Septober Energy Presents: Wildflowers 6 x Wildflowers 7

Septober Energy presents WILDFLOWERS 7

The year is 1976, multiple renaissance movements are erupting in the constellation of black life around the world. The Black Consciousness movement and students in South Africa have decided to consolidate with urgency what Bra’ Louis Moholo meant when he said ‘Hi my name is Louis Moholo Moholo I was born to be black!’ with a movement of resistance that is genre-less yet rooted in the Black radicalism of the seventies. We want to reflect on the folk urges that define seventies Azania alongside the blues urges that emerge from African American improvised music.

In New York, the late saxophonist, flutist, and composer Sam Rivers and his wife Beatrice opened up their home, Studio Rivbea to musicians and places like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Haven, capturing performances recorded over two weekends titled Wildflowers: The New York Loft Jazz Sessions, a series of five albums recorded May 14–23, 1976. These sessions are the biggest echo in a now-forgotten Loft Jazz cultural era that sought to give dialect to the relationship between art and black society. This era is a product of the momentum of the early sixties that ruptures into different movements. Septober Energy sits inside the archive of contributors Randy Weston, Anthony Braxton, Marion Brown, Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill, Sunny Murray, Oliver Lake, Roscoe Mitchell, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Dave Burrell, Hamiet Bluiett, Andrew Cyrille, Jimmy Lyons, Khan Jamal and many others.

Over two days, on November 8th and 9th, Septober Energy invites a rotation of selectors, collectors, and archivists to sit inside this dialect. It is an ode to elders and the lessons of the seventies.