Monthly Playlist – February 2021

Thinking a lot about absent friends lately, and I’m sure that colored these choices. But usual winter melancholy and spiraling showed up, so I tried to counteract that with as much dancing as possible. Courtesy of Hype Machine, a merch table for this playlist: https://hypem.com/merch-table/42OpOdyNgQoMcq1KHEqQ45

Continue reading for notes on these songs.

• John Paul Keith, “If I Had Money” – Memphis is one of my favorite cities, a place I loved with every fiber of my being within half an hour of setting foot there. Catching a set by John Paul Keith is high on that list of reasons and emblematic of what I love about the town: a fantastic songwriter and guitarist Anne turned me onto, making outstanding records of his own and feeling like he knows and has played with everyone, a benchmark for loving your town and music the way I hope I love my town, my friends, and music. 

A few years ago, we realized the only overlapping opportunity was a Saturday night at one of those Beale Street clubs. With a little grumbling but also the sense of “At least this will be hilarious,” we mapped out which band we could comfortably skip at Gonerfest (a hard call – this was a stacked year), had a bracer at the oasis of calm that’s the Peabody Hotel bar. We went through the wanding and the wading to Keith leading a larger band, replete with a three-piece horn section and keys. That configuration knocked me flat against the wall – the sweet and greasy flexibility of that larger group, his delight in the colors they let him play with, getting to lean into the more R&B side of his rep (I maintain that night gave me a version of “That’s How I Got to Memphis” I’ve only seen bettered live once – by Solomon Burke). But what most struck me was how good his material – which I love with a trio or a second guitarist – felt propelled by that big, muscular engine. We stayed for two full sets, barely getting back to the Hi-Tone for the headliner, without an ounce of regret.

This month, Keith put out The Rhythm of the City, and he’s finally captured the feeling I had that night. More than that, he’s made the record that best captures that feeling of Memphis in the sunshine since I’ve been going (anything I already knew and loved – OV Wright, Carla Thomas, Al Green, Ann Peebles – colored my expectation and are impossible to separate). This is the perfect daytime record companion to his earlier Memphis Circa 3 am and his most three-dimensional, richest-sounding record, self-produced and engineered by the great Scott Bomar.

The Rhythm of the City makes the most of a cracking band – highlighting that community connection I pointed out earlier – including drummer Danny Banks (Nicole Atkins), keys maestro Al Gamble (St Paul and the Broken Bones, City Champs), Tierinii and Tikyra Jackson from Southern Avenue on vocals, and Hi Rhythm Section legend Archie “Hubbie” Turner on clavinet. The tune I’m leading off with boasts a sizzling arrangement by trumpeter Marc Franklin. Franklin is probably best known for that latter-day Gregg Allman band. I first learned about him when a review hipped me to Rev. Sekou, and the feel epitomizes that dancing, strutting in the sunlight, even if you’re shaking off a hangover feeling that’s all over this record. Every element combines to make me miss Memphis terribly.

• Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, “Call Your Mom” – I caught Seattle’s Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio on a recommendation from Andrew Patton when they played a dinner series at our finest French restaurant, The Refectory. Anne and I went unprepared with Andrew and his wife Jess, and the trio blew us all away. The best Booker T-ish instrumental soul I’d seen since early Sugarman 3 or Soulive. I Told You So is their finest moment yet, a series of pulsing, crunchy grooves rendered in bright, sharp (but never glossy) color. This song balances swing, longing, and throb the way I want all dance music to do.
• Black Coffee with Maxine Ashley and Sun-El Musician, “You Need Me” – This caught my attention as a Sun-El Musician feature, one of the freshest electronic producers I’d heard in a while with two records I love. I loved a couple of early Black Coffee – Sun-El’s fellow South African electronic musician – singles but had utterly lost track in the intervening decade. The ingratiating creep of this collaboration with singer Maxine Ashley, all slinky streetlight shadows and heartbeat sank its hooks in me. It’s lush and spiky in the right places, steady and surprising the way you want a dancefloor to feel underneath you.
