It feels like Fall, my favorite season, in more than one sense. And this marks a full year since I’ve been doing these – they helped keep me tethered to some sense of loving music and art and wanting to share that with people even as other outlets dried up in the depths of last year, and I’m grateful for anyone who pressed play, who said something kind or told me they found a song or an artist they didn’t hear before, or who read any of these notes. Thanks, as always.
Bandcamp links where available, courtesy of Hype Machine’s Merch Table function: https://hypem.com/merch-table/0BgevKbvPofQ0xMv6zweXs
- King Britt and Tyshawn Sorey, “Untitled One” – I’ve been a fan of drummer/composer/bandleader Tyshawn Sorey since I first heard him with Fieldwork, the collective trio with Steve Lehman and Vijay Iyer, and Prodigal Frog, with peers Ingrid Laubrock and Kris Davis, in relatively quick succession, and that fandom shifted into overdrive with his piano trio record Koan. Philadelphia electronic musician King Britt hit my radar in the early ‘00s when I was in dance clubs a lot; his work with vocalists like poet Ursula Rucker and the soulful underpinning of his spacy explorations always got me to the dancefloor. This unexpected (by me) collaboration – Tyshawn & King – made all the sense in the world. The building and mutating groove on this track, bubbling synths and scratching around drums mic’ ed so close you can almost smell the metal, wood, and skin, rises to a climax and a suspension in the air, All the drama of a sweaty club and all the layered depth of my favorite chamber music.
- Tony Kieraldo, “Warren Street Rag” – I’ve been pals with Tony Kieraldo since he went to college with my dear friend Mike Gamble. The first time I saw him, he was playing keytar in jam-funk band Bootyjuice (a band I loved that would not be my thing on paper), and over the years he’s blown me away in roles such as music directing for singer-songwriter Lizzie West, playing harmonium in Brook Martinez’s Brooklyn Qawwali Party, and lending raucous, barrelhouse keys to Tommy Stinson’s revived Bash and Pop. Kieraldo’s always had a special love for ragtime. One of my favorite streaming diversions during lockdown came with his ragtime recasting of pop songs from his Hudson apartment and that flourished into this series of marvelous originals, Hudson Ragtime Piano Suite. This tune captures the free flowing bounce of one of the first truly American forms of music with more than a little of the way that sunlight falls when you cross the town square in Hudson, New York, and start to walk downhill to meet the day.
- Call Me Rita, “Good News from a Long Distance” – My first exposure to Vanessa Jean Speckman came with her striking text-based visual art and when I heard her poetry a few years later I was just as captivated. This musical collaboration finds Speckman’s words and beguiling delivery backed by a close, sympathetic batch of friends who also happen to be some of Columbus’ best musicians: her partner Micah Schnabel (Two Cow Garage), Todd May (Lilybandits, Lydia Loveless), Jay Gasper (Lydia Loveless, After-Death Plan), and Jason Winner (Garbage Greek, Good Reverend, Indigo Wild). This early single from the band braids the best aspects of her other practices together in an immediately accessible package, full of a gripping gentleness.
- Iris Dement, “One Red Rose” – Broken Hearts and Dirty Windows: The Songs of John Prine Vol. 2 is full of highlights. There are more adventurous revisions, but I kept coming back to this gorgeous version of one of my favorite of his songs sung by one of his go-to collaborators. The drop to a whisper on “What I never knew I never will forget” kills me every time.
- Sierra Ferrell, “Whispering Waltz” – The warmth of Ferrell’s voice and the cutting, out-of-time lyrics kept me returning to Long Time Coming. This closing track, letting go of a lover who’s not treating her well, uses Jerry Douglas’s dobro like a stiletto, driving the blade into the listener’s chest while the honeyed dusk of her voice beckons us closer.
- Madi Diaz, “New Person, Old Place” – There’s a similar rumble, a bowed bass or low cello, and tumbling drums that connected this to the Ferrell sonically for me as I moved pieces around on this month’s list. The hard accents and line breaks on the verses reinforce the box Diaz’s character finds herself in, then open into the longer lines of the chorus, the devasting realizations of “What used to work doesn’t work anymore…Can’t be a new person in an old place.”
