heroes are gang leaders

Winners of the 2018 American Book Award for Oral Literature, Heroes Are Gang Leaders are a genre-bending ensemble known for its bold approach to Race Fearlessness and Creative Deception Busting. HAGL was co-founded by saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and Poet Thomas Sayers Ellis initially to pay tribute to the late poet, activist and Jazz critic Amiri Baraka but over the course of 4 CDs, HAGL has created an Oral Literature of whirling and original ideas unlike any Spoken Word Jazz Ensemble before them.

Recorded over a three-year period at the longtime Fast Speaking Music Home of poet Anne Waldman by her son, musician and engineer Ambrose Bye, in New York City,

Artificial Happiness Button finds HAGL in search of new and original ways to combine Poetry and Jazz. For this project they move away from the literary canon to turn inward, courageously and humorously reaching, aesthetically and politically, beneath and beyond the manufactured Problem Reaction Solution Movements of Social Justice to reinvigorate the tradition of Jazz Poetry.

The album opens with the title track, “Artificial Happiness Button,” a searing anthem, calling out the artificial aspects of song, happiness and information. Embedded within this hymn to buttons, delightful and deceptive, is a small tribute to expatriate Gertrude Stein, the author of Tender Buttons, and poet Randall Horton’s State of the Union Address-like message to the Woke Industrial Complex. Bassist Luke Stewart provides the swamp-dragged bottom of “Mista Sippy” as Ellis pens (for keyboardist and vocalist-poet Janice Lowe) a scathing and unorthodox homage to the mighty river as well as a meditation on those who used to liquor-up before and after watching and participating in lynchings, all dynamically framed within the social climate and tradition of the American Southern Gothic Novel.  The band’s many chants including “This funk ain’t William Faulkner’s fault” are complex, lyrical and soon-to-be classics. The improvised and lyric-less, “Hurt Cult” finds HAGL and vocalist Margaret Morris at the new crossroads of Jazz and Trap during a very difficult period of personal down- and upheaval, surround by the actions of those who have been hurt and those who cause hurt. Featuring legendary bassist William Parker, “London Butterfield” was written and composed in Florida by TSE and JBL. It is a love song to the great peninsula as well as the answer to the question Ellis was asked again and again, “What are you doing in Florida?” His answer, “Do you really want the truth, London? I’m Post Boo bruised London, attractive as a battlefield, food for the moon…” “The Day We Gave the Globes Back” imagines the benefits and possible liberations of not living in the constant spin of Social Engineering. Harkening back to the days of whistles, ice cream trucks, roller skate clubs and long humid summers, it features Jaimie “Breezy” Branch on trumpet. When, mid heartbreak and turmoil, JBL composes a soothing song, TSE flips it as if looking into a self-reflective oppositional mirror. “It’s the End of the Babysitting of Traumatized Grown Ass Men” is the only song on the project that does not feature James Brandon Lewis on saxophone. It features JBL on piano and Devin Brahja Waldman on alto sax. Again featuring William Parker and Jaimie “Breezy” Branch, the final track, “Internet Kill Switch,” is a poetic and musical tour de force and a warning about the arrival of Transhumanism and its many insidious inroads into our daily lives via technology and Hive Mind Login Think. The sounds you hear at the end of the track are by featured artist Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña. 

With its longtime lineup of poets, musicians and artists James Brandon Lewis, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Margaret Morris, Randall Horton, Luke Stewart, Heru Shabaka-ra, Devin Brahja Waldman, Brandon Moses, Warren "Trae" Crudup, Janice Lowe, HAGL is joined by new members Melanie Dyer, Jenna Camille, Nettie Chickering and Bonita Lee Penn as well as featured guests such as the legendary bassist William Parker, Jaimie "Breezy" Branch on trumpet and Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña. A wake up call for 2020, Artificial Happiness Button is unflinching in its ability to take on such topics as the built-in earthly ceiling of human joy, the truth tug of war that occurs in personal relationships, the addictive effects of bottled racism in literature and the American South, mechanized widespread programmed hurt and the deadly electronic net of one-hive info sharing. This new offering from Heroes Are Gang Leaders is a timely and prophetic tour de force aimed at giving back all of the false aspects of the globe (and local globalism) while rescuing the real ones.