A Song For Friday: Flutronix

Black Being is a work of great power. Also: Toninato-Theissen, Luca Bevacqua, Jan Esbra, Gentle Brontosaurus, Middleman, Aaron Shaw, and Michael Stephen Brown

What’s better than one adventurous, virtuosic flutist/composer? Two, of course! Which is exactly what we get from Flutronix, the duo of Nathalie Joachim and Allison Loggins-Hull. Add Joachim’s ever-more stunning voice and Loggins-Hull’s production skills, and you have something more than the sum of its quite impressive parts. However, Black Being, the album I’m celebrating today, is a universe away from their early releases, which were infused with jazz, R&B, hip hop, and pop. It even exists on a different plane from Joachim’s recent solo albums, which explored her Haitian roots with creativity and compassion.

Black Being, Flutronix’s first release on Cedille, is the culmination of a project that started years ago and had its world premiere in Chicago in 2021. While musically and dramatically effective in every way, Black Being strikes me as not just a mere album or performance piece. It should be recognized as an essential text illuminating the Black experience—especially for women—in America. Whether by accident or design, it lands on the runway ahead of whatever “celebrations” are to come of the 250th anniversary of the American experiment, which are at risk of being co-opted by some very unpatriotic forces. Let Being Black be one of the antidotes to that.

Created in collaboration with North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green and performed by Flutronix with the Chicago Sinfonietta under the direction of Mei-Ann Chen, this four-movement work reveals the emotional realities that underpin everything from the transatlantic slave trade to the strength and grace exhibited by Black women every day. The second movement, Water Babies, takes on the incomprehensible cruelty that befell enslaved Africans who were thrown from ships to drown in the sea. But this pain is also transformed by Green’s poetry, which seems to conflate the deaths in the ocean with a rebirth into freedom, even if only in the afterlife.

As Hannah Edgar says in the liner notes, “Meditative, then stormy, then reflective again, Green’s text doesn’t sugarcoat the harrowing reality of people being thrown from slave ships. But she reimagines those souls as fantastical sirens, liberated, at last, from their earthly forms.”

Of course, even before I knew what Water Babies was all about, I thought of the 1976 Miles Davis compilation named after the Wayne Shorter piece of the same name. I didn’t know until just now that Shorter was inspired by an 1863 children’s novel called The Water-Baby, about a young chimney sweep who falls into a river and drowns, only to be reborn and redeemed. While I don’t know if Loggins-Hull and Joachim had that in mind, Shorter’s transformation of a moralizing 19th-century fairy tale into an example of Black excellence would seem to be in the lineage of Black Being.

The blend of orchestral power, spiky electronics and percussion, silky flutes, and exquisite singing in Water Babies is a microcosm of the work as a whole. I hope it leads you there.

In Being Black’s third and fourth movements, Joachim, Loggins-Hull, and Green trace a journey out of the darkness by celebrating the lives made here by their ancestors and the resilience of all those who persevered in the past and continue to do so today. As Joachim intones in the final movement, repeating a refrain heard throughout the work but now with her voice digitally altered in startling fashion, “We keep coming!”

Listen to all the songs for Friday here or below.

Other Recent Releases

Toninato & Thiessen — Dream Of Heat (Ambiances Magnetique) This second collaboration between Canadian composers Ida Toninato (baritone sax, voice, synthesizers) and Jennifer Thiessen (viola, voice, synthesizers) arose from a live show called Winter[City]Speaks, which they developed during a period of lockdown in the winter of 2021. A string-driven lament, I Need Warmth opens the album with an ancient, droning feeling that pulls you right into the narrative of “death and rebirth as manifested by the experience of winter.” Working with producer Jason Sharp, who also contributes synthesizers, they maintain a compelling tension throughout the six tracks, resulting in a song cycle that feels very complete. Even if you’re not connecting with the lyrics, in this long, cold, murderous winter of 2026, I think we can all relate when Toninato unleashes wordless shrieks in I Am Suffocating. Fortunately, the consolation of Change is the next song, ending the album with a feeling of peace, well-being, and community.

Luca Bevacqua - NOSTOI (EVEL) My introduction to this Italian electronic musician was last year’s Alpi Graie e Pennine EP, which was animated by “beats, abstraction, and deep thoughts.” This album gives an even broader overview of his methods, with soundscapes of an almost physical quality that pull you into another world almost as completely as a virtual reality headset. Marry that deeply textural approach to evocative titles like Arte Povera In The Substation, and you have a collection whose depths may not be plumbed even after several listens.

