Angel Bat Dawid
Angel Bat Dawid
bio by Joe Darling
From age 11, music has been the backbone of Angel Bat Dawid’s life. Her journey, however, has been anything but typical. But what is typical? The piano, clarinet and voice have been a constant for Bat Dawid as her principal disciplines, though a career in music has not been. Of music, she told the Chicago Reader’s Leor Galil that “it’s always been my best friend. It ain’t ever let me down.” It’s been merely within the past year (at the time of this writing in early 2020), however, that her incredible companionship with music has finally connected with a global community of attentively attuned spirits.
Born Angel Elmore to missionaries in Atlanta, Georgia, Bat Dawid grew accustomed to moving as her parent’s ministry mandated. From Georgia to Kentucky and Kenya, the family finally settled in Chicago’s south suburbs where she would go on to study clarinet and music education at Moody Bible Institute and Roosevelt University, respectively.
Since 2014, Bat Dawid has recommitted herself to a life in music. Giving up her day job, she began following in-roads through Chicago’s experimental music community with touchstones like David Boykin’s Sonic Healing Ministries sessions and Damon Locks’ Black Monument Ensemble along the way. She soon formed her own improvisationally-focused collective known as The Participatory Music Coalition and developed a unique performance residency at Elastic Arts dubbed the Mothership 9 Multimedia Series.
Inspired by everything from the poetry of Margaret Burroughs to the music of Yusef Lateef and even Mozart, Bat Dawid made her debut, The Oracle, with International Anthem to wide acclaim in 2019. Eschewing conventional labels, even those as open-ended as “jazz,” Bat Dawid describes her work in no uncertain terms: "This is Black Music.” On The Oracle, she echoes ancestral agonies that she translates to blues and spirituals, a conversion theory she attributes to the late Milford Graves. Though the joy of survival never overcomes the inequity and deep-seated injustice imposed on Black life in America, Bat Dawid is outspoken in her commitment to telling the stories that will eventually turn the tide.
Though her introduction in 2019 was nothing short of an explosion onto the scene, it is the future of her artistry that has us most thrilled. When asked what’s next, Bat Dawid is lucid. “I have really big artistic goals and hope to expand compositionally. I’ve always wanted to write a symphony and I’m really interested in film scoring.”
A new voice has rumbled forth with clarity and intention from Chicago’s Southside, reminding us that the past is still the present and the future is full of radical hope.