Rowing up River to Get Our Names Back Anthony Joseph

• 1 Satellite 04:50
• 2 Black History 06:42
• 3 Tony 09:18
• 4 A Juba for Janet 08:13
• 5 Churches of Sound (The Benitez-Rojo) 08:38
• 6 An Afro Futurist Poem 04:40
• 7 Milwaukee & Ashland 08:42
• Total Runtime 51:03

Info for Rowing up River to Get Our Names Back

While often atmospheric in its thematic registers, ranging from spaces of the subterranean underground to the intergalactic, and equally so with its sonic registers, ranging from doubly articulated vocals to the reverb echo, there is indeed something like a core to Rowing Up River to Get Our Names Back. Taken as a suite, the three tracks that make up the middle, if not heart and soul, of the album—“Tony,” “A Juba for Janet,” and “Churches of Sound (The Benítez Rojo)”—put on display how the cultures and histories of the Black diaspora always constitute both the downbeat and backbeat for Anthony, not just his music but perhaps even his very consciousness. We can hear it in the deep pain when “Churches of Sound” moves into a poetic ode when Anthony notes that Lord Kitchener’s Calypso “croon reached Ghana / just in time for Independence,” and in “A Juba for Janet” with its dub soundscape, and yet again with the Afrobeat undertones of “Tony.” If “Churches of Sound” is closer to an ode, “Tony” might be a paean; significant no less because it contains the lyrics from which the album gets its name. It is here that Anthony uses the conceit of seeing Tony Oladipo Allen perform in France to proclaim his admiration of Allen’s virtuosity as a drummer (“He was duplicitous / a conjure man / with seven hands.”), arguably as significant as any of his counterparts including Art Blakey and Max Roach.

If Rowing Up River to Get Our Names Back has an anthem it might well be “An Afrofuturist Poem.” The penultimate track on album, and the shortest at 4:41, Anthony opens the song with the line “I am my mother’s son …,” seemingly in reference to Toni Morrison’s famous lines about sons in her novel Beloved, before announcing numerous other sources that constitute his personal and artistic genealogy including his father, I & I, and oil. But in the middle of the song, the bass subsides and for a full 30 seconds Anthony waxes “We must arrive new mythologies / and syntax / and modes of expression / which are fixed beyond comparison / to alien transmission.”

The resonances of Afrofuturism are everywhere on this album as both Anthony’s lyrics and Dave Okumu’s production try to “ride through space.” There are mentions of “anti-matter propulsion” and “Afronauts” elsewhere, but the song that emblematizes Afrofuturism as more than merely spatial temporality is the album’s lead track. “Satellite” is a reminder and encomium that, facing the conditions of modernity, Black folks across space and time have always been curious, if not compelled, by a yearning for the beyond, a beyond outside of the here and now, and sometimes back into the past to press into the future. In this sense, “Satellite” shares a sonic accord and political vision with the Soulquarians’ “Heaven Somewhere,” on a version that featured Omar. In an album where Anthony plays with order, sequence, and boundaries, such as when he inverts “alpha and omega” to “omega and alpha” or rearranges the postcolonial model of “core and periphery,” he concludes that there is, or at least can be, a center: “Moving through / the center / connected to everything (yeah, yeah) / spun out of galaxies / and diasporas / and still at the center / of all that is.”

Dan See, drums
Dave Okumu, bass, guitars, keyboards, synthesizers, programming, percussion, background vocals
Nick Ramm, Fender Rhodes, synthesizer
Aviram Barath, synthesizer, Moog
Colin Websters, saxophones
James Wade Sired, trombones
Byron Wallen, trumpet
Eska Mtungwazi, vocals, vocal arrangement
Anthony Joseph, vocals
Aviram Barath, synthesizer

Engineered by Nick Powell and Dave Okumu
Mixed by Dan Parry
Mastered by Shawn Joseph @ Optimum Mastering
Produced and Arranged by Dave Okumu

Anthony Joseph
is a Trinidad-born poet, novelist, musician and lecturer. He began writing as a young child, and cites his main influences as calypso, surrealism, jazz, the spiritual Baptist church that his grandparents attended, and the rhythms of Caribbean speech. He has lived in the UK since 1989.

