Gift From a Stranger

Donald Byrd - Steppin' Into Tomorrow

Hello internet pals of music. You know it’s black History Month and what we’re about. So, this month let’s get into it.

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The future. Are we all looking forward to it?

Futures are cool. There’s so much possibility. My cynical self, rising up over my right shoulder like a dark ghost, tells me that the future is dumb. But that future is based on the present, and the state of the world lately seems admittedly dumb.

Cue the cynicism.

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But what happened to believing in putting one foot forward in hope? It’s not like the world was easier, or kinder, in the 1970s. The same as it wasn’t either in the 1990s, when we were plundering all the jewels of that tacky decade twenty years prior. Yet, even then somehow there was more aura of a better tomorrow, a tale we now have to tell ourselves in the morning as we strap in and prepare for the sludgy trench warfare of modern mendacity that any of this isn’t a simulation of worst case scenario workshopping by a bunch of extra-terrestrial bureaucratic middle managers. It’s like we’re in that stage of the twenty year cultural ouroboros where we’re reflecting the strange anxiety age of pre-millenial tension.

Donald Byrd isn’t sounding futuristic or anything here. But his continuation of work here with Larry and Fonce Mizell shows the futurism of the personal, putting his past work in the rear view mirror: stepping into tomorrow.

The string of records Byrd did with the Mizell brothers is incomparable, and for me, will stand as the best work he released.

Can never understand jazz purists who don’t value the soul jazz period it went through. Seems cynical to expect that a whole musical style that did away with the rule book should be bound to rules.

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