Philadelphia percussionist Kevin Diehl unites avant-garde jazz with Afro-Cuban traditions

As a 19-year-old fleeing the suburbs of Plymouth Meeting for the fervent music scene of mid-’70s New York City, Kevin Diehl quickly made two discoveries that would seal his artistic fate. The first was the loft scene, in which avant-garde jazz musicians would host performances and jam sessions in makeshift venues. The second came during a stroll through Central Park.

“I was taking a walk and I heard drums in the distance,” Diehl recalled at a coffee shop near his Mount Airy home. “They sounded African, but at the same time they sounded Latin. So I walked toward them and I finally found these drummers gathered in the gazebo, and they blew my mind. That was how I found Batá drums.”

Diehl has been melding those two worlds — avant-garde jazz and Afro-Cuban percussion — ever since. In 2000 he founded his long-running band Sonic Liberation Front as a vehicle for the unique fusion. On Friday, Aug. 5, an expanded version of the band will perform music from their new album, Justice: The Vocal Works of Oliver Lake (High Two). The band will be supplemented by a quartet of singers from UArts, and be joined by legendary saxophonist and loft scene veteran Oliver Lake. The concert, presented by Fire Museum, will take place at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Atonement in Fishtown.

While the vocalists, dubbed the Sonic Liberation Singers, are a new addition to the ensemble for this occasion, notably absent are the Afro-Cuban drummers that have been such an integral part of SLF’s hybrid sound. That omission reflects Diehl’s recent decision to unravel the two strands of influence that have so long intertwined in his music. Earlier this month at Philly’s Clef Club, he performed with a new, more percussion-focused, ensemble dubbed the Ashé All-Stars. A pared-down version of that band will continue as Kevin Diehl’s Ashé O.

In part, dividing his jazz and Afro-Cuban interests into separate ensembles is a practical decision. In either world, he said, “it’s always seen as the other if these two things are together.”

It also reflects a renewed burst of energy for the drummer and percussionist, who has been leading monthly small group performances closer to home at Mount Airy’s Commodore John Barry Arts and Cultural Center. The resurgence naturally follows the lack of activity experienced by everyone during the pandemic. Diehl has also been inspired by a successful battle with prostate cancer that directly preceded it.

“It made me realize, now is the time that you get,” he said. “If you want to do something, do it now.”

At the Clef Club performance, SLF mainstays bassist Matt Engle and saxophonist Elliott Levin, along with new additions trumpet and clarinetist Matt Lavelle, violinist Veronica Jurkiewicz, and flutist Jameka Gordon, brought a familiar angularity to the percussion explosion on arrangements of John Coltrane’s “Syeeda’s Song Flute” and Thelonious Monk’s “Evidence.”

The latter hearkened back to that fateful day in Central Park more than four decades earlier. As it turned out, those were not just any group of Batá drummers that Diehl encountered. They included the trumpeter and percussionist Jerry González, who would become a foundational influence in Latin jazz through his Fort Apache Band; longtime González collaborator and prolific percussionist Gene Golden; and Milton Cardona, a key figure in the New York salsa movement.

Golden was on stage with Diehl once again last month, as he had been in the studio with Jerry González for the recording of the latter’s debut album, Ya Yo Me Curé, which included the raucous arrangement of “Evidence” that the Ashé All-Stars revived. “That first album was epic,” Diehl enthused. “It had a cast of thousands, which we were trying to replicate at the Clef Club.”

While the foundation for Diehl’s approach was established in New York, his musical life didn’t really take off until he returned to Philly in 1985. Through a local percussionist named Nick Rivera, he was initiated into Santería, the religion of the West African Yoruba diaspora in Cuba in which the Batá drums are a key element. In 2017 he was ordained a Yoruba priest, allowing him to play the sacred version of the drums.

“I played my first bembé [Santería ceremony] here in Philadelphia off of 5th Street,” he recalled,“and the woman who was cooking the feast ran out of the kitchen and right up in front of my drum. Suddenly she was mounted by the spirits, pretty emphatically. From that point on, I felt like I belonged.”

At the same time, Diehl began to recognize parallels between the sometimes free-form praise songs of the Yoruba and the spiritually driven free jazz of artists like saxophonist Albert Ayler. Diehl went on to forge close relationships with many of the pioneers of avant-jazz, including his nearby neighbors in northwest Philadelphia, drummer Sunny Murray and vibraphonist Khan Jamal. Oliver Lake is the latest addition to those ranks.

The 79-year-old Lake was a part of the influential Black Artists Group, a collective of experimental multidisciplinary artists in St. Louis during the late 1960s, and went on to cofound the influential World Saxophone Quartet. The music from Justice was premiered in June at New York’s Vision Festival, where Lake was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award.

“Kevin is a very creative and insightful collaborator,” Lake said. “I tried to use a variety of colors to deal with in writing for the voices, and I wanted to reflect the times that we’re in, when we really need justice.”

While Lake has long incorporated poetry into his work, he had never written for voices as instruments before. Diehl had previously enlisted Lake for SLF’s 2016 album Bombogenic and wanted to expand on the collaboration. ”I wanted to do a record with Oliver that concentrated on his composition,” Diehl explained. “I wondered, ‘What would the World Saxophone Quartet sound like if it were vocals instead of saxophones?’ And he ran with it. It’s been a transformative experience.”