Electrical Field of Love is the brilliant new release from Harriet Tubman – the long-running trio of guitarist Brandon Ross, bassist Melvin Gibbs, and drummer JT Lewis, joined here by the fervent voice and imagination of Grammy-nominee Georgia Anne Muldrow. Described as “black music at its best” by NPR, Tubman has been a band that creates its unique sound world through its exploration of all tributaries of what the Art Ensemble of Chicago called “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future.” Jazz, funk, psychedelia, doom metal, soul, dub, and electronics are just some of what the group amalgamates through their creative process into its own mystical brew. Into this vortex enters Muldrow, whose shared devotion to exploring black music in all of its multivariate forms melds seamlessly into the Tubman sensibility. She moves freely within the music, with her voice by turns incantatory, declarative, and spectral. Moments of raw propulsion resolve to space and rare beauty. Through collective creativity, the convergence of these kindred spirits results in music that feels both deeply grounded and yet, inspiringly exploratory.

Inspired by the ideals of freedom espoused by the abolitionist Harriet Tubman, the eponymous band was formed over a quarter century ago by three veterans of the New York scene, who were steeped in jazz, rock, and R&B. As individuals, Ross, Gibbs and Lewis have individually performed with some of the most important musical innovators and visionaries of the last half of the 20th century: Ross with Henry Threadgill, Cassandra Wilson, Oliver Lake, Butch Morris and Leroy Jenkins. Gibbs is a founding member of the Black Rock Coalition who was nominated for a Grammy as a member of the Rollins Band. He first gained notice in the no wave band Defunkt, then formed one third of the band Power Tools alongside Bill Frisell and Ronald Shannon Jackson. Lewis has worked with luminaries such as Herbie Hancock, Don Pullen, Tina Turner, Vanessa Williams, Sting, and Lou Reed, and he and Ross were members of Henry Threadgill’s Make a Move. All of this is distilled into the band’s distinctive sound: Gibbs’s bass shudders the subterrain, Lewis’s drums thunder and skitter, while Ross’s guitar rises through it all like tendrils of smoke. Throughout, the emphasis is on listening – musicians responding in real time, shaping form through insight rather than formula, moving with the force of electric Miles, the ooze of the heaviest Funkadelic, and the sharpened edge the Black Rock aesthetic.

Georgia Anne Muldrow’s introduction to the Tubman sound world came decades earlier. While living in New York as a jazz studies major at the New School, she came across the band performing at the now-defunct Galapagos Arts Space while walking down the street in Williamsburg. According to her, “God led me to them. It was like the juke joint of my dreams. I heard everything in that music. And I was never the same after that.” She has since gone on to a successful solo career, releasing over 20 albums in addition to collaborating with the likes of Yasin Bey (Mos Def), J Dilla, Madlib, Robert Glasper, and Erykah Badu. Overload, her 2018 release on Flying Lotus’s Brainfeeder label was nominated for a Grammy for Best Urban Contemporary album. Her release Mama You Can Bet, released under her Jyoti moniker – a name bestowed upon her by family friend Alice Coltrane that means “light” or “radiance” in Sanskrit– was named one of the top jazz releases of 2020 by The New York Times, who said that it “sounds like a message arriving from a past we haven’t met yet.” Jyoti is a name Muldrow typically reserves for her more jazz-oriented projects, a music she was surrounded by growing up as the child of Ronald Muldrow, who was saxophonist Eddie Harris’s long-time guitarist, and singer Rickie Byars-Beckwith, who worked with Pharoah Sanders and Sir Roland Hanna.

The musicians reconnected when they both were scheduled to play at the Detroit Jazz Festival in 2022 and Muldrow asked Harriet Tubman to perform with her. “It was the gig of my dreams. When Brandon called me later to do the recording, I almost fainted. I’m still gasping just thinking about it.” As with other Tubman recording projects, the music was largely collectively and spontaneously composed in the studio. Ross asserts that “Harriet Tubman has always composed organically. We are all aware of the architecture of form, so can we go anywhere in space and create structure out of nothing.” This method of music making might seem counter to Muldrow’s own recorded output, which are almost entirely studio constructs with her playing most, if not all of the parts. But according to Muldrow, “I love to play free. I grew up in this music so it’s my comfort zone. Brandon and I always seemed to be in spontaneous unison, it felt so natural to echo each other harmonically. Melvin synthesized everything beautifully. I didn’t even need to explain myself – they already knew. And I call JT ‘liminal thrash,’ like someone who screams and whispers at the same time. The space he leaves and his manipulation of dynamics… He’s the real glue of the group.” Gibbs explains: “When people get with [Tubman], they enter our world. Georgia Anne has a multidimensional musical mind, and she jumped right in like she’s one of us.” Muldrow had been dealing with some difficult personal matters around the time of the recording. As she explains: “I took my pain to the studio – a pain that would freeze me. I was greeted with a beautiful blanket of love. If there was any way to get this pain out of my body this was the way. I was sobbing tears of gratitude. They’re family, my big brothers. My heart is honored. I can rejoice to that.”

Just as important is the steady hand of producer Scotty Hard, who also worked on Tubman’s two prior releases. A protégé of Teo Macero, Hard distilled more than six hours of material, assembling disparate parts of the session – similar to Miles Davis releases like Bitches Brew, In a Silent Way, and On the Corner – to create the finished product. It was important to Hard to make sure that the recording is fully reflective of the emotional vibe in the room, which he described as “Two days of summoning the gods and finding inspiration in each other’s creative flow.”

Ultimately, Electrical Field of Love is music about connection, both personal and to the ultimate unity of black music in all its disparate forms. Harriet Tubman and Georgia Anne Muldrow make that connection visceral, and present-tense.