Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber

★★★★ Angels Over Oakanda AVANTGROIDD. CD/DL

First album in four years from the New York Afro-futurist big band.

This thrilling return to record has sadly turned into memorial with the sudden passing of Greg Tate, the acclaimed critic and Burnt Sugar’s conductor-composer, last month. In its first decade, the improvising avant-funk collective – launched by Tate, a co-founder of the Black Rock Coalition, in 1999 – fired records of constant, tectonic surprise with Sun Ra-on-Saturn frequency and a kaleidoscope of P-Funk-scale line-ups.

Angels Over Oakanda is a comparatively terse eruption: an 18-minute title ride of electric-Miles soloing argument over the salsaColtrane spell of Santana’s

Caravanserai; then an LP side’s worth of remixed variations. But the effect is a sustained psychedelic-fairground high with gripping undertow (the slippery loops and bass-hook jitters in Repatriation-Of-TheMidnight-Moors) and a striking climax in Lisala-Over-InnaOakanda, galactic hip-hop with soaring vocal fireworks by Lisala Beatty that now sound like sweet farewell to a great writer and departed leader.