| Jazz |
Peace Anthems Is Not Trying to Change the World. It Is Trying to Change the Way We Listen
By the time the August sun began pushing through the white cotton curtains of the studio, the room had already settled into its familiar silence. It was one of those summer Sundays when the outside world seemed suspended between heat and stillness, the kind of morning that invites patience before demanding attention.
Next to the large analog mixing console stood the inevitable pile of records awaiting review, each one promising its own carefully constructed universe. Reviewing music often means moving quickly from one release to the next, balancing curiosity with deadlines, trying to give every artist the attention they deserve. Yet every so often a record asks for something different. It asks you to slow down before you even press play.
One promotional sheet resting on the desk immediately drew my attention. Three names alone were enough to interrupt the rhythm of an ordinary review session: Wadada Leo Smith. Amina Claudine Myers. Taylor Deupree.
For anyone who has spent years listening across the boundaries separating jazz, contemporary composition, experimental electronics, and improvised music, those names carry considerable weight. They represent decades of artistic courage, musicians who have consistently resisted convenience in favor of exploration. Their careers have never been defined by commercial certainty but by an unwavering commitment to discovery, each new recording serving less as a destination than another stage in an ongoing conversation.
Outside, the summer light continued to fill the room. Inside, another anniversary was about to be celebrated.
Five years after its founding, Red Hook Records has chosen to commemorate its existence with remarkable confidence. Many independent labels celebrate milestones by revisiting their greatest successes or assembling familiar names around an easily marketable compilation. Peace Anthems follows neither path. Instead, Red Hook Records has commissioned thirteen original works from thirteen extraordinary artists, creating a collective statement that feels ambitious without becoming self-congratulatory.
Perhaps that should not come as a surprise. During its relatively short existence, Red Hook Records has quietly established itself as one of the more adventurous homes for contemporary creative music. Rather than chasing trends or algorithms, the label has consistently invested in artists willing to challenge conventional listening habits. Its catalogue favors patience over immediacy, atmosphere over spectacle, and artistic curiosity over commercial formulas. In an era increasingly defined by disposable streaming culture, that philosophy already feels quietly radical.
The anniversary, then, becomes almost secondary. What is really being celebrated is a community. Before reading another word of the promotional material, I deliberately placed the sheet face down on the desk. Publicists perform an essential role, but every listener knows how persuasive advance narratives can become. Once we are told what an album intends to accomplish, it becomes surprisingly difficult to hear it without searching for confirmation. I wanted none of that. I wanted my first encounter with Peace Anthems to belong entirely to the music itself.
Perhaps that decision proved especially important because of the musicians involved. People often describe artists of this stature as talented. I have always been uncomfortable with that word.
Talent suggests something almost accidental, an effortless gift bestowed upon a fortunate few. Listening to Wadada Leo Smith, Amina Claudine Myers, Taylor Deupree, or the remarkable musicians assembled throughout this project, one hears something altogether different. One hears decades of discipline. Endless experimentation. Failures that became discoveries. Doubt transformed into conviction. Countless collaborations that slowly refined individual voices without diminishing collective purpose.
Great musicians are rarely defined by inspiration alone. They are defined by persistence.
That distinction matters because Peace Anthems itself feels built upon precisely those qualities. Nothing here seeks immediate gratification. Nothing reaches for dramatic effect simply to impress. Every gesture appears considered, every silence intentional, every sonic decision patiently earned.
Long before the first composition reaches its conclusion, another realization quietly emerges. This is not merely an album about peace. It is an album that attempts to practice peace through listening. There is an important difference.
Many recordings addressing war rely upon confrontation. They seek urgency through volume, intensity, or righteous anger. Those responses are understandable, perhaps even necessary. Yet Peace Anthems chooses an entirely different language. It refuses emotional manipulation. Instead, it asks the listener to slow down, to remain present, to inhabit uncertainty rather than escape it.
In today’s cultural landscape, where outrage has become one of the dominant currencies of public conversation, that choice feels unexpectedly courageous.
