Playlist – August 2021

Had a hard time getting going, a hard time connecting for the first half of this month: to music, to relationships, to writing. Some of that was the lingering fallout from my COVID breakthrough case, part was in response to the overwhelming, oppressive heat beyond what Ohio’s used to in August, and some was just ennui, the wall I hit after rushing too hard to get things close to a normal we might not see again without making the proper allowances for stamina and change. 

But I made it through, some interactions with old and new friends, a couple astonishing shows, some mind-blowing theatre as local troupes come back, and a handful of those moments where I was playing a new record while I’m on the treadmill at the gym or walking to the bus to work and a song felt like a lightning bolt going up and down my spine. They all reminded me why I do this and what I want to be. Thanks for listening and checking in. I hope you find something to enjoy here. 

As usual, keep reading below for notes on the songs. 

Bandcamp links courtesy of Hype Machine’s Merch Table: https://hypem.com/merch-table/671AAQ5TJFQzBboAqN20E6

• Wanda Jackson, “You Drive Me Wild” – From her heyday in the ‘50s to her majestic honky-tonk second act in the ‘60s through her stellar revival, Wanda Jackson’s always had great taste in collaborators who bring additional flavors to her work while still centering that magic that made us fall in love with her. I remember the first time I got to see her live, at the local blues and folk bar The Thirsty Ear, backed by (and with a scorching opening set) the great Rosie Flores and her band. I found things to love on all the comeback records – the irrepressible backing of the Cramps on a couple of songs on Heart Trouble, the thick horn sections, and joyous stylistic swerves on the Jack White-produced The Party Ain’t Over, the tight five-piece band and impeccable song choices on the Justin Townes Earle collab Unfinished Business – but none have equaled the surging majesty of Encore, co-produced by Joan Jett and Kenny Laguna. This Jett-written stomp going back to her Runaways days is a perfect showcase of the power still in one of the great growls of rock and roll, with immaculately sleazy backing. A call to arms with crunchy guitar. 
• Marc Anthony, “Pa’lla Voy” – I was 19 when Marc Anthony broke out with the English-speaking audience as a salsa superstar (I didn’t find any of those earlier techno records until much later) and while I had an affection for all the Latin crossover acts in that period – hell, I was happy to hear Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” blaring from a bar jukebox last night – Anthony was my favorite. I kept in touch with his work periodically and never caught a bad song, but I probably hadn’t heard a Marc Anthony single in close to 10 years. Notice of this on twitter piqued my interest and I loved it immediately. Apparently a reworking of Senegalese song “Yay Boy” by the band Africando, this reminded me of an interview I saw with him on top of the world where Anthony said, “I look for all my songs in ballad form then see if they can translate to salsa.” The rippling percussion here and those flamethrower horns, plus a sunlight-on-cobblestone acoustic guitar break make this a marvelous ode to the last gasp of summer: linen shirts, sweating drinks, and swing. 
• Shannon and the Clams, “Midnight Wine” – A new Shannon and the Clams record is always a time for celebration in Sanfordtown – I’ve treasured and been awe-struck every time I’ve seen this band including one of the highlights of our much-missed local garage-punk festival Sick Weekend (with a stellar turn from Hunx on guitar) and a victory lap on their home turf of San Francisco for Burger Boogaloo that made Anne say, “That’s everything I want to see in a band.” Year of the Spider might be her best, most sharply focused album yet. This loose-limbed, cinematic stomp is a declaration and a warning wrapped in a sticky organ part and a guitar solo that feels like glass shattering and turning into light. “Dazed under the naked moon, I know the end will find me soon. Babbling comes up my throat: a melody I’ll never know.” 
• Marisa Anderson and William Tyler, “At the Edge of the World” – I’ve been raving about Marisa Anderson since I first heard her, and William Tyler damn near as much (even with a touring set where Anne said, “Why do all these songs sound like ‘Going to California’?”) and I included one of the advance singles from their duo record on an earlier playlist. When Lost Futures came out, I devoured it, easily one of my records of the year, with the right mix of hope in each other and longing for what’s torn from us or turned to dust I look for in most art. This track is an example of everything I love so much about the record. Their guitars waltzing with each other, one a bright, chiming source of light with the other casting shadows, one sculpting and the other throwing in an unexpected element. There’s so much space here but that space is balanced by a sense of motion, a drive that doesn’t fall into easy tropes and an expanse that leaves plenty of room for the flamenco-tinged melody to triangulate with Gisela Rodriguez Fernandez’s violin and the rhythm to chop up against Patricia Vázquez Gómez’s quijada. 
