Group Theory: Black Music

Group Theory: Black Music is a stunning new statement from South African drummer and composer Tumi Mogorosi. Standing in the lineage of South African greats such as Louis MoholoMoholo, Makaya Ntshoko and Ayanda Sikade, Mogorosi is one of the foremost drummers working anywhere in the world, with a fexible, powerful style that brings a distinctive South African infection to the polyrhythmic tradition of Elvin Jones, Max Roach and Art Blakey. Since his international debut on Jazzman Records in 2014 with Project ELO, Mogorosi has been in the vanguard of the South African creative music scene’s burgeoning outernational dimension, taking the drummer’s chair in both Shabaka Hutchings’ Shabaka and The Ancestors formation and with avant-garde noiseniks The Wretched, who featured on Brownswood’s ac­claimed South African showcase, Indaba Is.

Where Group Theory: Black Music moves an established format dramatically forward is in the addition of a nine-person choir. Their massed voices soar powerfully above every track as a collective instrument of human breath and body, and enter the album into the small but signifcant number of radical recordings to have used the voice in this way, such as Max Roach’s It’s Time, Andrew Hill’s Lift Every Voice, Billy Harper’s Capra Black, and Donald Byrd’s I’m Trying To Get Home.