The opening composition, “Al Badawi,” composed by Naqvi, establishes that philosophy almost immediately. Rich sustained synthesizer drones unfold with remarkable patience. Rather than introducing melodies that demand attention, the piece gradually constructs an environment, one in which time itself appears to stretch. Listening becomes less about following musical events than about noticing subtle transformations inside sounds that initially seem motionless.
The experience recalls entering a large architectural space before anyone else has arrived. Nothing appears to happen. Then, gradually, everything begins to change. Minute harmonic shifts alter the emotional temperature. Resonances bloom almost imperceptibly. Frequencies interact with one another until silence itself seems to acquire texture. This is music that trusts its audience. That trust may ultimately become one of the album’s defining characteristics.
Contemporary culture increasingly rewards immediacy. Songs introduce hooks within seconds. Streaming platforms measure attention spans in moments rather than minutes. Albums compete not only with one another but with every distraction available on the same device.
Peace Anthems quietly rejects those expectations. Instead, it proposes something almost unfashionable. Listening requires time. Real listening requires even more. That philosophy extends beyond aesthetics. It speaks directly to the album’s larger subject.
Peace, after all, rarely arrives through speed. Understanding certainly does not. Both demand patience, the willingness to remain present with perspectives that may never become entirely comfortable or familiar. The music never states that argument explicitly, yet every sustained note seems to embody it.
As “Al Badawi” unfolds, another thought gradually takes shape. Perhaps the record is not asking us to agree with one another. Perhaps it is asking something more fundamental. Perhaps it is asking whether we still know how to listen.
That question lingers long after the opening composition fades, preparing the ground for everything that follows. By the time the first piece reaches its quiet conclusion, Peace Anthems has already accomplished something increasingly rare. It has changed not what I was thinking, but the pace at which I was willing to think.
And that may be the most meaningful beginning any album devoted to peace could possibly offer.
Peace Anthems Is Not Trying to Change the World. It Is Trying to Change the Way We Listen.
Part I.B
If “Al Badawi” teaches the listener how to enter the record, the second composition quietly begins teaching something even more demanding. How to remain there.
There is a temptation, particularly when writing about experimental music, to describe every sound as though it were an isolated event. Critics often catalogue textures, identify instruments, explain production techniques, and move methodically from one composition to the next. While those observations have their place, they rarely capture what makes records like Peace Anthems so affecting.
This is not an album built from individual moments. It is built from accumulated attention. Each composition alters the emotional climate established by the previous one. Ideas are rarely abandoned. Instead, they linger beneath the surface, quietly reshaping the listener’s expectations. By the time the second piece begins, the ear has already been recalibrated.
“Wither Light and Airy” unfolds less like a performance than a conversation overheard from another room. Taylor Deupree, Michael Vandever, and Luke Stewart Morgan resist every instinct toward virtuoso display. Their objective is not to demonstrate technical brilliance, although each musician possesses it in abundance. Instead, they construct an environment in which every sound seems to acknowledge the presence of every other sound.
Morgan’s bass never simply anchors the harmony. It breathes. Its low frequencies seem to inhale and exhale beneath the composition, creating an almost physical sense of space. Vandever’s trombone enters not as a melodic protagonist but as another living surface, its warm resonance dissolving into the surrounding textures before reappearing from unexpected angles.
Above them all stands Taylor Deupree. Calling him the producer barely begins to describe his contribution. For more than three decades, Deupree has become one of the defining architects of contemporary minimalism. Through his recordings, his collaborations, and his work as founder of the influential 12k label, he has consistently explored the delicate boundary where electronic composition, environmental sound, and silence become indistinguishable. His work has never pursued complexity for its own sake. Instead, it has revealed how extraordinary simplicity can become when every detail is treated with absolute care.
That philosophy is immediately recognizable here. The electronic elements never compete with the acoustic instruments. Neither do they accompany them. Instead, both seem to exist inside the same breathing organism.
Tiny digital artifacts shimmer at the edge of perception. Barely audible harmonic clouds drift behind the trombone. Resonances appear, disappear, then return altered by everything that has occurred in between. Listening becomes an act of discovering relationships rather than identifying individual sounds. This is production as architecture.
