Burnt Sugar

The Village Voice critic Robert Christgau describes Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber as “…electric Miles with soul, Maggot Brain with a PHD, the Hendrix Evans band of dreams, the underwater funk some hear in A.R. Kane.”

With their latest release, If You Can’t Dazzle Them With Your Brilliance Then Baffle Them With Your Blisluth, a two-disc set recorded live at festivals in Bordeaux, San Sebastian and New York City, New York Times critic, Ben Ratliff wrote, “With structures pulled out of the band as the music goes along, this album changes its personality in every track – swing grooves with violin solos and ensemble riffs, Brazilian rhythm, funk, electronics, fuzzed-out guitar and free jazz.” Ratliff also considers Burnt Sugar to be one of the first successful “Live” mashup groups.

British critic Kevin Le Gendre of Jazzwise wrote,”If You Can’t Dazzle Them is an important release because it presents Burnt Sugar in their natural creative milieu – the stage, the 37th chamber of real time creativity… what we discern here is the ghost of Sun Ra drifting through a post-modern urban environment in which any idiom from jazz to rock to hip hop is strange fruit for Sugar’s blender…It’s Africa in the heart of the city. And Europe right out in the bush. That’s Burnt Sugar in a nutshell, actually.”