Vocal Classics of the Black Avant Garde
Cafe Oto, London

IN THIS 60-minute programme, an amalgam of vocals, text and experimental jazz, East End vocalist Elaine Mitchener and fellow artists draw on some of the standout works from the 1960s and 1970s African-American avant-garde, itself influenced by the burgeoning civil rights movement of the period.

The performers enter the space blowing on kazoos, tapping on iron and chanting rhythmically, with Mitchener singing “Every day is a struggle” and her pulsating voice palavers with the simmering alto saxophone of Jason Yarde and the searing lyricism of Byron Wallen’s trumpet.

It’s followed by a commentary on Jim Crow racism, with Neil Charles’s bow beating the strings of his bass like a drum until Wallen’s open horn — first muted, then lucid — Yarde’s militant alto, Alex Hawkins’s intense piano runs and Mark Sanders’s crescendo of drums crown the words: “Jim Crow is wrong/One day he will be gone.”