• Betty Shirley and The Red Organ Trio, “Sunday Kind of Love” – New Orleans was another city I loved immediately – it says something if I have a stroke in your town and, as soon as recovered, can’t wait to visit again. Drummer Simon Lott II juiced that love with a couple of long hangs with our mutual friends Mike Gamble and Tony Barba (and a ferocious set late night at Dragon’s Den), so when I saw he was playing on this, I had to check it out. Classic organ trio with sweetly stabbing guitar from Chris Alford, the gliding burn of Will Thompson’s organ, and Lott’s immediately identifiable drumming, surprising without upstaging the singer or the song. And the singer, good lord. Betty Shirley is what I want in this brand of late-night balladry, dripping like candle wax and drenched in the humidity that drives me insane anywhere except that city.
• Moses Boyd featuring Katy B, “2 Far Gone (Vocal Mix)” – I talk about that current generation of London jazzers, and they keep blowing my mind. Moses Boyd’s Dark Matter last year picked up the mantle of acid jazz so many of us had such hope for when I was in High School. It dusted off the coffeehouse/striving clothing boutique reputation clinging to the genre in the intervening years, reclaiming its potential. This remix pumps up the original dancefloor vibration and brings in garage diva Katy B to give it that stiletto-edge gleam.
• William Parker, “A Great Day to Be Dead” – William Parker was one of the first free jazz players and composers I loved and went deep on, including following the spiderweb of other players on those records. He’s having a more-than-deserved moment including a phenomenal, deeply researched, and even more deeply felt biography out, Universal Tonality, and a mammoth ten disc set on Bandcamp Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World restates and amplifies his commitment to abstraction but also his commitment to communicating and his open-hearted love of melody. Off the Blue Limelight disc, this track expands on pastoral trends in his early work with a lilting melody from oboe player Jim Ferraiuolo slipping over the dappled sun-river of Mara Rosenbloom’s piano amidst a landscape of swirling strings. All set against a gorgeous vocal from Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez that never fails to choke me up right around the moment of “Let’s go down to the river. We’re home.”
• Emmet Cohen, “Toast to Lo” – Continuing those themes of community and connection, the collaborative nature of jazz lends itself to tightly-knit scenes. One of the most vibrant and loving I’ve ever been close to orbits around Smalls and Mezzrow in the West Village. These two clubs of Spike Wilner’s remain dedicated to late nights, to jam sessions, and to providing a mix of globe-hopping superstars and college students. They lost one of their most beloved lights when Lawrence “Lo” Leathers was murdered in 2019, and this beautiful elegy features Cohen, known for his mastery of the stride idiom, leading a storming quintet of close friends of Lo’s and habitues of that Village scene. Cohen provides the glue of a ferocious rhythm section with Kyle Poole on drums and Russell Hall on bass while also lighting the fire of the gorgeous, longing melody. That melody is picked up and turned into a sea of fireworks by one of the finest solos I’ve ever heard from tenor giant Melissa Aldana, volleying and jousting with fiery, melodic trumpeter Marquis Hill. This remembrance leaves room for the joy of laughter and the renewed love of being together, the sense that jazz is always a conversation in a room.
• Ethan Iverson, “Tempus Fugit” – For a commission from the Umbria Jazz Festival, Ethan Iverson put together a righteous quintet to pay tribute to Bud Powell, backed by a sympathetic big band. This Powell classic features crisp, evocative playing from Lewis Nash on drums and a deep hookup with longtime Iverson collaborator Ben Street on bass. Iverson knows this classic at a cellular level and plays it like it’s brand new, with jaw-dropping solos from Ingrid Jensen’s trumpet and Dayna Stephens’ sax.
• Lost Horizons featuring Marissa Nadler, “Marie” – I’ve been a fan of Marissa Nadler’s for many years. Her voice and mysterious lyrical sensibility fit this collaboration with Simon Raymonde from the Cocteau Twins and Richard Thomas from Dif Juz. A haunting landscape unfixed between time and place, like drifting through a warm lake and watching a lightning storm in the distance.