The listener rarely notices the walls of a beautifully designed building until long after leaving it. Yet every movement, every change in perspective, every emotional response has quietly been shaped by those invisible structures. Deupree approaches sound in much the same way. His greatest achievement is often what the listener fails to notice.
There are producers who leave unmistakable fingerprints on every recording they touch. Their sonic identity becomes immediately recognizable, sometimes even overpowering the artists themselves. Deupree belongs to the opposite tradition. His production disappears. Not because it lacks personality, but because it serves the music with extraordinary humility. That restraint proves essential throughout Peace Anthems.
The album gathers thirteen composers whose musical languages differ dramatically. Some emerge from jazz. Others from electroacoustic composition. Others from contemporary classical music, ambient experimentation, spoken word, or free improvisation.
On paper, such diversity could easily collapse into fragmentation. Instead, the record feels astonishingly unified. That coherence owes as much to sequencing and production as to composition. Every transition appears carefully considered. No piece attempts to overshadow the next. Silence becomes connective tissue. Resonance becomes narrative. Even contrast begins to feel like continuity.
Listening from beginning to end, one gradually realizes that the album behaves less like a collection of individual works than like a single extended meditation viewed through thirteen different imaginations. Perhaps that explains why the anniversary itself almost disappears from consciousness.
Most commemorative albums inevitably become celebrations of institutions. Peace Anthems celebrates relationships instead. Relationships between musicians. Between generations. Between traditions that too often occupy separate cultural spaces. Most importantly, between listening and empathy. Those ideas are inseparable.
In recent years, public conversation has become increasingly performative. Everyone speaks. Everyone publishes. Everyone reacts almost instantly. The pressure to produce opinions has begun to eclipse the quieter discipline of absorbing what another person is actually saying. Music has not escaped that acceleration.
Albums appear every Friday only to disappear beneath the following week’s releases. Streaming encourages endless discovery while often discouraging sustained attention. We consume more music than ever before, yet many listeners spend less time inhabiting individual records.
Peace Anthems resists that economy. It refuses to become background music. It asks for commitment. Not because it is deliberately difficult. Because it is deliberately patient. That distinction matters.
There is nothing exclusionary about this music. Its emotional vocabulary remains remarkably open. One need not recognize every compositional reference or understand every production decision to feel its emotional gravity. The record never demands specialized knowledge. It asks only for presence.
That may be one of its quietest political gestures. Not because it offers solutions. Because it proposes attention. Real peace begins long before diplomacy. It begins with the willingness to hear another voice without immediately preparing one’s response. Listening, then, becomes more than an aesthetic act. It becomes an ethical one.
By the time “Wither Light and Airy” reaches its final moments, the album has already begun altering the listener’s internal rhythm. Time itself feels different. The silence between sounds grows more meaningful. Even the studio around me seemed somehow transformed. The sunlight had climbed higher across the floor. The untouched stack of albums waiting beside the console no longer felt urgent.
For perhaps the first time that morning, deadlines had quietly surrendered to curiosity. And that, I realized, was precisely what Peace Anthems had been inviting from the very beginning. Not agreement. Not admiration. Simply the patience to listen before deciding what any of it might mean.
Peace Anthems Is Not Trying to Change the World. It Is Trying to Change the Way We Listen.
Part II: When Voices Become Landscapes
There is a moment in Peace Anthems when the album’s central idea stops existing only as an atmosphere and begins to reveal itself as a human presence. That moment arrives with “Imaginary Lines.”
Until this point, the record has been teaching the listener how to inhabit space. It has explored silence, resonance, and the delicate relationships between acoustic instruments and electronic environments. The first compositions create a landscape of contemplation, asking us to slow down and accept a different sense of time.
But “Imaginary Lines” introduces something more vulnerable. A voice. Not a voice used as decoration. Not a voice placed above the music as an authority. A voice searching for a place to exist.
Created through the collaboration between Moor Mother and BlankFor.ms, the piece occupies a fragile territory between speech, memory, and sound. The human language remains recognizable, yet it constantly threatens to dissolve into the surrounding textures. Words emerge, disappear, and return transformed, as if passing through layers of distance, history, and uncertainty. It is one of the album’s most powerful achievements because it understands something essential about communication.
