Monthly Playlist – October 2020

Man, this was a great month for recordings. There’s also far more stuff that is a contender for my year end list that didn’t make this – my rule for instrumentals is they have to work with the larger song-based contexts, I’ll almost never drop a fifteen minute movement of an extended minimalist suite in here; it never feels like it works.

Like most autumns, I find myself drawn toward the reflective and the melancholy even a little more than usual. I tried to keep this from being monochromatic but time and you will tell. Thanks for listening. Continue reading for notes on each song.

October 2020

1. Dave Alvin, “Highway 61 Revisited” – I loved Dave Alvin’s work the minute I heard it; his encyclopedic sense of what’s gone before and ability to spin it into fresh stories in that unmistakable voice puts him in a rare caliber of writers. That same quality of absorption doesn’t always translate to covers – for every “Holy shit” like his version of Tom Russell’s “Blue Wing” or the Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne standard “Time After Time”, there are a dozen that are fine but never make it out of the original’s shadow. This take on Dylan’s reminder that the world is always ending struck me firmly in the former category. Alvin’s low-key read on the dense lyric drips with charm and ambiguity in a landscape that’s all shadows. The second I heard it I couldn’t picture not opening with it.
2. The Budos Band, “Sixth Hammer” – One apocalypse follows another, like seeing another side of the dice hitting the felt. It only felt appropriate to follow the Dylan-by-way-of-Dave drama with another deluge. The Budos Band is crushing it lately and this new one turns down a few of the more overt metal influences of the last but keeps the same high intensity and raucousness for a new apex in their catalog. Saying something for one of my favorite bands of the last 20 years.
3. Bonnie Whitmore, “Flashes & Cables” – Whitmore’s new one Last Will & Testament is a slower burn than the record that knocked the rust off my receptors and made me realize what I was missing, Fuck With Sad Girls but it cuts even deeper and the hard-edged tracks like this one nail that balance between pumping your fist in the air and weeping that I’m always on the look-out for. “Nobody told us the cameras were here…It’s finally quiet. Turn in your uniforms.”
4. Amanda Shires featuring Jason Isbell, “The Problem” – Shires gets better and better with every record. This perfectly observed duet with husband Isbell is as good as “message music” gets, always focused on the human cost of systems and arrogance, with a luminous hook that drives home the heartbreak.
5. Resistance Revival Chorus featuring Meah Pace, “I Hope” – Also on the list of message music doesn’t get much better than this, I didn’t learn about supergroup Resistance Revival Chorus until the week it was released and it hasn’t let me go since. This song with lead vocals but Meah Pace – best known for her work in !!! but who blew me away on a rainy New York night last year at Lincoln Center echoes the classic hopeful protest music of the Staples, Curtis, Swamp Dogg, but comes ready to fight for our souls now.
6. Christian McBride Big Band, “Night Train” – One of my favorite memories of the last month-ish was having a cigar on the lawn with my pal (and former JazzColumbus editor Andrew Patton), listening to this record. McBride’s one of my all-time favorite bass players and this union with his high school classmate and B-3 maestro Joey DeFrancesco in tribute to Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Smith, and arranger Oliver Nelson, is a perfect chill-in-the-air Saturday night record. This cover of “Night Train” is a sizzling highlight, but if you like this, you’ll like it all.
7. Bethany Thomas, “I’m Not Sorry and I’m Not Scared” – A more modern stomp. I gushed about this Thomas song when I wrote up the livestream of her record release, and it just gets better and better.
8. Afel Bocoum, “Bombolo Lillo” – Ali Farka Toure’s protege, Bocoum, put out one of my favorite records of recent memory and sent me down a glorious rabbit hole of the Malian music I was discovered and gorged myself on in college, including a wonderful memory of seeing Ali Farka Toure himself at the Southern Theater.
9. JD Allen – “I Should Care” – I can’t think of a saxophone player with a better tone for a ballad working today than JD Allen, this is just luminous, gorgeous, painting with light and air.
10. Arum Rae, “Blurry Eyes” – Any time new Arum Rae songs come out, I get excited. I first saw her – cold – at 11th Street Bar’s always-stellar Tuesday night series seven or eight years ago and she took my breath away. After strong swerves into different genres and topics, she returns to the simmering intensity that first got my attention here, and she sticks the landing.
11. Kenny Roby, “Silver Moon (For Neal)” – For me the centerpiece of his excellent record, The Reservoir, finds the 6 String Drag frontman paying tribute to his fallen comrade and collaborator (and original producer of this record before Dave Schools ably took the reins). A lilting soul-country lullaby no one does like Roby: the sound of moonlight dripping through the leaves as they barely hang on. And a tune you know Casals could have played the shit out of. “I will never understand the hearts and minds of other men; so I pray to the one who hung the moon.”
