In many senses, The Oracle inaugurated this period of intense productivity and recognition of Angel's exemplary work. Part of the album's historical significance is undoubtedly within this trajectory of hers (as an artist). However, while it announced Angel's brilliance as a composer and an improviser, in another sense, The Oracle merely made visible to a wider audience what she was already doing and had already been involved in.

More profoundly than all the records and the accolades, Angel has continued spending time doing the work in which the totality of her existence and practice as a musician is rooted. Something that I have always respected and admired about Angel is the fact that underlying the extensive recording and collaborating, the gigging, international touring and all the public-facing activities of her life as an artist, is a committed life in community work. This work is the basis of her life as an artist. These are practices not oriented toward the industry’s trendy hype and its production of abstract value, but to building and sustaining black social life. If you know Angel, you know that this work is her heart. It’s completely fundamental to her orientation, her music, her performance, the traditions she comes from, as well as to The Oracle and its many afterlives and extensions. 

Dr Margaret Burroughs' life and work has been somewhat of a northstar(zzzzz) for Angel. Amongst a lifetime of major contributions, Burroughs founded two Chicago institutions - the DuSable Museum of African American History and the South Side Community Arts Center. She also wrote a poem titled What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black? - part of her broader cultural and artistic focus on, and love for children in the black community. Angel always says: "we got to think about the babies," and it’s this kindred quest that found expression in her song which borrows the title of the Burroughs poem. The haunting ballad is a love for the kids, a sympathy with their lives, an empathy with the woes of black life and a commitment to a positive involvement in their development. 

"What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black" is even more than a song title, a homage to Burroughs and an ode to the babies, it’s a clue to what Angel would call the real work. 

Angel works in collaboration with organisations like Music Moves Chicago, institutions like Old Town School of Folk Music, and bandmates and friends to develop and teach music education courses for Chicago's South Side youth. These programmes take place in community centres, in the street, local schools and juvenile detention centres - wherever the youth are at. Always in these programmes these youth are participants - they are encouraged to compose, experiment and, ultimately, are given the space to find themselves in this music. This expansive approach to arts education - encompassing spiritual practice, history,  dancing, music theories and more - allows for travel - to other times and spaces through different rhythms and scales. 

Like this portal-opening education, and because The Oracle's root is this work, it takes us beyond itself. It refuses the confines of "the album" and moves toward opening a broader world, of Burroughs, of ancestors, of community work, of memory and the work of those who have passed on. Because the album is not just the album, the question of what to write still looms large and it takes us, again, beyond itself to the real work. 

Angel's already-mentioned project Transition East, one of The Oracle's afterlives, hips us to Eliel Sherman Storey's life (peace Eliel, go well Eliel!), his intention and his work. About the South Side independent cultural centre which he ran since the early 1990s until his passing and transcendence a few years ago, Eliel said: "Transition East is a memory we decided was valuable enough to resurrect for the Community." Like Muhal's maxim, and Burroughs' books, this elder's orientation captures a motive principle of Angel's approach. This orientation is manifest in real, ongoing relationships and a practice inscribed in the city. Through working with Eliel - a trusted and supportive elder - Transition East became a space that Angel continued to invest in and put a lot of energy into. She organised community events there, like 2019's "Duetzzz" which I was privileged to participate in, her band Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty used to support the space and rehearse in it, and whenever anyone was looking for a space to perform or record, she would always try to put them onto it. Why? Because it was "a memory we decided was valuable enough to resurrect for the Community."