Bring Backs

Jazz is well known to be hip hop’s spiritual and cultural ancestor, so the narrative that Alfa Mist discovered his love of jazz digging through Dilla’s catalogue and journeying down the rabbit hole to the source is an interesting flip. On Alfa Mist’s third solo album ‘Bring Backs’ – his first released on ANTI - the cyclical relationship between these two legacies is a clear inspiration for all aspects of the project. 

Ideas of origin, legacy and time run throughout the album, from references to Alfa Mist’s childhood games in the titles (‘Bring Backs’ and Run Outs’), to nods to early beatmaking experiments with the grime rhythms of his upbringing in Newham (‘Run Outs’), to frequent collaborator Kaya Thomas-Dyke’s reflective lyrics (‘People’). The album is threaded together with a poem by Hilary Thomas, which grapples with the struggle and pays tribute to the legacy of a maternal ancestor on ‘Last Card (Bumper Cars)’; “from Africa, to Europe, via Caribbean she came...from basket on head to paper bags and plastic wrapped bread. She worked and she hurt, from the names that she heard.” This heavy, cinematic narrative is underscored by a wash of strings and a mournful duet between trumpet and clarinet. At the poet’s words, “but payday was Friday and glory come Sunday,” the band explodes into Bumper Cars, a track inspired by the late master sampler Madlib that takes melodic ideas from ‘Last Card’ and twists them into hard fusion grooves, building to a fever pitch before Alfa interrupts with “wait wait, hold on, one sec.” 

Alfa’s intentional integration of jazz and hip hop approaches to composition is the strength of the album. Since Bring Backs was recorded live to tape to get the organic, improvisational feel of jazz, Alfa brought his beatmaking mindset to his compositions rather than the studio. This makes for an album that has many of the hallmarks of modern jazz, like soaring, abstract horn lines and Highway Rider era Brad Mehldau-esque string palettes (with string player and arranger Peggy Nolan), but flows seamlessly into rap verses like ‘Organic Rust’. Aside from the gripping instrumental singles ‘Teki’ and ‘Run Outs’, ‘Mind the Gap’ is a standout, a gem featuring Alfa’s covert skill as a rapper on top of the long list of his other musical talents. The dehydrated texture of Lex Amor’s intimate vocal combined with the lull of Alfa’s vintage EP vamp and Johnny Woodham’s ghostly trumpet viscerally recalls a mentally hazy morning after ride on an underground train. 

As flexed on his revamp of the classic Blue Note recording, Eddie Henderson’s ‘Galaxy,’ for 2020’s compilation ‘Blue Note Reimagined,’ Alfa Mist has thoroughly absorbed the parts of jazz and hip hop that work for his signature sound. A self-taught pianist, Alfa’s approach to the keys is minimalistic, functioning more as part of the groove and creating the vibe while leaving space for the horns to take centre stage. While Alfa Mist is cooking with the same ingredients he successfully used on 2017’s Antiphon and 2019’s Structuralism, ‘Bring Backs’ stays fresh with its focus on composition, thoughtfully considered theme, and creative features.