Sometimes the most important messages are not the clearest ones. Sometimes what survives is not a complete sentence, but a fragment. A tone. A breath. A signal attempting to reach another human being. This is where “Imaginary Lines” reveals its deeper meaning.
The title itself suggests borders that exist because we have created them. Lines drawn on maps. Divisions between nations. Invisible boundaries separating communities, cultures, and individual experiences. Some borders are physical. Others are psychological. Many exist only because history has convinced us they must.
The music questions all of them. Rather than presenting separation as permanent, the composition explores what continues to move beneath those divisions. Sound travels. Memory travels. Human experience travels.
The piece begins almost like a transmission received from a distant location. The listener is not immediately given certainty. Instead, we encounter fragments, echoes, and impressions. The effect is strangely familiar, recalling the experience of searching through radio frequencies and discovering distant voices emerging briefly from static before disappearing again. That image carries particular emotional weight.
Throughout history, radio has represented one of humanity’s most resilient forms of connection. During moments of crisis, displacement, and conflict, radio has often remained a lifeline. For people separated from their homes, families, or communities, a fragile signal crossing enormous distances can become proof that the outside world still exists. A voice through interference becomes an act of resistance. A message that survives becomes evidence of humanity.
BlankFor.ms understands this emotional territory with remarkable sensitivity. The electronic environment surrounding Moor Mother’s spoken reflections never attempts to imitate reality. Instead, it creates a psychological landscape where uncertainty itself becomes part of the composition.
The sounds feel damaged without being defeated. Blurred without being meaningless. Fragmented without losing their emotional center. That balance is difficult to achieve. Many artistic responses to suffering fall into one of two extremes. They either attempt to document pain with such intensity that the listener becomes overwhelmed, or they transform suffering into an abstract concept removed from human experience.
“Imaginary Lines” avoids both approaches. It does not exploit tragedy. It does not simplify it. Instead, it creates a space where complexity can remain visible. This is where Moor Mother’s contribution becomes essential.
Her work has always existed at the intersection of poetry, history, politics, and sound. She understands language not simply as a method of communication but as an instrument carrying memory. Words contain the experiences of those who speak them. They carry generations, places, conflicts, and dreams.
In “Imaginary Lines,” language becomes almost physical. The voice does not simply tell a story. It becomes a landscape itself. There is a profound connection between this approach and the larger philosophy of Peace Anthems. The album does not attempt to provide a universal answer to conflict because such answers rarely exist. Instead, it explores the many ways human beings search for understanding despite uncertainty.
Peace, the album suggests, is not a final destination. It is an ongoing practice. It requires imagination. It requires patience. It requires the ability to recognize another person’s reality even when that reality exists far beyond our own experience.
This is why the title Peace Anthems is so interesting. An anthem traditionally suggests collective certainty. It implies voices united around a common declaration. National anthems, protest songs, and revolutionary music often rely on that power. But these are not traditional anthems. They are quieter. More questioning. More vulnerable. They do not announce victory. They express hope. That difference changes everything.
A world experiencing conflict does not necessarily need more declarations from those already convinced. It needs spaces where uncertainty, grief, and longing can coexist. It needs artistic environments where people can encounter emotions that are difficult to articulate in ordinary language.
Peace Anthems creates such a space. The album understands that peace is not merely the absence of violence. It is also the presence of recognition. The recognition that behind every statistic exists an individual life. Behind every headline exists a personal history. Behind every border exists a human being whose experiences cannot be reduced to geography or politics.
“Imaginary Lines” never states this directly. It does something more effective. It makes the listener feel the distance. Then it makes that distance smaller.
The accompanying text written by Moor Mother for the album expresses the project’s purpose with remarkable clarity: “As many wars continue to rage across several countries, we see confusion and fear written across faces and realize there is no better time for peace than the present moment.”
The sentence carries a certain simplicity, but the music surrounding it understands that simplicity is not the same as ease. Peace is a simple idea. Achieving it is profoundly complicated. That tension defines the entire album.
