Jyoti is the one-woman jazz ensemble moniker of experimental soul artist, Georgia Anne Muldrow and it is the nickname given to her by a family friend, the legendary Alice Coltrane. Her forthcoming studio album, Mama, You Can Bet! is out August 28. She has released two socially conscious singles from the album “This Walk” (which includes the B-side “The Cowrie Waltz”) and “Orgone.”
“This Walk” is a vocal driven tune, which according to Georgia deals with how “violence can both ignite and snuff out a voice.” It is accompanied by a beautiful animated lyric video which includes Georgia’s powerful illustrations.
“Orgone” is a more direct protest tune and it is timely in light of the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests. According to Georgia, the song is “a double entendre, ‘Orgone’ being a supposed device that helps to dampen extra low frequencies that come from electronics.” Muldrow adds that she hopes “this song can be a device for the extra low frequencies that occur to people in places, namely in the African Diaspora, in the way that the diaspora affects the people in places,” and that “the second part of the double entendre is “Orgone” meaning… repatriated back to the source of origin; gone from here. And the song is another poem, and it’s my way of being able to get my feelings out. I just closed my eyes and played piano, and then I wrote to it, and then I orchestrated on it, and then at the end, I sang the blues on it.”
Elaborating further, she says, “this is a song for all of us, in this transatlantic nightmare. And this is a song just to say ‘I know how you feel, and maybe you feel the way I feel,’ and maybe we can live in a place where being Black ain’t such a big deal, because it’s just normal. Because it’s a natural thing. It ain’t a result of… somebody else’s story on our lives, we’re just human beings, that are looked upon with a little bit more… Je ne sais… plain, you know? Even though we’re not plain people, we’re much more than that. We’re beautiful people. We’re ugly people. We’re happy people. Sad people. Peaceful people… we’re people just like everybody else.”