Taylor’s work with the Chicago Underground and at the city’s legendary Velvet Lounge jam-session for just as long. The group was in their favored environment, the stage, where their individual relationships had been molded. A world of possibilities was certainly pending for Fly or Die leading into 2020 and that Zurich gig. “There was so much promise for the year,” remembers branch. Or maybe you felt there was some hope blowing in the air. Where were you in January of 2020, those last moments of the Before Times? Where was your mind, your body, your soul? Did you have plans, hopes and aspirations for the oncoming calendar trip around the sun just starting its initial turn? Were you embroiled in the turmoil continuing to roil the feeds and the headlines, or steeling yourself for the ones that we all knew were incoming during an especially contentious American election year? Maybe both. “This is a warning, honey…” cries the song, and over the ensuing 70 minutes, the band echoes its sentiment, filled with glee and terror. For the next 12 minutes, “Prayer” careens through its twists of wide-eyed racism and family separation, Ajemian and Taylor driving branch’s punk-jazz Morricone horn line. ![]() Her horn doesn’t know what’s about to happen to our world, and yet, somehow, it does - with only the catastrophic details needing to be worked out. By now, “Prayer” had gained a tough spoken-word intro, bringing the context as it slowly gearshifts the intensity: “It’s a song about America,” off-the-cuffs branch while the band seethes behind her, “but it’s about a whole lotta places - ‘cause it’s not just America where shit’s fucked up.” Then arrives the climax, at once site-specific and far-reaching: “.and it’s not always time to be neutral, do you know what I mean?” The gathered Swiss crowd knows, understands, and responds vocally, as Taylor’s backbeats cue branch to bring the trumpet to her lips, and let out a high-pitched wail. A week into a European tour and after three months of constant live performance, Fly or Die is at home in this new song’s contours, messing with its internal machinery while guiding its meaning. The multi-part “Prayer” begins as a goth-blues stomp, its moaning ghosts flying around the room. Louis, double bassist Jason Ajemian, and drummer/percussionist/mbira player Chad Taylor - had just kicked off the concert at Moods, with the opening tracks off their then-new studio album FLY or DIE II: Bird Dogs of Paradise, the second of which, “Prayer for Amerikkka” is among the best political songs written during the Tr*mp Era, and when the moment in question pops off. branch and her Fly or Die crew - cellist Lester St. There is a moment near the top of jaimie branch’s FLY or DIE LIVE, the new album recorded by the trumpeter’s quartet in Zurich, Switzerland on January 23rd, 2020, which feels like it bears the weight of both that specific pocket of time, and a prophecy for all that was soon to come. Fly or die full#Full flight capture of the full Fly or Die suite, parts 1 & 2 compounded & flawlessly communicated in a singular epic of raw cosmic brilliance.įull story in the words of Piotr Orlov here: ![]()
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