• Enchanters, “Back Stabbers UK” -Toronto band Enchanters serve us this catchy slab of garage punk with an appealing acid-tinged guitar solo and snarled vocal from Craig Daniels of the Leather Uppers and a driving bass line by pal Derek Brunelle and a teen-beat stomp courtesy of Ter from the City Sweethearts. One of the bands I most want to see in the next year if we keep being able to open up. 
• Los Lobos, “Los Chucos Suaves” – Los Lobos’ Native Sons is exactly what I’m looking for in a covers record. This personal travelogue through the LA bands and songs that shaped their trajectory is imbued with all the fun and all the driving passion they bring to records of their originals – when Anne and I saw them open for Emmylou Harris a month or so ago (in the first large show we’d seen since being vaccinated) easily the highlight was their raging take on Thee Midniters’ “Love Special Delivery” off this then-new record. I first found out about Lalo Guerrero through LA guitarist Skip Heller’s insightful writing on various web forums when I was in my late teens/early twenties. Heller’s passion for digging deep on anything that interested him spawned a sampler Career Suicide that included artists I was already a fan of – Uri Caine, DJ Bonebrake, Katy Moffatt, Big Sandy – but my favorite track was a live recording with the great Lalo Guerrero from a project where Heller recreated classic Guererro arrangements and let a septet, reviving songs one of the great LA voices hadn’t done in years. That sent me to find as much Guerrero (and the surrounding Chicano scene) as I could, especially the Pachuco Boogie compilation, and including the Los Lobos collaboration Papa’s Dream. I haven’t heard as good a Lalo Guerrero cover – and I’ve heard a few over the years – as the hot blooded, dance floor explosion Los Lobos turn “Los Chucos Suaves” into here. 
• Yola, “Whatever You Want” – I talk a lot about “When in doubt, do the thing you’re mulling over.” Yola came through town with Amythyst Kiah a year and a half ago or so, right before things shut down, and it wasn’t a venue I loved and it was an inconvenient time, and I’ve been kicking myself for not doing it since. That kicking got so strong it almost threw my knee out with the British singer-songwriter’s astonishing new record Stand For Myself. I had the hardest time picking a single song off this loose and lush record, produced by Dan Auerbach, but this hip-swaying regret ballad in classic warm, ‘70s tradition (even co-written by John Bettis who gave us “Slow Hand,” “Human Nature,” and “Sweet Beginnings” along with Yola an Auerbach) wouldn’t let me go. That echo on “You don’t give a damn…” as it fades into a euphoric guitar solo and dancefloor rapture is something I could live off for weeks. 
• Marina Sena, “Seu Olhar” – I felt a similarity in the slinky percussion and the chunky guitar as the previous song, and the way Sena’s voice glides over the backing track. I find the mystery in “Seu Olhar,” my first exposure to this Brazilian singer, intoxicating. 
• Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, “That’s All It Takes” – A mention from Boo Mitchell’s Instagram got me to check out Ingram’s second album 662 and it’s one of my favorite contemporary blues albums in years. He doesn’t push his voice, he leans into the soft, burnished quality and lets the song do the work – his clean, sharp guitar and those sweet horns provide the perfect backing for this quintessential late summer slice of memory and nostalgia. 
• Southern Avenue, “Don’t Hesitate (Call Me)” – I saw Southern Avenue completely cold at Woodlands Tavern when my pal and guiding light in all things funky Andrew Patton and I decided to see Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe. Southern Avenue’s opening set turned that venue – clearly full of people who didn’t know anything about them like I didn’t – out. One of the most exciting live bands I’d seen in a while, clearly indebted to and students of classic Stax, Hi Records, and Goldwax, but not afraid to bring their other influences into it. With Be the Love That You Want, Southern Avenue have a record that’s as good as the show. Co-Produced by Steve Berlin of Los Lobos and their guitarist Ori Naftaly, this song feels like the gorgeous sunlight on the various eras of architecture as you drive around Memphis, dipping on and off the band’s eponymous street, looking for a cold drink. 
