Pianist/composer Cat Toren conjures music as healing force and hope for the future on the second album by her exploratory quintet Human Kind Scintillating Beauty, due out September 11 on Panoramic Recordings, evokes 60s spiritual jazz, sound healing techniques and positive activism
If it hadn’t already been claimed by Albert Ayler, “Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe” might have been an ideal title for the second release from Cat Toren’s Human Kind. Over the course of the album’s four exploratory pieces, the Vancouver-born, Brooklyn-based pianist and her adventurous, deeply attuned quintet tap into the profound tradition of spiritual jazz exemplified by pioneers like Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders while offering a visceral balm for today’s turbulent reality.
The ultimate effect is vividly captured by the album’s actual title, Scintillating Beauty. Due out September 11, 2020 via Panoramic Recordings (an imprint of New Focus Recordings), Toren’s fifth album possesses a uniquely enthralling and invigorating kind of beauty. A practitioner of sound healing, Toren creates music that soothes the soul while quickening the pulse.
“Scintillating Beauty illustrates how musical improvisation is a form of conscious communication,” Toren writes in her liner notes. “This album is being released during a time where voices who have been in the foreground instead amplify voices that have been kept in the background, so we may achieve a more perfect harmony going forward.”
Three years after its self-titled debut, Human Kind reconvenes with the same stellar line-up: Toren, saxophonist Xavier Del Castillo, oud player Yoshie Fruchter, bassist Jake Leckie and drummer Matt Honor. The group initially formed during the 2016 election season, as the mood of the country was turning decidedly bleaker. Scintillating Beauty was composed and recorded as Toren was feeling a glimmer of hope arising from that contentious period. Though its release coincides with an uncertain future marked by quarantine and mass protests, the pianist continues to feel a cautious optimism as another election cycle nears.
“I was feeling a surge of hope until very recently,” Toren says. “With everything we’re going through now, I honestly feel a little conflicted, but I don't want to diminish the fact that hope is something that we need and that was what was in my mind writing the music. The music is definitely tinged with some darker tones, but I meant for it to ultimately be uplifting and cathartic.”
Toren’s sense of optimism has been sustained in recent months by the birth of her first daughter. Though the album was already finalized by the time she arrived, the newborn helped to reinforce many of the ideas and emotions that Toren was already pouring into her music. The epic-length opening track, “Radiance in Veils,” for instance, travels metaphorically through progressive stages of human life, from innocence through struggle.
“Life is very pure and innocent at the beginning,” Toren explains. “When you’re born you’re a beautiful baby, full of love and radiant. Human existence can put a veil over that light, so the piece is about trying to rediscover that inner radiance. When I look at my daughter I feel that when I see this innocent, perfect being.”
Inspiration for the music also came from two quotes by Martin Luther King Jr. that Toren includes in the liner notes. The first, from Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham City Jail, gave the album its title as well as a pointed social imperative: “Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.”
The second quote, from the sermon “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” begins, “We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” That thought provided a title for the second piece, “Garment of Destiny,” as well as suggesting a parallel between societal coexistence and improvised music.
As Toren describes, “That idea led me to think about how free improvisation was so related to his words in the way that we all affect one another. If you’re not a musician, free music may sound like cacophony, but it’s very much not. At any moment one musician might have something to say, so the others support that person; then the first person will listen as the next steps forward to say something else. Sometimes you end up talking over each other, but we’re all listening all those voices combine to make the music what it is.”
The term “Ignis Fatuus” is akin to a will-o’-the-wisp, a phantom light glimpsed by travelers at night. In Toren’s mind it references the delusions inherent in the chaos of political debates and social media misinformation, embodied in a bold, Mingus-like romp. Finally, “Rising Phoenix” looks ahead to a restoration from the ashes that can stem from more and diverse voices being heard and changing the world.
Toren hopes that the music of Human Kind acts not only as a response to the world around it, but helps to exert that healing force that music can provide. She’s pursued that idea in a more formal sense, earning a Sound Healing Training Certificate from the Sage Academy in Woodstock, New York. On “Radiance in Veils,” she pairs with Stephanie Rooker, a professional sound healing facilitator and founder of Brooklyn’s Voice Journey Sound Center, summoning positive forces through drones using chimes, rattles, tuning forks and singing bowls.
“I’m just one person and my music can only do so much,” Toren concludes. “But I think it can be helpful even if it’s just energizing people to be in a certain vibe or mood. I’d like listeners to sit in the feeling that I created. That’s a positive connection we can share.”