Joseph is the author of four poetry collections: Desafinado (1994), Teragaton (1998), Bird Head Son (2009), Rubber Orchestras (2011), and a novel, The African Origins of UFOs (2006). Described as an “afro-psychedelic-noir, a poetic work of metafiction, mythology and afro-futurism”, the book was endorsed by Kamau Brathwaite, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Lauri Ramey, who hailed it in her introduction as “a future fiction classic.” Ali Alizadeh of the book remarked that “contemporary literature doesn’t come a lot more sophisticated and intriguing than this.”

Joseph has taught poetry and fiction at Goldsmiths University, London Metropolitan University, and currently lectures in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College. He was chosen in 2004 by Decibel and the Arts Council of England as one of fifty Black and Asian writers who have influenced contemporary British literature. In 2005 he served as the British Council’s first poet in residence at California State University, Los Angeles. He also performs internationally as the lead vocalist for his band, The Spasm Band, with which he has released three critically acclaimed albums, all timed to coincide with book publications.

The two long poems presented here by the Poetry Archive are the perfect introduction to Joseph’s distinctive and compound style – incorporating the insistent rhythms and reasoning that seem to emerge from his childhood among Baptist preachers; an agile density of phrasing that places him in the lineage of Caribbean poetry; as well as an eye for techniques of fragmentation and collage more recognisable from the Modernist tradition. His poems are perhaps most remarkable for their use of strongly descriptive and melodious aspects, which in Joseph’s reading of ‘Michael X (Narcissus)’ escalate through the meeting and departure of recurring sounds into a mournful and striking litany about a semi-folkloric figure of recent Caribbean history. It is the Joseph’s sense of restraint in the treatment of his subject that proves so consistently effective, as if a stake in the powers of quietness, control and patience has allowed his poems able to discover the memorably visceral moments at their hearts. One is made aware, too, of Joseph’s unusual ability to create a sense of serious listening in his poems, a genuine response to, rather than urge to command, his subjects and surroundings. That he is not content to simply continue within established poetic traditions, but at once complicates, agitates and renovates them from within, has caused Ali Alizadeh to describe Joseph as “both a faithful heir and an agnostic rebel; a Black poet haunted by Africa’s past as well as a bilingual post-modernist amused by the possibilities of the future.”

Eska Mtungwazi
(born 1971), known professionally as ESKA, is a London-born British singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. Following her inaugural release as a solo artist with her 2013 Gatekeeper EP, her eponymous debut album, ESKA, was released on 27 April 2015.

After gaining a BSc in Mathematics from the London School of Economics, Mtungwazi became a teacher of Maths and Music. During this time she spent many years as a backing singer on other musicians' projects, and steadily built a reputation in the UK for her featured work with an eclectic range of established British artists and bands, including Grace Jones and Bobby McFerrin.

Following vocal credits on many independent releases throughout the 2000s, in 2013 she released her debut solo project titled Gatekeeper EP on her own Earthling Recordings label, which featured five original tracks and was co-produced by acclaimed producers Matthew Herbert and David Okumu. The EP attracted worldwide critical acclaim, including BBC Radio 6 tastemaker Gilles Peterson, who called her "one of the most important singers in the UK right now", and Jamie Cullum, who declared the EP's title song to be "an unbelievable track that will be hard to beat in 2013". The title track from the EP was also selected by Peterson for his Brownswood Bubblers 10 compilation, which was released on Brownswood Recordings.

Mtungwazi released her eponymous debut album ESKA on 26 April 2015. ESKA was well received by critics, and was nominated for the 2015 Mercury Music Prize.

On 18 August 2016 it was announced via Billboard that ESKA would be one of 18 emerging artists to receive #Momentum funding from the PRS Foundation Speaking on her selection, PRSF said "ESKA’s restless inventiveness will continue to be explored further on her sophomore album and in her live performances which have become legendary showcases for this inimitable artist.

This album contains no booklet.