Kitt Lyles - Wake Before Dawn (2020)

Wake Before Dawn is Lyles’ most ambitious project to date, bringing together his band Real Talk Collective with guest musicians from Chicago’s jazz, latin, and classical music scenes, and from his hometown in South Carolina. The album is also Lyles’s debut as a songwriter/vocalist, and seeks to reach beyond jazz’s more intellectual tendencies to the organic joy and human expression found in folk music around the world. The diverse and uninhibited compositions that comprise Wake Before Dawn each explore their own imaginative space without regard to narrative structure. Taken together, the pieces form an ecosystem connecting our relationships to place, to the natural world, to each other, and to our own hearts.