• Gunna featuring Taurus, “9 Times Outta 10” – This track from rising Atlanta rapper Gunna, billed with producer Taurus, is imbued with a similar humid languid quality that felt like it echoed against the last couple of tracks. That cracking drum snaps to attention in the haze of nodding out and Gunna’s vocal has an icy confidence that implies a lackadaisical mumble while articulating every word, so he drives them home. “Nine times out of ten, I’ll probably sin again.” 
• The Bug featuring Manga Saint HIlare, “High Rise”- I’ve been a fan of Kevin Martin since I was a kid, originally through his collaborations with John Zorn and Justin Broadrick. One of my favorite live music moments was getting to see Martin and Broadrick together – as Zonal and featuring Moor Mother – in a London club with a sign taped over the bar “VOLUMES WILL BE EXCESSIVE.” Another favorite – was 2008, taking Anne (I think on her first trip) to a basement lower Manhattan club, called Love – in his dub-focused guise The Bug. I’ve never heard bass lines twist and melt around me, I’ve never been so unprepared to dance to something that forced my body to move. It felt like I was sweating out whole versions of myself. I’ve never seen that project live again but those records still hit me that hard and his new one, Fire astonishes me. This track featuring grime MC Manga Saint Hilare uses a slow, lugubrious bass line (augmented by sampled horns?) and staccato machine gun drum rolls under sharp, cinema verité snapshots of a world in crisis and people still standing up. “We don’t respond to no threats – we’ve seen worse in the flesh…we don’t take the high road. We just screw face and explode.” 
• Theon Cross, “We Go Again” – Another slice of ominous London electronica, this one from tuba player Theon Cross (Sons of Kemet). This feels like the fruition all the promise I heard in the acid jazz I got turned onto in High School with no time for the coffeehouse niceties swamping those earlier records. As good for swaggering through the sunlight as the leaves fall as it is for watching the scene across a bar in the dead of night, trying to clear your head. 
• Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble, “Despedida: Del Mar” – For years, O’Farrill and his band – in residences at Lincoln Center and Birdland – has kept the flame of Afro-Cuban jazz burning brightly in New York and taken it around the world, spawning countless bands out of players who cut their teeth in his orchestra. This opening piece of a suite he created for the Cuban Malpaso Dance Company starts with just O’Farrill’s piano, almost a breather after the density of the last few songs, then the commonality shows up as it builds with the orchestra – including a blistering but never outside the narrative trumpet part from Adam O’Farrill and a driving groove from Zack O’Farrill, his sons, and the surging, interwoven percussion of Vince Cherico, Carlos “Carly” Maldonado, and Victor Pablo Garcia Gaetan. 
• Rauw Alejandro, “Todo De Ti” – Rauw Alejandro uses a kaleidoscopic range of club and dance music styles and always sounds like nobody else. “Todo De Ti” has an easy going ‘80s roller disco funk vibration, sweetened with handclaps, sunshine harmonies, and shimmering synths I can’t get enough of. 
• Pamela Z, “He Says Yes (From Echo)” – I don’t remember the first time I heard San Francisco avant-garde composer Pamela Z but the moment I did it felt like I’d always been with those sounds, that palette of colors but that didn’t limit my ability to be mesmerized or astonished. This solo record – following 2004’s masterwork A Delay is Better, is another potent dose of wildly surprising, infectious investigation of the limits of human voice and human memory. The shine layered on her voice, the way she lights it through different angles, is what connected this song with the previous track for me, and the chopped, almost stuttering rhythm bonded it to the next. 
• Aaron Dilloway and Lucrecia Delt, “The Blob” – I’ve been a fan of Aaron Dilloway’s work since the late ‘90s when those early Wolf Eyes records blew my whole world open and, for a few years, Columbus was a pivotal stop on the touring noise scene with several of my friends collaborating with, hosting, and logging miles on the road with Dilloway and his pals. This collaborative record with Colombian musician Lucrecia Dalt who I wasn’t very familiar with, is a breath of fresh air, two distinct voices connected by spider webs of lightning for something that sounds old as time and familiar in the best ways. 
