Kahil El’Zabar and the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble @ Space Gallery

Kahil El’Zabar @Ueberjazz 2024
Photo by Wanja Wiese_Art

By Gary Chapin

Question: Why would it be that an artist or art that has been widely recognized as wonderful, groove-tastic, ecstatic, and cool for fifty years “suddenly” becomes transcendent, “suddenly” becomes preternaturally compelling, “suddenly” becomes the best music you’ve heard live in years?

Is it the persistence of the vision that transports you? Has the music been gaining gravity over the past 50 years? Is it improvement? Has the artist upped their game year after year and now, in the present moment, they transcend? Or is it the quality of the audience? Has the time, space, context, trauma, and treasure of “us today” rendered the present moment into the right time? Or is it a mystical alignment of the river and the foot stepping into it? Never the same twice, but perfect for this exact moment?

These were my thoughts in the days after attending Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble performance at the Space Gallery in Portland, ME, on February 4, 2025.

The trio came into a sold out room and began with the “little instruments” percussion wash that the AACM has turned into a sacred ritual. The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble has celebrated its 50th year as one of the only extant ensembles from the collective’s early days (possibly one can say the Art Ensemble is still around). The audience—packed in—was ready to be embraced.

Corey Wilkes, trumpet, and Kevin Nabors, tenor, traveled the spectrum. The head of the first tune was quirky, post-boppish, and soulful with space and tricky syncopations, but the solos were barnburners, the sorts of things where outlandish blowing is occasionally accomplished by pistoning the keys/plungers using your forearm and the elbow as a fulcrum. This first tune, apparently a mission statement for the evening, ended with Zabar’s own solo which had enough kinetic energy to raise a house. Rarely has destructive energy (hitting) been used to create so extravagantly.

That said, Zabar did not spending that much time behind the kit, often coming out front to sit on the most thoroughly, skillfully, and soulfully whacked cajon I’ve ever heard, or playing a “thumb piano” (of all things) in a way that defied all expectations of what most people think of as a gift shop tchotchke. Through it all, Zabar threaded his songs and vocalizations, bringing together the blues and the choir, uniting Saturday night and Sunday morning. This was spiritual, trance-making music, joined with noise, play, and ecstasy. His wordless singing has a dreamlike quality to it, evoking joy without being required to articulate it.

The evening had half a dozen pieces. Zabar’s own “A Time for Healing” was the center of the set. The trio’s rendition of “All Blues” was the most sublime moment, with Wilkes’ harmon mute (of course) bending the room to his will. McCoy Tyner’s “Passion Dance” came through like a cyclone. Zabar’s tribute to Ornette Coleman mesmerized us, with Nabors provoking a standing O in the middle of the tune. The evening ended with a solo vocal performance from Zabar, a love standard—”my mother’s favorite”—rendered in Zabar’s unique scatted/sung/dreamscaped/onomatopoetic way. It was funny, adventurous, exciting, and remarkably touching.

Was this the best performance I’ve seen in the last few years? Maybe. At the very least, when we discovered, after the concert, that the keys had been locked in our car on an evening when the temperature began at 8 degrees and only went down—my sense of joy was in no way dampened. I after-glowed the drive home, lightly buzzing as I made my way back into the dark, snow-blanketed Maine Woods.