"Members of the dispossessed, lend me your ears!"

This is the repeated call and rallying refrain of the nearly 40-minute centerpiece of composer and percussionist Asher Gamedze's new album Constitution. The sprawling double album, a minor scholarship in breath, is Gamedze's follow-up to 2023's Turbulence and Pulse (IARC0057/M3H013) and his first with The Black Lungs, a ten-piece ensemble. The album - recorded in one day at Sound and Motion Studios in Cape Town - is an elaboration of the possibilities of an autonomous constitution in and through polyrhythmic, modal, large-scale music.

Gamedze sits at the drums and, together with Ru Slayen (percussion), Sean Sanby (bass) and Nobuhle Ashanti (piano), forms what one might call a rhythm section. The ensemble is expanded by further breaths - horns and voices. Tumi Pheko (cornet), Garth Erasmus (alto saxophone), Jed Petersen (tenor saxophone), Tina Mene (vocals), Athi Ngcaba (trombone) and Fred Moten (words) together explore and deconstruct the conceptual, sonic and atonal possibilities of themes that are at once old and new dreams - curious and instancing, melancholic and aspirational.

As Moten puts it, "this polyrhythmic but also always polyphonic critical assemblage - this recomposition of the ensemble, this loving violation - allows the nightmares of individuation to dissolve". The Black Lungs join a tradition of sound, struggle and thought that is constituted by this very process of dissolving the isolating questions of isolated philosophers: "Is Socrates happy?"; 'Does the dialectician have a sound?' In Constitution, the power of the question, the possibility of an improvised answer and the celebration of togetherness lies not in the solo, but in the group, the ensemble.