• Humberto Alvarez, “A Night View” – From first listen Accord, the first record I heard from avant-garde accordionist and “sound healer” Humberto Alvarez, beguiled me. A record of lush nocturnes and whispered prayers for the world and those of us within. The tones that decay in such a way we see the different colors shine through them as they fade connect this song with the previous two. 
• Roy Hargrove and Mulgrew Miller, “Monk’s Mood” – These newly released live recordings of the great Hargrove and Miller who both left us too soon and recently (Miller in 2013, Hargrove in ‘18), are a blessing for at least couple reasons. Two of the great New York players, emblematic of a scene, a vibe, and a culture that’s now fractured and changed, some of the last links to that mid-’50s bop heyday, who dedicated much of their time to uplifting and enriching their community. Any time you saw either of them on a bandstand – and it wasn’t uncommon to see them playing a supporting role or even at a jam session with cats half their age – you knew you were in for a good night. These duets, captured at an apartment gig, with no rehearsal, playing standards they both knew in their blood (and de rigueur for coming up in the rooms they did) feels as close to being in those rooms and watching uncommon magic born out of common reference points as any recording I can think of. This track, one of my favorite Monk compositions (a tall order from probably my favorite American composer) doesn’t try to be a definitive reading, it doesn’t have to. It’s the beauty of that moment, captured and preserved like stardust. 
• Kenny Garrett, “For Art’s Sake” – I think my first real awakening to Kenny Garrett – one of the definitive alto sax sounds of my lifetime – was midway through college when I heard him on a Jeff “Tain” Watts record and a John Scofield record in proximity; his ability to connect ideas in such a fluid, conversation way left me breathless. He’s still doing it – as on this marvelous new Mack Avenue album Sounds From the Ancestors. This joyous and bittersweet track, steeped in memory and celebration, pays tribute to the great drummer and bandleader Art Blakey with fiery, grooving work from Ronald Bruner, Jr, on drums, ringing piano from Johnny Mercier, and a front-line pairing Garrett with trumpeter Maurice Brown. 
• Booker Stardrum, “Parking Lot (Carl Stone Remix)” – This track off percussionist and composer Booker Stardrum’s (who I first heard as a member of Landlady) beguiling album CRATER gets an expansive, jittery remix from avant-garde electronic composer Carl Stone. To me this has some similar spiritual, remembering your friends and building to something-exciting-is-happening-around-you feelings as those last few tunes, but coming from a right angle and splashed with different, more synthetic colors. Or maybe it’s just my midwestern affection for drinking, dancing with my friends, and listening to music in parking lots as a key component of the summer I’m projecting on the piece. 
• Molly Herron and Science Ficta, “Lyra” – Composer Molly Herron’s astonishing record Through Lines drills deep into the rarely played (except in period adaptations) viola da gamba with an ensemble of three viol players, Science Ficta (Loren Ludwig, Zoe Weiss, Kivie Cahn-Lipman). The percussive, thick tones bounce off one another with gorgeous negative space between them. The visions this record conjured reminded me of the Vija Celmins paintings that so enraptured me last year, and so much else. I’ll be unpacking Through Lines for a long time. 
• Tré Burt, “By The Jasmine” – Up there with the Yola, this was another record I had an almost impossible time choosing from but this deeply sad piece from Tré Burt about the weaponized fear (or “fear”) of entitled white people wouldn’t let me go on with what I was doing until I listened more closely to the rest of it. Then listened again. Without a wasted word or a superfluous note, in a tight arrangement, he planted his flag in the ground as one of the finest examples in a tradition personified by Burt’s mentor and label head John Prine. “When Dante woke up, he didn’t mean to. He coulda used a little more time in his dreams.” 
• Kamasi Washington, “My Friend Of Misery” – I’ve been really enjoying most of the varied covers of Metallica’s Black Album released to celebrate its 30^th anniversary but I haven’t loved any quite as much as this soulful, swinging read from LA sax player Kamasi Washington and band. Patrice Quinn’s understated vocal, slowly layered with distortion and shadow, let me see this song I grew up with (the record hit when I was 11 and every song felt like it was on the radio) in a more specific, more intense light than I had in the 30 years I lived with it. 
