Dominique Miller

There is a cinematic quality to “Our Roots Run Deep”. Dominique Fils-Aimé frames her latest album with a loose, dreamlike narrative structure that tells a story of growth. The first track sets the stage with the phrase: “our roots run deep underground”. Along the way, there are a myriad of human challenges and forms of interference. An underlying life force presses on. The final track closes with the lyric: “let me climb all the way to the sun”.

There is a cinematic quality to “Our Roots Run Deep”. Dominique Fils-Aimé frames her latest album with a loose, dreamlike narrative structure that tells a story of growth. The first track sets the stage with the phrase: “our roots run deep underground”. Along the way, there are a myriad of human challenges and forms of interference. An underlying life force presses on. The final track closes with the lyric: “let me climb all the way to the sun”.

There is a cinematic quality to “Our Roots Run Deep”. Dominique Fils-Aimé frames her latest album with a loose, dreamlike narrative structure that tells a story of growth. The first track sets the stage with the phrase: “our roots run deep underground”. Along the way, there are a myriad of human challenges and forms of interference. An underlying life force presses on. The final track closes with the lyric: “let me climb all the way to the sun”.

'Three Little Words' concludes Dominique Fils-Aimé's album trilogy exploring the roots of African-American musical culture. Each album carries with it a lesson that has been learned and then moulded into each subsequent volume. This final album is Fils-Aimé's adaptation of soul music in the truest sense of the term: music that comes from the depths of her soul and is meant to challenge and enrich the souls of her listeners. It is at once both an acknowledgement and an appreciation of the different musical genres that live within her head and flavour her own soul. In music, as in with life, the best prognosticator is looking to the past.

Since 2014, drummer/bandleader Robert Sput Searight and percussionist Nate Werth have led an incredible collective of musicians brought together as a groove-based funk, hip-hop and jazz group which has amassed a global audience. With Mustard n’Onions – the follow-up to 2018’s critically acclaimed Swagism – the band brings the funk to new levels with an album of originals featuring bassist MonoNeon (Prince), keyboardist Dominique Xavier Taplin (Toto), saxophonist/arranger Sylvester “Sly5thave'' Onyejiaka and more alongside special guest keyboardist and legend Bernard Wright.

This collection of 8 discs may be the most comprehensive collection of its type. There are a total of 120 songs from almost as many artists. There are a few artists represented more than once, with The Kingston Trio represented by 9 songs, every one memorable. The era represented by these songs spans about ten years. The earliest songs in this collection date back to the late 1950's. The latest songs date to about 1968.

This collection of 8 discs may be the most comprehensive collection of its type. There are a total of 120 songs from almost as many artists. There are a few artists represented more than once, with The Kingston Trio represented by 9 songs, every one memorable. The era represented by these songs spans about ten years. The earliest songs in this collection date back to the late 1950's. The latest songs date to about 1968.

This is an attractive eight-CD set (+ Bonus CD), whose discs are also available as eight separate releases, that could have been a great reissue but settled for being merely quite good. To celebrate the 80th anniversary of the first jazz recording, RCA released a disc apiece covering each of the past eight decades. In listening to the music straight through, one becomes aware of RCA's strengths and weaknesses as a jazz label. Victor was one of the most important jazz labels during the 1920s, '30s and '40s, catching on to bebop a little late (1946) but still documenting many classic recordings. By the 1950s, the label's attention was wandering elsewhere; it missed free jazz almost completely in the '60s, and in the last three decades has only had a few significant artists, mostly Young Lions whose output sounds conservative compared to the earlier masters…