• Lara Downes and Titus Underwood, “Song For the Lonely” – Pianist Lara Downes put together a rapturous EP Remember Me to Harlem, providing a necessary reminder of the rich black American tradition in classical music. My favorite track is this lovely reading of the William Grant Still piece with Downes’ piano dueting with Titus Underwood’s oboe. This sounds like a cold wind down a street (and up your back) right when you’re not sure Spring’s ever going to come.
• Toumani Diabaté and the London Symphony Orchestra, “Haïnamady Town” – I found Diabaté’s records in High School and early college, leading me into the rich wells of Malian music (I also saw Ali Farka Touré around that time), particularly wearing out his collaboration with Taj Mahal. And I remember seeing him live for the first time, right before my birthday in 2007, in the same college theater I saw my first production of Into the Woods, a magical night that still rings in my head fourteen years (this month) later. So I was probably primed for this kind of cross-genre blend. Even more primed because my sentimental ass is a sucker for strings – I love those Ray Charles records, syrupy as I acknowledge they are, I love the swell when Sinatra tears into a Nelson Riddle arrangement. And Diabaté’s kora is that kind of voice, pure and sweet but powerful enough to rise over the orchestra and bring it with him.
• Arlo Parks, “Eugene” – One of the most exciting singer-songwriters I’ve heard in a minute, London’s Arlo Parks grabbed me (and the rest of the world) with her world-beating album Collapsed in Sunbeams. This poison-dart character study recalls so many college-era days and shifting vulnerabilities and allegiances, “You play him records I showed you. Read him Sylvia Plath – I thought that was our thing. I hate that son of a bitch,” but delivered with the ease of a warm breeze and a melody I want to roll around in.
• Archie Shepp and Jason Moran, “Lush Life” – If you want an 80% chance at making it on one of these mixes, a version of “Lush Life,” my favorite Billy Strayhorn song, is a pretty good shortcut. While I’m a diehard partisan for Archie Shepp’s classic ‘60s fire music, his more delicate recent work has more charms than it frequently gets credit. He brings a breathtaking bruised beauty to this standard of a life wasted, with his tone shining through Jason Moran’s piano, like shifting stained glass in the kind of old bar I miss most.
• Yasmin Williams featuring Amadou Kouyate, “Urban Driftwood” – I’m a sucker for American Primitive guitar, and we’ve been awash in great examples lately; for the two that made this playlist, there were six in earlier versions that didn’t quite make the cut. But my favorite new exemplar of the form is Yasmin Williams. This breathtaking sophomore album sums up the history of solo finger-style guitar. It puts that history through a personal, idiosyncratic lens for the most exciting example of the form I’ve heard since Marisa Anderson. The subtle djembe backing from Amadou Kouyate helps make this title track one of the most fascinating things I expect to hear all year.
• Vic Mensa featuring Wyclef Jean and Chance the Rapper, “SHELTER” – I have a known soft spot for Wyclef Jean; his diverse party record The Carnival came out at exactly the right time for me, right after the Fugees soundtracked my high school experience. So I was a sucker for hearing a new tune that started with that inimitable guitar and vocal. The Vic Mensa and Chance the Ripper verses set up a hard, incisive look at America’s current – and perpetual – trauma.
• Pony Bradshaw, “Calico Jim” – The chime of the guitar and the searching, croon on the verge of breaking down in the world-weary shuffle driving this beautiful Pony Bradshaw meditation on finding some uneasy peace with the world that felt like it vibrated against that previous song, “Talking tall in them snakeskin boots, spitting lies and tobacco juice; it don’t have to be high drama.”
