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Drumdance to the Motherland was recorded live in October of that year in a subterranean coffeehouse in west Philadelphia, on the campus of University of Pennsylvania. It was issued some time later in an edition of 300 copies on Lancaster’s Dogtown label—it wasn’t supposed to be a fetish item, but at the time 300 copies was all he could afford. The record was never really distributed outside of Philadelphia, and nearly three decades later it became a highly sought-after collector’s item. The disc’s rarity is one thing, but the otherworldly sounds captured within its grooves are quite another. The group morphed out of the Sounds of Liberation, a jazz-tinged R & B band that opened for many soul stars of the day, and on Drumdance to the Motherland they play a weird mix of free jazz, psychedelia, dub, and Afro-futurist mayhem.
Some of the electronic effects were made by the musicians themselves; drummer Dwight James attached a device to his snare that created an echo effect. The thick polyrhythmic grooves and an elusive sonic haze certainly suggests the influence of Sun Ra , who had moved his Arkestra to Jamal’s Germantown neighborhood two years earlier. On the fifteen-minute “Inner Peace” guitarist Monnette Sudler —who’s long been a steady mainstream presence on the Philly scene–uncorks a lyric solo that’s as spacey as it is bluesy, while Jamal switches instruments to play some snake-charmer clarinet. However freaky things get, the five musicians maintain a sublime degree of communication, carefully reacting to and prodding one another. Ultimately this album delivers a stunning demonstration of the free-jazz ethos applied to a fairly nonidiomatic, deeply spiritual sound world, and it sounds as fresh and unusual now as it probably did back then.
