{"id":1990960,"date":"2025-09-01T10:10:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T10:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=1990960"},"modified":"2025-09-01T10:10:00","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T10:10:00","slug":"album-review-gwen-laster-and-new-muse-4tet-keepers-of-the-flame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/album-review-gwen-laster-and-new-muse-4tet-keepers-of-the-flame\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: Gwen Laster and New Muse 4Tet | Keepers of the Flame"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div id=\"post-64178\">\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p><strong>Gwen Laster and New Muse 4Tet \u00a0<\/strong><br \/><strong><em>Keepers of the Flame<\/em><\/strong><br \/>(Independent)<\/p>\n<aside>\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p>Evolutionary, entropic improvisation is deployed fluidly on <em>Keepers of the Flame<\/em>, summoning tonal imagery of almost synesthetic vividness\u2014channeling the grief, loss, and injustice that has relentlessly, insidiously pervaded the African American diaspora and remains, infuriatingly, an inescapable part of the Black American experience and its fabric. Burdened by this oppressive history, <em>Keepers<\/em> is mournful, even lugubrious at times\u2014with a transcendent arc. Violist Melanie Dyer and cellist Teddy Rankin Parker are cocredited as composers alongside Beacon-based bandleader, composer, and violinist Gwen Laster, forming an imposing triad with riveting support by percussionist Andrew Drury, who swerves intuitively between punctuating, resoundingly primal bass drum and delicately nuanced tom and snare textures and is subtly authoritative throughout. These tracks bleed into each other like movements in a suite: discrete, yet holistically engaged and symphonic. <em>Keepers <\/em>is laden with bop\u2019s effervescence, but bluegrass seeps into its fabric, too. \u201cDrishti\u201d is a tone poem gone scherzo, a jocular contrast to the somber, contemplative pair of opening tracks. It\u2019s chimeric: at once a strings-enlaced hootenanny, languid hoedown, and freewheeling jam evoking Manhattan\u2019s \u201970s loft jazz scene. \u201cAsamondo\u2019s\u201d MENASA-esque exoticism has a sultriness not heard elsewhere on the record. \u201cShoreline\u201d stills <em>Keepers<\/em>\u2019s fulminating tumult but also embodies its elusive dichotomies, its measured, hushed outer layers are a barely contained mask for its roiling, agitated essence, which recalls John Cage. Darkly elegiac, its fleeting-yet-pronounced moments of negative space leave room for Laster to enter the frame, murmuring imploringly with an incantatory presence that oscillates between resting comfortably, undulating mellifluously within the music\u2019s contours, and jarring it loose from its moorings.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\">\n<p>\n<iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: Keepers of the Flame\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"352\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\" allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"perfmatters-lazy\" data-src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/album\/0q4A1kWYf7CFL8EXqGGGdd?si=UsYgg-zZRxqoayGRCiADrw&amp;utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe><noscript><iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: Keepers of the Flame\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"352\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\" allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/album\/0q4A1kWYf7CFL8EXqGGGdd?si=UsYgg-zZRxqoayGRCiADrw&amp;utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe><\/noscript>\n<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<aside>\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<p class=\"collection-link has-small-font-size\">This article appears in <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.chronogram.com\/collections\/september-2025\/\">September 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><h3 class=\"jp-relatedposts-headline\"><em>Related<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><!-- .entry-content --><\/p>\n<p>\t<!-- .entry-footer --><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><em> \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n<p><em> \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.chronogram.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gwen Laster and New Muse 4Tet \u00a0Keepers of the Flame(Independent) Evolutionary, entropic improvisation is deployed fluidly on Keepers of the Flame, summoning tonal imagery of almost synesthetic vividness\u2014channeling the grief, loss, and injustice that has relentlessly, insidiously pervaded the African American diaspora and remains, infuriatingly, an inescapable part of the Black American experience and its [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1990961,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[359693,359694],"class_list":["post-1990960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-gwen-laster","tag-keepers-of-the-flame"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Album-Review-Gwen-Laster-and-New-Muse-4Tet-Keepers.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1990960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1990960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1990960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1990961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1990960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1990960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1990960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}