Credits:

Lakecia Benjamin

Description:

In March 2020, saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin released Pursuance: The Colltranes, her fiery, imaginative third album. While driving home from a performance in Ohio in 2021, her car left the road in a rural area and flipped over in a drainage ditch. She suffered multiple injuries including neurological damage and a broken jaw. Three weeks later she was touring Europe. Phoenix is her fourth album. Co-produced with Terri Lyne Carrington, Benjamin appended her working quartet — Victor Gould (piano, organ, Fender Rhodes), E.J. Strickland (drums), and Ivan Taylor (basses) — with a large guest list. She includes a string trio, trumpeters, pianist Patrice Rushen, singers, poets, and polemicists. Opener “Amerikkan Skin” commences with the sounds of sirens and gunshots before activist/writer Angela Davis intones, “Revolutionary hope resided precisely among those women who have been abandoned by histo