Four years ago, the Chicago-based improvisational artist Damon Locks began layering vocal samples of speeches from the Civil Rights movement over original beats programmed on a drum machine. These politically charged sound collages gradually expanded and transformed into the Black Monument Ensemble, a 15-member performance collective that features singers from the Chicago Children’s Choir and musicians active on the city’s jazz and improv scene, including clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid, drummer Dana Hall and percussionist Arif Smith. Where Future Unfolds is the fruit of Locks' vision, an ensemble performance recorded live at the Garfield Park Botanical Conservatory last year. Locks' project feels revelatory in its bridging of the past and future, its blend of old and new. This is uplifting activist jazz for tumultuous times.
"Statement Of Intent/Black Monument Theme” fires the ten-track album into life. It’s a song commandeered by Locks, who delivers an impassioned sermon against a backdrop of shimmering wind chimes and rattling percussion. “Confrontation/Dislocation by avenues and blocks/Whole neighborhoods upturned/Officials constantly re-framing, presenting, re-presenting, composing and positioning," roars Locks in a similar fashion to hip-hop poet Saul Williams, before reaching and repeating the climatic mantra “Some things never change—black monuments.”
The music moves easily between Afrofuturist gospel—typified by the spacy synths of “Which I Believe It Will” and the luminous electro beats of “Which I Believe I Am”—and hip-hop grime. “The Colors That You Bring” sets the choir’s soulful harmonies against wavering strings and murky boom-bap drums, like a civil rights protest movie scored the RZA. Upping the intensity, sampled fragments of archived speeches are embedded in the songs; on “Solar Power” a voice proclaims, “There's no black person on this planet that will disagree with freedom.” These spoken snippets give the album a militant edge, recalling interludes from the classic Public Enemy records, where speeches from social reformers like Frederick Douglass were fused with steely breaks.
Where Future Unfolds began as a retelling of the Civil Rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s, but as the title suggests, it is also concerned with what is to come. At one point we hear the sweet, youthful voice of Rayna Golding—the daughter of Black Monument Ensemble singer Monique Golding—leading the choir in a vow: “I can rebuild a nation no longer working out.” The line comes to encapsulate the tenor of the album: gritty sentiments that radiate an optimistic glow. In the way that music from old eras can be sampled and repurposed into new forms, Locks’s majestic work strives to reach better days by looking back and learning from the past.
