Aaron Osborne helmed an event at Charlotte Street Foundation in July in which Kelley Gant was at the literal center of the proceedings. The pairing has followed up one of the year’s most notable performances with the similarly cosmic album New Midnight.
Osborne is a core member of the Extemporaneous Music and Arts Society. Gant has been one of the regional improving music community’s most valuable components for more than a decade. Her 2019 initiative as a promoter, for instance, was sorely needed at the time.
Gant’s balmy vocals and ballyhooed whistling provide a flesh-and-blood counterpoint to the electronic maneuvers of New Midnight. From serene ambient noise akin to the low rumble of traffic on a distant highway to gothic industrial clatter that might accompany the application of dark arts, New Midnight contains an impressive range of textures.
New Midnight is likely to strike jazz purists as alien and sterile. Yet while the “(l)ong form improvised sounds captured live in studio” aren’t necessarily jazz, the sounds are precisely the type of bold experiment that’s a necessary catalyst for advancing the form.