- Lilly Hiatt, “Been” – One of my favorite songwriters, Lilly Hiatt’s going to have more “new” songs I’m hungry to hear her do live than she can fit in a set by the time I next see her on a stage, with Lately now following last year’s Walking Proof, and it’s another barn burner. This tune pairs a swaggering groove with a lighter touch on the guitars and a magnetic, smoky vocal, wrapped around one of her signature challenge-and-invitation hooks: “You say this is all just a moment so why don’t you own it? You may never get this chance again, but you don’t know where I’ve been.”
- David Sanford Big Band featuring Hugh Ragin, “A Prayer for Lester Bowie” – David Sanford’s (no relation) all-star big band’s new record doesn’t have a dull moment, but there’s extra magic in this title track, where Sanford hands the baton and composing duties to soloist Hugh Ragin for a fiery, sweet tribute to the St. Louis native and font of at least two or three streams of modern trumpet work, Lester Bowie. Starting with a light-in-the-darkness trumpet intro setting up a gorgeous melody, the tune takes us on a spinning, dazzling carnival ride through everything Bowie did well – the cinematic storytelling, the gutbucket R&B, screaming edges of the avant-garde – refracted through everything they’ve picked up since. May every artist get a tribute half as loving as this.
- Adam O’Farrill, “stakra” – Riding the trumpet train a little further with one of my favorite contemporary trumpeters, Adam O’Farrill. I got hip to O’Farrill with former Wexner Center Performing Arts Curator Chuck Helm’s effusive singling of O’Farrill out while announcing the season he’d be appearing as part of Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Bird Calls project. The next year, O’Farrill came to the Wex leading his own quartet Stranger Days. Even non-jazz fan Anne was stunned by the interplay and blue-flame power of the compositions, and I was almost as intrigued in my interview by how much we talked about the impact of film and travel on his compositions. This lead-off track from Visions of Your Other is another jaw-dropper, a cinematic, shifting expansion of the eponymous Ryuichi Sakamoto composition with a perfectly unsettling rhythm section hookup from his brother Zack O’Farrill on drums and Walter Stinson on bass, and Xavier del Castillo’s sax slithering through and leaving shadows.
- Punch Brothers, “Church Street Blues” – The Punch Brothers reconvened during the pandemic, after their usual touring schedule canceled, and dug into an early inspiration for the band, Tony Rice’s landmark solo album Church Street Blues. This early single from Hell on Church Street takes the Norman Blake title track and unfolds it with their trademark subtle harmonies and an arrangement that’s ornate but not showy. As big of a fan as I am of their originals, this got me incredibly excited for the full record and seeing them live again when Anne and I take her mom to see them in February.
- Whit Dickey/William Parker/Matthew Shipp, “Village Mothership” – These three players have such a storied history in various configurations – for me, most notably, the engine powering the best version of the David S. Ware Quartet – it was shocking to me to see they hadn’t actually recorded as a trio since Matthew Shipp’s 1992 Circular Temple. This series of collective improvisations stands as a testament to the power of communication between players and the way that communication deepens over time if you’re open to it. This title track is everything good about their playing, the deep centering in groove and the openness to running down spiky textures but most of all, the listening. A reminder when the East Village was the center of a few artistic universes, and that real beauty still springs out of those blocks.
- Makaya McCraven, “Sunset” – One of my favorite contemporary drummers, in some sense picking up the thread Dickey and other members of his generation cast but entirely his own thing. McCraven has dug deeper into electronic textures and cut-ups with his own work, and with stronger results, than anyone I can think of working at the moment, and he looks to take that to another level as he applies that taste and skill to the historical Blue Note catalog with his next album Deciphering The Message. This track explodes a Kenny Dorham rarity, keeping the earworm melody and crispness, layering it with McCraven’s own cracking drums, Jeff Parker’s snarling guitar, Joel Ross’ vibes, and Junius Paul on “ceramic bird.”
- Soft Cell, “Bruises On All My Illusions” – Most of you who’ve talked to me more than twice have heard me blackguarding “’80s Music.” As with anything, my dislike of certain pieces of the sonic palette and tones, is going to have a few exceptions. My biggest one is Soft Cell, Marc Almond’s wry, personal narratives and Dave Ball’s cinematic landscapes, always hit my sweet spot, and this single off the upcoming reunion record finds them in fighting shape, with a slinky pulse and purred vocal. “Lying on my back, I’m listening to the police sirens; sounds like lullabies in the soft twilight.”