The artists gathered here do not pretend that twelve compositions can resolve centuries of conflict, political failures, or human divisions. Such an ambition would be unrealistic and perhaps even arrogant. Instead, they propose something more modest and more meaningful. They propose attention. They propose empathy. They propose that art can create temporary spaces where people remember their shared humanity. That may sound small compared with the scale of global suffering.
But history repeatedly demonstrates that cultural change often begins in spaces that appear small. A conversation. A poem. A photograph. A melody heard at the right moment by someone who needed it. Music rarely changes the world by itself. But it changes the people who eventually shape the world. This is why the emotional impact of “Imaginary Lines” extends beyond its immediate beauty. The piece does not simply represent displacement or uncertainty. It places the listener inside those feelings, even if only briefly.
And perhaps that is one of the most powerful responsibilities of art. Not to speak for others. Not to claim understanding where none exists. But to create a moment where understanding becomes possible.
The emotional weight of “Imaginary Lines” prepares the listener for the album’s later collaborations, particularly the extraordinary dialogue between Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers. Those pieces reveal another dimension of Peace Anthems: the power of shared history.
Where Moor Mother and BlankFor.ms explore fractured communication and distant voices, Smith and Myers explore what happens when two artists who have spent decades developing their own musical languages meet again. Their collaboration does not feel like a reunion built on nostalgia. It feels alive. It feels necessary. Because peace, like music, is not created through uniformity. It emerges through conversation. And conversation requires difference.
The next section of Peace Anthems moves into that territory: the territory of memory, improvisation, and the extraordinary ability of musicians to transform personal history into collective expression.
Peace Anthems Is Not Trying to Change the World. It Is Trying to Change the Way We Listen.
Part III: The Memory Inside the Music
There is a particular kind of conversation that can only happen between musicians who have spent decades learning how to listen. Not simply hearing. Listening. The distinction is fundamental.
Hearing is an act of perception. Listening is an act of attention. It requires openness, patience, and the willingness to allow another voice to alter the direction of the conversation. Few forms of music depend on this principle more deeply than improvisation.
Improvisation is often misunderstood as spontaneity alone, as though musicians simply arrive, begin playing, and allow instinct to determine the outcome. The reality is far more demanding. Great improvisation is not the absence of structure. It is structure transformed into a living language. Every gesture carries memory. Every silence carries intention. Every response reveals a relationship built over years of experience.
This is precisely what makes the collaborations between Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers, “Sonic Requiem X” and “Reflections on Palestine,” among the most profound moments on Peace Anthems. These are not merely two remarkable musicians appearing together on the same recording. They are artists whose histories have been shaped by a shared understanding that music can exist as both personal expression and collective responsibility.
Smith’s trumpet has always occupied a unique place in contemporary music. It does not simply project sound. It carries a sense of ceremony. His phrasing often feels less like conventional melody and more like a form of spoken reflection, each note placed with the patience of someone aware that silence is part of the statement.
His music has frequently explored themes of spirituality, history, memory, and social consciousness. Yet what distinguishes his work is that these themes never become slogans. They are not imposed upon the listener. They are discovered through sound.
Myers brings a similarly profound relationship between music and meaning. Her piano playing has always combined extraordinary technical command with a deep sense of emotional architecture. She does not approach the instrument as a collection of notes waiting to be organized. She treats it as a living extension of human expression.
Together, Smith and Myers create something that cannot be reduced to genre. Calling it jazz would be accurate but incomplete. Calling it contemporary improvisation would also be accurate but incomplete. The music exists in a wider territory, one where spiritual traditions, experimental composition, blues, free improvisation, and personal history intersect. This is where Peace Anthems reveals one of its most important ideas. Peace is not created by eliminating difference. It is created by allowing difference to exist in dialogue.
The phrase “Reflections on Palestine” carries obvious emotional and historical significance. Any artistic work engaging with such a subject carries a particular responsibility. There is always the risk of reducing human suffering into symbolism, transforming real experiences into abstract ideas.
