Angelo Outlaw's Cosmic Soul-jazz
A review of the album "Axis of Time" on Eraserhood Sound
Here’s a new, mainline juncture of the Philly sound, perfectly beautiful, and instantly classic—an infectious album by poet and vibraphonist Angelo Outlaw, whose radiant grooves are magnified like a fresnel under warm, colorful lights reflecting multifaceted, patterned shapes and swaths of the leathercoat streets of this city.
The poetry is mostly made with the mallet, in music—there’s less than two dozen background words on this record. It’s a smooth single ride of urban smokeshow boogie voltages, gelatinous press train cycles, and meditative sonic statements on the floral reality of sequential causation, orbital motion, and change.
This is a place of illuminated steps in a gardenic plush and tangled sunken edifice steamed by raindrop stew, Shamu spilling out lovelorn tales and wailing heartbreaks from the roiled deepwater Pacifics, taken by tall drifts, away, through the Milky Way and where you can see statued tone tablatures inside the blue cosmos unfolding.
There are painted hints here of the haunted dimensional subway, the freestyle glows of archaistic ampitheatre sabre landings, and plutonian gardenia breaths like white porcelain: this is cosmic soul-jazz.
Thank you for recommending this, Michael. I would have never known about him without this post. I am digging his 2021 EP.