The knowing that there is no compromise for someone with vision this endless. Jamila Woods is a singular soul singer who, in voice, holds the rhetorical demand. Soul is all of those things come back to claim what is theirs. Soul is all the things a country tries to force itself into forgetting. True soul lives in the pages of a worn novel that no one talks about anymore, or a painting that sits in a gallery for a while but then in an attic forever. Rather, soul is what gold can be dug from the depths of ruin, and refashioned by those who have true vision. Soul music did not just appear in America, and soul does not just mean music. On 'Sun Ra,' Woods sings 'I just gotta get away from this earth, man / this marble was doomed from the start' and that type of dreaming and vision honors not only the Legacy of Sun Ra, but the idea that there is a better future, and in it, there will still be black people. The whimsical and malleable nature of sonic delights also grants a path for collaborators to flourish: the sparkling flows of Nitty Scott on 'Sonia' and Saba on 'Basquiat,' or the bloom of Nico Segal's horns on 'Baldwin.' More than just giving the song titles the names of historical black and brown icons of literature, art, and music, Jamila Woods builds a sonic and lyrical monument to the various modes of how these icons tried to push beyond the margins a country had assigned to them. From the airy boom-bap of 'Giovanni' to the psychedelic flourishes of 'Sonia,' the instrument which ties the musical threads together is the ability of Woods to find her pockets in the waves of instrumentation, stretching syllables and vowels over the harmony of noise until each puzzle piece has a home. Her new album, Legacy! Legacy! is the logical conclusion to that looking.

This was the case on 2016's HEAVN, which found Woods hopeful and exploratory, looking along the edges resilience and exhaustion for some measures of joy. Jamila Woods has a voice and lyrical sensibility that transcends generations, and so it makes sense to have this lush and layered album that bounces seamlessly from one sonic aesthetic to another.

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