| Jazz |
Summary : A review of Russell Gunn’s Afrikan-Amerikan Book of the Dead, exploring how jazz, funk, hip-hop and African American history come together in a powerful meditation on memory, identity and renewal.
Russell Gunn’s Afrikan-Amerikan Book of the Dead: Jazz, Memory and the Power of History
Some albums are discovered by chance. Others come to us because a name is already familiar. And then there are those that draw us in before the first note, simply because the thinking behind them suggests something larger than the usual boundaries of a musical work. That is what happened to me with Russell Gunn’s Afrikan-Amerikan Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth By Any Means Necessary. I did not really know Gunn before encountering this project, and I came to it without expectations, without preconceptions and without an earlier body of work against which to measure it. What caught my attention was the premise: taking the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead and turning it into a meditation on history, memory and the African American experience. On paper, the idea could easily have become overly ambitious, even risky. It is one thing to invoke a text so heavily burdened with symbolism; it is another to transform that intellectual material into music without making the music feel like an illustration of an argument that existed beforehand. Yet from the opening notes of “Folkz,” something happened. I immediately felt on familiar ground, not because I had heard this music before, but because it draws on a vocabulary that feels instinctively recognizable: jazz, funk, soul, hip-hop and the broader tradition of Black American music, along with that particular ability to build a composition around a groove without sacrificing complexity. The music is immediately inviting, but it does not give everything away on first hearing. It leaves enough unanswered to make you want to come back. That is where the journey begins.
“Folkz” can be heard on several levels at once. You can simply surrender to the pulse, the saxophone, the strength of the rhythm section and the almost relentless forward motion. But beneath that apparent ease is a much more carefully constructed form. The compositions are complex without becoming self-conscious; the arrangements are rich enough to reward close listening without seeming determined to advertise their sophistication. As the album unfolds, I find myself thinking about something that goes beyond jazz itself. It reminds me of the experience of walking into a museum and unexpectedly encountering a major contemporary work. You may not possess every key to what the artist intended, but you recognize that there is something there worth your time. The first response is physical before it becomes intellectual. You receive the work, absorb it, listen to it, and only afterward comes the desire to understand it. Gunn achieves precisely that. He does not ask the listener to choose between musical pleasure and reflection. He makes one the doorway to the other. The album does not merely have something to say; it understands that an idea only truly lives when it can be felt.
The project rests on a deceptively simple idea with considerable consequences: use a text associated with death to speak about life, take an ancient funerary imagination and use it to examine the memory of a people, and turn the passage into the afterlife into a metaphor for renewal in the present. The Book of the Dead becomes more than an archaeological or religious artifact. It becomes a point of departure. From there, Gunn raises a question that reaches beyond African American history: How does a community, a culture or an individual move forward while carrying a history marked by violence, dispossession, resistance and creation? His answer is not forgetting. If anything, the album suggests that the future can only be built through a more precise understanding of what came before. But Gunn also refuses to turn memory into a place where one must remain trapped. The past is not a prison here. It is raw material. The task is not simply to remember what was lost, but to recover what was created, transmitted, invented and accomplished. That distinction matters because it helps explain why the music, despite the historical tensions it invokes, never feels trapped in grievance. It looks backward in order to move forward.
Gunn himself has emphasized that his music is not conceived as a defensive response. Instead, he wants to affirm what his ancestors were capable of creating and accomplishing while drawing attention to institutional narratives that have distorted or diminished that history. What interests me is not simply the force of that assertion, but the way Gunn refuses to reduce his work to a rebuttal of the past. He is not merely replacing one narrative with another. He is asking what happens to identity when it is no longer defined exclusively through the eyes of those who once dominated it. That question carries particular weight in a country where African American music has played an extraordinary role in shaping global popular culture for more than a century, even as the history of the people who created that music has often been told through categories imposed from outside. Jazz, blues, gospel, soul, funk and hip-hop are not marginal footnotes to American modernity. They are among its defining languages. Gunn is therefore not trying to manufacture a sense of grandeur. He is reminding us that the grandeur is already there, and that perhaps the real work is learning how to see it.