Jan Esbra - Keep Moving Forward (Redhill) Following up the “expressive soundscapes” of 2024’s Suspended In A Breath, Esbra has given us a five-song EP of airy, light-filled art songs focusing on his calm tenor and precise guitar playing. His electronics, plus flute & alto sax (André Sacalxot), piano (Andrew Haug), bass (Dave Strawn), and drums (Daniel Rossi), round out the distinctive sound world. The lyrics are poetic and philosophical, seeming to result from conversations Esbra had with himself. However, the words will likely feel familiar to any thinking human, as in the title track, when he sings, “They say/when one door closes/I ask/when is the other one supposed to open?” and “Am I the one calling the shots/Or just a puppet on a string.” Esbra is definitely calling the shots in his music, and we are all the beneficiaries of his intelligence and musicality.

Gentle Brontosaurus - Three Hares ( Self-released) As long as the dinosaur is gentle enough not to hurt the bunnies, I’m good with the ahistorical animal kingdom suggested by the title of this Wisconsin quintet’s third album. All credit due to the Rosy Overdrive blog and Discord for putting me on to the many wonderful songs found within, from the shimmering twee of Luxury Bones, which opens the album, to the rootsier environs of Agatha’s Ashes. You almost get two or three bands in one, as several members sing and write, but Huan-Hua Chye, who also puts out music as Miscellaneous Owl and takes the lead on seven of 11 songs, is the clear standout. She also contributes guitars, keyboards, and ukulele while the rest of the band (Nick Davies: vocals, keyboards, trumpet; Paul Marcou: drums, percussion, vocals; Scott Stetson: vocals, guitars; and Anneliese Valdes: bass, vocals, conch) provide plenty of detail and even heft on her songs and theirs.

Middleman - Following The Ghost (Evil Speaker) I’ve been listening to a lot of records by The Who for a ranking project, so I’m especially attuned to the seam of vulnerability that often accompanies even their toughest rockers. The same could be said of this storming debut from the London quartet led by Noah Alves. Vacant Days is perhaps the best example, moving at a quick tempo but never sounding rushed, and featuring an ascending bridge that leads to an aching guitar solo. With nine songs over 25 minutes, there’s no chance for their energy—or yours—to flag. Smart and noisy, just the way they liked it down on Wardour Street in 1965.

Aaron Shaw - And So It Is (Leaving Records) My curiously narrow relationship with contemporary jazz has often left me unsatisfied while others are enraptured. Kamasi Washington’s albums sound overly familiar to me, for example, and that flute record by Andre 3000 was a complete waste of time to my ears. And now, we have a student of Washington’s working with Carlos Niño, who propped up Andre’s explorations with an expert lineup of musicians. On paper, perhaps not a promising prospect for me. However, Niño often creates amazing music himself, including 2022’s Live at Commend and last week’s incredible collaboration with Saul Williams. And Shaw is more than the sum of his teachers and collaborators, of course, and has developed a distinctive tone and melodic approach that make this album consistently enthralling.

That some of his tonal command is the result of adjustments he had to make after a life-threatening bone marrow condition is an impressive backstory, but not one necessary to appreciate this marvelous and expansive collection. Working with a varied septet (Alex Smith - Drums; Niño - Drums and Percussion; Dwight Trible - Voice; Kiernan Wegler - Cello; Lawrence Shaw - Bass; Merci B - Harp; and Sam Reid - Piano) gives Shaw all the colors he needs to realize his impressionistic compositions, which are as architectural as they are atmospheric. The album also includes covers of Chick Corea’s Windows To The Soul and the Kendrick Lamar/Flying Lotus collaboration Never Catch Me Out Of Alignment, which tell you all you need to know about Shaw’s interests. The latter track ends the album on an unsettling note, with a barely-there groove and Trible vocalizing in a haunting fashion. One listen is all you need to know Shaw is far from finished with what he wants to do in music.

Michael Stephen Brown - Twelve Blocks (First Hand) It’s hard to overstate the charm of an album that, while being indebted to past masters like Brahms and Schumann, can not only engage my attention but inspire delight. Yet Brown does just that in the five chamber works on this debut portrait album, beginning with Four Lakes For Children (2024), a solo piano tribute to children of the founders of Yaddo, all of whom died before the age of ten. Brown’s light touch as a composer and a pianist shines right from the start, inviting you into his world, where you will happily remain to listen to lovely song cycles sung by soprano Susanna Phillips or Relationship (2018), a clarinet (Osmo Vänskä) and violin (Erin Keefe) duo filled with tart wit shaded by reflective melancholy. By the time you get to the quirky narration of Twelve Blocks for Piano (Four Hands) and Poetry (2021), assayed with verve by legends Jerome Lowenthal and Ursula Oppens, you will be fully on board and wondering where Brown has been all your life.