In the World: From Natchez to New York
Olu Dara
(Atlantic)

Snap open Olu Dara's first CD, and the liner photo shows him at a table, astonished grin on his face, surrounded by huge amounts of food and four elegant women fetching it to him. Pop out the disk, and beneath it a pecan pie circles in its absence. It's not for nothing that Dara titled his band "The Okra Orchestra"; the first cut here is even named after the vegetable.

All this might suggest that Dara—veteran of the '70s New York loft scene—has caved in to the demands of culinary jazz with a collection of tasteful digestifs, sort of an Imodium CD for the progressive digestion. Instead, In the World is about food the way the exile thinks it (say, a Delta dweller in New York)—food as a signal of all the nourishing, comforting aspects of home which can be carried to a new place and recreated there.

Of course, music can be like that, too, and Dara, though he's gigged with everyone from Art Blakey to Cassandra Wilson, travels way back here to the earliest recipes of jazz. "Okra" is the sales cry of the rural vegetable peddler—"I've got strawberries, good looking ears of corn, I've got some okra"—but it's more of a joyful song of plenitude. Dara's singing comes out of the country blues, but Ghanaian guitarist Kwatei Jones-Quartey's looping Afropop runs and the women's chanting in the background reminds that home here is as much the motherland as Mississippi. "Rain Shower" is a slinky laid-back blues about survival, percolated through a late-night funk drizzle. The epic testifying of "Natchez Shopping Blues" finds Dara assembling a mythic identity from the touchstones of the American black experience—"I bought my mind and soul on the river, I bought my heart in Nashville, Tennessee . . . I bought my eyes in Brooklyn down on Herkimer Street." "Bubber," with its muted, squawky horn background, is a tribute to Ellington's trumpeter of the same name, but the poet Mayanna Lee speaks a sultry, whispered seduction over the top of it. Dara's son, the rapper Nas, does a tribute of his own to Ur-rapper Grandmaster Flash on "Jungle Jay."

There's more here, too—Caribbean swing, blue lullabies, and soul ballads. What's best about it is that Dara offers it up without the exile's usual nostalgic insistence on purity. Roots and tradition figure as the hearty meal you scarf down before going off to your new job in the big city. They fill you up without holding you back.

© Edward Batchelder
(from Signal to Noise: The Journal of Improvised & Experimental Music)