That same philosophy can be heard in Gunn’s choice of musicians. He has explained that he selected the members of Blackhawk for what each could contribute to the whole, rather than simply for reputation or name recognition. That distinction matters because the album is fundamentally a collective work. Kendrick Smith, whom Gunn has known since childhood, brings a saxophone presence that is never reduced to the role of supporting the leader’s ideas. Trombonist Andre Hayward, whom Gunn has known even longer and who has worked with Mingus Dynasty, Gerald Wilson and Roy Hargrove, adds another layer to the ensemble’s sound. The choices appear to follow the same principle as the album itself: this is not a gathering of prestigious names but a group of personalities capable of advancing a shared musical and intellectual vision. Jazz is, of course, a music of soloists, but it is equally a music of relationships. What happens between musicians can matter as much as what each musician does alone. In Blackhawk, that collective dimension is constantly audible. The instruments do not simply decorate an argument. They participate in the construction of a story.
That way of thinking about music is also rooted in Gunn’s own trajectory. He grew up between Chicago and East St. Louis, began with hip-hop and later developed his language as a trumpeter and composer within jazz. He has worked with important figures in contemporary jazz while remaining connected to African American popular music. That movement across genres is essential to understanding Afrikan-Amerikan Book of the Dead. Gunn does not appear to regard jazz as territory that needs to be protected from outside influences. He treats it as a language capable of absorbing, transforming and reinventing whatever surrounds it. Funk is not simply an ingredient added to make the album more accessible, any more than hip-hop is a gesture toward contemporary relevance. These forms belong to the same cultural history. They are branches of the same tree, with roots that reach much deeper than genre labels suggest. Gunn’s strength lies partly in refusing to hide those connections.
“Pan Afrikan Invocation” extends that feeling by introducing an almost ritual dimension. The organ, the voices and the gradual unfolding of the piece give the album a new gravity. The music seems less interested in being merely heard than in creating a space in which a community might recognize itself. There is something here of the Black church tradition, in which music can become prayer, testimony, affirmation and gathering at the same time. But Gunn is not attempting to reproduce an ancient ritual. He recovers its function. The music invokes, calls and gathers. It makes something larger than the individual temporarily present. That connects directly to the album’s central idea: if history is collective memory, its transmission cannot remain purely intellectual. It also moves through the body, through rhythm, repetition and voice. We can read history for years, but a single melodic line can sometimes summon a memory with a force that language cannot reach.
“The Rule of Two” introduces another kind of tension. The title refers to the logic of power in the Star Wars universe, but Gunn uses it to explore relationships of domination. The music becomes more nervous, more compressed, as though the balance could shift at any moment. This is one of the album’s most effective devices: instead of describing historical or political change, Gunn makes the listener experience it. A rhythm changes, the sonic space tightens, instruments begin answering one another differently, and suddenly something has happened. History becomes a sensory experience. That may be what most clearly separates this album from a record built simply around a message. Gunn never needs to turn his compositions into lectures. The music remains music, and the ideas emerge through its movement.
“Cahokia Pyramids” may provide the clearest key to the project as a whole. Cahokia, the major archaeological site in present-day Illinois near St. Louis, bears witness to a complex society that developed in North America long before European arrival. Gunn uses the site as a starting point for thinking about memory, civilization and the ways historical achievements have been viewed, named and interpreted. The music does not attempt an archaeological reconstruction. Instead, Cahokia becomes a symbol, a way of asking the listener to imagine a world before rupture. At first, the composition feels almost weightless. The melody creates a space in which one can imagine daily life, ceremonies, exchanges and structures gradually transforming the landscape. Then something begins to fracture. The rhythm breaks open, the saxophone takes on a new intensity, and the music becomes more urgent. A threat has entered the story.