The greatest strength of this composition is that it avoids that temptation. It does not attempt to summarize a conflict. It does not pretend that music can replace political action or historical understanding. Instead, it reflects.
Reflection requires humility. It acknowledges that some realities are too complex to be captured entirely by language. Sometimes the most honest response is not explanation but attention. Smith and Myers understand this instinctively. Their music does not rush toward resolution. It allows grief and beauty to exist simultaneously. That may be one of the defining characteristics of truly meaningful art. It does not erase contradictions. It reveals them.
The world often demands simple narratives. Victors and victims. Causes and consequences. Heroes and villains. Human experience rarely functions that way. Music, particularly improvisational music, has the ability to preserve complexity. A single performance can contain tension and harmony, uncertainty and direction, solitude and connection. It can hold opposing emotions without forcing them into artificial conclusions. That is not only an artistic principle. It is a human one.
Throughout Peace Anthems, the musicians repeatedly return to the same fundamental question: How do we remain connected in a world that constantly creates separation?
The answer offered by these artists is not found in a single lyric or a single statement. It is found in the process itself. Listen. Respond. Adapt. Leave space. Allow another voice to exist.
Improvisation becomes a metaphor for coexistence. A musician cannot dominate every moment. If one player refuses to listen, the conversation collapses. If everyone attempts to lead simultaneously, nothing meaningful emerges. The music works because each participant understands both presence and restraint. That principle extends beyond the studio. Perhaps this is why the album feels so relevant.
The contemporary world is experiencing a crisis not only of conflict, but of attention. People increasingly encounter one another through fragments, through shortened messages, through arguments designed to produce reaction rather than understanding. In such an environment, the simple act of listening becomes surprisingly radical. Peace Anthems does not offer a political program. It offers a different model of interaction. One based on patience. One based on respect. One based on the belief that another person’s voice does not represent a threat merely because it differs from our own.
The role of the thirteen musicians assembled here becomes increasingly clear. They are not creating a manifesto. They are creating an ecosystem. Each artist brings a distinct vocabulary, a personal history, and a unique way of understanding sound. The achievement of the album lies not in making these voices identical but in allowing them to coexist without losing their individuality.
This is an important distinction. Many collaborative projects fail because they confuse unity with sameness. Peace Anthems understands that genuine unity requires diversity. A forest is not powerful because every tree is identical. It is powerful because different forms of life share the same environment. The album operates in much the same way. Electronic textures coexist with acoustic instruments. Spoken word exists beside abstract sound. Silence becomes equal to performance. Individual expression becomes collective meaning. The result is not a compromise. It is an expansion.
This may also explain why the album feels particularly significant as a fifth anniversary celebration for Red Hook Records.
A label is often described through its catalogue, its releases, and its commercial achievements. But a great independent label is ultimately defined by something less measurable. Trust. Trust between artists and producers. Trust between musicians. Trust between creators and listeners.
Peace Anthems feels like the result of an environment where artists were allowed to follow ideas rather than expectations. There is no obvious attempt to create a fashionable statement. No attempt to manufacture controversy. No attempt to simplify difficult subjects into easily shareable messages. Instead, the album accepts complexity as part of its identity. That acceptance may be its greatest form of generosity.
By the time the record reaches its final stages, the listener begins to understand that the album’s title is not simply descriptive. These are not anthems in the traditional sense. They are not songs designed for crowds to sing in unison. They are quieter forms of collective expression. They are reminders. Reminders that creativity survives uncertainty. Reminders that dialogue remains possible even when agreement feels distant. Reminders that beauty can exist without ignoring suffering.
The musicians on Peace Anthems do not claim to have discovered the solution to humanity’s conflicts. They offer something more realistic. They offer evidence that another way of relating remains possible. And perhaps that is where music has always held its greatest power. Not in replacing action. Not in solving problems beyond its reach. But in preserving the qualities required to solve them. Curiosity. Empathy. Patience. The courage to listen.
Peace Anthems Is Not Trying to Change the World. It Is Trying to Change the Way We Listen.
Part IV: The Architecture of Hope
An album like Peace Anthems presents a particular challenge to those who attempt to describe it.