• Nathan-Paul and the Admirables, “For The Night” – Nathan-Paul, alto sax player and formerly the band leader for Cleveland-Akron soul sensation Wesley Bright, steps out on his own with the afrobeat-tinged harder funk project Nathan-Paul and the Admirables. The whole debut record Funk Me, is a sticky, frothy late summer delight, with expectations that this tune in particular featuring torchy vocals from Billie Mitchel riding a thumping groove will be in heavy rotation when we can gather safely. 
• Andrew Gabbard, “Cloud of Smoke” – I first knew Andrew Gabbard with Cincinnati psych-tinged garage rock stompers Thee Shams (who I saw play some killer shows with my friends from the same Cincy scene, The Griefs) and continued to follow him through the harder, acid-fried ‘70s rock of Buffalo Killers, but lost track for a few years. This solo record was a fantastic surprise reacquaintance – Gabbard singing in the sweetest part of his range over a loping, steel-drenched acoustic guitar groove about the kind of longing that slides right in where the seasons meet. 
• Connie Smith, “I Just Don’t Believe Me Anymore” – Connie Smith’s The Cry of the Heart is the kind of pure country record that could have fit into any of the six decades she’s been singing brilliantly in the 55 years since her first album came out. Beautifully produced by her husband Marty Stuart and Harry Stinson, with a crack band of multi-generational Nashville veterans from Harold “Pig” Robbins to Kenny Vaughan to Chris Scruggs. This Glenn Ashworth-Dallas Frazier weeper feels tailor made for her supple voice. “I wouldn’t trust my eyes if you came walking through that door.” 

• Martha Wainwright, “Rainbow” – I played the hell out of Martha Wainwright’s first couple albums, especially I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too, but I lost track for a while. Her new one, Love Will Be Reborn, made me regret what I’ve missed and feel lucky it showed up right at that moment. A blistering set of songs with lean close-to-the bone arrangements. This tune explodes the tight world she constructs on much of the rest of the record with a guitar part that quavers and burns. “You got me running around, losing ground, changing towns like a clown.” 
• Jade Bird, “Open up the Heavens” – This London-based singer-songwriter’s second album Different Kinds of Light took everything good about her eponymous debut and made it sharper, more vibrant, and more three-dimensional. This taunting seduction orbits around an infectious guitar riff and a crackling rhythm with the kind of vocal you can picture cutting through 1am bar conversation or the rolling hills and sunbaked drudgery of a festival and forcing the right people to pay attention. 
• Los Psychosis, “Dionysus Wave” – Rock and Roll Dreams, the debut album from Memphis-based Latinx rock band Los Psychosis, scratches an itch for reverb-and-drama-laden rock I last felt satisfied a few years ago by Ireland’s Fontaines DC. Javi Arcega’s black coffee with blackberry brandy vocals draw you in with a shudder and a shake over wire-taut arrangements. All signs point to this well-oiled machine being a hell of a party I hope I cross paths with soon, either in Memphis or up here. 
• James McMurtry, “Blackberry Winter” – Every time there’s a new James McMurty record, I have a compulsion to hear it as soon as possible, something itching under my skin, because there are guaranteed to be a couple songs that are a benchmark for any poems, any fiction, hell, any descriptive writing I’m going to do for the next few years. His new one, Horses and the Hounds, is packed with songs as good as anything he’s ever writing and I’ve probably played this one, the album’s majestic closer about hard-won hope when everything’s going wrong, a dozen times in the couple weeks since it came out. From the perfect in media res opening line, “I don’t know what went wrong, I ain’t known you that long to begin with,” through devastating images like “The cold rain don’t help with your low state of mind hanging down like the fog on the ridge,” it also features some of his finest singing. 
• Lorde, “Dominoes” – God help me, I love Lorde. Her last record Melodrama still has songs I reach for every few weeks, and the new one is growing on me fast. This low-key kiss-off with an irrepressible guitar lick and some neon-bright synth orbits around the burned-in-my-brain chorus “You get fifty gleaming chances in a row, and I watch you flick them down like dominoes. Must feel good being Mr. Start-Again.” 

• Tim Easton, “Peace of Mind” – During his time in Columbus, Tim Easton was one of the first great songwriters I ever saw up close and one of those handful of moments as a teenager when you realize real art is being made in your town, not just far away. I don’t catch him every time he’s back in town, but I’m always enriched when I do, and his new record, You Don’t Really Know Me, is his best, his most sharply observed, his fullest sounding, in over a decade. This jangling, swaggering stomp feels rejuvenated and reminds me what it’s like to be alive and know how lucky you are to be in a community, to observe and to get to participate. “Cross my path talking vengeance and lies and bad math? Time will tell on you. And your greedy, greedy friends telling the same lies again and again, aw, time will have its way with all of you.” 
