Darius Jones - Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) (AUM Fidelity, 2024)

By Lee Rice Epstein

In the context of the previous six chapters in Darius Jones’s Man’ish Boy epic, the cover of chapter seven, Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) is most striking for its black-and-white portrait of the artist looking out towards the listener, eyes wide open, welcoming, inviting, asking, also demanding to be seen. Previous covers showcased Randal Wilcox, Justin Hopkins, and Risha Rox, featuring bold colors and dense imagery. Oh yeah, and then there’s the music. This is a necessary album, a heartbreaking and passionate collection that explores self, trauma, healing, affirmation, and community.

It’s been 15 years since the first album in this series was released, Man’ish Boy (A Raw and Beautiful Thing), and one of the more striking elements of Legend of e’Boi is how Jones’s performance has evolved and grown in that time. From the jump, he played with such a clear vision it could be easy to skip over the cleverness and openness of his compositions, especially when songs like “Roosevelt” and “Chasing the Ghost” were revisited on subsequent albums, where a listener could zoom in and hear more of his ideas at play. Arguably, Legend of e’Boi reaches a mighty high peak; throughout the album, Jones plays with the lushness of Arthur Blythe, the lyricism of Julius Hemphill, and the compositional range of Oliver Lake—oh, how he swings, how he skronks, and all with one of the most beautiful alto tones.

Joined this time by drummer Gerald Cleaver and bassist Chris Lightcap, Jones premieres five originals—“Affirmation Needed,” “Another Kind of Forever,” “We Outside,” “We Inside Now,” and “Motherfuckin Roosevelt”—alongside an adaptation of “No More My Lord,” one of many songs recorded by Alan Lomax on February 9, 1948, at Parchman Farm (the Mississippi State Penitentiary) in Parchman, Mississippi (about 20 miles from the Mississippi River), in two performances by Henry (Jimpson) Wallace: first accompanied by an anonymous group of men, then performed solo. With Lightcap playing a drone and Cleaver improvising alongside Jones’s melody, “No More My Lord” is a potent, vital plea, seemingly drawing from his personal history, as well as the song’s and the history of Parchman Farm, known as an abusive prison that was run like a pre-Civil War plantation.

All this history feeds into Legend of e’Boi, which, per the liner notes, acts as a means of acknowledging and processing trauma and overcoming the stigmatization of so-called poor mental health. In the enclosed booklet, following Harmony Holiday’s liner notes, Jones asked several artists to listen to the album and reflect on what they felt and heard. In this way, every moment on the album is a revelation and invitation—going back to the portrait on the album cover—asking us to reflect, listen, and to also participate.

There’s no true center of the album, but the couplet “We Outside”/“We Inside Now” might be closest. In 20 minutes, Jones, Cleaver, and Lightcap lean way in, then pull back, a patiently swaying rhythm gradually settling into one of Jones’s most (least?) unvarnished solos that will pierce whatever shell surrounds you and slowly hopefully support your peeling it away, not leaving something behind as much as baring yourself to yourself. Maybe perhaps, you’ll listen to all this music and come away thinking, “It inside me now.”