The music of composer, improviser, and vocalist Amirtha Kidambi well represents her situation in the New York scene, pulling from many directions of involvement including her jazz quartet, Elder Ones, and an avant-garde duo with Lea Betrucci. She has a shopping list of collaborators including William Parker, Peter Evans, and Ingrid Laubrock, in addition to Mary Halvorson's Code Girl sextet and a role in Robert Ashley's final opera, "Crash." An educator at the New School, she has a leading role in the promotion of social equity in the new music scene, and "decolonizing the canon." More recently, she has been focused on Afro-Asiatic solidarity as a means of progression to complete equity in the musical world, as well as that with the LGBTQ+ community.
Her quartet, Elder Ones, draws from a variety of influences including free jazz, noise rock, and Carnatic Music, and is known for Kidambi's unique timbral vocal techniques as a means of communication to the other colors of the combo. The drummer, bassist, and saxophonist also use electronics to manipulate their sounds, while Kidambi also uses synthesizers and a harmonium, reminiscent of the cosmically reverent work on the instrument by Sun Ra. Their most recent 2019 album, "From Untruth," is a tour through their influences as well as an intense response to social injustice, featuring the ultimately uplifting and encouraging title track, and the blistering "Decolonize the Mind." The early forays into spiritual free jazz led by the Coltranes and Pharoah Sanders also permeate Kidambi's work, viscerally so. Kidambi states during her work with Mary Halvorson's Code Girl that "I'm really into ecstaticism; I like something on the edge that can be unhinged."
Elder Ones' first album, "Holy Science," serves as a tribute to Eric Garner, a 2014 victim of homicide by a police officer. From South Asian origin, Kidambi attributes her increase in awareness and participation in the Black Lives Matter movement to Matana Roberts, another figurehead in the modern jazz world's symbiosis with social equity. A 2015 invitation from Roberts to a memorial concert for Michael Brown, another famous case of police homicide, catalyzed the birth of Kidambi's combo. Kidambi states in an interview that musical activism exists on a different ground than political "front-line" activism, as it is mainly for raising awareness and sometimes money. She encourages the recognition of issues of race or otherwise being not separate, but issues of humanity.
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