Ears and Eyes Records is excited to announce the October 6th, 2023 release of Pulses, the groundbreaking new album from visionary flutist-composer Elsa Nilsson and her latest creative outfit Band of Pulses.

What is the line that makes sound, music? Nilsson, along with pianist Santiago Leibson, bassist Marty Kenney and drummer Rodrigo Recabarren, seek to answer that question in Pulses, a riveting eight-part suite based and built on the rhythmic and melodic aspects of Dr. Maya Angelou’s voice.

Awarded a Chamber Music America New Jazz Works Grant, Pulses explores the intersection between jazz and communication by highlighting the subtle melodic development and deep groove in Dr. Angelou’s reading of her poem “On The Pulse of Morning”.

Crafted, composed, and improvised around Dr. Angelou’s pitch and phrasing, Pulses is an impressive creative experiment that brings to light the full depth of her sonic and poetic brilliance.

“I’ve always been drawn to Dr. Angelou’s work,” says Nilsson. “What I find compelling is her ability to look directly at difficult topics and approach them with both compassion and honesty. Her unflappable clarity in her expression of everything from the beautiful to the brutal is something I work to embody on my instrument as well. I return to her work often in order to guide myself back to center, and find a path forward in making art that feels genuine.”

1. Pulse
2. The River, Rock, Tree
3. Bruising Darkness
4. Praying For A Dream
5. Root
6. The River, Rock, Tree Reprise
7. Faced With Courage
8. Up And Out

With the seeds for Pulses having been first planted about three years ago, when Recabarren shared a clip of Dr. Angelou’s seminal recitation of “On The Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s inauguration with Elsa, as they were both working on musical projects inspired by the spoken word, this new recording opens on the hauntingly Avant-garde Pulse and the historically informative The River, Rock, Tree, and then brings us the rhythmically jaunty Bruising Darkness and the skittishly playful Praying For A Dream.

On an album having been made possible with the support from the Chamber Music America’s New Jazz Works program funded through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, along next is the swirlingly melodic Root and an ornate The River, Rock, Tree Reprise, the recording rounding out on the heady ebb and flow of Faced With Courage, closing on the atmospherically-charged, electronically-hued instrumental Up And Out.

Dr. Maya Angelou stood on the national mall on January 20th, 1993 to mark the presidential inaugural celebrating the 1992 election of Bill Clinton as the 40th President of The United States of America. Looking out onto the crowd gathered for the occasion, she scanned the sea of bodies before looking toward the horizon, where she envisioned the collective pain of the country’s fraught past as a more just, equitable future.

Angelou’s poem On The Pulse of Morning found her calling out to an America that enacts the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity as lived ideals instead of lofty ornamentation just close enough to the eye to induce wonder but hovering above us, perpetually out of reach.

An America honest enough about a legacy of settler colonialism and separatism to finally be unbound by it. An America first founded, in earnest, with little more than the elements that populate the opening words of her speech: “A rock, a river, a tree...”.

Bandcamp Purchase Link

www.elsanilssonmusic.com