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Greetings to you, my much beleaguered friends/colleagues/community, This a bit of self-promotion, but also (I think) a project of interest. I have an album releasing on the stellar Astral Spirits label next Friday, May 22. This record, entitled Apura! (Tagalog for "very urgent"), is a collection of improvised trios and quartets featuring the company of the O board's own Alexander Hawkins, South African legend Louis Moholo-Moholo, and UK great Trevor Watts. This project is the fulfillment of a longtime dream to convene an international, intergenerational quartet of creative voices for the goal of making music that is at once spontaneous, contemporary, and suffused with the energies of the incendiary past. To put it in so many words, this felt and feels like crisis music for today in much the same way that the music of the Blue Notes, Amalgam, etc. was crisis music for its era. You can pre-order and preview some tracks here: https://apura.bandcamp.com/ As some of you may know, it was my goal to bring a version of this project out to the US for a run of May concerts. Clearly this didn't/won't happen, though we're going to try for a series of December dates featuring myself, Alex, Asian American jazz innovator Francis Wong, and the great Andrew Cyrille. Will keep you posted, but in the meantime, I've scheduled a livestream "Album Release Concert" (accompanied by prerecorded elements from the Moholo/Tippett album No Gossip). In summary: it's going to be strange, but it's going to be cool. May 22, 7pm PT: https://youtu.be/daAtrW-nAF8