• Pharez Whitted, “Creepin’” – Another very early example that showed me how great Columbus could be. I think I was 18 when I first saw trumpeter Pharez Whitted and his molten tone with just enough sweetness, leading a fiery quintet took the top of my head off. For the next several years, until he took off for Chicago, I saw Whitted every time I could and that opened the door to rooms (including the much-missed Barrister Hall and 501) and a whole word of local jazz I’m still in love with, a scene we’re lucky to have so many worlds class players in. Whitted is still killing it in Chicago with regular residencies at Jazz Showcase and the Green Mill, and his new record Pharaoh Smooth edges toward smooth jazz with the burbling bass lines and super-crisp drum sounds but that tone still knocks me sideways. 
• James Gaiters’ Soul Revival, “Soul Man” – James Gaiters is one of my favorite Columbus drummers and one of my favorite drummers anywhere. His ability to work in every context – intricate hard-bop with the Muv-Ment, hip-hop inflections with Watu Utongo, blues and ballads behind Honey and Blue – always delights me. One of his finest projects of the last few years is the hard-edged R&B and deep-pocketed soul jazz of Soul Revival, a quartet featuring the great Robert Mason on organ (one of the younger shining stars of this town’s scene on anything with keys), my longtime tenor hero Eddie Bayard, and friend and idol Derek Dicenzo on guitar (someone please correct me if it’s gone back to Craig McMullen, I couldn’t find credits).  
• William Parker, “Painted Scarf” – Bassist and composer William Parker continues this year’s streak of records at the top of his game, a true renaissance for someone I’ve been a fan of live and on record for 20+ years and who was killing it for another 20 before I’d heard of him. This meditative set pairs him with my favorite of his rhythm section foils, Chicago drummer Hamid Drake, and longtime collaborator Daniel Carter on reeds. Parker’s shakuhachi and Carter’s clarinet create shapes with subtlety and surprise in equal measure, with accents from Drake’s drumming. 
• Piotr Anderszweski, “JS Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier Book 2, Prelude and Fugue No. 12 in F Minor, BWV 881: 1. Prelude” – I’m a big fan of repertoire and that’s grown over the years. Examples in semi-recent (what does time mean anyway?) memory include a local string quartet pairing “Death and the Maiden” with George Crumb’s “Black Angels;” one of my favorite drummers doing a happy hour of all Booker T and the MGs tunes; a Dexter Gordon night pairing local sax legend Randy Mather with the above-mentioned Robert Mason and a cracking rhythm section. And my pal Ed Mann’s admonishment a few years ago might have had something to do with seeking more of these out; “Original isn’t necessarily the same thing as interesting or good.” Back was probably the canonical composer I loved first – my grandmother’s collections of arias not withstanding – when I found Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach in elementary school. I’m still far simpler than a dilettante but pianist Anderszweski’s new set of the Well-Tempered Clavier pieces knocked me sideways. 
• Jennifer Koh, “Hail, Horrors, Hail” – Jennifer Koh is one of our finest violinists – I remember seeing her in a marvelous revival of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach in Ann Arbor almost 10 years ago – doing a stellar job balancing classic rep with brand new work. During the earliest, uncertain, locked-down days of the pandemic Koh commissioned her network of friends and collaborators to write short violin pieces for live streaming. Her collection of them, Alone Together, is so beautiful it makes me want to weep. Sometimes it does make me weep. I have been a fan of the composer she worked with here, Missy Mazzoli, for I’m not sure how long – I think I saw her perform at Le Poisson Rouge first, Anne and I saw her chamber music ensemble Victoire at Millenium Park in Chicago, I’ve seen Now Ensemble and yMusic do her work, her longer-form operatic work blows me away. This piece, inspired by a passage in Milton’s Paradise Lost sums up a lot of the pain and shakiness we were feeling, that some of us are still feeling, in a bright, beautiful explosion of a cri de Coeur. 