12. Kronos Quartet, “Storyteller” – Kronos Quartet have as much to do with my taste now as any other artist, easy, seeing them in late high school or early college opened my skull to the world of possibility in the classical idiom. I found Pete Seeger around the same time, and this tribute hit a part of my soul I didn’t even know needed filling… and fit perfectly. Everything here is good, but this cut-up of samples of Seeger’s voice, speaking and singing, woven into an original composition by Jacob Garchik, sums up the best of what they do in these tributes and stops me every time.
13. Jerry David DeCicca, “Coffee Black” – One of my dear friends, even if I don’t see him often, and someone who keeps refining his own sound world, with tastefully chosen collaborators, and expanding his reach to embrace the outside world. Maybe the hardest call of a single song off any record I drew from, this love letter to growing into our own skin, to the life he’s built with Eve (whose harmonies light up all of The Unlikely Optimist And His Domestic Adventures), and to the simple pleasures of life has few equals in contemporary music. “I’ve gotten sweeter with time and love and luck, and slowly more healthy, like sips from a cup. Here I am, I’m ready to wake up.”
14. Diana Krall, “This Dream of You” – I’ve gone back and forth on Diana Krall but her phrasing of lyrics has caught up to her stunning musicianship in the last ten years or so and her new record, collecting outtakes from her long collaboration with producer Tommy LiPuma hit me in a comforting, intriguing way I wasn’t expecting, especially this title track, a Dylan tune from his Together Through Life I barely noticed before this.
15. Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, “This Land Is Your Land” – Also a compilation of covers and soundtrack tunes, any Jones fan should be happy to have these songs in one place – any time is a good time to revisit their perfect cover of this Woody Guthrie anthem, but now is the best time. And tomorrow.
16. Quintron and Miss Pussycat “Buc-Ee’s Got a Problem” – New Orleans’ favorite weirdo dance party and puppet show put out their first joint record (after a few great albums just labeled Quintron) with production from The Reigning Sound/Oblivians’ Greg Cartwright and it’s an infectious slab of left-angle grooves, ominous and funny lyrics, and acid-tinged guitar.
17. Chloe x Halle, “Do It” – One of my favorite slabs of ingratiating dancefloor sweetness. It makes me sad – or adds to the sadness – that there’s no Pink Elephant because I want to put this on at 11 pm and see how my friends react to it.
18. Leon Bridges and Lucky Daye, “All About You” – Leon Bridges gets looser and freer with his referents, less beholden to the retro-soul box, with each release, and I’m here for it. This slinky ballad duet is begging for a 12” couples-skate mix and a million-dollar Hype Williams video.
19. Emma-Jean Thackray, “Speak No Evil (Night Dreamer)” – Knowing the handful of people who listen to this, I come fully prepared for you thinking this is the corniest shit you’ve ever heard, but I love it. This Blue Note Re:Imagined compilation brings me back to those Verve and Blue Note remix records when I was in my late teens and early 20s and delivers on that bountiful, cheesy joy if you let it. Thackray reworks two classic Wayne Shorter anthems, “Speak No Evil” and “Night Dreamer”, into a bubbly dancefloor smash without selling either of the original tunes short.
20. Irreversible Entanglements, “The Code Noir / Amina” – Irreversible Entanglements brings together Moor Mother on spoken word, Keir Neuringer and Aquiles Navarro on horns and percussion, and the ferocious rhythm section of Luke Stewart and Tcheser Holmes, into a punk-tinged free jazz spiritual explosion. A warning sign disguised as poetry, insurrection in beauty’s clothes, as dark as the next fire.
21. Noah Haidu, “Chambers of Tain” – More traditional jazz from Haidu’s quartet. When I was a kid, the piano player casting a long shadow over everyone else was Kenny Kirkland. The linchpin of both Marsalis’ brothers bands at various times, and Sting’s jazz period, Kirkland died too soon, with only one album to his name as a leader, and Haidu reminds us all what a fantastic body of compositions he left us with on this tribute album, Doctone.
22. Gabriel Garzón-Montano, “With a Smile” – This miniature R&B fantasia opens up an entire world, Garzón-Montano’s most fully realized record, blending various genres and colors with a steady hand and making music with obvious (and perfect) referents that really doesn’t sound like anyone else.
23. Optic Sink, “Girls in Gray” – NOTS is my favorite band to come out of the Memphis garage-punk scene in years and this off-shoot featuring Natalie Hoffmann on vocals and keys with Ben Bauermeister from Magic Kids on percussion grabbed me immediately. A slab of rich darkwave, some good for the dancefloor, some good for the bedroom, some for walking through streets slick with damp leaves, some, like this one, good for all three, with keenly observed lyrics and a wry vocal.
24. Dave Hause with Laura Stevenson, “When It Don’t Come Easy” – Dave Hause gave me one of my most unexpected delights this year with his dual covers project: alternating Dillinger Four songs and Patty Griffin. Taking on one of my favorite songs by Griffin, one of my all-time favorite songwriters, is a challenge, but he hits every song out of the park. This anthem to showing up gets interesting angles with a crafty guitar hook and some magical harmonies between Hause and Stevenson.
