Video above is Baku with Roscoe Mitchell and Craig Taborn
Kikanju Baku first got wide notice about five or six years ago as Roscoe Mitchell’s drummer in a series of recordings that began with 2014’s Conversations I and Conversations II. But whether he was in smaller settings such as these projects or much larger ones, Baku always stood out as his percussion style is one of the true originals of our time.
Extremely nimble and employing a vast array of mostly lighter timbres, he uses his arsenal of drums and assorted percussion to assume a front-line role, an audacious drummer with exceptional feel. Beyond his association with avant-garde greats like Mitchell and Michael Gregory Jackson, the London-based artist keeps busy with his own projects,
Baku’s latest group is titled the Citizens of Nowhere, an assemblage of like-minded music outliers that includes Chris Pitsiokos (saxophone), Reg Bloor (electric guitar) Luke Stewart (basses) Ignacio Ruz (noise) and Mad Swun Hua (vox). In a flurry of recording activity, Baku and his troupe recorded two albums of material, No Justice – Justification and Revolt Against State Stimulated Stockholm Syndrome. As they are packaged together, they can be thought of two discs of a single, sprawling album.
It only takes a quick glance at the art layout and the song titles to figure that Baku is radically anti-establishment but the music makes the loudest message of all about pushing back against conformity and the whole corporate music thing. If Ariana Grande is your thing, you might as well GTFO of this space right now.
The performances tend to be one of three varieties. There’s the free-form jazz like “Societal Destruction And The Austerity Abattoir,” which is a half hour of relentless three-way improvisation between Baku, Stewart (on electric bass) and Pitsiokos, with some random electro noises tossed in presumably by Ruz. “The Serpent Devouring The Banker” has a similar musical music, communicated in a tidy eleven minutes. “Moai-Maya-Mishin” is all acoustic with the base trio and a showcase for Baku’s fidgety attack. “The Go-To Guy In The Rare Instance That Subcultural Credibility Is Required Vending For Establishment Institutions/Rewarding Weakness/The Camae Cocksuck Complicité” is the sparsest of this bunch, but also rich with discreet characteristics.
The second type of songs is what I affectionately call ‘room clearing music,’ that all-out unhinged noise where the improv is too chaotic and dense to have even a scintilla of jazz in it (Hua enjoins the others in the fun by lending some screaming). But the chaos is the point, and this is as uncompromising as music gets. “Child Killer Given A Knighthood By Thrice Disgraced Necrophile For Crimes Against Humanity,” “Riddance of Rulers,” and “Mike Pompeo Assassination Strategy” fall under that category.
Lastly, a couple of performances (“Knocking” and “Mmere Dane”) feature the spoken word of Niles Asheber, best known as the leader of the Asheber & The Afrikan Revolution, lending pithy spoken commentary about contemporary UK politics and the tragic Grenfell Tower fire, backed economically by Baku on percussion and double bass.
Put together, this montage of music held together by rage and reflection paints a picture of the elusive Kikanju Baku. Listening to his own work like No Justice – Justification and Revolt Against State Stimulated Stockholm Syndrome, it becomes crystal clear why so much better-known talent like to be around him.
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