Don’t listen to the new single from the Afro-Semitic Experience if you wish to remain mired in despair over the state of the world or the harshness dividing groups of people.
Definitely don’t watch the video either. It will make you feel … hopeful. You might even find yourself swaying your hips or singing along.
The single is called “Unity in the Community.” The jazz-based combo released it Monday to coincide with the 26th anniversary of their founding on Martin Luther King Jr. Day as an inspired mixed-race band updating traditional Jewish and Black liturgical music.
The single (and the accompanying album, My Feet Began To Pray) arrives just in time to offer a change-the-channel option amid presidential election and Mideast war doomscrolling.
Why don’t we come together
Why do we got to fight
Let’s be like sis and brother
Who finally got it right
Let’s praise up each other
Black, brown, yellow, white
And cherish all the colors
The highest we can be
Unity in the community
Go far as we can see
Unity in the community
New Haveners will recognize the song’s title: Since 1976 a volunteer group by that name has been staging annual let’s‑get-together events in town.
It was indeed one of the Afro-Semitic Experience’s New Haven members who inspired this song: Beloved percussionist (and music teacher) David “Baba” Coleman.
“He had a lot of nice slogans,” including that one, band co-founder and pianist Warren Byrd recalled Tuesday during an interview on WNHH FM about the new single and album. “It made us think about what it meant to build community together and what it meant to have a community.”
Byrd wrote the song based on the slogan. The band prepared to record it for an album in March 2020. Covid hit. The recording studio shut down. It took three years before the band returned to the studio to record the song last summer as part of the album at New Haven’s Firehouse 12 studio. Pianist Byrd sings lead on the track, co-founder David Chevan plays bass, Saskia Laroo trumpet, Will Bartlett tenor sax, Alvin Carter Jr. drum set, Jocelyn Pleasant congas, and Orice Jenkins vocals.
By the time of the recording, Coleman had died of cancer. The joy of liberation reflected in his music very much lives on on the track, from the uplifting horns to Byrd’s roaming on the keyboard to the gospel choir’s background vocals (including from New Haven’s Dr. John Q. Berryman along with Dana Fripp and Cantor Meredith Breenburg). It lives on in the cameos of people clapping and dancing to the song in Jay Miles’ music video.
“Music has a way of melting away boundaries,” Byrd observed. “Once the beat starts, once the melody begins to waft into people’s ears — something happens to melt resistance.”
You can watch the video at the top of this story; you can order the full album here. With apologies to AI-generated algorithms determined to keep us doomscrolling in despair.
Click on the above video to watch Warren Byrd discuss his career as a jazz pianist and composer, the quarter-century-plus trajectory of the Afro-Semitic Experience, and the band’s new album on WNHH FM’s“Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of Dateline New Haven.