Jazz Violinist Gwen Laster’s Compelling ‘Keepers of the Flame’ Is Quietly Intense

By Greg Cahill | From the September/October 2025 issue of Strings

Having read scholar Joseph Campbell’s acclaimed work The Hero’s Journey, Detroit-born jazz violinist Gwen Laster wondered if anyone had written a similar book about African mythology. Sure enough, curiosity led her to Clyde W. Ford’s 2000 book The Hero with an African Face: Mythic Wisdom of Traditional Africa, the inspiration for her compelling new album that draws from epic tales of creation, nature, nation building, warrior spirits, and death. On Keepers of the Flame, this newly appointed Guggenheim Fellow offers seven emotional pieces imbued with a deep command of her instrument, mixing melodies, complex harmonies, and a sense of mystery with chordal gymnastics and extended violin techniques.

The title track, based on a Cameroonian myth of survival, showcases the skills of her improvisational quartet, the New Muse 4tet: Melanie Dyer, viola and composer; Teddy Rankin-Parker, cello and composer; and Andrew Drury, drums/percussion. Such tracks as “Black Sun Shifting” deftly blend Western classical, traditional and modern jazz, and African music while Laster’s high-position phrases hover eerily above Middle Eastern bowed drones. 

There is a quiet intensity to these works, notably the mesmerizing “Foraging for Freedom,” a seven-minute arco and pizzicato piece that meanders in a most engaging way before resolving into the elegiac opening of “When Peace.” A playful mood manifests on “Drishti,” a reference to a yoga technique used to summon inner strength and adapted from a big-band arrangement Laster penned while in residence at Bard College. The closer, an incendiary 12-minute avant-garde piece titled “Shoreline,” concludes with flaming staccato trills interspersed with spoken-word segments. 

Laster is no stranger to original works that highlight the African diaspora and social activism: In 2016, she was commissioned to write the “Black Lives Matter Suite,” later featured on her Blue Lotus album. The aptly titled Keepers of the Flame finds Laster and her cohorts once again rising to the challenge of the subject matter, creating thought-provoking music rooted in the past, informed by the present, and striving for the future in music that speaks to a bruised world in search of healing and understanding.