Playlist – February 2022

Finally moved off Spotify to Tidal, I doubt this is the final stop but at least it has Joni Mitchell who I listen to just about weekly, and the interface didn’t suck – tried a couple that handled playlists really badly. And, of course, there are more important things to think about, and I make donations and try to stay informed, but nobody’s looking for my ill-informed take on the horrific invasion of Ukraine, so I try to stay in touch with beauty where I find it and tell people “Hey, this is great – it made my day or week or month better.” Thanks for reading and listening. 

• The Delines, “Hold Me Slow” – I got excited about The Delines from the first time I heard one of my favorite songwriters, Willy Vlautin, was teaming with one of my favorite voices, Amy Boone, and every album digs deeper and expands the universe of their rootsy, gothic torch songs. Sea Drift continues that progression and took my breath away. This languorous jewel of a song sums up the pleasures of the record and their approach, Boone’s vocal balancing the character’s hope of being with someone along with the fact that she’s been burned often enough to be beyond the point of bullshitting them, over smoke-drenched horns courtesy of sax player Noah Bernstein and trumpeter Cory Gray, and a rhythm from Freddy Trujillo’s bass, Sean Oldham’s drums, and Cory Gray’s keys, that drags like a shadow on a long afternoon. “Tell me it’s not a fleeting feeling. Tell me it’s not a fleeting thing,” over and over again, like a poet holding the words up to the light to see if they change – because the speaker knows the answer and still hopes it’ll change. 
• Anais Mitchell, “On Your Way (Felix Song)” – I knew I was excited for a new Mitchell solo record, but I didn’t know how badly I needed it until the self-titled landed this month. This tribute to the impact someone else made on the speaker, on finding reasons in music to go on living and finding paths to flourish – along with being maybe the best example in a song of what music brings most of us, what keeps us going back night after night into crowded rooms or curling up with headphones – is so perfect I had to play it three times writing these few sentences. “Tonight, I’m gonna be a seeker, staring into a stereo speaker. Kick drum, and someone singing. Make me one with everything. Tonight, my tape is rolling, I’m going where the take is going – no regrets and no mistakes. You get one take.” 
• Robert Glasper featuring Esperanza Spalding and Q-Tip, “Why We Speak” – Ten years ago, Robert Glasper’s Black Radio felt like a summation of every style of black music of the last 50 years in a way that avoided the corniness and preciousness that often befell other acts working at a similar project. His Black Radio III expands on that vision and took my breath away. This track, with Glasper’s searching, shimmering keyboard tones over Justin Tyson’s crisp, crunching drums, Isaiah Sharkey’s clipped and catchy funk riffs, and Travis Burniss’s slinky bass lines, jousts with jousting vocals, in French and English, by Esperanza Spalding and Q-Tip. The use of the various vocal tones – including Glasper’s voice on keys – as sound amplifies the message, is the content instead of distracting from it. While Spalding spins songs of the earth and love, “Et le sang de la Terre,” coming back to the reminder “Se souvenir,” Q-Tip comes at the why as self-determination and the joy of discovery, “Sometimes in life when you go too far, the truth will bring you to who you are.” 
• Immanuel Wilkins, “Don’t Break” – Maybe the greatest young alto sax player I’ve heard in a while – I’m 90% sure he was the killing one-person-on-stage-I-didn’t-know at a Makaya McCraven set at WJF a few years ago and a vital part of work that’s blown me away lately by Joel Ross, Harish Raghavan, and Orrin Evans – Wilkins delivers on his promise and blows past expectations on his second album for Blue Note, the stunning The 7^th Hand. This tune pairs his cooking quartet of Micah Thomas on piano, Kweku Sumbry on drums, and Rolling Stone Darryl Johns on bass, with the Farafina Kan Percussion ensemble. I think of the first five songs here as drilling into what makes us keep living. While this is a little more abstract than the others, the title and the hope suffusing everything here, the shining gravity, like sunlight, of Thomas’s chords underneath Wilkins, and the rolling, stretching tension landscapes of the percussionists, draw a map to a life worth living. 
• Maya de Vitry, “How Bad I Wanna Live” – If the last song was the most abstracted take on the theme which I think ties this opening gambit together, this might be the most on the nose, but that doesn’t mean it’s not artfully done. The unhurried pace and warm tones of de Vitry’s tune, and the way it soars without making demands also echoed the Wilkins with me, the grit and softness of their tones. The repeated “I’m not dying today” into “Oh, but I’m so happy knowing how much more I wanna give, and I’m so happy knowing just how bad I wanna live,” has given me comfort I can scarcely describe. 
• Combo Chimbita, “Sin Tiempo” – Nothing could dull my excitement about going back to Big Ears on my birthday weekend – I hope that doesn’t jinx the trip – but the one thing I’m most sorry to miss back in town is an appearance from New York Latin band Combo Chimbita, and their stellar new album IRE amplified that regret. The drag and echo of this burning, psychedelic torch song, keyboards hanging in the air and dissolving like smoke, highlights the bring beam of light that is Caroline Oliveros’ voice. As good for the cold nights of a winter that won’t release its grip as it will be with sweating drinks on a patio looking over a body of water. 
