George Burton’s ‘White Noise’ at 9 Orchard

As the sun falls behind the skyline, the rattle and grind of trucks racing down Canal Street runs off to a distant hum. Crosstalk rises from the sidewalk, and the Chinatown air alights with voices seeking company among neon signs and shuffling heels. When curtains draw inside the century-old bank turned ritzy downtown hotel on the corner, the patter files into the upstairs event space. It’s Jazz Night at 9 Orchard, curated by the legendary Stretch Armstrong. Tonight, the who’s who wait for pianist and composer George Burton to premiere his new album White Noise.

The crowd buzzes while the eminent Stretch sets the mood, spinning ‘70s soul jazz rarities and making his rounds to the tune of “Song for My Father.” Yellow beams silhouette the audience, and the band slips through to a spotlight at the rear of the room. Burton, who rolls up his sleeves before a Rhodes piano, is joined by bassist Junius Paul, percussionist Nazir Ebo and saxophonist Dylan Band, the latter pair of whom are longtime collaborators from his roots in the Philadelphia scene. Though all four performers feature on the album, this is their first time staging the songs together for an audience. As they get situated, Stretch asks, “Who needs live music in their life right now?”

White Noise is Burton’s farthest-reaching offering to date, capturing his reckoning with veiled injustice through a musical revolution. Since first finding a new voice with modular synthesizers during the pandemic, the artist layered three years of feelings and revelations into each track, compounding personal experiences into universal truths. The resulting collection is a meditation on subjection, survival and the systems of oppression that pervade beneath our culture’s white-washed surface. Now, as the cracks in that facade become clearer by the day, Burton’s cry for liberation is more crucial than ever.

To prepare the audience, Burton invites novelist Nadia Owusu to recite her liner notes for White Noise. The author defines the title as “a constant background noise, especially one that drowns out other sounds,” then extrapolates the term into a symbol for the narratives that invisiblize the oppressed. “We’re attuned to the machine in infancy,” she reads, “the fairytales with pale horses and dark villains, the ambient violence on the television, the clock ticking in a single direction. Doubt creeps in, but children who voice it might be exiled to the principal’s office to repent and recommit to the machine’s story.”

Against this tyranny, Owusu asserts that Black creativity cannot be crushed. She calls for radical new art forms to create “a reality in which all of us are free and threatening.” Enter Burton’s powerful blend of jazz, hip-hop, electronic music, Xhosa rhythms and more.

“The beautiful part is that I didn’t give her any real guidelines. I just gave her the music and an idea of the story behind each track,” Burton recalls, in a conversation after the show. “I remember reading them, and there were certain sentences that I feel were absolutely, absolutely genius. There’s no better way of putting some of these. There’s no other way I could conceive of these being that good.”

Moments after the reading, the air is filled with scattered percussion. Abrupt tom pops and cymbal trills build to a clatter as deep modular samples rise and fall like heavy breathing. Bass plucks and kicks move in and out of sync, pushing and pulling a faint core tempo behind automatic snare rolls and a saxophone wail that cuts through the haze. Burton strikes pensive chords that become more angular and dramatic as the noise mounts, then pushes the free interplay to the brink of fracture with intense, frantic runs. “In the Labyrinth of the Free” is a reclamation of cacophony, responding to modernity’s din in kind to express the feeling when “you’re finally free, and you find out that you’re not really that free,” Burton details.

The quartet settles to a simmer, then ushers in “Heard But Not Seen,” which similarly seems to exist before it begins and emerges from the shadows when the musicians turn up the heat. The second track is more structured than the first but no less immense. A yearning melody from Band’s saxophone tears at the soul, while Paul and Ebo’s tripping backbeat brings a pounding, lurching pulse. At the apex, Burton lunges as the keys and telegraphs ferocious strikes with spontaneous vocalization. On and off the record, the pianist thrives at dramatic peaks, but his live style is distinguished by its passionate, self-emptying instinct.

Burton cues up “Rumination” next, which staggers into motion behind a grinding modular loop that jerks like heavy industry. This is one of the most prominent Minimoog inclusions on White Noise, and the instance that most clearly conveys the instrument’s symbolic significance. “I referenced it as the machine,” the artist shares. “Because there’s this constant thing that’s always happening in the background, whether we realize it or not. I mean, that’s my take on it. Whether it’s loud in front of us, as in this current election… or if it’s in the background, and you’re not really noticing that it’s there, but it’s still kind of on your shoulders. It’s like white noise, you know? It’s kind of sleepy, and you don’t notice it. It just falls into your life.”

The band fills out its third track with storming bass lines, off-kilter drum fills and cascading counter-rhythmic saxophone blasts. Over this uproar, Burton lays down heavy chords that snap the ensemble to a central rhythm; even as he jumps off into free sprints, the bandleader’s performance reliably amplifies the heart of intricate compositions like stochastic resonance. After a particularly affecting solo, he stops to check in with the crowd. “Everybody okay? I think I’m okay. I’m working on it.”

The narrative turns as the quartet welcomes poet Dante Clark, who features on “A Color for Hope.” Clark’s words pair perfectly with the song’s sober, yet spirited tone and emphasize the liberatory purpose of Burton’s work. “I believe endurance might be the closest I’ll get to a notion of cope,” Clark reads over an unfettered and apprehensive groove “even though I’ll have to learn how to find it again, and again,” Without pulling any punches, the pianist sounds cautiously encouraged.

“I’m aware that everybody wants to hear happy music. Everybody wants to hear music that takes them away from the world that they have to live in,” Burton observes. “I know that my music is not happy jazz—it’s not always going to make you feel that way. I don’t really know how to do that. I just want to be real about it. And I think this audience here in New York is, as it’s always been, an audience where you can present this type of work without scaring too many people.”

Burton’s unwavering realism makes the hope that resolves from White Noise meaningful. In his slower, softer mode, the pianist’s notes evoke a hope that wasn’t given, but hard-fought and resilient. That hope charges his message of collective liberation, which he enacts by stirring his listeners to transformative soul-searching. It rings out as the band moves into “Gratitude,” the first track from Burton’s 2020 album Reciprocity.

Burton begins his closing song by repeatedly striking a single note, then adding urgent, resolute chords that bring on a sense of ascent as they repeat. Ebo, Paul and Band follow with loops of their own that lock into the bandleader’s to build a contemplative foundation. Steadily elaborating his part, the pianist is patient, deliberate and definite; he listens closely to his surroundings and alters his song in stride as if telling a story he knows by heart.

With each strike, Burton unreservedly gives everything he is and knows to his music—then, as the song moves towards its last passage, he stops, turns from the keys and closes his eyes. He listens to his collaborators slowly falling away, to cabs honking at jaywalkers and to the audience that buzzes to life again. For the evening’s final word, he attunes the room to silence, leaving the white noise to speak for itself.