“Summit meeting” is a term that has all but fallen out of use in music commentary, but it is applicable to the eponymous debut of Onilu, the trio of Joe Chambers, Kevin Diehl, and Chad Taylor. (Onilu is Yoruba for drummer.) For over a half-century, Chambers has brought an incisive compositional sensibility to percussion-centric music; and while most of the eight compositions are credited to Sonic Liberation Force leader Diehl and/or the nearly ubiquitous Taylor, Chambers’ gravity centers the proceedings. While there is abundant energy and exhilaration throughout the album, there is also a current of palpable solemnity that, arguably, can best be mustered in tandem with an esteemed elder like Chambers.
There is a gentle seesawing between pieces rooted in traditional materials like “Nyamaropa,” a piece that first appeared on the Nonesuch Explorer classic now titledZimbabwe: The Soul of Mbira – Traditions of the Shona People, and recently composed works like Taylor’s buoyant “Mainz,” a piece which Jeff Parker has recorded two notable contrasting versions. Even when the intensity of the material approaches a boil, as on “A Meta Onilu” when all three man a drum kit, each stroke seems prescribed by ancient protocol. With each listening, not only do the layers in every piece vibrate more vividly, but each piece becomes more entwined with the others.
Onilu is unassumingly profound. It does not shout from the ramparts, nor does it shake its fist at the oppressors. It relays a message that has been passed down through centuries, despite it being waylaid by the middle passage and repressed through enslavement and its aftermath. It is a message of determination and resolve and ultimate conviviality. It is a recording that meets the current moment.

I first listened to Onilu on Blue Monday, January 20th, 2025, the most depressing day of the year, at least according to a notion invented by a British travel company a few years ago. In Toronto, the high temperature for the day was -6° Celsius, the low -11°. There was some snow and an Arctic chill coming from the North. There was a different chill coming across Lake Ontario from the South. Fortunately, Canada had just ended a mail strike, so there was new music in the house: Onilu immediately warmed things up.
“Onilu” is a Yoruba word for drummers and the band consists of three percussionists from three generations: Joe Chambers, Chad Taylor and Kevin Diehl. They’re best known as drummers, but percussion here extends to keyboards as well – pianos, vibraphones and marimbas, crucial melodic components in this invocation of African music. There are also “ideophones” (“an instrument the whole of which vibrates to produce a sound when struck, shaken, or scraped, such as a bell, gong, or rattle,” OED).
The credits are expansive: Joe Chambers plays conga, drum kit, idiophones, marimba, shakere and vibraphone; Kevin Diehl, batá drums, cajóns, drum kit, electro-acoustic drum kit , Guagua and shakere; Chad Taylor: alfaia, clave, clay drums, drum kit, mbira, marimba, piano, tongue drum, tympani and vibraphone. Tracking down descriptions of some of those instruments might resemble work, but listening to Onilu is an extraordinary pleasure, a world of resonant instruments that seem to vibrate, shimmer and transmit light, sounds that might suggest a waterfall of fire, something both benign and impossible. Here one feels the materiality of instruments, and the processes of their making, whether from steel, wood, clay or skin.
The eight tracks, ranging from 4’32” to 7’25”, are mostly compositions on traditional patterns by one or two members of the band. The exceptions will immediately suggest the trio’s range. “Nyamaropa”, with mbira (“thumb piano”) played beautifully by Taylor, is an ancient melody that appeared on an extraordinary collection in Nonesuch’s series of field recordings over fifty years ago: The Soul of Mbira: Traditions of the Shona People of Rhodesia by Paul Berliner, most recently available on CD as Zimbabwe: Soul of Mbira. At the opposite pole is Bobby Hutcherson’s “Same Shame”, with Chambers (who played drums on the original 1968 recording) turning to vibraphone, Diehl on drum kit and Taylor on tympani.
The same levels of virtuosity and flexibility manifest themselves in different ways on every track. On the Diehl/Taylor composed “Estuary Stew”, the group stretches instrumentation to have Chambers on ideophones, Diehl on batá drums and electro-acoustic drum kit, and Taylor on marimba, creating a complex mix of acoustic resonances and electronics. Taylor’s “Mainz” (previously recorded in two different versions by Jeff Parker) is particularly tuneful, with Chambers on marimba, Diehl on drum kit and Taylor on piano and drum kit. For sheer rhythmic energy and complexity, there’s “A Meta Onilu”, with everyone playing drum kits, Chambers adding vibraphone and Taylor, mbira.
Onilu is consistently declarative work, emotionally open, sonically generous, three masters of different generations celebrating a shared musical passion.

