Portland, OR · cosmic jazz · spiritual jazz

The MerKaBa Brotherhood

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Roman Norfleet and Brown Calvin's cosmic jazz duo on Mississippi Records — sax, Rhodes, and percussion shaped by mystic thought.

The MerKaBa Brotherhood pairs two musicians from Portland, Oregon's improvised-music community. Roman Norfleet is a percussionist and saxophonist who also works with the ensemble Be Present Art Group; Brown Calvin is a keyboardist and producer active in the same city. Together they work in a loose, largely improvised idiom built from saxophone, electric piano and hand percussion, closer to extended meditation than to conventional song structures.

Brown Calvin is the recording name of Andre Raiah, also known for his work as Brown Calculus and, like Norfleet, a member of Be Present Art Group. Norfleet's other credits include the Cosmic Tones Research Trio, another outlet for the same interest in extended, meditative sound.

The duo draw on esoteric texts, sacred imagery and mystic thought, using them to shape sound into space, tone and pulse rather than fixed song forms. Their records tend toward the spare and the geometric, built from small, repeated gestures rather than melody in the conventional sense.

Their records appear on Mississippi Records, the Portland label and shop better known for reissuing folk, blues, gospel and archival recordings from around the world, which places the duo alongside a catalogue with a similar interest in raw, unpolished documentation.

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cosmic jazzspiritual jazz