The lengthy essay on Melvin Gibbs’s Elevated Entity on the project’s Facebook page begins:

Listening to Melvin Gibbs’ Elevated Entity and their new album Ancients Speak (LiveWired Music; March 17, 2009) is like walking down the street in New York and unexpectedly falling into a manhole, only to discover there is an African-American underground music scene where the African diaspora has knocked down all barriers between genres.

I think that’s right. Last night’s album-release show at Santos Party House felt encyclopedic — at once ancient and thoroughly modern, encompassing a range of traditions so broad that one of the most astonishing things about the performance was the players’ ability to make them all hang together so organically and comfortably.

The impression I’m left with the morning after is of a series of deep, elemental, hypnotic grooves rumbling beneath a radio being tuned to distant, sometimes wildly divergent, sometimes downright alien frequencies.  The subterranean basslines and rhythms remain constant as different elements emerge from the static between stations — Amayo’s clarion chants, Vernon Reid’s squalling guitar, bandleader Gibbs’s superfuzz explorations of the bass’s outer reaches, Casey Benjamin’s transcendent work on the keys and saxophone, Kid Lucky’s nimble rapping and beatboxing — only to fade and give way to something different again.

It took some time for me to synch up with their groove, which was miles wide, slow and contemplative and deliberate — and it seemed like it took a few minutes for all of them to get in the same place themselves; this is New York, after all, and it isn’t always easy to shift from the multitasking hyperconsciousness that day-to-day life in this city requires to the intent focus and attention that this music demands.

But once they got there, the result was gargantuan in size and impact — like seven towering gods calling forth a new kind of creation.