Amirtha Kidambi's Elder Ones at Kuumbwa Jazz Center

"Vicious music for tense times." — JazzTimes, Mike Shanley

Sometimes the eye of a storm can draw upon the chaos around it, taking on its energy and consolidating it for use. Something like that is going on in Elder Ones, the quartet led by the vocalist and harmonium player Amirtha Kidambi. She creates drones on the harmonium — an old, air-powered keyboard — and coaxes her bandmates into ripping them apart. Then her voice funnels that energy out in a scorching beam. In its best moments, it’s like a mix of a Cuban soñero’s citrusy cry and a riot grrrl yowl. — New York Times, Giovanni Russonello...

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"Vicious music for tense times." — JazzTimes, Mike Shanley

Sometimes the eye of a storm can draw upon the chaos around it, taking on its energy and consolidating it for use. Something like that is going on in Elder Ones, the quartet led by the vocalist and harmonium player Amirtha Kidambi. She creates drones on the harmonium — an old, air-powered keyboard — and coaxes her bandmates into ripping them apart. Then her voice funnels that energy out in a scorching beam. In its best moments, it’s like a mix of a Cuban soñero’s citrusy cry and a riot grrrl yowl. — New York Times, Giovanni Russonello

Elder Ones is a quartet led by vocalist, harmonium player and composer Amirtha Kidambi. Kidambi fuses the ecstatic and revolutionary free jazz spirituality of John and Alice Coltrane’s later work with her own background in Carnatic and Western classical vocal techniques. Her quartet includes Max Jaffe on drums and his custom Sensory Percussion electronics, Matt Nelson on soprano sax and synthesizer, and Nick Dunston on bass. On their new album From Untruth, Elder Ones anchor their music in the tradition of free jazz while pushing into new futurist realms, reeling seamlessly from modal meditation, atonal expressionism, free improvisation and melodic invention, to unabashed bursts of punk rock energy infused with an explosive charge of protest.

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