Jamila Woods has a voice and lyrical sensibility that transcends generations, and so it makes sense to have this lush and layered album that bounces seamlessly from one sonic aesthetic to another. This was the case on 2016’s HEAVN, which found Woods hopeful and exploratory, looking along the edges resilience and exhaustion for some measures of joy. Her new album, Legacy! Legacy! is the logical conclusion to that looking. From the airy boom-bap of “Giovanni” to the psychedelic flourishes of “Sonia,” the instrument which ties the musical threads together is the ability of Woods to find her pockets in the waves of instrumentation, stretching syllables and vowels over the harmony of noise until each puzzle piece has a home. The whimsical and malleable nature of sonic delights also grants a path for collaborators to flourish: the sparkling flows of Nitty Scott on “Sonia” and Saba on “Basquiat,” or the bloom of Nico Segal’s horns on “Baldwin.”
More than just giving the song titles the names of historical black and brown icons of literature, art, and music, Jamila Woods builds a sonic and lyrical monument to the various modes of how these icons tried to push beyond the margins a country had assigned to them. On “Sun Ra,” Woods sings “I just gotta get away from this earth, man / this marble was doomed from the start” and that type of dreaming and vision honors not only the legacy of Sun Ra, but the idea that there is a better future, and in it, there will still be black people.
Soul music did not just appear in America, and soul does not just mean music. Rather, soul is what gold can be dug from the depths of ruin, and refashioned by those who have true vision. True soul lives in the pages of a worn novel that no one talks about anymore, or a painting that sits in a gallery for a while but then in an attic forever. Soul is all the things a country tries to force itself into forgetting. Soul is all of those things come back to claim what is theirs. Jamila Woods is a singular soul singer who, in voice, holds the rhetorical demand. The knowing that there is no compromise for someone with vision this endless. That the revolution must take many forms, and it sometimes starts with songs like these. Songs that feel like the sun on your face and the wind pushing flowers against your back while you kick your head to the heavens and laugh at how foolish the world seems.
This is a standing show.
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FOOD AND DRINK
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Open from 5pm on gig nights, our bar is the perfect pre-show meeting place. Every gig night we serve up a range of freshly-prepared pizza, bar snacks, over 50 speciality gins with paired tonic waters, beers, wines, fine spirits and more.
Get down early and sample our delicious food and renowned gin menu.
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HAPPY HOUR
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Sun-Fri 5-7pm / Sat 12pm-7pm
Pint Carlsberg Pilsner £3
Bottle House Wine £12
Prosecco £15
Two Cocktails £12
House doubles £5
Pizza & Pint/Soft Drink £9
Two Pizzas & Bottle House Wine £20
More info: https://bandonthewall.org/food-drink/
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TICKET EXCHANGE
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We know that sometimes you can’t make it to a show you’ve got tickets for. If you would like to pass on your tickets for a sold out show to someone else, we recommend listing them via Twickets, an ethical and secure face value fan-to-fan ticket exchange.
If you are looking for tickets to a sold out show, we strongly advise you DO NOT PURCHASE from people you don’t know online – particularly those advertising spares on Facebook, due to a sharp rise in scammers and touts.
More info on Twickets here: https://www.twickets.live