Hudah, Cid, Baji, L.T., Yosh, Rocco and Clef and Smoove—eight sons of the jazz trumpeter, astral jazz pioneer, and black American icon Phil Cohran—grew up on Chicago’s South Side living apart from their peers. They were raised as vegans. They wore homemade clothes and hand-me-downs to school. And they lined up sometimes before dawn every morning for practice. Cohran taught his sons to play their horns young, in some cases shortly after they learned to walk, and they would line up as a family for “long tones,” where they emptied all the breath in their bodies into their horns, generating one rich drone that greeted the sunrise.
It was a meditative practice that you can hear take up root in the often boisterous and molten-hot music they make now, as Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. On Book of Sound, their latest album, the group that made their name in scrappy performances on the sidewalks and street corners of New York City and Chicago turns muted, spare, warm and still. It is their first without drums on Honest Jon’s label, and it is also the group’s most open tribute to the legacy of their father, whose interest in Afrocentric philosophy and astral jazz runs like a river through American culture. Cohran passed in June of 2017, and Book Of Sound is, at its warmest and best, a living, breathing document of his philosophy.
The music rings with the familiarity of family and the reverence of loving disciples, and much of it overtly references their family lives. The track called "Morning Prayer” is literally that, a drone around F based on the morning drone the sons played each day. It fans out like sun rays through Venetian blinds. Bits of chant and additional instrumentation are provided by their mothers, Aquilla and Maia. “Kepra” moves with the moves with the rhythm of breath, and “Now” mingles their own voices with the sounds of their horns.
The compositions are clean and uncluttered, with one or two melody lines interlocking and circling each other over an unchanging bassline, a structure that establishes and builds rather than twists. The brothers play in even-breathed tones that dilate like gas lamps or hover like Rothko paintings. The goal of these pieces is replenishment and clarity, not surprise. The rich changes of “Midnight” evoke a sense-memory fingerprint somewhere between Duke Ellington’s “Autumn Leaves” and John Coltrane’s “Naima,” and they raise more goosebumps the more they repeat, cresting in feeling as Aquilla’s spiraling soprano enters the mix.
Not all of the pieces on the album soar as high or reverberate as deeply. A few, like “Purple Afternoon” or “Heaven and Earth,” simply sit still for a few minutes, not quite accreting meaning or power as they do. But they are small moments, and they feel like worthwhile dead spots in an album this intimate, this bare, and this generous.