25. Latitude, “Remember The Good Times” – This came to me through a promo email with the tag line “Brian Eno writing songs for Fleetwood Mac” and that intrigued me enough to give it a spin. It uses a lot of the ‘80s references I don’t usually care for but does it in a way it was hard for me to deny.
26. Marc Almond, “Teenage Dream” – There’s no benefit in ranking loss; everyone who has gone in this plague is valuable. That said, Hal Willner was a massive, important figure for me and most of my generation who grew up with these drifting, amorphous, magpie tastes – one of my favorite moments in 50 trips to NYC was taking in one of his shows at The Stone. So him doing a tribute record to Marc Bolan and T. Rex, also huge for me, was an built for me to love. This song sums up so much of what I love about his approach, Marc Almond in full self-aware cabaret mode chewing through a lush arrangement by longtime collaborator and friend of both men, JG Thirlwell (Foetus), is perfection.  “These prison bars are so hard to clean – whatever happened to the teenage dream?”
27. Anna von Hausswolff, “Dolore de Orsini” – Anna von Hausswolff strips away some poppier elements for this record of pieces for solo pipe organ inspired by the Orsini castle in Italy and opens up a beautiful light on these landscapes.
28. Rejjie Snow featuring Snoh Aalegra, Cam O’bi, “Mirrors” – This was the first I heard from this Irish rapper and I’ve had a hard time getting it out of my head for weeks. A charming, low-key seduction, right on time for the season.
29. The Bug featuring Dis Fig, “You” – Anytime Kevin Martin puts work into the world under any of his aliases is a banner day for me. This haunting, sparse collaboration with Berlin-based producer and singer Felice Chen under her Dis Fig banner feels like changing weather in every sense of the word.
30. Lionel Loueke, “Cantaloupe Island” – This Benin-raised guitarist makes waves with more and more intricate, organic solo records but takes a pause from his compositions to pay tribute to his sometime boss Herbie Hancock with a disc of classic pieces, HH. For someone who knows that catalogue really well, he strips away layers of associations to let me see things anew, and if you don’t already have these pieces tattooed on your brain, it’s a door opening to one of the great writers of the 20th century.
31. Erik Friedlander, “Ripleyisms” – I first came into contact with Friedlander, who rapidly became my favorite cellist, through the John Zorn continuum of artists. He makes any context better, from avant improvisation with Mark Feldman and Sylvie Courvoisier to several of my favorite mid-period Mountain Goats records, to classic post-bop jazz. But even for a fan like me, this record The Sentinel, was a grimy, blues-drenched revelation in a tight trio with Ava Mendoza on guitar and Diego Espinosa on drums and percussion.
32. Ammar 808 featuring Thanjai Nayani Melam, “Duryodhana” – Ammar 808 (Sofyann Ben Youssef) makes some of the most interesting electronic music to break out to a Western audience in a while. He fully integrates the different strands of his music that’s simultaneously meditative and dancefloor-meditative without falling into lazy four on the floor cliches.
33. Kelly Lee Owens featuring John Cale, “Corner Of My Sky” – I wasn’t hip to this Welsh composer-producer until the name of legend John Cale caught my eye. His dry, incantatory vocal drifts through the silky, surging river of Owens’ composition and this gateway drug got me hooked on one of my favorite records (and favorite new artists) of the year so far.
34. Magik Markers, “That Dream (Shitty Beach)” – Magik Markers were one of my favorite bands in my early 20s and I’d given up hope for ever hearing a new record by them with singer/guitarist Elisa Ambrogio’s focus on her own excellent solo records. Within 30 seconds of that big, falling-off-the-rails riff, I was taken back to seeing them in a corner at Skylab, at Bourbon Street, in an abandoned firehouse in Manhattan.
35. Shemekia Copeland, “Money Makes You Ugly” – Another artist who was massively important to me in my 20s and I lost track of, Uncivil War proves her attack is as vital as ever, full of great songs, great riffs (this is my favorite of the set) and proof that classic genres don’t have to stay mired in the past.
36. The Mountain Goats, “Picture of My Dress” – The Mountain Goats have been on a hot streak for a few years and it was very difficult choosing one song of their killing record, Getting Into Knives. This tune, inspired by Columbus breakout writer Maggie Smith, holds a special place in my heart and lets me plug Smith’s terrific new book Keep Moving, something most of us need right now. 
37. Fred Hersch, “All I Want” – One of the preeminent jazz pianists, Hersch took advantage of quarantine to record an album of pieces on the Steinway in his home. He takes the hymn-like threads of this, one of my favorite Joni Mitchell songs, and weaves them into an expansive tapestry without sacrificing their intimacy.