Carnegie Hall

There’s a “goes there–ness” to Angel Bat Dawid’s music. In her galaxy of sound, paradox births clarity. Her clarinet—both haunting and effervescent—snakes through the land of binaries, seeking and spreading ancestral truths. When she leans digital, it feels analog; when she leans traditionalist, it rings otherworldly. Whether Dawid’s on woodwinds, playing the organ, or wielding her earthy vocals, she relishes in the tapestries of the ironic as if her very survival depends on it. Perhaps the ironic is the metaphor for the current landscape: one in which surviving is thriving. In the tradition of her heroes from Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, freedom is on the other side of socialized convention.

“We are Starzz,” Dawid sings on her debut album, Oracle, as in the literal stuff of which the cosmos are made. It is a declaration that’s hard to argue against aft er being awash in her musical odes.

Just as George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic inverted realities with lyrics and space themes, Dawid does so with overlays of musical constitutions. There’s humor in the serene and delta blues in her gospel, but she is at heart an Afrofuturist here to upset the status quo.

Take “Voice o’ Heab’N,” a song that begins as a soulful, heavy gospel organ solo—the kind whose austerity didn’t prevent it from inspiring the funk era—that under Dawid’s steadied hand, slips into disorienting chords that double as alien communication before straightening up into the standard it pretended to be at the onset.

Dawid’s determination to obliterate the isms of the world with music as healing is a Sun Ra–esqe charge that mirrors her religious upbringing. The Kentucky native’s albums take her listeners on a quest for home—a land neither here nor there—that resonates as a deep feeling that rises from the root chakra up to the ever-blazing sun. The overcoming of loss—the kind that’s encoded in DNA memory as resilience—is what Dawid aims to tap, and she does so with the mastery of harmonizing apparent opposition.

In Hush Harbor Mixtape Vol. 1 Doxology, the gospel tambourine embodies the sensual shimmy of the belly dancer. The rural call of rooster crows and gospel wails are sampled with a hip-hop lover’s ear. North African harmonics sway into a serenade reminiscent of Nancy Wilson, which rockets into meditative synthesizer. The seamless mix feels like the adoring work of Dawid’s deejay side. Nevertheless, the album is dedicated to Escrava Anastacia, a Brazilian folk saint who is oft en shown wearing a metal mask as punishment for her beauty. The term “hush harbor” refers to the secret places where enslaved Africans worshipped in the antebellum South.

Much like hush harbor, Dawid’s performances and records feel intimate, personal. “Music has been my best friend—it really has,” she told the Chicago Tribune last December “It’s helped me get through the worst stuff. Maybe that’s what people feel in my music.” With Dawid building on the pentatomic scale as her backbone, home lies in the sonic epiphany.

Ytasha L. Womack—a member of Carnegie Hall’s Afrofuturism Curatorial Council—is an independent scholar, filmmaker, dancer, and author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Her other books include Rayla 2212 and Rayla 2213; Post Black: How a New Generation is Redefining African American Identity; Beats, Rhymes & Life: What We Love and Hate About Hip-Hop; and the upcoming Blak Kube. She directed the Afrofuturist dance film A Love Letter to the Ancestors from Chicago and is an artist-in-residence with Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Senegal.

Photography: Dawid by David Raccuglia.