Who Is Zoh Amba?

Coming to grips with the free jazz saxophonist of the moment

Before anything else, go read this heartfelt tribute to Greg Tate by Vijay Iyer. It can’t be said enough: no Greg Tate, no me. I hear him every time I write a sentence.

Montana update! We are now seeing deer. Lots of them. My neighbor is a farmer (I’ve showed you a picture of the cows) with a large hay field which is directly behind my building. For the last week or so, deer have started showing up at night to eat the hay. The first time they appeared, there were seven or eight of them. A scouting party, I guess, because they left and told their friends, and the next night there were twice as many. Now there are almost 20. They’re young, and if they have a leader, I’m not sure which one of them it is. What’s most fascinating to me is that they have a schedule. They get here about 8:30, walk around calm and safe, playing (some of them are young) and eating for about an hour, and then they vanish back into the woods. (Sunset in Montana in the summer is around 9:30. Sunrise is about 6.) They’re too far away for me to get a clear picture on my phone, but I very much enjoy watching them from our back window. Do you remember how excited you were, as a child, to see wild animals — not ordinary animals like squirrels or birds, but foxes or deer or something special? Watching the deer gives me that feeling again, and it’s fantastic.

Moving on… I’ve been thinking about up-and-coming free jazz saxophonist Zoh Amba’s music for a while. I first heard her last year, at the same time everyone else did — she appeared on five albums in 2022 (of which I’ve heard four), and three so far this year. But she’s getting a lot of attention for a 23-year-old, including a New York Times profile by Hank Shteamer. (Hank’s a friend, and a very good writer. It’s a pretty good piece.)

Part of me wants to shrug Amba off as just the latest new face in a genre, and a scene, that feeds on youthful energy. I’ve been writing about music, including avant-garde and free jazz, since 1996. Every few years someone arrives on the scene, surfing a small wave of positive press from the few critics who cover this music regularly, and sometimes they turn out to be great, like Darius Jones and James Brandon Lewis, who are still very much active, doing brilliant and pathbreaking work. (I interviewed Jones in 2021.) Other times they fade away, like Assif Tsahar, or remain relatively obscure, like Mat Walerian.

At this point, Zoh Amba is just getting started. When I listen to her, it’s impossible not to hear the fire-breathers who came before her: Frank Wright, Albert Ayler, David Murray (with whom she studied), David S. Ware, Charles Gayle et al. Amba favors long passages of upper-register squealing, though she can slip into the tenor’s lower register and growl with authority. But there’s a little bit more there than just the things she’s borrowed; an individual voice is developing, bit by bit.

Her first album, O, Sun, was released in March 2022 on John Zorn’s Tzadik label. The band consisted of pianist Micah Thomas, bassist Thomas Morgan, and drummer Joey Baron. The melodies on pieces like “O, Sun” and “Hymn to the Divine Mother” are extremely simple, repeated phrases somewhere between the deliberately primitive gospel of Albert Ayler and the stormy mantras of David S. Ware. Thomas’s piano provides a strong anchor, especially on the more delicate ballads like “Gardener” and “Satya.” Zorn himself plays on one track, “Holy Din,” and it’s fun to hear him playing in a style he doesn’t have much time for anymore, since he’s mostly a hyper-prolific composer of chamber music for various ensembles these days.

Her next batch of music, O Life, O Light Vol. 1 & 2, appeared on the 577 label, which is co-owned by fellow saxophonist Daniel Carter, a fixture on the New York scene since the loft jazz era and someone who’s always kept at least one foot in the underground. (Literally; he played for years in the quartet Test, best known for their performances in NYC’s subways.) For those albums, she was backed by bassist William Parker — a crucial co-sign for anyone making this music; he worked with Lewis, Walerian, Tsahar, and Jones as well — and drummer Francisco Mela. The bassist is a thick, gluey foundation as always, and Mela’s drumming takes a skittering, Rashied Ali-esque approach to time.

It seems like the session was only split into two releases so it could come out on LP as well as CD, because the two volumes of O Life, O Light only add up to 73 minutes of music, and Vol. 2 begins very abruptly, with “Dance of Bliss” starting almost in medias res and meandering along for 19 minutes. (She’s also made a duo album with Mela, Causa y Efecto Vol. 1, which I haven’t heard — the second volume has yet to be released.)

She reunited with Thomas for Bhakti, on the Mahakala Music label, which also features drummer Tyshawn Sorey and, on the final track, guitarist Matt Hollenberg (of the avant-death metal band Cleric and the Zorn ensembles Chaos Magick and Simulacrum). The combination of his stinging, razor-wire guitar and her squalling horn is extremely potent; for the first couple of minutes, the pianist and drummer lay back and let them go at it, but then they come rumbling in like a two-pronged avalanche.

Her latest release is The Flower School, a collaboration with guitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer Chris Corsano. It’s a clanging, skronky, rattletrap three-way exchange that makes me think of drummer William Hooker’s Shamballa, on which he played duos with Thurston Moore and Elliott Sharp. Amba’s keening, gospel-ish lines meld well with Orcutt’s guitar, which at times reminds me of North African desert blues; the album as a whole sounds like three people writing hymns for some new folk religion. I think it’s probably my favorite thing she’s released so far.

One other thing I’ve really enjoyed from Amba isn’t available on CD, though. It’s this YouTube video of a performance from Union Pool in Brooklyn in April 2022, where she played with violinist gabby fluke-mogul and bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Tcheser Holmes (aka the rhythm section from Irreversible Entanglements):

I would really like to hear an album of discrete tunes by that band. They could record free jazz versions of gospel and folk songs, or just improvise as they are here and likely wind up in the realm of the Albert Ayler recordings from Europe in 1966, which have always been some of my favorite music by him.

At this point, it’s far too early to predict Zoh Amba’s musical arc. I think it might be interesting to ask some of the musicians she’s worked with what they think of her work, and what she’s adding to the free jazz language/lineage. Right now, she sounds to me like she’s kinda coloring inside the lines — free jazz is a language, no different from bebop or New Orleans trad jazz, and she speaks it well. But the moments where something truly original comes through are so far rare, and the real greats have always sounded unmistakably like themselves, even early on. Think about how instantly identifiable Ornette Coleman’s playing was, or Pharoah Sanders’, or Peter Brötzmann’s, or Albert Ayler’s. No one else sounded like them. Zoh Amba is not instantly identifiable right now, and I’m not sure she ever will be. But I’m willing to keep listening.

That’s it for now. See you next week!