The mad-dash scramble of a pre-storm grocery store in central North Carolina is a sight to see, not quite as panicked as the initial daze of the pandemic but close. I rush here, I rush there, in pursuit of eggs, bread and shrimp, with the Young Mothers’ avant-garde sound adding to the tension. Their music blends jazz, rock and hip-hop, with techno flourishes scattered about like Molly’s leftover ashes from a rave.
The group’s origin story begins in 2009, when bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten moved from his native Norway to Austin, Texas, where he fell in with talented tunesmiths who, like him, forged sounds that integrated genres and mindsets. Freeform jazz, funky R&B, rap and heavy-duty rock ’n’ roll accent their 2014 debut, A Mothers Work Is Ever Done, while the 2018 followup, Morose, mined the same terrain. Flaten moved home not long thereafter, with the pandemic then upending their plans for cross-oceanic collaborations. In late 2022, however, the other band members—Jawwaad Taylor (trumpet, rhymes, electronics, programming), Jason Jackson (tenor and baritone sax), Stefan Gonzalez (vibraphone, drums, percussion and vocals), Jonathan F. Horne (guitar), and Frank Rosaly (drums, electronics and programming)—joined Håker Flaten (acoustic and electric bass) at Studio Paradiso in Oslo, where they recorded the five-track, 51-minute Better If You Let It.
The centerpiece of the album is “Song for a Poet,” which pays tribute to Gonzalez’s father, Texan jazz trumpeter Dennis González, who passed away in March 2022. As Gonzalez explains in the press release, “In 1993, 29 years prior, he had traveled to Oslo from Warsaw to record an album with some of Norway’s finest musicians of the era: Nils Petter Molvaer, Sidsel Endressen, Pal Thowsen, and Bugge Wesseltoft, the recorded result came out on CD and cassette as an album entitled Welcome to Us. I vividly remember him mapping out this music at home, prior to him traveling to Europe to meet up and record with said musicians. I was 8 years old. I decided on a whim that it would be beautiful if we could pull off some sort of tribute to my father’s music from his time spent in Oslo. Me and my gracious bandmates in The Young Mothers (plus haunting spoken word from Klara Weiss and Malwina Witkowska) settled on covering the ever mournful sounding composition ‘Song for a Poet.’ As you can hear, it turned out beautifully, really capturing the melancholic and spiritual qualities that my father loved about Scandinavian jazz. Fittingly enough this particular track was recorded on Día de Los Muertos, fueled by a surreal feeling of connection and synchronicity to the music and to my father on his prior Scandinavian musical journeys.”
Throughout, the music is a stew of high-octane sounds mixed and matched to the moment, and forever elbowing its way to the foreground. Try as you might to concentrate on the road or reading, for instance, odds are you’ll find yourself focused on the bleating brass crashing into the funky rhythm, while a melliferous melody syncopates its way into the soul. The music brings to mind, in an odd way, the closing lines of Wallace Stevens’ “Esthétique du Mal,” which finds the philosopher-poet questioning how to cope with the evil that populates our planet.
And out of what one sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds—
As if air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.
It also conjures, of course, his more concise “The Idea of Order at Key West,” which explores how we mortals make sense of the chaotic world. The best music, as with all art, takes us beyond the immediate, makes us contemplate such things as life and death, destiny and fate, and the unordered order in which we live. Such is the case with Better If You Let It. Listen to it and deep thoughts—some lofty, others (like many of mine) pretentious—result. It’s a fascinating album well worth one’s time.
The Old Grey Cat 