Gunn has explained that he wanted listeners to imagine a period of peace after these places had been built, before that tranquility was disturbed, and then to bring the music gradually back toward serenity. What makes the construction so effective is its refusal of literal reconstruction. We are not hearing what the past supposedly sounded like. We are hearing what the past can provoke in the imagination. The artist does not replace the historian; he offers another way of looking. Cahokia becomes less an archaeological object than a question addressed to the present: How many worlds have we forgotten because we learned to view history through narratives that had already been constructed? And what changes when we stop treating ancient civilizations merely as ruins and begin to consider them as complex societies with their own aspirations, institutions and visions of the world?
That question extends far beyond Cahokia. It reaches one of Gunn’s fundamental concerns: bringing back into circulation histories that have been separated, fragmented or pushed to the margins of dominant narratives. But this is also where the distinction between artistic interpretation and historical demonstration becomes important. Gunn’s connections belong to a particular vision of history and to a deliberate attempt to shift the listener’s perspective. They may invite discussion, further research and, in some cases, disagreement. That is not necessarily a weakness. An artwork that seeks to provoke thought should not attempt to close the conversation. It should create enough material to make the listener want to investigate, read, compare and understand. One of the album’s virtues is precisely that it does not provide every answer. It gives you more questions to pursue.
That impulse to place particular places within a larger history resonates especially strongly in “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” Duke Ellington and Bubber Miley’s composition. The choice is hardly incidental. East St. Louis is tied to Gunn’s personal history, while Ellington’s piece belongs to a formative period in jazz. By revisiting it, Gunn brings several moments into conversation: Ellington in the 1920s, East St. Louis, the young Gunn growing up in that environment and the contemporary musician looking back across decades. What might otherwise have been a straightforward cover becomes a conversation with the past. And that conversation takes place through funk. The old composition is electrified, strengthened and displaced. It retains its identity while becoming something else. That is what a living tradition does. It does not preserve what it receives unchanged. It transforms it.
This may also explain why jazz remains so central to Gunn’s project. Jazz is inherently a music of memory and transformation. It almost never exists without inheritance, yet it constantly alters that inheritance. A theme returns, a harmony shifts, a rhythm changes, a musician improvises, and suddenly something that belonged to the past becomes present again. That is exactly the logic of this album. Gunn does not ask listeners to forget what came before. He asks them to hear what that inheritance can still produce now. It is a deeply musical understanding of memory: remembering is not repetition. It is transformation.
As the album progresses, its references accumulate without ever becoming a catalogue. Traditional and modern jazz, funk, gospel, hip-hop, soul, electronic music and spoken word all leave their traces. What matters most, however, is the coherence with which they are integrated. Gunn does not seem interested in proving that he knows several styles. He uses them because they belong to his history and because they allow him to tell the story he wants to tell. That distinction is fundamental. Virtuosity can be demonstrative; here, it is functional. It serves the larger purpose without overwhelming the music. The arrangements are sophisticated, but their sophistication remains connected to something physical. There is always a rhythm to hold on to.
And that may be what struck me most. I initially thought I was being drawn to the album because of its ideas. I stayed because of the music. Then, returning to the ideas, I heard the music differently. Some records reveal themselves immediately and disappear almost as quickly. This one works in the opposite direction. The more you understand what Gunn is attempting, the more certain passages seem to acquire weight. A rhythm that initially sounded simply effective becomes a sign of tension. A rupture becomes the passage from one era to another. A peaceful melody becomes a memory. A familiar composition becomes a conversation with an earlier generation. A saxophone solo can suddenly seem to carry something much larger than itself.
There is another dimension to the album that feels especially important now: its ability to address history without turning music into a closed argument. At a time when narratives of identity are often reduced to slogans, Gunn chooses the more difficult path of complexity. He allows anger without becoming trapped in it, memory without turning it into nostalgia, pride without self-congratulation, and history without pretending that it can be reduced to a handful of certainties. His argument can be direct, even forceful, but the music remains open. It gives the listener room to move among the references and construct an understanding of his or her own. That openness matters because it prevents the album from becoming merely an ideological object. It remains art, with ambiguity, tension and room for interpretation.