The temptation is to focus on the message. The title invites it. The circumstances surrounding its creation invite it. The participation of artists whose careers have often intersected with questions of history, identity, spirituality, and social consciousness invites it. But the most remarkable achievement of Peace Anthems may be that it never allows its message to exist separately from its music.
The album does not begin with an idea and then search for sounds to illustrate it. The idea is already contained within the sounds. Peace is not simply the subject. It is the method.
The musicians do not describe patience. They practice it. They do not describe dialogue. They create it. They do not describe coexistence. They demonstrate what coexistence sounds like.
This is why the production choices throughout the album become so important. Behind every emotional gesture lies an extraordinary level of technical precision, yet that precision remains almost invisible. The listener is never distracted by craftsmanship. Instead, craftsmanship creates the conditions necessary for emotion to exist.
Produced by Sun Chung and recorded, mixed, and mastered by Rick Kwan and Taylor Deupree, Peace Anthems benefits from a rare balance between clarity and mystery. The album sounds carefully constructed without ever feeling controlled. That distinction is crucial.
There are productions where every element is polished until nothing unexpected remains. The result may be technically impressive, but the human presence begins to disappear. Peace Anthems takes the opposite approach. It preserves uncertainty. It allows imperfections, spaces, and subtle interactions to remain audible.
The listener can feel that these recordings were not assembled to create an illusion of perfection. They were shaped to preserve a moment of genuine communication between artists. That may be the highest compliment one can offer a recording. It sounds alive.
Taylor Deupree’s role throughout the album deserves particular attention because his approach to sound is fundamentally connected to the record’s larger philosophy. For Deupree, production has never been about placing technology between the artist and the listener. It has been about discovering the emotional possibilities hidden inside sound itself. A slight resonance. A fading frequency. The distance between two instruments. The space surrounding a note.
These elements are often overlooked because they are not traditionally considered musical events. Yet Deupree has spent much of his career demonstrating that they are essential. Silence is not the absence of music. Silence is part of music. Space is not empty. Space contains meaning.
This perspective becomes particularly powerful on Peace Anthems because the album is fundamentally concerned with relationships. Between individuals. Between cultures. Between memories. Between what is spoken and what remains unsaid.
The production reflects that philosophy. Nothing is crowded. Nothing competes unnecessarily. Every sound has room to exist.The album breathes. This sense of breathing may be the element that connects all twelve compositions despite their extraordinary differences.
A project involving thirteen musicians could easily become fragmented. Each artist arrives with a distinct vocabulary, a different history, and a different relationship with sound. Without a clear artistic foundation, such diversity can create confusion rather than richness.
But Peace Anthems achieves something much more difficult. It creates unity without reducing individuality. This is perhaps the album’s greatest structural achievement. Each composition feels like a separate landscape, yet every landscape belongs to the same continent. Some pieces move through electronic abstraction. Others emerge from jazz traditions. Some depend on spoken language. Others communicate almost entirely through texture and atmosphere.
Yet beneath these differences exists a shared emotional vocabulary. Reflection. Compassion. Attention. The belief that listening itself can be transformative.
There is also something deeply meaningful about the timing of this project. In an era when conflict is often experienced through images of destruction, statistics, and endless streams of information, Peace Anthems chooses another perspective. It asks what happens before and after those images.
What happens to memory?
What happens to individuals whose lives continue beyond the moment when the world stops paying attention?
What happens to voices that become distant because geography, politics, or history have placed them far away?
These questions are not answered directly. They do not need to be. The album understands that some questions become less meaningful when they are resolved too quickly. Art has a different responsibility. It keeps questions alive. It protects complexity from disappearing. This may be why the album avoids becoming a traditional protest record.
Protest music often functions through urgency. It identifies a problem and demands a response. That tradition has produced some of the most important recordings in modern history. But Peace Anthems belongs to another lineage. It is closer to meditation. A reflection rather than a declaration. A conversation rather than a confrontation. This does not make it less powerful. In some ways, it makes it more challenging. Anger is immediately understandable. Patience requires effort. Compassion requires imagination. Peace requires both.
