Jazz
Imani Records release “Incantation”, the duo album by Caleb Wheeler Curtis and Jason Moran, on 23 October. There are twelve tracks and all of them come from a single session: 18 December 2025, at The Bridge Studio in Brooklyn.
Curtis plays the stritch — the straight alto saxophone Rahsaan Roland Kirk popularised — and switches instruments four times: soprano on “That Which Cannot Be Replaced”, “Gangsterism on a River” and “Restin’”, and trumpet on “Archaeology”. Moran plays only piano. There is no bass and no drums.
The writing is shared out. Five pieces are Curtis’s and two are Moran’s, “Gangsterism on a River” and “Restin’”. Two more are credited to both, “One Hundred Years” and “Archaeology”, which came out of improvising in the studio. The remaining three are from elsewhere: “Miss Nancy” is Arthur Blythe’s, “Big Small” is Orrin Evans’s and “Tiramisu for Two” is Noah Garabedian’s.
The title, Curtis says, comes from reading the record as an invocation: “In a sense, this music is a call to the ancestors.” The trumpet was the hard part. “Playing duo with Jason is a very sensitive and vulnerable musical environment, magnifying every choice, so I spent nearly the whole session looking at the trumpet on the stand, wondering when I would find the moment to step through the door of fear.”
Dave Darlington mixed and mastered it at Bass Hit in New York, and Curtis produced it himself. The artwork is by Nico Raddatz.
Text by Aina Torrents