• Cameron Knowler, “Lena’s Spanish Fandango” – One of the most prominent of the new breed of instrumental acoustic guitar voices, Knowler blends a warm touch with a taste for off-beat, surprising harmony. This record Places of Consequence blends a concrete sense of location, physical and psychological, with a dry wit – those drones strung through the beautiful, lilting melody give It a rough edge that keeps me rubbing up against it. 
• Madi Diaz, “Nervous” – I didn’t know singer-songwriter Madi Diaz before this record but History of a Feeling is one of the finest singer-songwriter records I’ve heard all year. On this tune, one of my favorites of the record, hard, right-up-to-the edge drumming shoves the guitar and piano forward, and the echo threatens to swamp her lead vocal in an uncanny approximation of those lonely walks when the various parts of us we try to shove down come bubbling up, amplifying, and undercutting our conscious thought. “I know why I lie to myself. I’m not really looking to get healthy. I have so many perspectives I’m losing perspective.” 
• Mr. JazziQ featuring Kabza de Small, Lady Du, Boohle, “Woza” – This shining example of the South African Ampiano scene, produced and led by Mr. JazziQ does a similar balancing act between the sparse and the thick as the Diaz and has a similarly infectious hook. 
• Nite Jewel, “This Time” – No Sun feels like Nite Jewel’s most introspective record, a three in the morning record for remembering every regret you have that also works for those times you’re waiting for the sunrise and wondering if it will ever happen. Her layers of Moog and synthetic percussion, along with Corey Lee Granet’s guitars on this track, build a shifting, silky landscape for the contours of her voice. 
• Oxygen Destroyer, “Enduring the Maternal Rage of the Amphibious Monster” – Also a song about shifting layer and texture, this proggy death metal band named after the weapon that killed Godzilla in the original 50s movie. Slippery bass lines sluice through rapid-fire but catchy guitar and bass riffs and a guttural scream of a vocal. This checked off most of my teenage nostalgia boxes in the best way. 
• Rey Sapienz and the Congo Techno Ensemble, “Minzoto” – Congo-born and Uganda-based producer Rey Sapienz makes shocking, intricate electronic music that feels like it is from another world, a wholly separate set of experiences but also stirs the part of me who hung around in decaying factories and parking garages letting their body be transformed and brain transported by sounds I couldn’t predict or anticipate. 
• Clara Iannotta and the Munich Chamber Orchestra, “dead wasps in the jam-jar (ii)” – Italian composer Clara Iannotta crafted this sticky, mysterious piece “for chamber orchestra, objects, and sine waves.” Abrasive textures rub raw against beautiful harmonies with enough space for everything to breathe, to let the light in even around some brilliantly crafted ugliness. 
• Lingua Ignota, “Repent Now Confess Now” – Sinner Get Ready, the excoriating, potent album by Lingua Ignota (Kristen Hayter) had the same “Where am I? What was I thinking thirty seconds before?” qualities as the Iannotta. Torturously slow, like being told a story over a campfire, Ignota intones lines like “I can’t say I don’t deserve it – he will take my legs and will to live. God’s will be done, no wound as sharp, no pleasure in the year” over a backing of Hayter’s cello lines and prepared piano, Seth Manchester’s stabbing banjo and percussion, and Ryan Seaton’s bursts of unsettling saxophone. 
• Bela Fleck featuring Molly Tuttle and Sierra Hull, “Wheels Up” – Ending with some sunshine, using similar acoustic palettes. I’ve gone back and forth on Fleck since seeing the Flecktones at the local Jazz and Rib Fest when I was in high school or early college, but I’ve never wavered in my love of his acoustic work and that bright vocal tone of his. He found excellent partners in guitarists Molly Tuttle (that break around the three-minute mark leaves me breathless) and Sierra Hull here. 
• George Cables, “Roses Poses” – Mentioning the New York jazz scene earlier, George Cables is another of the great habitues of the great piano rooms, still luckily with us and still trucking. His new album Too Close For Comfort pairs him with the perfect bass player for this kind of setting the great Essiet Essiet who Anne I lucked into seeing at Small’s when we were back in the City in July and Victor Lewis (Stan Getz, James Carter, David Murray) on drums. Like seeing that perfect sunrise and being fully aware of how lucky you are – even while you know it won’t last for long. Ending on a note of hope and peace and the kind of joy you get from finding your people and being around them for years.