The saxophonist based in New York abandons their instrument of choice on an Americana album with indie influences. Raw and intense.
The cover is explicit: “Tennessee welcomes you.” It’s not merely a return to roots, nor a desperate attempt to cure any form of homesickness. The ambition lies elsewhere, to surface from the depths of memory to revive memories, seize emotions, and multiply perspectives.
Imagined in a Brooklyn apartment, Eyes Full, the new record by Zoh Amba and the first album to be released on the indie label Matador, turns toward the musician’s homeland in the hope of softening the pains of the past, but also to cast a gaze on the suffering of bruised souls in the surrounding area. Here, the two converge and reply to one another, as the reality of an overlooked working class echoes a personal experience just as desolate.
At seventeen, Zoh Amba packed her bags to flee Kingsport, Tennessee, and its woods that were supposed to be protective at the heart of the Appalachians. It is in jazz that she finds refuge, and through the saxophone and a free approach that her most pure mode of expression develops. After a stint in San Francisco and then Boston, and after training with the great David Murray, the American quickly establishes herself on the New York avant-garde music scene.
Healing Music
Several records followed, including one with the Bhakti trio in 2022, then O, Sun, released in her name the same year, before Sun came out three years later. All share this spontaneous approach dear to the musician. But it is above all a spiritual dimension that continues to permeate her music. And this, even when the saxophone is silenced.
Recorded live with guitarist Kevin Hyland and the renowned founder-drummer of the Dirty Three, Jim White – with whom the American had already collaborated in 2024 within the Beings project, where she first lent her voice –, Eyes Full was meant to move away from jazz.
If Zoh Amba evokes the Tennessee of her origins, she partly reconnects with her very first instrument, the guitar, and draws from it open-hearted songs that tap into blues, folk and other Americana traditions, as well as indie inspirations, even noise and post-rock (the striking Thousand Years, Child You’ll See and PG Tips). Eyes Full leaves therefore no blind spot. The gaze is everywhere, seeking light, following the divine. To see and be seen in order to hope to find salvation.
Eyes Full (Matador/Wagram). Release on June 5.
