Dwight Trible & The Life Force Trio 'Love Is The Answer' album

Dwight Trible is a legend on the quiet, a retrospective waiting to happen. Over a remarkable career, this Los Angeles native has worked with everyone from Bobby Hutcherson and Charles Lloyd to Harry Belafonte.

He is the vocalist with the Pharaoh Sanders Quartet and is also the vocal director for the Horace Tapscott Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a Los Angeles institution with a history stretching back forty years and an active engagement in the city’s Black community since the Watts Uprising.

A couple of years ago Carlos Niño (best known over here as one half of Ammoncontact) invited Trible onto his radio show and from there a friendship and musical journey began. As Trible puts it, “you have to be careful what you say to Carlos, because he makes it happen!”. A chance comment about making some kind if hip hop record set Niño off on the journey which led to “Love Is The Answer”.

Enthused by the power of Trible’s vision, Carlos started speaking to the new luminaries of the LA scene about collaborating with this elder statesman and before he knew it he had an LP which combined sixties-inspired avant garde/spiritual jazz with the hottest beats the city had to offer. Sa-Ra Creative Partners, Madlib, Daedelus, members of Platinum Pied Pipers, Jay-Dee - wherever he went, Niño found only enthusiam and the project began to take shape…

From “Equipoise” on which Sa-Ra revisit 80s synth funk and give it their signature loping twist, through “Freedom Dance” (from Trible’s some-time drummer, multi-instrumentalist Dexter Story) with its Stetsasonic-meets-Fela vibe, on into the sheer oddness of Madlib’s “Waves of Infinite Harmony” the more straight-up boombap of “The 10th Jewel” (featuring the one and only Brother J of X-Clan fame and Sa-Ra’s second production contribution), to the mellow, looping guitars of the title track and finally through a last third that probably peaks with the incantatory “Musician’s Union” (by Ammoncontact) and the beautiful “Constellations” (which grew out of a piano loop contributed by Scott Herren to the Piano Overlord project), this is a record of pure sonic invention and all round goodness.

It is also, given Trible’s involvement, a record which is unfashionably lacking in cynicism, one which truly believes that “love is the answer” to the world’s ills. If the time, effort and beauty which result from these inter-generational collaborations are anything to go by, the great man might even be right...

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Dwight Trible & The Life Force Trio - Love Is The Answer