Featuring habitual collaborators like Jamael Dean and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, the L.A. percussionist and producer’s sprawling, shape-shifting seventh album finds joy in unexpected connections.
Carlos Niño has always been attuned to the atomic. Twenty-five years ago, when the prolific L.A. percussionist, arranger, and producer was merely a revolutionary teenaged DJ, he designed his radio show Spaceways as a method for tracing back the long lines that led to hip-hop. He’d play jazz and funk records whose samples formed the bedrock of the genre, eventually moving deeper into new age, folk, and recordings from around the world. Judging by the pan-genre music he’s spent his career perfecting, the process trained him to see songs as being made of discrete units: a series of moments that might one day lead elsewhere and connect to unrelated sounds in unexpected ways. On Actual Presence, the seventh album in his long-running Carlos Niño & Friends series, he tries to anticipate as many of these moments and connections as possible, traveling along with his collaborators as they open door after door on a staggering number of paths.
Niño isn’t a traditional bandleader; he’s more of a weather system, hovering over and influencing the events at hand. As it weaves through free jazz, ambient, new age, hip-hop, contemporary classical, and beat music, Actual Presence is often beyond its creator’s ultimate control, which is probably the point; listening to it is like being rocked to sleep in the abyss. Working with frequent collaborators like Jamael Dean, Jamire Williams, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Iasos, Deantoni Parks, and Sam Gendel, Niño subjects these songs to a kind of musical Spirograph, spinning them along and finding joy every way he turns them. Consider it cubist healing music, presenting support from every possible angle.
Much of Actual Presence was cobbled together from live and in-studio improv sets, which Niño then edited and augmented in post-production. He manipulates the stereo space with ease, moving the listener through multiple dimensions as these songs unfold. “Explorations 7” opens with a gorgeous piano run from Dean that transitions into a Cecil Taylor mambo, which Devin Daniels cheerfully chases down with his alto sax. Niño takes us through a veil of gongs, plucking out Randy Gloss’ pandeiro and dunking it in reverb, then stripping away the rest of the band and dropping into a brand-new, crystalline space; when the musicians return, the air between them sounds polished. “Luis’ Special Shells,” meanwhile, opens in a lobby, where the titular shells hold court with a plonking keyboard. Niño kindly shoulders through, leading the way to a noticeably larger stage where fireflies of gong and cymbal flit around a spotlit Dean, who plays an aching lament. At any given moment, Niño seems to be thinking of where else he needs to take us, moving quickly from room to room as if he’s chasing the spirit through myriad incarnations.
Dean is both the album’s shooting star and its grounding point. He performs the same role Lonnie Liston Smith did for the early Pharoah Sanders groups, setting the scene with a few chords and hammering everyone back into tonality when necessary, and he gives Niño a solid place to return when the post-production excursions threaten to get too far out. Dean puts “Actually” in motion with a solo that recalls Girma Yifrashewa and Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s blend of Ethiopian and Western classical modes, trickling his notes through the rocks of Niño’s hobbled bass synth. “Youwillgetthroughthis, I promise” glides to an end on the back of his organ, which emanates from Alice Coltrane’s ashram in one moment and Frank Ocean’s warehouse in the next. With field recordings of rain and waves splashing around him, the steadiness Dean provides for the song’s long denouement is the musical equivalent to the second half of its title—a sudden shift to standard grammar that signals how sincere we should understand the message to be.
When John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy overturned jazz conventions (and greatly annoyed jazz critics) with what would be called the “new thing” in 1961, Coltrane justified their moves by claiming they were “just another way of saying that this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that’s been given to us, and here’s an example of just how magnificent and encompassing it is.” Though it was partially recorded before the pandemic and the uprisings that have defined 2020, Actual Presence is music for an unpleasant present. It’s discordant and fractured, and it frequently comes off as a long trip toward a salvation that’s just out of reach. But like Coltrane, whose spiritual influence runs deep here, Carlos Niño believes in a big, beautiful universe that exists in spite of the present suffering. The sprawling, ever-changing sound of Actual Presence is his best attempt yet to recreate the joy of losing yourself to it.
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