• Becca Mancari, “Annie” – The thick strings and echo are a haze of smoke in a cocktail lounge, sharpening the intense drama of this killing Mancari tune, reminding me of some of the more ornate Sarah Borges ballads. She makes the most out of a tight rhythm section and a keen ear for finding maximum heartbreak in an economy of words without relying on any tricks or shortcuts. Just singing “When you fall away, I’ll be there” almost made me fall out of my seat. I can’t wait for the whole record.
• Aaron Lee Tasjan, “Cartoon Music” – With Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan! Columbus ex-pat Aaron Lee Tasjan came a huge step closer to integrating his various music personalities. This snide, sultry vamp deploys classic ‘60s strings and throbbing fuzz bass with a big cracking snare. His voice burrows deep into an insidious hook with an affect that made this Marc Almond fan grin from ear to ear.
• Goat Girl, “Closing In” – London’s Goat Girl gave me one of the most fun post-punk records I’ve heard in years. Choppy guitars over a swinging rhythm section and big hooks that reveal more and more as I dig in and sly lyrics – “Make up words just as we rehearsed – drain ‘em out, fear and doubt disperse.” This is pure joy that feels targeted for me.
• Demoniac, “Equilibrio Fatal” – This Chilean blackened thrash band is a burst of everything teenage me loved and wanted in a rock band. Swinging drums and bass, riffs that balance that tendency toward higher math with thickness and are still jam-packed with hooks and a vocalist who makes you feel like you want to run right through a brick wall. Great songs and big fun.
• Eximperitus, “Utpāda” – This band from Belarus, shortened from a full name of Eximperituserqethhzebibšiptugakkathšulweliarzaxułum, is a little proggier than I usually like my metal. Still, there’s a heaping serving of foreboding death metal grind and those typewriter drums are mixed far enough to the back… I have a hard time putting my finger on it, but I can’t get enough. I recommended this to three people within a day of playing it.
• Alostmen featuring Villy, “Teach Me” – Alostmen take traditional Ghanaian instruments and rhythms, like the kologo singer Stevo Atambire, and twist them into something rough and new. Nigerian singer Villy guests on this infectious single. I defy anyone to get these punchy lyrics and the syncopated talking drum riff out of their head.
• Bomba Estéro, “Deja” – Whenever this Colombian band puts out a new song, it’s cause for rejoicing in my world, and this title track of their upcoming album is a prime slice of their brand of psychedelic cumbia. Bubbling percussion as good for sipping a drink as for tearing up a dance floor and a barbed, hooky guitar riff backing a soaring vocal.
• Joey Quinoñes, “The World I Know” – Bringing it down a little in tempo but ratcheting up the emotional intensity with this aching slice of East LA Latin soul. As soon as I heard this – I want to say on Binky Griptite’s radio show but could have been John Wendland’s – I needed to listen to it repeatedly and tell people. A perfect ballad from the near-flawless ears of Colemine Records.
• Nahawa Doumbia, “Ndiagneko” – A Malian singer I’m ashamed to say I didn’t know anything about – I was barely aware of the wassoulou style she’s legendary for – but this blew me away. The didadi rhythms cutting across the n’goni and guitar draw me forward, and her vocal breaks my heart.
• Adrian Younge, “The American Negro” – Adrian Younge never seems to let me down – his production for acts from Ghostface to the Delfonics to Roy Ayers, his soundtrack work, Midnight Hour, I love it all. This title track off a new project brings together everything he does better than anybody else now, lush ‘70s strings and pulsing contemporary rhythms with a deep emotional punch.
• Bodies of Water, “Trust Your Love” – This LA Band merges a slippery, infectious groove with a quirky, searching vocal and creates a refreshing, bright sound flecked with enough darkness and curiosity to keep me digging into it.
• Tokischa featuring Yallin la Mas Viral and La Perversa, “Yo No Me Voy Acostar” – An article about the Dominican label Paulus sent me down a rabbit hole and this posse cut by – if my read is right – three of their superstars is the kind of raunchy, joyous tune that has me hungry for summer and to be around people again.
