Founded in 1999 by The Village Voice icon Gregory Stephen Ionman Tate and co-led with Dayton-native monster-groove bassist Jared Michael Nickerson, Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber was conceived as multigenerational, multigender, and multiethnic forum for the New York City improvisational musicians to compose, record, and perform material that reflects the breadth and depth of American music in the 21st century.

The intent of The Arkestra Chamber, through the deployment of Butch Morris’s conduction system, is to make every performance a fresh interpretation of its constituent parts. Rather than be limited to the straightjackets that the commercial recording industry uses to market contemporary Black music, Burnt Sugar freely moves among many styles, eras, and genres to devise its own exciting hybrids. These hybrids are based on a solid foundation of various musical traditions and the use of cutting-edge music technology. In this sense, the group mission honors its deepest inspirations, the first postmodernists of American music: Duke Ellington, Sun Ra, Parliament-Funkadelic, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

As with any venture of this ambitious nature, audience development must come in many forms—live performance, magazine and newspaper profiles, and cutting-edge recordings. Because of the necessity to build the TruGroid brand, Burnt Sugar and its collective must continually generate new product that highlight The Arkestra Chamber’s continual metamorphosis integrating R&B vocal extrapolations, rock ‘n’ roll–guitar brio, free jazz horn explorations, 20th-century string dissonance, and up-to-the-minute electronic manipulation.

Music must be heard—especially music designed to push back current musical boundaries. Burnt Sugar and TruGroid fill a vacuum in terms of reestablishing a presence and profile for American experimental music on the world stage that is conversant with the idioms and recording techniques of hip-hop, drum and bass, jazz, and alternative rock. In today’s musical context, there are few American bands like Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber that are both innovative on stage and in the recording studio.