DESCRIPTION:
The Coffle- Ft. Antoine Roney & Gino Sitson - by Kimati Dinizulu, from the Ancestral Spirits Album.
This composition is haunting. And that is decidedly the point of the performance. It is based upon a chant that is hummed rather than sang, with a slow 6/8 percussion palette underneath. The opening evokes the terror and existential angst through the labored breathing audible at the start of the song. It is like the panting of someone undertaking an arduous task upon which the stakes are as high as life itself, as though the breather has spent his every morsel of energy. Antoine Roney's soprano saxophone, with its ethereal, serpentine lines weaves throughout the piece with the supreme mastery of space and feeling that helps make this song effective. The song is redolent with moans, whispered breathing, melismatic, non-tempored, dissonant unisons, eloquently painting the emotional picture necessary to carry us to the time and place of the coffle. Supporting this are the rhythms played by Nana Dinizulu on an Udu drum and a gourd (grown in North Carolina). The Maafa, or African Holocaust, had its terminus upon the auction blocks and plantations of the Americas, but began in Africa, often with conquest and/or sale. "The Coffle" depicts the beginning of the journey towards the dreaded Middle Passage. Captured in the interior, Africans were chained together in a coffle and marched to the coast for weeks or months, as other captives were added to the coffle to add to the coffers of the slave dungeons where they were held until their numbers sufficed the needs of the slavers. Roney's saxophone throughout comments as though representing the accompanying spirits, including the ancestors, that gave spiritual succor to the captives as they headed for their uncertain destiny.
Dr. Salim Washington

This selection is from the Ancestral Spirits Album by Kimati Dinizulu.