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Force Majeure

I was delighted and a little surprised to hear a harp in the mix of the opening tracks on Makaya McCraven's 2018 album Universal Beings, and looked up the musician responsible: Brandee Younger. I watched and enjoyed several YouTube videos featuring her playing solo and as part of a quartet. It seemed her own recordings weren't readily available in the UK at that point, but when Force Majeure (a collaboration with her partner, bassist Dezron Douglas) came out in 2020 I was eager to listen. 

It's an album that grew out of a series of (I think) Facebook videocasts from their New York apartment in the early months of the pandemic, under the title 'brunch in the crib with Brandee and Dezron'. So it's domestic music-making but for public consumption, and serves as a record of that strange time and the ingenious ways some musicians found to reach out and find an (often captive) audience. It's also a beautiful album with tremendous charm, and vividly-recorded too.

There's one original composition written by the pair, but all the other tracks are arrangements of either classic jazz pieces or pop songs. Of the latter, I especially enjoy the versions of 'Never Can Say Goodbye' and 'This Woman's Work'. Of the former, their take on John Coltrane's 'Wise One' is exquisite, and is prefaced by Douglas sombrely dedicating the performance to the memory of the then recently-murdered Ahmaud Arbery. I have it on CD - which, most unusually nowadays, has a 'hidden' bonus track at the end: after some apparently closing remarks, the final track continues in silence for a few minutes before an additional uncredited number begins.

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