- Kalie Shorr, “Amy” – I liked the wistful fade of the Soft Cell crashing into the 0-to-60 pop aggression of this Shorr song that reminded me of my favorite parts of the Dollyrots and Haley Bowery. That sticky guitar riff and growled vocal left me singing along to myself for hours when I first heard it and it still made me want to pump my fist in the air playing it as I wrote this. “You want the other half of my credit card debt? Because he still owes me money. You wrote that song about how he’s so good in bed – well, he learned it from me.”
- Lael Neale, “For No One Now (US Girls Remix)” – I didn’t know much about Lael Neale, whose second record the original of this comes from, but I’ve been a big fan of Meg Remy’s US Girls project for years and she brought out the drama and intricacy of this song in a way that didn’t feel overstated, she sharpened the contrasts and added textures without changing the fundamental DNA.
- Lil Ugly Mane, “Benadryl Submarine” – Mumblecore rapper Lil Ugly Mane made this left-field psych masterpiece Volcanic Bird Enemy and the Voiced Concern and its shuffling drums and interlaced synth patterns – meshed perfectly for me with the leaves changing and the chill in the air. “You can watch me fall apart and never intervene.”
- Grouper, “Ode to the Blue” – I came to Grouper (Liz Harris) through her chamber music/contemporary classical work but I also have love for her more song-based records and her new one, Shade, is my favorite in that latter vein. This song pairs a hypnotic guitar part with a six-line lyric that sits right between etched-in-stone and writ-on-sand, and I couldn’t get it out of my head when I first heard it. “I’ve been thinking about the way the light gets lost in your hair.”
- Springtime, “The Viaduct Love Suicide” – Springtime unites singer-songwriter Gareth Liddiard (Tropical Fuck Storm, The Drones) with his fellow Australians, Dirty Three drummer Jim White and The Necks’ pianist Chris Abrahams. There’s a fragile quality to this tune, a faded photograph burned around the edges, with White’s trademark snare slides and subtle cymbals, and Abrahams’ cellular, insistent piano creating a world painted mostly in shadows, wrapped around Liddiard’s evocative vocals and guitar. “And she stepped from the bridge with her child in her arms to join with the Earth no providence harms.”
- Houston Person, “Since I Fell for You” – At 86 years old, Houston Person is one of the last of his generation of great soul jazz tenors and his vocal tone and unerring command of the material, his ability (like all great interpreters, from Sinatra to Sarah Vaughan to Person’s longtime boss Etta Jones) to live inside the song is on full display in this marvelous organ quartet date, recorded live in Paris. For someone to still find so much beauty, to find new nuances, to stay so excited about a song he must have played over 1,000 times, would be a marvel if he did it at 50. That he’s swinging this hard, and this subtly, at 84, is a high bar we should all be reaching for.
- Brandi Carlile, “Broken Horses” – This title track off Carlile’s excellent new album, for me, merged the interiority of the previous three songs and amplified the muscular swing of the Person. The production from Dave Cobb and Shooter Jennings sets these songs up perfectly. And Carlile’s in-your-face vocal and lyric hit as hard as any song I’ve heard this year. “It is time to spit you out like lukewarm water from my mouth. I will always taste the apathy, but I won’t pass it down.”
- Natalie Hemby, “Pinwheel” – Lots of Hemby’s work as hitmaker for other artists caught my ear, especially her long and fruitful relationship with Miranda Lambert, but it didn’t prepare me for how much I’d love this solo record Pins and Needles. Every song on here kills me, but I kept coming back to this perfect slice of fuzzed-out pop, fragmented images that spark that feeling of a new crush that always feels like autumn, over a shuddering guitar riff and a track full of handclaps and finger snaps like walking past a playground through leaves.
- Helado Negro, “Hometown Dream” – It’s almost impossible to separate art from the context we first view it through, and by that token I bet this masterful new Helado Negro album Far In would have given me similar feelings in the cracking chill of early Spring as it conjures for me with the first leaves on the ground. But this, the most fully realized album by an artist I’ve loved for years, feels like it’s painted in earth tones and textured fabric, dancing in corduroy when the floor’s cleared out and the lights are coming up, walking home with the beats still reverberating through your bones but shifting in your memory. “Our times won’t stop. Lifetimes slow down.”
