Anthony Joseph launches new album with powerful and poetic Ronnie Scott’s show
Calvin McKenzie
Monday, March 31, 2025
The spoken word artist brought a top-notch band to the Frith Street club to premiere tracks from his new album Rowing Up River To Get Our Names Back
Trinidadian/British poet Anthony Joseph chose Ronnie Scott’s for the live launch of his eighth (ninth, if you include his magnum opus - at 18 hours long - The Frequency of Magic), collection of insights into the world of Caribbean and African diasporic experiences. Rowing Up River To Get Our Names Back is an explicit exploration of the concepts of Afrofuturism, reclaiming the past is a constant theme in his work.
The seeds of the album’s ideas were sown in his first novel The African Origins of UFOs (moving into the future to correct the wrongs of the past). Using Afro futurism and sci-fi in an attempt address the history of the Black Atlantic slave trade.
The musicality and cadence of his poetic readings are a natural fit with the Caribbean and West African rhythmic stylings on display here, perhaps not surprising when the direction and production utilise the considerable talents of the musical polymath, Dave Okumu, featuring on guitar and bass, duties he shared with London based, Yves Fernandez.
The groove heavy ensemble was completed by percussionist Crispin ‘Spry’ Robinson and Leo Taylor on drums with Nick Ramm on Keys and Chelsea Carmichael on sax.
The set opened with explicit references to afrobeat heroes, name checking Tony Allen on the opener ‘Tony’, and there were echoes of Prince on the psych-funk of ‘Satellite’. The overt messaging of the funky ‘Black History’ is self-explanatory.
The album run through was broken up with a rendition of the previous record’s languidly reflective ‘Calling England Home’, a treatise on three generations of migration to the UK from the Caribbean ending with his own experience of life in the ‘mother country’. How long do you need to be in a place before you can call it home.
The dub reggae rhythms of the Paean to his mother ‘A Juba for Janet’ – a Juba being a West Africa dance used as a form of self-expression and resistance by enslaved peoples in the plantations of the ’new world’, followed.
The deeply personal nature of the music continued with a tale of succumbing to and subsequently recovering from depression during a trip to Chicago on the spacey ‘Milwaukee & Ashland’, and as he related in the pre-amble, the personal is universal.
A second instalment is due in the autumn, no doubt with further live dates, and on this evidence, will be well worth the wait.
