Active since 2003, the oldest and largest improv collective in Canada, Kalmunity, presents us STARS SHINE DARLKY – a full night of powerful words, words of love and raging roars, healing grooves and dissent manners. Soul of the project Jahsun, curated a special evening of solos, duos and trios of musicians, poets and creatives to come together and improvise the night away. A night that felt like community, that echoed gratitude and resistance.
In a world where “leaders” and governments keep failing us, genocide is live streamed, racism and deportation cracks the land open, separates and traumatises families, the poet D-na reminds us of the age of this collective wound – “Are you done now?”, she asks repeatedly accompanied by the swirling saxophone of Aaron Leaney, while Stella Adjokê reminds us the power of poetry, confessing why she decided to become a poet – “poetry is a way to viscerally explain the explosion”, – followed by a healing preach-like poem about love and fear, to the sound of Aaron Leaney’s and Eric Hove’s saxophones.
The loquacious pianist Zach Frampton and the inspired, and inspiring, poet and improviser Zibz BlacKurrent slammed the piano and the words together into a conversation on nostalgia, gratitude, who you are and where you go, – BlacKurrent doesn’t let us part without demanding to “STOP it in Gaza, Sudan and Congo”.
Jahsun and Fred Bazil unite for an explosive set, with a grounded but frantic at times drumming and a roaring saxophone; Engone Endong embarks us into the rich and tasty journey of texture, sampling and sound design and Jason “Blackbird” Selman shares with us his feelings of Caribbean manhood, alongside his poem “8 things that make a black man cry”, a very heartfelt exchange accompanied by the grooviest bass lines by the legend Mark Alan Haynes.
Closer to an end but not quite, Skin Tone, Jairus Sharif and Mustafa Rafiq come together not only in a musical journey but a spiritual one in all its beautiful encounters and twisted turns where noise fusions with drone, free jazz and electronic – the sounds of hope, freedom and vision.
On a third and last set, Brussels based self taught bassist Farida Amadou, who played her solo show on the same stage the day after, joins Jahsun and Engone Endong in an unbridled performance, making the way to the iconic group Dark Maatr’ and a final all-together improvisation moment that leaves Casa flooding in electrifying sound waves and a holy-like energy.
Improvisation is not just a moment of play, but an intentional and rather emotional, intimate, empowering space for community, nourishment and care; challenging structures and systems and not just musical ones; listening, giving and taking space, liberating one self and one another – Kalmunity is the project that brings the very musical and the very political sounding unison on the stage and outside of it; that brings the realness of life and struggle into hope, celebration, love, gratitude and resistance.
