Viewing entries tagged
D D Jackson
The musicians weren’t the same Roots band seen regularly on NBC’s “Tonight” show with Jimmy Fallon. They included the Metropolis Ensemble — the conductor Andrew Cyr, a string quartet and four singers — and the jazz pianist D. D. Jackson, who wrote dramatic, somberly dissonant arrangements for the ensemble.
The album has an instrumental coda… an elegiac string quartet and a last dissonant piano chord, an unpeaceful final rest.
A gorgeous neo-classical suite closes the album… If an album can be both chilling and beautiful at once, "Undun" is it.
Finally, credits roll over a sublime string quartet, mercifully for Black Thought's black thoughts — at least for a moment, before ?uestlove's meticulously arranged strings are silenced by the chilling, deathly growl of a struck piano.
