Search - Khan Jamal, Creative Arts Ensemble :: Drumdance to the Motherland

"If ever a record was ripe for reissue, Khan Jamal's invisible release on Dogtown is the exact fruit everyone should be trying to harvest." - Wax Poetics There's not another album on the planet that sounds even remotely like vibraphonist Khan Jamal's eccentric, one-of-a-kind masterpiece, Drumdance to the Motherland. In its improbable fusion of free jazz expressionism, Black psychedelia, and full-on dub-like production techniques, Drumdance remains a bracingly powerful outsider statement thirty-four years after it was recorded live at the Catacombs club in Philadelphia in 1972. Comparisons to Sun Ra, King Tubby, Phil Cohran, and BYG/Actuel merely hint at the cosmic otherness conjured by the band and by recording engineer Mario Falana's real-time "enhancements." The first edition of 300 copies, issued by Jamal in 1973 on the local Philadelphia label Dogtown, was barely distributed outside the city's limits. Since then, Drumdance has assumed a mythic status among the very few aficionados, eBay mutants, and heads that know of it at all. Hallelujah that it can finally be heard outside their murky inner sanctums!