Every once in a while, there comes an innovative new recording that seeks to amend the hidden attraction of ancient and esoteric art forms, all the while keeping its vision firmly planted on its creative ambitions of the future. Many jazz artists have possessed that intention to explore the relationship between sound and spirituality – cast your mind back to Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, or more recently, to the likes of Esperanza Spalding or Angel Bat Dawid – but very few are successful in their efforts.

Nite Bjuti (pronounced ‘Night Beauty’), the Afrofuturist trio of Candice Hoyes, Val Jeanty and Mimi Jones, exude many of these influences on their self-titled debut. You may have heard them last on the virtual collaborative tribute album from Palladium, entitled 2020, which honoured the work of Wayne Shorter and was curated by the maestro’s protege assistant Jesse Markowitz. Their inaugural studio recording, a spirit-rousing take on the Shorter composition ‘Midnight in Carlotta’s Hair’, was a sure-fire sign of things to come, with the trio even receiving an endorsement from the recently departed jazz legend himself.

Whilst still a relatively new band enjoying the springtime of its life, the group’s members are anything but inexperienced. Take vocalist Hoyes, for instance, a celebrated singer-songwriter from New York. A self-described ‘glass ceiling breaker’, she has spent several years working as both a public-speaking activist and scholar. Similarly teeming with academic rigour, there’s Jeanty, a Voudou descendant of Haitian origin whose avant-garde electronic compositions supplement her professorship at the Berklee College of Music. Finally, bassist and label-founder Jones, herself a native of The Bronx, has been recognising and shaping upcoming talent for well over a decade. All of the above should provide some insight as to the kind of worlds these artists have been inhabiting. Put these three prestigious women in the mix with one another, and you’ll see just how well their individual practices and talents start to merge.

That Nite Bjuti can be the work of three people alone is an incredible but convincing fact, when you take into account the untiring commitment each performer has put in over the course of their creative journey. It may come as a surprise then, in spite of the well-executed blend of haunting vocals and enticing musical snippets which make up the finished product’s rich sonic tapestry, that Nite Bjuti is 100% improvisatory – this record included. In a voyage of what can only be coined as ‘jazz adventurism’, the trio’s indelible chemistry holds down proceedings with the music serving as a vehicle for their trinity of multi-disciplinary approaches to enhance and expand the unit’s artistic vision. From a purely vocal basis, this record mixes incantational poetry, conversational interludes, ghostly warbling and angelic whispers. But either ‘haunting’ or ‘spooky’ would be too simple a word to describe the aesthetic goals Nite Bjuti are setting out to achieve here; the same goes for any kind of spine-chilling mood they may inadvertently convey. says the band. “We [were] inspired to rediscover the buried beauty in the world, because singing and drumming are transcendent languages across generations.” With this in mind, the album’s contemplative aims soon become clear as frenetic Afro-Caribbean rhythms gel with the deep resonant frequencies of pulsating basslines, interspersed with enchantingly sung melodies and all in celebration of the subjects and narratives from which their inspiration is derived. Following this bewitching first release, Nite Bjuti has proudly stamped its mark with a totally different and immersive experience, one of mystical correspondence and magic charm. 

Barney Whittaker

from www.prestomusic.com