- The Cookers, “Traveling Lady” – I get a similar warmth and roll out of this supergroup of classic hard-bop lifers The Cookers, some with resumes going back to the ‘60s, who’ve played with every legend, together and apart. I caught part of a set at Winter Jazzfest several years ago, to my shame I had to be talked into it, there was some “hot new thing” I was intent on seeing in that timeslot, and it made my legs buckle. That volcanic rhythm section – Billy Hart on drums, Cecil McBee on bass, and George Cables on piano – set up the throbbing rhythm on this Cables composition, the sense that time is short and must be capitalized on but not at the expense of enjoying it, with the horns, Billy Harper and Donald Harrison’s lush saxophones and Eddie Henderson and David Weiss’s sparkling trumpets, taking the melody into the stars. Highlights include Cables’ glittering, rolling comping behind a gorgeous, tart Henderson solo, but the seamlessness and the sense that everyone is moving in the same direction is what makes everything so great.
- Bitchin Bajas, “Outer Spaceways Incorporated” – Bitchin Bajas have blown me away since their earlier iteration as CAVE, one of the most creative and inspiring bands of the current Chicago scene. Their deep dive into another of Chicago’s treasured songs, Sun Ra, has a lovely, gauzy sweetness with overlapping vocals and sticky keyboard tones.
- Bonobo featuring Jamila Woods, “Tides” – Staying on the Chicago tip for a minute, one of the finest vocalists in years out of that scene, Jamila Woods, creates a perfect, wistful vocal and lyric over this expansive, shifting track from UK producer Bonobo. “I’m not supposed to feel, I’m not supposed to miss. How am I supposed to heal? How am I supposed to fit? A little awkward, then? A little oxygen. I let you get away. I held the ocean in.”
- Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit featuring Steve Gorman, “Sometimes Salvation” – There isn’t a track I skip on Isbell’s terrific covers record Georgia Blue, and each song shines some light on his process and his journey. But I keep coming back to this one – maybe because I went on a Black Crowes kick after reading Gorman’s book (and not having thought about them in many years), but I think partly because this gives me a little taste of seeing those first Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit tours right after he left DBT, when it could easily go off the rails but when it clicked felt like you were seeing the best bar band you’ve ever seen in your life and they were singing directly to you. A lot like friends who saw the Black Crowes early said they felt. This recharges that sensation but with all the power and control he’s brought to his art over the last several years. Original Crowes drummer Gorman’s unique feel is the icing on the cake.
- Tommy Womack, “I Thought I Was Fine” – Tommy Womack, for years one of my favorite songwriters of the just-underground Nashville scene, continues his streak of getting better and better with his new collection of back-slappers and gut-punches, I Thought I Was Fine. This title song pairs two of his strengths, implying a story without spelling it out but leaving you with a very specific feeling of dread, and telling it to you like your best friend just sat down next to your ear. “You can tie one on – get a nice buzz. Tomorrow is a-dawning, it always does. I’ll carry this fear in the front of my mind; it’ll happen again when I thought I was fine.”
- Joshua Ray Walker, “Dumpster Diving” – A younger songwriter with a similar taste for the good joke and the jab that draws blood, Joshua Ray Walker refreshed the classic honky-tonk record with a hard thwack on the buzzing neon and as much appreciation for the dust that came flying off it as the red light. See You Next Time ends a trilogy with a fistful of loving looks at the regulars when a bar closes down. Any of us in towns rapidly spiraling through the gentrification dance, especially if we’re bar people, know that final last call feeling and the sense that you’ll text some people, you’ll see someone on her birthday, a few will drift to another bar, but that sense we’re all in it together is lost. This particular song tells a sweet story about unlikely love, with a ragged stomp and a fiddle part that drilled right into the base of my skull. “Sometimes what’s lost just isn’t worth saving but, in this case, I think you’re amazing. You got my cold heart a-blazing, I’m so glad that what’s one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I’d go anywhere as long as we’re together.”
- Caetano Veloso, “Sem Samba Não Dá” – Caetano Veloso was my gateway drug to Brazilian music, as a writer on those first Os Mutantes records, I bought reissues of at Dusty Groove and with his own work – I saw a sold-back promo of the gorgeous Omaggio a Federico e Giulietta when I was 19, at the height of my Fellini fandom, and worked both backwards and forwards. He was the first of those great Tropicalia artists I saw live, with my pal Sarah Yetter in our best-sounding theater where Jacques Morelenbaum, arranger and music director, played an electric cello solo that stopped time. I’ve always been struck by Veloso’s agility at blending the fragile, the delicate, with the stadium-rocking anthem and the grinding dancefloor. His new one, Meu Coco (My Head) was fully produced and recorded in his house during lockdown and it’s full of the sense of play and discovery he inspires me to try to stay in touch with.
