Amina Claudine Myers is one of those rare musicians where the music of the blues, gospel and jazz stretching out at its most adventurous is in the blood, and this came over no better than in her solo live performance at Cafe Oto.
Hailing from Blackwell, a small community in Arkansas, born in 1942, her musical talents took her from directing gospel choirs as a youngster through music degree studies in Little Rock, picking up jazz and rhythm and blues on the way when she decided that a classical music career wasn’t for her, and gravitating to Chicago where, in 1966, she was invited to join the radical, Black, jazz and arts collective, AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), the only woman in their era-defining first wave.
This brought her into the orbit of ground-breaking musicians including Muhal Richard Abrahams whom she would see as her ‘spiritual brother’, Roscoe Mitchell, George Lewis, Lester Bowie, Anthony Braxton and Wadada Leo Smith, with whom, in 2024, she recorded the highly acclaimed album, Central Park’s Mosaic of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens (Red Hook Records). The AACM, she has said, was ‘Just a chance to express ourselves freely, without anyone trying to stop us.’ ‘For me the AACM just opened the door so that anything was possible.’ (*)
Since the mid-70s she has been based in New York and, along with performing and recording with many of the music’s leading figures, she has taken on theatre direction and composing commissions for large scale works. In 2024 she was recognised by the National Endowment for the Arts as an NEA Jazz Master.
At Cafe Oto she made an eye-catching entrance singing the 1920s freedom song, Down On Me, while walking through the audience to the stage area. Seated at the piano, elegant in a black over-the-shoulder dress and glittering jewellery, she continued with its heartfelt, plaintive sentiment, ‘Everybody in the whole round world is down on me’, glimpsing heaven with its ‘gates of pearl and streets of gold’ and Satan who is ‘down in hell and can’t get out.’
Amina doesn’t stand still. Her range, imagination and technical accomplishment on piano and, later in the set, on Hammond organ, were both breathtaking and deeply moving. Everything came from the heart. She poured her soul in to the piano.
Turning to the piano, smiling with eyes closed, she painted with passion the gospel hymn, ’Steal Away to Jesus’, a reflection on life’s transience with its refrain ‘I ain’t got long to stay here’, underpinned by flowing piano work, and a crashing chord as thunder was evoked.
On Bessie Smith’s Standing in the Rain, ‘which can be done as blues, gospel or jazz,’ she chose the blues route, pulling out glistening phrasing and turns, a real natural, easing in to the riff at the cusp where blues meets rock and roll.
Graceful, fleeting arpeggios, resonant chordal sequences and complex left hand-right hand manoeuvres set out symphonic propositions that turned to dark terrain then lightened up with hints of both Satie and jazz – interestingly, a term she has said ‘is limiting … because it is all music.’ Deep in her own world she was exploring with an intensity that brought to mind Braxton’s brightly disruptive innovations.
The blues was never far away, and when she turned to play the Hammond (without pedals, she noted!), it was with staggering technical accomplishment, as left hand and right hand carried out dazzling bluesy interactions, welling, puttering, flying and swinging, bringing to mind another female organist of the era, Shirley Scott. Dipping in to her favourites she mischievously switched John Lee Hooker’s Hard Time Blues to a woman’s point of view – ‘I didn’t want to cook!’ – hauling out the riff that would also become a Muddy Waters mainstay.
She has said, ‘I write songs that’s giving praise to the creator. And just seeing how many names religions have – their names for the creator. And it’s all to me, it’s the same God, just different names.’ (**) She recited powerfully from that roll-call before leading in to the repetitive intensity of a chant mimicked by her right hand while the left kept the ground solid.
Finally, to round off an incredible hour and a half, going back to her roots she soulfully invoked another of her favourites, Andraé Crouch’s gospel song, Lord, You’ve Been Good To Me.
Thanks go to Cafe Oto who were able to put on this intimate, entrancing performance, the first time Amina Claudine Myers has played a solo show in London for almost 20 years – and at a time when she is deservedly receiving recognition for her talents and achievements.
(*) 2011 interview with Simon Rentner
(**) 2024 interview with Phil Freeman
Amina Claudine Myer’s solo album, Solace of the Mind, will be available on 20 June 2025 (Red Hook Records)
