I attended the New York City premiere of Hannibal Lokumbe’s ‘African Portraits’ in 1990, excited to see a classical orchestra joined on stage by a jazz ensemble, blues guitarist, gospel choir, and West African griot. It was dramatic in its storytelling, tracking Black music from bebop and spirituals to swing and African chants. Upon reading Hannibal Lokumbe, however, I learnt quickly that ‘African Portraits’ was not solely about chronicling Black music – it was also about reviving ancestral relationships. ‘Composing is an act of deep spiritual communion’, the authors write, ‘during which [Lokumbe] co-creates with the ancestors, other spirits of the work, and the Creator in profound ways’ (p. 146). His compositions, thus, emerge as bridges to sacred spaces steeped in spirituality, ritual, and myth, which are thoughtfully shared in the book.

Hannibal Lokumbe was written from ‘extensive conversations’ held between Lokumbe and Rosen over two years (p. 6). It ‘trace[s] major movements in the arc of [Lokumbe’s] life, interlaced with powerful formulations of his philosophies of music and nature, spirits, and humans, and bondage and freedom’ (p. 10). The book contains such extensive details around Lokumbe’s life, ‘dreams, visions, waking communications [and] signs’ (p. 3) that it reads more like a diary than a biography. This serves as a strength but also a weakness.

The authors must be applauded in that Hannibal Lokumbe moves beyond a simple record of Lokumbe’s musical contributions. The book provides a cultural and historical account of Lokumbe’s life as well as, in the words of Lokumbe, a ‘spiritatorio’ – that ‘journey of discovery and creation’ (p. 4), where music emerges ‘as a living thing, a spiritual consciousness, a potentially healing force, and a profound wellspring in the art of perpetual liberation’ (pp. 6–7). Writes Rosen, Lokumbe ‘draws inspiration from multiple sources across music studies, anthropology, and social theory’, and engages in ‘various forms of cosmopolitics, theopolitics, and pluriversal politics’ (p. 6) that ‘help to reframe and expand [his] conscious understandings of art and subjectivity, including what it means to be human, to be connected to spirit, and to be free’ (p. 7). A more analytical edge investigating how these various academic disciplines and ideologies have impacted his work would have been welcomed and could have positioned Lokumbe’s music and life within wider theoretical frames of resilience and freedom.

For example, Lokumbe’s union with the ancestors, a recurrent motif in the book, is also a common trope in Black music scholarship (e.g. Floyd Reference Floyd1996; Stuckey Reference Stuckey1987). Lokumbe speaks of his ancestors as sources of ‘love, guidance, protection, and wisdom’ (p. 160). Spirituality is so ‘deeply interwoven’ into his life and music (p. 3) that, reminiscent of the West African and Caribbean god Legba, Lokumbe lives with one foot ‘in the finite realm of things on earth’ while the other is outstretched towards ‘a formless world of the eternal’ (ibid.). There is a conscious ‘interconnectedness’ driving his music-making, which not only links the living and spiritual realms but also the human race. This is exemplified in his composition ‘One Land, One River, One People’, which highlights ‘the connectedness that lies beneath the seeming separation of spirit and matter, inner and outer social life, nature, and humans, and one person from another’ (p. 4): ‘one land’ represents the world we share with nature, ‘one river’ the blood that sustains life, and ‘one people’ the unification of humans and the spirit world (ibid.).

The power of flight is another motif introduced in the book that, indicative of the myths and folktales Lokumbe learned as a child, echoes the four levels of flight identified by ethnomusicologist Lorna McDaniel (Reference McDaniel1990). The first level, spiritual transcendence, powerfully frames Lokumbe’s pledge to write and play music that ‘signal[s] the divine’ (p. 124): ‘When Hannibal plays music or composes, he transcends the illusions of time that are part and parcel of the finite realm here on Earth’ (p. 133), and this enables him to ‘travel anywhere and everywhere’ (ibid.). Composition marks the second flight level, with song texts, rhythms, and instrumentation identified for keeping alive a sense of history, lineage, and family. Lokumbe’s opera Jonah’s People and his oratorio God, Mississippi, and a Man Called Evers vividly characterise this metaphoric form of flight by serving as ‘praisesongs of cultural knowledge that enliven the ancestors and the disremembered’ (McDaniel Reference McDaniel1998, p. 166). The third level is represented in Lokumbe’s regular dream communications with the spirit world, with ancestors arriving ‘by way of a sunlight in a dream’ or as ‘a raindrop’ (p. 110). A final level, the ‘rebellious, physical flight from enslavement’ (McDaniel Reference McDaniel1998, p. 4), also frames Lokumbe’s compositions. In Jonah’s People, for example, the enslaved character Asase escapes in order to save her children. ‘I must leave this place, my angels’, she sings, ‘so that you might live’ (Libretto, available: https://www.thejonahpeople.com/libretto). When she is captured and later lynched, however, death allows her spirit to finally attain freedom by joining the ancestors (ibid.).

Lokumbe’s approach to life and music-making is rich – so rich, I wanted the book to do more with dissecting the cultural and historical significances of his ‘spiritual soundscapes’. There is a detailed ‘Notes’ at the end of the book, which offers extended suggestions for additional reading; and perhaps leaving readers to independently seek out further clarification actually underlines Lokumbe’s central philosophy: that his works should serve as ‘a welcome mat to say come on in to discover those other places and those other abilities’ (p. 11). ‘What people have to discover’, Lokumbe says, ‘[is] in themselves’, and this gives them the freedom to make the connections that are most meaningful to them (ibid.). For his part, he explains, ‘I can only extend my shadow’ (p. 205).