• Quiet Child featuring Tinashe, “Delilah (GUDFELLA x Levity Remix)” – I’m eternally perplexed that Tinashe isn’t a giant star, and this collaboration with producer Quiet Child in a slinky, shuddering remix adds fuel to that fire. A perfect dose of after-hours club adrenaline, all stabbing lights, and sweet lies.
• Stiff Richards, “Got It To Go” – The other kind of after-hours warehouse party I’m too old for but miss fondly. Stiff Richards takes the garage-punk template, turns the ass-shaking rhythms and Stonesy insouciance up with little hints of Idles and catchy, catchy songs. High on my list of bands to finally see when all this lifts, ideally a bill with Liquor Store or Bad Sports and somebody local I haven’t heard of yet.
• The Staves, “Satisfied” – I’m coming in late on this band, but Good Woman kills me. Anthemic and delicate at the same time, that mournful synthesizer behind the soaring harmonies and a lyric that cuts right through me, echoing, “Don’t give up – you’re never satisfied.”
• Sarah Mary Chadwick, “Let’s Go Home” – This New Zealand singer-songwriter delivers on all the promise of an album called Me and Ennui Are Friends, Baby, with almost claustrophobic vocal and piano arrangements that force microscopic zooming in on each nuance of inflection, every turn of phrase, every melodic cell. The songs reward that scrutiny and never let the listener off the hook. This song had me at the first verse, “Let’s go home while home’s still…something,” with that little shrug before the last word, “Let’s go home while home’s still there, baby. And I’m not much for repeating lyrics, but I’ll repeat every sickness I ever had, baby.”
• Jillette Johnson, “I Shouldn’t Go Anywhere” – Another song where the opening lines slapped me across the face, and I knew I had to hear more – “No excuses; they are useless. Pointing blame has proven fruitless.” An almost Joni Mitchell-like ability to make melodies resolve in unexpected places that feel like the only possible way they could have landed and a creeping, minimal arrangement building like a snowball in density and power.
• Frankie Sunswept, “Married in my Mind” – Amid a new wave of cocaine country, Frankie Sunswept (who I knew from the garage rock band Crushed Out) paints this sweeping reminder of the crash and the comedown, splashed in neon washes of pedal steel and a cosmic/Bakersfield chug.
• JKLOL, “Build It Right” – Two members of this supergroup I have a long history with – Jefferson Hamer blew me away with his collaboration with Anais Mitchell on new arrangements of the Scottish Child Ballads (and a breathtaking set opening for Punch Brothers at the best-sounding theater in town). Kristin Andreassen killed me with her record, The Gondolier. She then provided one of my happiest surprises at a Big Ears when I stopped in a Knoxville scotch bar for an hour, and she was MC’ing a roots revue, calling dances, and delivering a “Crayola Doesn’t Make a Color For Your Eyes” that almost made me drop my drink. The other two – Lauren Balthrop and Lawson White – I went into completely blind. This taste of their debut lives up to expectations. With lilting guitar and interwoven harmonies, this is the kind of joyous, rippling folk I need for walking around in the Spring and makes me miss Tennessee. 
• Rob Noyce, “Invisible Ridicule” – Continuing the hints of spring from the last couple tunes, this sun-dappled but driving solo guitar feels built for long walks. 
• Jeremy Pelt, “A Beautiful (F*cking) Lie” – Jeremy Pelt has been one of our finest trumpet players for years, balancing the melodic and fiery and always sounding like nobody else. He’s grounded in all the facets of jazz history and using them to feed his forward-thinking approach. His new record, Griot! This is Important ties in with a new book of his interviewing other great trumpeters, and the record alternates spoken word among reflective ballads and sharp indictments. This tune uses a deceptive placidity over an acidic churn that’s my favorite kind of sucker-punch with an unfurling, controlled, tense brass line at its heart.
