Jamire Williams, the rare drummer on the jazz scene these days who’s heavily invested in leading his own band, says that he plays “social music.” This makes sense—every band is a social unit, and he’s clearly concerned with societal problems. But the 28-year-old’s group, ERIMAJ, goes in the opposite direction: It’s antisocial music, or at least reticent. This puts it on relatively untrodden terrain in contemporary jazz, and gives it the bite of something fresh.
If you’ve heard much of Frank Ocean, the laconically ruminative singer who’s trying to teach R&B fans how to see deeper into their own hearts by staring at their shoes, then you’re already on your way toward figuring out what ERIMAJ is all about. The band’s recently released debut album, Conflict of a Man (Don’t Cry), which features yearning vocals from Chris Turner on most tracks, scans like a diary full of regretful sentences that never find their way to completion. More than anything, you hear the sound of someone scraping for meaning in a world where digitization and corporatization leap forward unbounded. What suffers in this environment, among much else, is the wellspring of spirit that ought to feed art.
“For me, it’s definitely a spiritual thing, the battle between being true to yourself and artists just conforming to the mainstream,” says Williams, a Houston native who moved to New York City in 2002 and has since worked in bands led by Jacky Terrasson, Dr. Lonnie Smith, David Weiss, Robert Glasper and Christian Scott. “A lot of stuff in our generation is just corrupt, man. … That’s the conflict. ‘Choosing Sides,’ the last song on the album, is the apex of it: What are you going to do? Are you going to choose to keep being creative or are you just going to conform to what the masses want you to do?” With that much dogma behind it, Conflict of a Man might reek of gravitas; you can imagine it declaring, loud and strident, “I am pure.” But with ERIMAJ, you get a man who’s earnestly questioning his own ability to stand up when forces outweigh him. He’s also losing confidence in the people surrounding him.
read more on: http://jazztimes.com/articles/62608-jamire-williams-sensitive-singular-strong
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