Kaia Kater

Strange Medicine

Free Dirt

There’s been a buzz on social media lately led by Rhiannon Giddens about the importance of the ‘Black banjo.’ In that sense banjoist Kaia Kater’s Strange Medicine is certainly timely. Beyond that it shows the immense possibilities of the instrument beyond conventional ‘Americana’ or hybrid bluegrass or blues. Consider that the instrumentation here includes, flute, English and French horns, clarinets, trumpets, strings, synths, and pump organ to name just some.  It’s been six years since Kater’s 2018 Grenades, a rumination on her father’s life in Grenada, Since that time, she attended film school, studying composition, recorded with other artists, including a single released with jazz artist Chief Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott), all to break free of writers block and expand beyond the limiting realm of Americana and its rigid expectations of Black banjo players. Like artists such as Giddens and fellow born-and-raised in Montreal Allison Russell, the latter who appears on one track, Kater takes a Black feminist perspective. Some of these songs are a celebration of self and survival while others are rallying cries set in a historical context. Musically they stretch from the minimalist of Steve Reich to the orchestral scores of filmmaker Jonny Greenwood to the rhythms of the African kora and the drumming of jazz great Brian Blade. Along with Russell, Aoife O’Donovan and Taj Mahal guest. The album was co-produced by multi-instrumentalist Joe Grass (Elisapie, The Barr Brothers) whose musical imprint and experimental bent is all over the record.

Kater breaks down stereotypes immediately, embracing the notion of violence in the opening “Witch” in the infamous Salem witch trials, citing Tituba, the first woman, an enslaved Caribbean, who was burned. She becomes the symbol of lingering sexist perceptions, with revenge and resistance in mind –“When I dreamt I moved through you and/Burned my name into your chest.”

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