In a time when it’s hard to know just who and what to believe, Onilu shows how easy it can be to speak the truth. Joe Chambers, Kevin Diehl and Chad Taylor named their album (and, subsequently, their project) after the Yoruba word for “drum,” and that’s exactly what you get. All three of them are lifetime students of the drums, sufficiently steeped in the instrument’s lore to know how to make music that is complete and completing using only things that you strike and stroke.
Diehl, who has also been the leader of the Philadelphian Sonic Liberation Front for more than two decades, instigated this project. He and Chad Taylor—a bandleader, enduring associate of Rob Mazurek and the artistic director of University of Pittsburgh’s jazz-studies program—have known each other since the tail end of the last century. They decided to transition from colleagues to collaborators in order to merge their shared interest in the intersection of improvised music and African folk forms.
The group’s third member, Joe Chambers, has the longest CV by far. He was a valued player and composer on some of the Blue Note label’s greatest recordings in the 1960s and a founding member of M’Boom, Max Roach’s all-percussion ensemble, in the 1970s. Chambers has carried on teaching, playing and recording to the present time. Among his students was Taylor, who took private lessons from him in the mid-1990s.
That might sound like a lot of personal history, and the trio compounds it with a shared devotion to drumming as a cultural, spiritual and historical phenomenon. But they wear that reverence; Onilu is as stuffy as a house wide open to the sun and wind on a breezy spring day. The music is never cluttered. Chambers often takes the lead on vibraphone, which he uses to articulate graceful, unfussy melodies that’ll stick in your head as surely as the other two musicians will compel you to swivel your hips with a battery of additional drums.
On “Same Shame,” Taylor’s tympani ground the music so deeply that you’ll feel the mud between your toes; on “Grasta Maol,” Diehl’s Batá drums impart an extra throb that’ll unkink your spine. And when they lock in on three kits for “A Meta Onilu,” their funk is simultaneously undeniable and reserved, summoning solemnity in the midst of celebration. No lies—this music is purposeful and true. 

Back in 2021, one of my essential albums was Drag City’s Mind Maintenance, a duo instrumental album featuring Joshua Abrams’ guimbri and the mbira playing of Chad Taylor. Appropriately titled and timed for a fraught period (peak of COVID, etc.), the album was a tonic, coming when the world’s population needed soothing. Chad Taylor now lines up as one-third of Onilu (a Yoruba word meaning simply ‘drummer’), an all-percussion instrumental band, whose modus operandi, it seems, is to get a foot tapping. Armed with a host of percussive instruments, Chad, Kevin Diehl (Sonic Liberation Front) and Joe Chambers (M’Boom, etc.) are given not only centre stage but the entire stage to mesmerise us with their instrumental and composition skills.
For any of us wondering if percussion alone is enough to hold the attention, this set wastes no time in settling the listener (see Jim White and Chris Corsano, among others, for further reassurance). "Invocation" starts steadily, with a nifty rhythm and touches of hand drums, before a second beat settles in. It immediately screams confidence, with the players happy to allow the music to unfold at its own pace. But it is also subtly very technical and performed with such assurance that the whole concept quickly gets exciting.
On "Same Shame", something resembling a xylophone or marimba forms the core melody, with a darker percussive line behind it. This is a more mysterious piece, with plenty of space and sparse and pensive playing. Weirder is the excellent (and brilliantly titled) "Estuary Stew", which also uses some kind of idiophone, along with shakers (bringing a sense of natural unease, like a rattlesnake) and a bizarre squelchy sounding instrument unlike anything I have heard before. The overall mood is odd and furtive, with a hint of magical realism, but the music is just beautiful and so intelligently played it will have your eyes closed and entranced in no time.
Trickier to pin down is "A Meta Onilu", the longest song here at over seven minutes and one that incorporates many melodies into its main structure. Rather than the dream-like state some of the music here may induce, this one will have you listening closely and picking out each stand until the musical links become clear. It is a strong demonstration of the skill each of these players possesses, with very technical and challenging music seeming effortless. But this doesn’t feel like an academic album; it feels like three artists playing the music they love and relishing in the unusual position of being the main characters. Within the meticulous nature of the sound is a paradoxically careful abandon, and the love of the playing and bouncing off of one another shines through brightly. What a wonderfully uplifting, fresh and enjoyable recording this is. I’ve not come across anything quite like it.