• Kid Congo Powers and the Pink Monkeybirds, “He Walked In” – I’m sure I’ve talked at length about the mind-expanding experience of seeing Kid Congo Powers do a record release in 2006 after being a fan of so many of his records in so many contexts for so many years. This new EP, Sean Delear, captures that feeling better than any of his outstanding records since. Going from glam stomps so surfy garage ragers to this extended acid trip travelogue in tribute to his friend and bandmate Jeffrey Lee Pierce, I can’t seem to stop playing.
• Nun Gun featuring Sohail Daulatzai, “Under The Throne” – This has a similarly expansive, distorted landscape feeling to the previous track and comes from an intoxicating new band featuring Lee Teschen and Ryan Mahan from one of my favorite bands of the last few years, Algiers. The cinematic texture and slow, dark creep build into something familiar and surprising at the same time.
• Largemouth Brass Band, “Night Lightning” – I love this era where every medium-sized city has at least one brass band. Supplementing our august example of the form, New Basics Brass Band, comes the younger upstarts in Largemouth Brass Band. A few years ago at Jazz and Ribs Fest, I saw them and enjoyed it, but it felt a little unformed with too thin a low-end for my taste. With their new record Repilot, they correct that. It’s a thick, grooving tune with guest spots from other fine Columbus players, and this is one of my favorite tunes off it. Ready for barbecues and any party outside in the sunshine with plastic cups as soon as it’s safe.
• Joeboy, “OH” – Rising Nigerian R&B star Joeboy burst into the rest of the world with a firecracker of a debut full-length, Somewhere Between Beauty & Magic, and this is one of my couple favorite songs from it. Shimmering textures and an easy, seductive vocal over a rhythm that shakes every cell of mine.
• Muni Long featuring Sukihana, “Thot Thoughts” – Muni Long comes into the spotlight after acclaim as a songwriter for Rhianna and others with another in a string of warm, earworm singles that’s a funny, deep grooving entry in the lineage of classic booty call tunes, aided by the stinging one-liners and smoked-caramel delivery of rapper Sukihana.
• Ebhoni, “Hit This” – Another R&B song that makes me wish we could still throw parties. Hard seduction with a silky drawing-you-in tumble of delivery and a tempo right between dancing and swaying.
• Senora May, “No Sweeter Thing” – This Kentucky-based singer-songwriter got my attention with its woozy, sticky horns and disarmingly low-key vocal. The sympathetic production by Jessica Lea Mayfield places these paeans to home and stability in a three-dimensional, nuanced setting that highlights and contrasts May’s textures on this light song about being “Sweetly, madly, blind.”
• Bill Callahan and Bonnie “Prince” Billy featuring Cassie Berman, “Wild Kindness” – We drift into the homestretch of this month’s mix with the first in a series of prayers. This Silver Jews cover features Callahan and Oldham singing in unison with Cassie Berman (also on bass) on a lovely cover of this Silver Jews classic and a chorus of other collaborators and friends joining in on the hooks. Lots of us are still fucked up in the wake of David Berman’s death, and there’s never a wrong time to remember this chorus, “I’m gonna shine out in the wild kindness and hold the world to its word.”
• Joe Lovano, Marilyn Crispell, and Carmen Castaldi, “Sacred Chant” – Joe Lovano’s warm vocal tenor sax tone has never sounded better than it does here, dancing like moonlight with his longtime comrade and collaborator Marilyn Crispell’s piano. They reunite with Trio Tapestry partner and (like Lovano) Cleveland native Carmen Castaldi for this record of exquisite holy sculpture that’s been my favorite thing to write to since it came out.
• Charles Lloyd and the Marvels, “Anthem” – Another tenor heavyweight with a rich warmth to his tone, Charles Lloyd has been making the most of this late career resurgence with astonishing collaborations with Jason Moran and Lucinda Williams while growing into his current working unit and one of the best bands of his career, The Marvels. This take on the Leonard Cohen classic lets Lloyd’s saxophone and tumble around Frisell’s guitar and Greg Leisz’s steel with the always empathetic rhythm section of Rueben Rogers and Eric Harland providing a solid foundation and a gateway to the distant shore we all hope to find.