Angel Bat Dawid

Angel Elmore, who records as Angel Bat Dawid, works as a composer, improviser, clarinetist, and pianist at the center of Chicago’s experimental music community. The stage name began as a social-media handle; “Bat Dawid,” Hebrew for “daughter of David,” points to the spiritual foundation that runs through her work. Among the musicians she has joined are Roscoe Mitchell, Makaya McCraven, and Rob Mazurek, and she has also shared stages with players from rock and electronic backgrounds. Her first International Anthem album, The Oracle, arrived in 2019 and was widely praised as a “road map” to the origins of Black musical traditions. Live followed in 2021, and the provocatively titled Requiem for Jazz appeared in 2023.

Dawid was raised in Chicago, where her parents immersed her in funk, jazz, classical repertoire, and Broadway scores. When she was five, her father took her to see Milos Forman’s film Amadeus; captivated by the young composer and the violin, she requested violin lessons for the school orchestra yet received a clarinet instead. At first the substitution felt uninspiring, since the only clarinet recordings at home featured Benny Goodman, an artist she considered outdated. She persisted with lessons, however, until hearing Mozart’s clarinet concerto revealed the instrument’s expressive range. Piano study began at age twelve; she later attended the Moody Bible Institute, left without completing the program, and transferred to Roosevelt University. At twenty-two a brain tumor was diagnosed, eventually necessitating surgery.

After an extended recovery Dawid spent seven years selling high-end lingerie while continuing to practice music in evenings and on weekends. At thirty-two she resigned, liquidated her 401(k), rented a coach house, and began attending the free-jazz sessions organized by saxophonist David Boykin under the Sonic Healing Ministries banner. Boykin’s coaching taught her to play by ear, redirecting her musical path. With fellow participants met at the South Side Community Arts Center, including Adam Zanolini (now executive director of the Elastic Arts Foundation), installation and performance artist Viktor Le Givens, and Ben LaMar Gay, she co-established the Participatory Music Coalition. She accepted every available performance regardless of style, steadily sharpening her improvisational abilities through these experiences.

By 2014 Dawid had become a frequent presence in Chicago’s vanguard jazz circles. She collaborated with Gay, McCraven, Mazurek, Mitchell, and Jaimie Branch, and appeared with Damon Locks’s large-scale Black Monument Ensemble. From 2014 to 2018 she maintained a daytime position at Hyde Park Records before leaving retail to concentrate on music. Her visibility on the city’s avant-garde circuit drew the attention of International Anthem founder Scott McNiece, who asked about a set of demos she had captured on her cell phone over two years while traveling. McNiece chose to release the recordings unaltered; Dawid assembled the separate clarinet, keyboard, drum-pattern, and lyric files into the album issued in early 2019 as The Oracle, which earned immediate recognition for its synthesis of folk, blues, jazz, classical, avant-garde, improvisational, and Afro-futurist spiritual jazz elements.

National tours with the ensemble Tha Brotherhood produced the October 2020 release Live, which earned multiple honors, among them placement on NPR Music’s “Best Albums of 2020” list. In March 2023 she issued Requiem for Jazz, a twelve-movement suite composed and arranged partly in response to dialogue from Edward O. Bland’s 1959 documentary The Cry of Jazz. That film juxtaposes footage of Chicago’s Black neighborhoods with performances by the Sun Ra Arkestra and others to draw formal parallels between jazz structure and African American experience. Dawid’s work was realized by a fifteen-piece ensemble, a choral quartet, and dancers; Arkestra saxophonist Marshall Allen appeared on the track “Lux Aeterna – Eternal Light/My Rhapsody.”