root WorkGroup ™

In April 2026, the bassist, bandleader, collaborator, and composer Melvin Gibbs released his first book, How Black Music Took Over the World. Borrowing concepts from environmental biology, acoustic research, physics, geometry, sociology, and history, Gibbs’ tome considered how musical ideas and structures exported from Africa had not only evolved to meet the demands of the oft-oppressive outside world they encountered but how they had, in turn, changed that world, building the firmament of so much modern music and culture. Despite its heady theoretical underpinnings, Gibbs’ book is also deeply personal, tapping his experiences as an instrumentalist (“the greatest bassist in the world,” as Time Out New York once put it) and enthusiast to make these ideas leap off the page and into reality. Indeed, during the last 50 years, Gibbs has worked with Sonny Sharrock and David Byrne, Arto Lindsay and Wadada Leo Smith. He has been a member of the Rollins Band, anchored the enduring and influential Harriet Tubman, and been one vertex of the mighty Power Tools with Bill Frisell and Ronald Shannon Jackson. Like his book, his 2025 album, Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2, synthesized so many of these experiences into something compelling. At Big Ears 2027, Gibbs presents three projects to explore ideas from Black Music and plays in the Zig Zag Power Trio.

Rootwork, Hoodoo, and Conjure are interrelated words referring to a system of practices and beliefs developed by enslaved African-Americans in the Deep South; these were ways to protect and heal one another, based on ideas brought from ancestral Africa. As Black people spread from the South, those customs slowly spread worldwide, too, infiltrating global culture since so much music has its roots in Black America. With the new root WorkGroup ™, Gibbs explores those ideas and their artistic implications. The group begins with a text developed by Moor Mother in collaboration with writer and Afrofuturism expert Sheree Renée Thomas, the group’s spiritual advisor. Moor Mother then delivers that text alongside singers and instrumentalists Mankwe Ndosi, an AACM member from Minneapolis, and Lisa E. Harris, a Houston-based practitioner of Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening system. Gibbs, who wrote about rootwork and its artistic implications in Black Music, joins on electronics and bass, as well as veteran guitarist Marvin Sewell.

Performers:

Moor Mother: voice and electronics 

Mankwe Ndosi: voice, miscellaneous instruments 

Lisa E. Harris: voice and electronics 

Marvin Sewell: guitar

Melvin Gibbs: bass, Ableton Push and electronics 

Spiritual Advisor: Shree Renee Thomas