BLK2LIFE: A FUTURE PAST by THEO CROKER

Rush Hour Store Record of the week W45:

Here’s another record that’s been gracing our expanded Klipschorn set-up a lot over the last week: Theo Croker’s ‘Blk2Life: A Future Past’.

On his sixth album, his most expansive and accomplished to date, everything falls into place for the American trumpeter, composer and producer who’s worked with anyone from Dee Dee Bridgewater to Common and J. Cole.

Written and recorded in his
childhood home in Leesburg, Florida during the pandemic, much of the  album was informed by psilocybin meditations and astral travels.

The result is a universal sound palette that encompasses jazz, funk, soul, pop, hiphop and broken beat, all flowing together in a completely natural manner.

Or, as Croker tells it: “Our hero received a transmission from his ancestors while in meditation that set him on a mission to raise the planet's vibrations through music that defies the confines of a ‘genre’ and frees the culture from the imminent threat of commercial gentrification”.

Standout cuts are the beautifully fluid ‘Soul Call/Vibrate’ with its sweeping horn theme and gently floating piano chords, the warm-blooded ‘Anthem’ with Croker’s former teacher Gary Bartz and the frantic spiritual jazz attack that is ‘Hero Stomp’, but this is the sort of album that’s best appreciated in full - it’s worth the trip. (RO)

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New album by US jazz sax player Theo Croker - featuring the likes of  Wyclef Jean, Ari Lennox and Gary Bartz. (who was his teacher at the  Douglas Anderson School of the Arts)

After seven years of sojourn in Shanghai, Croker crash-landed with a simmering original sound on the 2014 Dee Dee Bridgewater-assisted album AfroPhysicist. Following the success of Escape Velocity in 2016, he ascended to a new stratosphere with Star People Nation in 2019.
Croker’s understated trumpet playing holds his small band together with swagger and poise.” Along the way, he also lent his sound to platinum-selling albums by everyone from J. Cole to Ari Lennox while touring his band across the globe many times over. In 2020, he hunkered down at his childhood home in the midst of the global pandemic and wrote his sixth full-length album, Blk2life:  A future past,