The album’s final impact comes from a realization that slowly develops throughout the listening experience: The opposite of conflict is not silence. It is meaningful communication. Silence can separate. Silence can represent absence, fear, or isolation. But the silence inside Peace Anthems is different. It is active. It is the space musicians leave for one another. It is the pause before responding. It is the moment when a person chooses to listen rather than interrupt. That may be the most profound statement hidden within the album. Peace is not simply the end of violence. It is the beginning of attention.
For Red Hook Records, this fifth anniversary project represents far more than a celebration. It is a declaration of values.
At a moment when much of the music industry is built around speed, visibility, and immediate impact, the label has chosen depth. It has chosen artists whose work requires patience. It has chosen a form of creativity that cannot be reduced to a single image, a single phrase, or a quick reaction. That decision feels increasingly rare. And increasingly necessary.
Independent labels have always played an essential role in protecting artistic possibilities that larger institutions often overlook. They create environments where experimentation is not treated as a risk but as a responsibility.
Peace Anthems feels like the natural expression of that philosophy. It is ambitious without being arrogant. Political without being simplistic. Emotional without becoming sentimental. Experimental without becoming inaccessible. Most importantly, it is human.
Great albums often reveal something about the moment in which they are created. Some capture the anger of their time. Others capture its uncertainty. Some capture its dreams. Peace Anthems captures something perhaps even more fragile. It captures the desire to believe that connection remains possible.
That desire should not be mistaken for innocence. The artists involved understand the world too well for that. They understand conflict. They understand loss. They understand the complexity of human history. But they also understand that abandoning the possibility of peace guarantees nothing except surrender. Music cannot stop a war. It cannot negotiate treaties. It cannot repair every wound created by history. But it can preserve the imagination necessary to believe that another future is possible. And perhaps that is the most important role art can play. Not to provide answers. Not to offer easy comfort. But to keep alive the questions that make us human.
Five years after its creation, Red Hook Records celebrates not simply a milestone but a philosophy. With Peace Anthems, the label has brought together artists who understand that sound can be more than entertainment, more than expression, more than documentation.
Sound can become a meeting place. A place where different histories encounter one another. A place where memory survives. A place where voices separated by distance can still be heard. A place where, even briefly, peace can be imagined.
And perhaps imagination is where every meaningful change begins. Because before humanity builds a more peaceful world, it must first remain capable of imagining one. Peace Anthems reminds us that this capacity still exists. It asks only that we listen closely enough to hear it.
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, August 3rd, 2026
Follow PARIS-MOVE on X
::::::::::::::::::::::::
Musicians :
Moor Mother: voice
Qasim Navqi: modular synthesizer
Taylor Deupree: guitar, percussion
Kalia Vandever: trombone
Thomas Morgan: bassBlankFor.ms: electronics, tape loops, processing
Wadada Leo Smith: trumpet
Amina Claudine Myers: piano
Sungjae Son: tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, pump organ
Martha Deribe: voice
Simone Maggio: Fender Rhodes
Andrew Cyrille: drums
Kit Downes: pipe organ
Track Listing :
1. Al Badawi – Qasim Naqvi
2. Wither Light and Airy – Taylor Deupree, Kalia Vandever, Thomas Morgan
3. Imaginary Lines – Moor Mother, BlankForms
4. Sonic Requiem X – Wadada Leo Smith, Amina Claudine Myers
5. The River of Imjin – Sungjae Son
6. War is Over – Martha Deribe, Simone Maggio
7. Three Years Later – Qasim Naqvi, Wadada Leo Smith, Andrew Cyrille
8. Into the Woods – 3 Weary Calls – Kit Downes
9. Reflections on Palestine – Wadada Leo Smith, Amina Claudine Myers
10. Closing Meditation for OM – Kit Downes
Recorded: 2026, various locations
Engineer: Rick Kwan
Mastering: Taylor Deupree
Photos: IJ Biermann, Macha Rose, Tae Cimarosti,
Cover Art: Guk Hwa
Design: Matthew Appleton
Produced by Sun Chung