In a time when it’s hard to know just who and what to believe, Onilu shows how easy it can be to speak the truth. Joe Chambers, Kevin Diehl and Chad Taylor named their album (and, subsequently, their project) after the Yoruba word for “drum,” and that’s exactly what you get. All three of them are lifetime students of the drums, sufficiently steeped in the instrument’s lore to know how to make music that is complete and completing using only things that you strike and stroke.
Diehl, who has also been the leader of the Philadelphian Sonic Liberation Front for more than two decades, instigated this project. He and Chad Taylor—a bandleader, enduring associate of Rob Mazurek and the artistic director of University of Pittsburgh’s jazz-studies program—have known each other since the tail end of the last century. They decided to transition from colleagues to collaborators in order to merge their shared interest in the intersection of improvised music and African folk forms.
The group’s third member, Joe Chambers, has the longest CV by far. He was a valued player and composer on some of the Blue Note label’s greatest recordings in the 1960s and a founding member of M’Boom, Max Roach’s all-percussion ensemble, in the 1970s. Chambers has carried on teaching, playing and recording to the present time. Among his students was Taylor, who took private lessons from him in the mid-1990s.
That might sound like a lot of personal history, and the trio compounds it with a shared devotion to drumming as a cultural, spiritual and historical phenomenon. But they wear that reverence; Onilu is as stuffy as a house wide open to the sun and wind on a breezy spring day. The music is never cluttered. Chambers often takes the lead on vibraphone, which he uses to articulate graceful, unfussy melodies that’ll stick in your head as surely as the other two musicians will compel you to swivel your hips with a battery of additional drums.
On “Same Shame,” Taylor’s tympani ground the music so deeply that you’ll feel the mud between your toes; on “Grasta Maol,” Diehl’s Batá drums impart an extra throb that’ll unkink your spine. And when they lock in on three kits for “A Meta Onilu,” their funk is simultaneously undeniable and reserved, summoning solemnity in the midst of celebration. No lies—this music is purposeful and true. [Eremite]
—Bill Meyer
