Burnt Sugar is an evocative name. I live near a coffee roaster and can tell you with the limited sugar content of the coffee beans it is already quite intoxicating when they're being roasted. The Burnt Sugar in question here is a different kind all together. It is the musical collective organized by Greg Tate-Village Voice journalist(that paper was the musical gold standard for what was cool and worth checking out in NYC when I was a young hipster in training there) and founding member of the Black Rock Coalition, which boasts members like Living Colour and Yohimbe Brothers guitarist-Vernon Reid.
Burnt Sugar's site describes themselves thusly:
BURNT SUGAR is a territory band, a neo-tribal thang, a community hang, a society music guild aspiring to the condition of all that is molten, glacial, racial, spacial, oceanic, mythic, antiphonal and telepathic.
Some of us play with Steve Coleman, some of us play in Rolling Stone cover bands, some have stints with Jeff Buckley, Gary Lucas and The The on their resumes, others can list James Blood Ulmer, The Holmes Brothers, Carl Hancock- Rux, Norah Jones, P-Funk, Sheryl Crow and Earthdriver. At least one of us is a graduate of The Actors Studio. Most are amazingly proficient and prolific composers and bandleaders in their own right. Post-Grunge to Post-Philly International to Post-Subotnick the flavors run. All take hats off to Miles Davis, Eddy Hazel, A.R. Kane, Sun Ra, Jimi Hendrix and the like for opening the gates and pushing us through.
If you like your music in eclectic forms where it touches you deeply and challenges you simultaneously, and can accept rich cross genre styles morphing from jazz to soul to funk and back again then Burnt Sugar's Making Love to the Dark Ages is probably your cup of tea. It is hip, moody and brooding and has many fine musical elements that work well together -not just random bits crammed into the stew for effect. This is my first exposure to their music and they have several other albums which I'll definitely be checking out in the near future.
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