Zoh Amba

With drummer Francisco Mela she recorded Causa Y Efecto Vol. 1 (2022) and Causa Y Efecto Vol. 2 (2024).

A trio with Joey Baron on drums and Micah Thomas on piano recorded O Sun (Tzadik, 2022), produced by John Zorn. Amba intones a lyrical quasi-pop saxophone melody in Gardener, and indulges in the spiritual John Coltrane-esque atmosphere of Hymn To The Divine Mother and Crossing. Holy Din is a cacophonous and feverish duet with John Zorn which sounds like a free-jazz version of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee". The ten-minute Satya swings from a prayer-like sax melody to a hysterical sax and piano "fugue" and to a romantic, melancholic sax elegy. The pensive O Sun is largely Micah Thomas' show.

Zoh Amba on tenor saxophone led the quartet with Micah Thomas on piano, Tyshawn Sorey on drums and Matt Hollenberg on guitar that recorded Bhakti (2022). The 29-minute Altar-Flower opens with five minutes of savage bacchanal followed by a deranged sax show that drags the piano into a mad dance until the music subsides and the sax intones a melancholic solo that slowly becomes a neurotic fit, leading to the abrasive, noisy coda. If the ten-minute The Drop And The Sea is relatively straightforward, the 21-minute Awaiting Thee bursts into dissonant flames right away indulging in tense free-form jazz-rock interplay for nine minutes. Things calm down around the 12th minute, when the sax intones a series of agonizing laments, leading to a confused and messy final jam.

Zoh Amba Quartet (2023) documents a live performance with Wendy Eisenberg on guitar, Patrick Shiroishi on saxophone and Chris Corsano on drums.

A trio with bassist William Parker and drummer Francesco Mela recorded O Life O Light Vol. 1 (577 Record, 2022). The 13-minute Mother's Hymn is a passionate sax invocation over intense drumming which at at the ten-minute mark intersects sound effects and ends in a prayer-like and almost funereal tone. The eight-minute O Life O Light has the folkish singsong quality for which she had become famous but the convulsed cascading drumming takes it to another orbit. She plays flute in the ten-minute Mountains In The Predawn Light, a sort of impressionistic free-jazz painting.

O Life O Light Vol 2 (2023) added two pieces, both worthy of the first volume. Dance of Bliss (18:58) is one of the trio's most dynamic and energetic pieces, with fluid interplay of the three instruments despite the rhythm section's formidable creativity. She again embraces the flute in the first half of Three Flowers (20:27), a less compelling agglomeration of sounds.

Zoh Amba, Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt recorded The Flower School (2023). She also recorded Solo In Italy (Palilalia, 2024).

She formed Beings with Steve Gunn on electric guitar, Shahzad Ismaily on bass and synth and Dirty Three's Jim White on drums. Their debut album There Is a Garden (2024) offers a humbler setting than her challenging free-jazz albums. They delve into acid blues with Small Vows, intone a sort of Lol Coxhill-ian fanfare in Sun Greeted, and take detours into the cacophony of Face Of Silence for dissonant piano The mournful elegy of Happy To Be turns into a vortex of rhythm and noise, whereas God Dances In Your Eyes transitions from a psychedelic wall of noise to a slightly neurotic folkish dance.

She led Lex Korten (piano), Caroline Morton (double bass) and Miguel Marcel Russell (drums) on Sun (Smalltown Supersound, 2025). The harrowing and destructive seven-minute threnody Interbeing is misleading. The album includes some of her most introspective music, from the stately and melancholic meditation of Ma (just two minutes) to the romantic and dreamy Seaside. The ten-minute In Heart is a journey into an exotic and ghostly territory, with the piano and the sax behaving like intrepid but fearful explorers (the real protagonist is the piano that escalates the hostilities but then reaches an emotional plateau where the sax simply glides to spiritual ecstasy).