Cautious Clay Recruits Ambrose Akinmusire And Immanuel Wilkins For ‘Yesterday’s Price’
The track is featured on Clay’s forthcoming album ‘KARPEH.’
Cautious Clay—the singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer also known as Joshua Karpeh—has released “Yesterday’s Price,” an explosive new instrumental jazz track from his forthcoming Blue Note debut KARPEH due out August 18.
The track features fiery performances by trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins in addition to Karpeh on tenor saxophone and flute, Joshua Crumbly on bass, and Sean Rickman on drums. “‘Yesterday’s Price’ is probably the heaviest song on the album,” says Cautious. “It’s about speaking one’s truth and expressing it in the most intimate and rawest form.”
KARPEH is a deeply personal new album which finds Cautious taking a giant artistic leap forward with an ambitious yet introspective song cycle about growth, conceptions of intimacy, and lineage that reveals a new side of his artistry by delving deeper than ever into his jazz roots.
Across the album’s 15 tracks—which include the previously released singles “Ohio” and “Another Half” featuring guitarist Julian Lage—Cautious can be heard on vocals, flute, tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, guitar, synthesizer, and bass.
For all of Cautious’ dexterity around multiple instruments, it’s always in service of the music’s narratives. “I wanted it to be musical for the sake of telling a story,” he explains. “Throughout this album, I am equating my life’s journey to an amalgamation of my family’s past life experiences, an exploration of my present, and how those pieces will influence by future.”
Cautious sequenced the album thematically in three sections with interludes throughout containing audio recordings of his relatives recounting bits of family history. The first section he calls “The Past Explained” with songs that touch upon his early experiences growing up in Cleveland.
The middle section of the album is what Cautious calls “The Honeymoon of Exploration.” These five songs depict some of his experiences with psychedelics, which inspired self-reflection and the desire for deeper forms of intimacy with others.
The concluding four songs constitute the third thematic section, which Cautious calls “A Bitter & Sweet Solitude.” Cautious posits that when we allow ourselves to spend quality time in solitude it enables us to forge better relationships with ourselves and others, therefore sparking deeper intimacy.
