Recording on the fly on her
iPhone, the
Chicago musician quit a high-end job to embrace free jazz and confront the
racism that still thrives in the US
For young black girls from deprived parts of Chicago looking to play the clarinet, there aren’t too many role models. “I’d never even heard of the clarinet before. It didn’t look cool. I’d seen saxophones, but this looked weird,” says Angel Bat Dawid, who was told she could play one in her school band. “I went to the library to work out what it sounded like, and everything I could find was Benny Goodman. I was like: damn, this corny-looking instrument with this corny-looking white dude.”
Thirty years later, Bat Dawid has hauled the clarinet out of corny white dude territory and hurled it into the cosmos. She appears at this month’s
London jazz festival and her debut album The Oracle is one of the year’s best releases in any genre, where swelling vocals, warm organ chords and lilting and freaked-out clarinet lines combine in a profoundly affecting whole. It was recorded on the voice notes app of her iPhone, and takes its name from her own nickname, a character in the Matrix: “A powerful black woman, and when everyone is acting crazy, she’s chilling in her kitchen and dropping so much wisdom. I aspire to be a woman such as that.”