Harriet Tubman and Georgia Anne Muldrow Cook a Powerful Brew » PopMatters

The trio of Brandon Ross (electric guitar, banjo, soprano guitar), Melvin Gibbs (electric bass), and J.T. Lewis (drums) is named for the abolitionist Harriet Tubman. Their five albums across two decades (1998-2018) have always suggested freedom—they were largely improvised in the studio—but also the rock-solid grounding of Black American music: jazz, rock, funk, wherever they take you. It’s not quite a jazz band and utterly a jazz band: the kind that Miles Davis put together in the 1970s.

The musicians’ credits cover a lot of ground. Ross is equally associated with Henry Threadgill, Cassandra Wilson, Oliver Lake, and MeShell Ndegeocello. Gibbs is famous for playing rock with Henry Rollins and Arto Lindsay but also jazz with Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society, John Zorn, and Sonny Sharrock. Lewis has played with Herbie Hancock, Sting, Don Pullen, and Lou Reed. Together, they have a clear yet wide sound; harsh and beautiful, grooving and free, songfully organized yet utterly improvized.

Harriet Tubman’s first recording in eight years unites them with vocalist Georgia Anne Muldrow. Muldrow comes from a pliant Los Angeles scene that is bathed in hip-hop and neo-soul, but she has also recorded jazz under the name “Jyoti” (given to her by none other than Alice Coltrane). Her 2020 Mama Can You Bet was made nearly entirely by her, and it found its way to the top of many jazz lists. Her chance encounters with Harriet Tubman gave rise to the new Electrical Field of Love.

The music is a lava flow of the blues sensibility, a collage of funk, soul, and jazz. Muldrow joins Harriet Tubman not as a featured singer but as a band member, prowling around the music and working her way into their groove and sound.

Producer Scotty Herd took tapes of the quartet and sliced and diced them in the style of Teo Macero (his mentor, who famously used this technique on the albums In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and On the Corner), editing six hours of music into a dozen finished tracks. The result is both a slow-morphing collage and a set of completed “songs” that are remarkably discrete and whole.

For example, “When You Rise” is built on a clear repeated bass line of five descending notes, over which Muldrow sings a poetic lyric twice: “When you rise / Do your eyes smile / Into the light?” She ends the second statement of the lyric on an astonishing note choice, after which the band Gibbs pauses the lick, and the band breaks down the groove only to restart it as funk, over which squiggling keyboards from Muldrow and washes of guitar from Ross rise and flash into a pungent, overdriven blues solo.

The range of sounds the quartet generates is wide. “Is No Match For You” is a quiet creation of arpeggiated electric bass, acoustic guitar, and whispering synth, with a plain-sung melody from Muldrow: “Holiness is yours / I believe you / In this world I walk, there’s pain / But I believe you, only you / I only believe you / To help me through, to hold my hand / To lead me through”. “A Black Song” is a swirl of atempo drumming, with lush harmonies from layered vocals, keyboards, and guitar—a kind of free-jazz art song, suggesting several lyrical melodies swirling and colliding in midair. Each of those two performances is less than three minutes long while suggesting the whole world of a musical idea.

Surprisingly little of the music here suggests a big jam, but those are seductive tracks in their own ways. The opener, “Flowers”, sets up as a straight 4/4 backbeat groove, one chord with descending lines, then a molten shifting tonal center. Muldrow enters with a lyric set relatively far back in the mix, sitting behind the guitars rather than placed out front. It’s a jam that resolves into a shimmer and the next tune, “Anatomical Fable of the Elements”. There, Muldrow’s voice is just a processed, phased sound, blending with another funky groove until the band eases back on the volume to let her be heard. The atmosphere is your entry into Electrical Field of Love.

There are other treasures to be found as your ears move across this aural landscape. The playful near-reggae of “Isom Dart Was” is dancing fun; “Assata” is a sensual, smooth instrumental; and “Hands” is a quick, plaintive duet between Gibbs’ bass and Muldrow’s voice at its most compelling (which includes the album’s title). Maybe the most original whole construction is “Insisting”, with Muldrow’s voice processed by a computer at the center of the sound and followed by a Brandon Ross guitar solo that is almost “conventional” at first but then morphs and tumbles toward more creativity.

Part of what makes Electrical Field of Love so compelling is that it doesn’t sound like it belongs in Brooklyn or Los Angeles, 2026 or 1976. It jumps across divides nimbly, but it carries real weight. You can certainly hear the most advanced progressive jazz of 50 years ago (those swampy Miles Davis funk bands, as well as the garrulous freedoms of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), but the band also channels the synth textures and sequencing of the new century. Muldrow brings a sensibility that comes from today’s West Coast scene, but Melvin Gibbs, Brandon Ross, and J.T. Lewis are about as New York as they come. The music is raucous and serene, complex and straight to the gut.

For all of its use of funk grooves and strong work from a wonderful singer, the music of Harriet Tubman with Georgia Anne Muldrow remains a challenging listen—often freely improvised, and the farthest thing from a slick pop product. Still, there is a direct connection in this “jazz” to the impulses that drive hip-hop and much of dance music. Sly and Stevie, George Clinton and James Brown, Betty (Mabry) Davis and Nina Simone—they are all lurking inside of Electrical Field of Love. Hip young listeners should find a backdoor to some of the year’s most daring music.