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“It’s energetic,” says Brittany Davis of feeling the spirits of the ancestors. “It’s interpretive. It’s a dance of sound and vibration. It’s a memory, it’s a wash. It’s washing over you.”
(Photo: Lance Mercer)Since she was 3 years old, Brittany Davis has been mimicking bird songs on the piano. Davis, who was born blind, also recalls growing up listening to gospel and the contemporary jazz her family would play in the house. “But I wasn’t really into ... the real juicy stuff, the jazz linguist type [music], you know what I’m saying?” she said. “They had the lingo, man, and I wasn’t hearing that.”
While Davis is bashful about associating herself with the title of “jazz musician,” her sophomore LP, Black Thunder (Loosegroove Records), gleams with those “juicy” jazz elements she never fully understood as a kid.
Black Thunder, the result of a completely improvised two-day session at Seattle’s Studio Litho, draws on Davis’ organic connection to spirit, song and soul, and the synergy between Davis and two stalwarts of the Seattle jazz scene: drummer D’Vonne Lewis and acoustic bassist Evan Flory-Barnes.
The record includes nine songs with eight otherworldly interludes soaked in Afrocentric elements, groovy vamps and powerful lyricism sung or spoken in Davis’ rich alto. Thematically, Black Thunder shares Davis’ bittersweet reflections as a blind person of color, encourages others to connect with their true beauty and highlights a gift Davis usually keeps close to the heart — a strong spiritual sense that connects her to the voices of the ancestors.
“It’s energetic. It’s interpretive. It’s a dance of sound and vibration. It’s a memory, it’s a wash. It’s washing over you. It’s not me going, ‘I see the spirits.’ No, it’s not like that,” she said.
After spending most of her childhood in Kansas City, Missouri, where she played piano in church and was first exposed to gospel and jazz, Davis moved to Seattle at 15. Within a few years, she’d befriended mainstays in the Seattle rock ’n’ roll scene and was regularly attending jam sessions.
Eventually, Davis was introduced to Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard. Gossard quickly became a friend and one of Davis’ biggest supporters, signing her to his label, Loosegroove Records, in 2022. Gossard’s help, as well as that of Pearl Jam producer Josh Evans, was instrumental in the creation of Black Thunder, as well as her 2022 EP, I Choose To Live, and her 2024 LP, Image Issues.
“Stone, he’s like, ‘Brittany, I bet you could go in the studio and make an album in three days.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, no dude,’” she said, with a laugh. “But then, all of a sudden, this dude goes ahead and puts the whole [session together].”
On the first recording day, Gossard and Evans brought in Lewis, a versatile and perennially in-the-pocket drummer who’s worked with Gossard, as well as Wynton Marsalis and Maria Schneider. On the second day in the studio, they also brought in Flory-Barnes, a skillful bassist and Origin Records artist who played with pianist Aaron Parks in his early trio.
“I’m telling you, it was just like fate that brought that band together again, because we had played together before, but it just bounced back into my heart,” said Davis.
While making Black Thunder, Davis came to the studio with nothing but an open mind and the intention of following the music wherever it wanted to go. She’d sit at the piano and start in with a groove or harmonic progression, letting Lewis and Flory-Barnes join in when it felt right.
Quickly, she felt moved to voice the pain of the African ancestors, specifically those who were removed from their homelands during the transatlantic slave trade. She was also curious to explore how the atrocities and displacement that faced the ancestors continue to shape the Black community today.
That inspiration is potent on the album’s suspenseful eponymous track, “Black Thunder,” as Davis speaks: “It’s rainy season/ In the jungle I hear, the call of wild souls/ Who never knew, what it meant to leave their soil/ I can hear it down underneath the soil/ Tempered and wired tight/ Ready, preparing to bring forth light and fruit.”
As it explores this legacy and Davis’ relation- ship to it, Black Thunder incorporates African chants and rhythms, jazz harmony, soulful vocals and spoken-word verses. As pearls poured forth, Evans would carefully layer, edit and shape it all into refined tracks.
“Amid The Blackout Of The Night,” featuring soft, sensitive drumming from Lewis and a bluesy piano solo from Davis, explores what it feels like for Davis to have knowledge of something visual, like the Milky Way or the construct of race, but no context to truly understand it as a blind person.
“It’s a type of pain and uncertainty that will cause you to break free and become curious,” she says. “[D’Vonne] picked up on it and dropped in that beat. And then it took me to the place of curiosity I needed to go.”
Likewise, “Mirrors,” driven by a melancholy, marimba-like keys pattern, aches with the tension between Davis’ sense of her own beauty and the narrow, often racist, beauty standards of the sighted world.
“I’ve always believed that I’m beautiful. I’ve never had a problem with me. When I wake up in the morning, when I take that first deep breath, ‘Oh, wow, I’m beautiful.’ I’ve never had a problem with beauty until it becomes, ‘Your hair ain’t right. Your clothes ain’t right,’” she said.
Throughout Black Thunder, time and the material plane transform at the thrum of a bass note or a cymbal splash. Meanwhile, Davis harnesses uncanny sentience and vulnerable self-reflection, aiming to reveal her authentic self, dispel society’s projections and ultimately help others connect to their soul’s purpose.
“I would love to see people remember their humanity. I would love to see people embrace their flaws. I would love to see people embody their fullness,” Davis said. “We don’t need another person that we want to be like. Because the only person we should want to be like is the one that God made. That’s you.” DB
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