Label: Savant Records, 2022

Personnel - JD Allen: tenor saxophone; Charlie Hunter: guitar; Gregg August: bass; Rudy Royston: drums.

Saxophonist/composer JD Allen has been hailed as one of the most creative musicians of our time. His work is varied and resulted in several tour de force albums, but he found a particular voice in the American roots by playing the blues and folk songs with a unique touch. The album Americana came out in 2016, and its follow-up, Americana vol. 2, is here, a testament-in-sound that reflects the plight of southern Black sharecroppers and their early mid-1900’s exodus to the North and Midwest.

This idea frames the entire album, which features longtime associates, bassist Gregg August and drummer Rudy Royston, as well as a new partner: Charlie Hunter on guitar. Playing eight of the 11 tracks, the latter shows to be fully equipped to join the trio, and that becomes evident right from the start. “Up South” alludes to Detroit, Michigan, intensifying our imagination with vast plantations and sparse dedicated farms in operation. Here, Auggust lays down a 12-beat-cycle bass substratum that supports the intense guitar and torrid saxophone playing.

“The Battle of Blair Mountain” sonically depicts the 1921 labor uprising and armed resistance in West Virginia, sounding half-heroic and half-doleful in its procedures. The flickering vibrations of Hunter’s guitar makes it a harmonically expansive workout, and its mood gets closer to the traditional song “This World is a Mean World”, where Allen demonstrates to dominate the language profoundly. This last piece opposes to the sweet ballad “You Don’t Know Me”, a country song turned standard by Ray Charles in 1962, which doesn't fall outside the scope of the record. The triple time feel of “The Werk Song” also contrasts with the uptempo 4/4 of “Hammer and Hoe”, a piece that, inspired by the historian Robin Kelley’s book of the same name, depicts the struggling black farmers with enough sonic abrasion to make us sweat.

Three pieces are stripped down to the trio format, allowing some tension to break underneath the seemingly idyllic surfaces. They are: “Jackie and Johnny”, notably delivered with an abstract feel and disengaged posture; “Mickey and Mallory”, a communicative effort with a strong bass pedal and coruscating brushwork by Royston; and “A Mouthful of Forevers”, which features arco bass in brooding cogitation with the sax and drums.

This is another brilliantly assembled work by Allen, who demonstrates his command of the saxophone and the genre proposed with articulated lucidity.