Kaleigh Wilder, Ben Hall, and Jaribu Shahid are engaged in a process they call Afro-diasporic excavation. The trio is constantly examining what had to adapt during the Middle Passage in order to survive. Since traditional African languages were forbidden, the languages that remained were passed on through music, among other things. The trio explores these hidden languages in relation to their own experiences as Afro-Americans, recontextualizing their relationships to song, dance, rhythm, language, and their ancestors.

This is particularly obvious in their arrangement of “Kontobilli Wee”, a Ghanaian folk song which uses an instrument called gyil. The gyil is a gourd-resonated xylophone instrument from the Upper West region of Ghana, which Kaleigh studied in 2018 with one of Ghana’s master gyil players, Jerome Balsab. She reintroduced this instrument into her current practice as a way to reconnect what are now disparate languages and form something wholly new, yet rooted in African tradition. The rest of their set juxtaposes cacophony, melody, rhythm, pacing, and density with a freely improvised piece, a composition of Kaleigh’s, and a beautiful folk song of its own by Paul Motian.