"Imagine the Venn-diagram overlap of Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys, electric Miles Davis at its gnarliest and Lee Scratch Perry’s murky dub experiments and you’ll start to get a sense of Harriet Tubman’s heady sonic terrain, whose members’ collective résumé includes work with everyone from the (Henry) Rollins Band to Whitney Houston and acclaimed outside-the-box singer Cassandra Wilson."
— Hank Shteamer, Rolling Stone
"Two decades since they altered downtown New York City’s experimental music landscape with spiritual shredder I Am A Man, cooperative power trio Harriet Tubman—guitarist Brandon Ross, bassist Melvin Gibbs, and drummer J.T. Lewis—remain as potently freethinking as ever. Tubman’s hard-grooving sound-world spans free jazz, metal, rock, blues, funk, and dub—and it’s no wonder: veterans Ross, Gibbs, and Lewis’s far-reaching credits include collaborative and supporting stints with Cassandra Wilson, Rollins Band, Henry Threadgill, Sonny Sharrock, and Vanessa Williams, to name a few."...
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"Imagine the Venn-diagram overlap of Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys, electric Miles Davis at its gnarliest and Lee Scratch Perry’s murky dub experiments and you’ll start to get a sense of Harriet Tubman’s heady sonic terrain, whose members’ collective résumé includes work with everyone from the (Henry) Rollins Band to Whitney Houston and acclaimed outside-the-box singer Cassandra Wilson."
— Hank Shteamer, Rolling Stone
"Two decades since they altered downtown New York City’s experimental music landscape with spiritual shredder I Am A Man, cooperative power trio Harriet Tubman—guitarist Brandon Ross, bassist Melvin Gibbs, and drummer J.T. Lewis—remain as potently freethinking as ever. Tubman’s hard-grooving sound-world spans free jazz, metal, rock, blues, funk, and dub—and it’s no wonder: veterans Ross, Gibbs, and Lewis’s far-reaching credits include collaborative and supporting stints with Cassandra Wilson, Rollins Band, Henry Threadgill, Sonny Sharrock, and Vanessa Williams, to name a few."
— Brad Cohan, Bandcamp Daily "Album of the Day"
"This is Black music at its best."
— NPR
Elysium Furnace Works is thrilled and proud to announce the closing artists for its momentous 2024 season: the electric, eclectic, deliriously intense power trio Harriet Tubman.
Harriet Tubman is a musical collective formed in 1998 by guitarist/vocalist Brandon Ross, bassist Melvin Gibbs and drummer JT Lewis. Harriet Tubman was an African-American woman born into slavery in 1822 in the southern US state of Maryland. Tubman is renowned as a liberator of other African-American slaves who like she, chose to defy the system of Slavery and seek freedom by escaping to the North. She accomplished this with the help of a secret network of safe houses, or "stations" on what was known as "The Underground Railroad".
Far from being underground, Ross, Gibbs and Lewis have collectively performed with some of the most important musical innovators and visionaries of the last half of the 20th century: Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Herbie Hancock, Henry Threadgill, Tony Williams, Don Pullen, Tina Turner, James Blood Ulmer, Sonny Sharrock, Leroy Jenkins, Cassandra Wilson, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Oliver Lake, Muhal Richard Abrams, Lawrence "Butch" Morris, and many others.
The music of Harriet Tubman is both familiar and fresh, while allowing the listener to experience the music free from distracting labels of style or genre. At the same time, it is easy to perceive sources that have seeded the musical development of the trio. From the electric explosion of fabled Miles Davis bands of the 70's; to the transcendent spirituality of the music of the Mississippi Delta and beyond; to the anointing cry of John Coltrane's musical apex; to the open rhyme scheme of the rhythm invention of the American Urban 80's; to the imagined sound of the endless expanse of the African savannah - Harriet Tubman uses ALL of their musical experiences to communicate a vision of musical freedom and musical invention for those who choose to take the journey.
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