- Yarn/Wire, “Feld: I” – Premiere piano (Ning Yu, Laura Barger) and percussion (Ian Antonio, Russell Greenberg) quartet Yarn/Wire premiere this dazzling composition by German composer Enno Poppe. A carnival ride with projectors welded to it, dazzling landscapes and tilting/spinning in surprising, delightful ways. This had that same sense of play and discovery as the Veloso for me, along with some similar percussive, shimmery tones.
- Ìxtahuele featuring Kadhja Bonet and Orange Crate Art, “Manna” – Dharmaland, the transfixing new record from Swedish exotica band Ìxtahuele, pays tribute to Eden Ahbez, best known for writing the standard “Nature Boy.” This tune adds the mystery-drenched vocals of psychedelic singer-songwriter Kadhja Bonet and synth work from Orange Crate Art who I knew mostly for soundtracks. It’s exactly the right blend of lush and strange for me, where most people dabbling in exotica get too caught up in the shiny bits of nostalgia.
- Delv!s, “Round and Round” – Belgian artist Niels Delvaux conjures all the deep house and trip hop I loved in my early 20s without seeming like too aggressive a throwback and setting off my nostalgia alarms. The slinky funk bassline downshifts into a harder, grittier groove around the third minute and I can’t stop myself from moving. A paean to the haze back when clubs used to allow smoking – which I’m both opposed to and nostalgic for – and it hit the red or green lights just so.
- Alessia Cara, “Apartment Song” – I had a hard time picking a single song off Alessia Cara’s In The Meantime, an intoxicating collection of razor-edged pop-R&B. This is one of the three or four tunes I go back to most often and it gave me similar nostalgic thoughts while still being a song in the now and engaged with the now to the last couple songs. Those sparsely deployed handclaps and the sizzling kick drum under a laid-back vocal keep me floating for days. “What a wonderful world it is when you can see it. Tears that I shed turn into glitter on the floor of my apartment. Pop of shimmer I needed.”
- They Hate Change, “Faux Leather” – This Tampa-based rap duo hit me immediately in that nebulous space between hard dance music and something introspective and slippery. The bass slithers and the synths cast brief light over the proceedings then decay, dripping over everything, with lyrics that draw you closer to try to make out. The burst of excitement at the end of the track sounds like a call to war, I could picture exactly how a crowd would go crazy to it.
- Self Esteem, “Moody” – My favorite opening line this month, maybe all year: “Texting you at the mental health talk seems counter-productive.” And after that caught me, the rest of the song backs it up with heavy drums, infectious synth lines, and a chorus spelling out the name of the song like someone smoking behind the bleachers and mocking the cheerleaders.
- Kali Uchis featuring SZA, “Fue Mejor” – Kali Uchis’s collaboration with SZA is a perfect example of both their strengths, blending together into pop perfection. A slow creep, comforting and unsettling, with lyrics dancing between English and Spanish. “I’m gone but you never forget there are things that are tattooed without ink.”
- Nico Muhly with Michael Harley and the University of Southern California Wind Ensemble, “Reliable Sources” – Nico Muhly’s one of my favorite contemporary classical composers and this new concerto for Michael Harley’s bassoon and the USC wind ensemble under the baton of Scott Weiss, is a perfect example of taking classic sources and making something new and fresh out of them – in this case, Orlando Gibbons’ Pavan “Lord Salisbury”. He teases and shines light on Gibbons’ harmonic language while taking us on a journey through a world of textures that are unmistakably Muhly.
- Laurie Anderson, “Sweaters (Sam Gendel Remix)” – This is a more direct example of taking elements and making them into something new as rising saxophonist Sam Gendel takes labelmate Laurie Anderson’s “Sweaters” (off her landmark Big Science) and adds his own edgy alto saxophone, contrabass guitar, and wind synthesizer, reshaping one of the foundation documents for people who grew up like I did, with a taste for the avant-garde, without throwing away anything important. The remix – and the art practice – as a towering act of love. I hope this keeps you as warm as it did me. I’ll see you all soon.
Screen of Distance 