The sound of a hunch coming good

Joan Wasser is New York loud. Her resting register is CAPS LOCK, rising to flashing neon when roused to laughter or, occasionally, indignation. ‘I was born a very expressive person,’ says the singer. ‘I was always talking to people in the street that I didn’t know. I’m not super afraid of expressing how I feel, and I take chances very quickly.’

Bold spontaneity has served her well. The Solution is Restless, Wasser’s latest album as her artistic alter ego, Joan As Policewoman, is the sound of a hunch coming good. The record stems from a single day spent extemporising with her friend David Okumu and the late and legendary Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen.

She and Allen were introduced in 2019 by their mutual friend Damon Albarn, who played with Allen in the Good, the Bad & the Queen. Later that year, during a solo tour, Wasser built a free day into her schedule in Paris, Allen’s home city. She booked a studio, sent the drummer a few text messages and hoped it would all work out. ‘Right off the bat it was not a regular session,’ she says. ‘I purposely prepared nothing, didn’t write anything, I just wanted to play freely. I asked the engineers to never stop recording and we played for two hours, had a huge meal, then did a little more. I was surprised how excited Tony was. He always wanted to be doing something new.’

Wasser returned to New York and used Covid-19 downtime to ‘profusely edit’ and shape those Paris jams into songs. Early in this process, at the end of April last year, Allen died, aged 79, of an aortic aneurysm. She was working on the album when she got the call. ‘It definitely infused the writing with a little more urgency and many layers of… I was going to say heaviness, but that’s not all that it was.