“Pan-Afrikan Benediction” eventually closes the journey like a ceremony of departure. After moving through memory, civilizations, conflict, inheritance and different forms of domination, the album arrives somewhere quieter. The musicians themselves contribute vocally, as if the boundary between performers and community is meant to disappear at the end. The gesture is deeply symbolic. Throughout the record, individuals have worked together to create a collective history. In the final moments, they themselves become that collective voice. Individual virtuosity no longer needs to dominate. What matters is the group.
And then there is the idea of peace, returning almost quietly after all the tensions that have come before. It is not a naive peace because it is not based on forgetting. It comes after knowledge, conflict and confrontation with the past. This may be where the connection to the Book of the Dead becomes most meaningful. The passage into another existence is no longer simply the passage of the dead. It becomes the passage of a memory that can move beyond suffering and become a possibility for creation. Gunn is not suggesting that the past disappears. He seems to be suggesting that we can change the place the past occupies in the present.
Ultimately, that is what makes Afrikan-Amerikan Book of the Dead so compelling to me. The album works not only because of its subject matter, and not only because of the quality of its compositions and arrangements. It works because the thinking appears to have begun long before the musicians entered the studio. Gunn knows what he wants to question, he knows which musicians can help him explore it, and, most important, he understands that an idea becomes truly interesting only when it finds a musical form capable of carrying it beyond the original argument. That is what gives the record its density. You can hear it as a major contemporary jazz album, as a work shaped by funk and hip-hop, as a meditation on African American history or simply as a sequence of remarkably constructed pieces. All of those readings are possible, and none cancels the others.
I came to this album without really knowing Russell Gunn, and I leave it feeling that I have discovered much more than a trumpeter or composer. I have encountered a musician who treats creation as a way of thinking, but who also understands that once thought enters music, it has to become something else. It has to breathe, take risks, improvise, sometimes lose its way and leave room for the listener. That is perhaps why the album never feels heavy despite the importance of its themes. There is history, politics, memory, spirituality and philosophy here, but above all there is sound, rhythm, musicians playing together and the satisfying sensation that the music is still being made in front of us.
When I close this particular Book of the Dead, I am left with an idea much simpler than all the historical references running through the work: memory should not be a tomb. It can be a source of strength. It can help us understand what we were, what we have become and what we might still become. That may also be why music remains one of the best places in which to think about history. It does not necessarily impose a conclusion. It makes contradictions, ruptures, survivals and renewals audible. In Russell Gunn’s hands, the pyramids, East St. Louis, Duke Ellington, jazz, funk, gospel and hip-hop are not scattered references. They become pieces of a single memory in motion. And when the music finally settles after passing through so much tension, the peace it leaves behind is not the peace of forgetting. It is the peace of knowledge—the possibility of carrying history without allowing it to prevent us from moving forward.
So yes, this album is a pleasure. But it is a pleasure that refuses to flatter the ear alone. It asks us to listen differently, to look differently and perhaps even to consider what we do with our own memories. That may be Russell Gunn’s most remarkable achievement: turning an album devoted to the dead into a work profoundly concerned with the living.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, September 29th, 2026
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Musicians :
Russell Gunn – Trumpet, Composer, Producer
Andre Hayward – Trombone
Kendrick Smith – Straight Alto Sax
Kevin Bales – Piano
Kevin “Raw Dog” Smith – Bass
Jeremy “Bean” Clemons – Drumsa
Sean Falyon – Turntables
Larry Wilson – Hammond B3 organ
Rod Harris Jr. Guitar
Mino Cinelu and Ali Barr – Percussion
Jamel Mitchell – Baritone Saxophone
Carlos Brown Jr. – Alto Saxophone
Ken “K Solo 007” Wells – Spoken Word
Track Listing :
Folkz
Pan Afrikan Invocation
The Rule Of Two
Cahokia Pyramids
East St. Louis Toodle-oo
Voyages Of The Pyramid Builders
Pan Afrikan Benediction