• Tyler Mitchell featuring Marshall Allen, “Angels and Demons at Play” – Sun Ra Arkestra alum bassist Tyler Mitchell digs deep into the Sun Ra songbook in sympathetic small group settings on Dancing Shadows. His quintet – Wanye Smith on drums, Chris Hemmingway on tenor, Nicoletta Manzini on alto, and Elson Nascimento on percussion – is augmented by longtime Arkestra leader Marshall Allen and this take on one of my favorite ballads from that oeuvre is late-night-dreams-of-possibility perfection. 
• Ethan Iverson, “She Won’t Forget Me” – Ethan Iverson’s made the most of his time since leaving groundbreaking band The Bad Plus, simultaneously digging deeper into tradition and sharpening his personal language and relationship with the piano and other players. His first Blue Note album, Every Note Is True, is a dazzling collection of pieces, vibrating with a glowing light. Iverson teams with a masterful rhythm section, the legendary Jack DeJohnette, one of the greatest drummers since the ‘60s, and Larry Grenadier who turned around the way I think about the role of the bass in a piano trio with those Brad Mehldau records starting in the 90s (and my seeing that trio live starting in the late ‘90s). The jaunty melody of “She Won’t Forget Me” and its interlocking undercurrents, its sense of subtle drama, hints at its inspiration – Iverson said this tune grew out of a pandemic project to play various TV themes and this was his attempt at writing one. You can almost picture houses appearing out of the fog and ornate curved letters rising on the screen. 
• Fellsius, “Show” – I think I talked about Yoko Kanno’s Cowboy Bebop soundtrack a few playlists ago, I was already a head for more “serious” jazz and soundtrack music, but her Japanese take on American 20^th century forms struck its own chord for me. The EP Mesa and especially this track “Show” by Tokyo-based electronic artist Fellsius scratched that itch like nothing I’ve heard since. The woozy horns and twinkling keys mesh with thick kick drums and waves of snare and cymbal into a party, full of nooks and crannies, shadows to hide in and bright, flashing lights. 
• Wally B. Seck, “Boulko Tek Missér” – I was taking a Lyft from a friend’s house to meet Anne a few weeks ago and the driver was playing a mix of various African music. As we’re getting on the outer belt, I hear something I recognize, featured on last year’s Parting Gifts mix, “Thione Seck! This is great, I know he passed away recently.” The driver lit up, “You know Thione Seck? Have you heard his son, Wally? He sings good too!” and queued some of his up. I immediately took notes and dug into the younger Seck’s work the next day and it was gorgeous, more contemporary and in dialogue with modern forms but with that same sense of classic, unspooling melody. 
• Diane Ward and the Kevin Fingier Collective, ““Why Don’t You Go Home” – Argentinean producer Kevin Fingier teams with vocalist Diane Ward for this barn-burner in classic ‘60s R&B style. That baritone sax part over driving piano hits exactly the tone I’m looking for, and I can picture this setting the floor on fire on any rare groove night. 
• Wesley Bright, “Come Right Back (Pt. 1)” – The greatest current Cleveland soul singer, Wesley Bright, blew me away the very first time I saw him, and through two shifting backing bands, The Hi-Lites and The Honeytones, I never saw a set of his that didn’t knock me sideways. This new track, co-produced with Leroi Conroy, finds Bright alternating between the lower register of voice like a curled fist on the verses and a pristine falsetto on the choruses, surfing on a sinewy, sinister beat punctuated by guitar stabs and draped in menacing strings and horns.  
• Micah Schnabel, “Coin$Tar” – Still riding high on that marvelous Two Cow Garage reunion show from Friday as I write this, I remain awed by how co-frontman Micah Schnabel’s solo material continues to find new pathways, new ways to strip down what he’s saying and how. Constantly searching, making work that wouldn’t fit in the structures of that band so many of us love. This song is a prime example, torrents of sharpened-to-the-finest-point lyrics, images and digressions, around his propulsive rhythm guitar, a rollicking back beat from Jason Winner’s drumming, Bob Starker’s righteous saxophone, Jay Gasper’s empathetic lead guitar work, and harmonies from Vanessa Jean Speckman and Lydia Loveless. Another argument for trying our hardest to really see other people and finding hope when the world fights that hope on every front. “$53 in my bank account – if I ever get the opportunity to sell out, I’m gonna kiss it long and deep on the mouth. I’ve done the struggle so good I made it look like I was dancing while I was standing on your highway for hours at a time, thumbing for a miracle that would never arrive.”  
• Jeremy Scott, “Fred Neil Armstrong” – I knew Memphis mainstay Jeremy Scott mostly from his melodic bass playing and sweet harmonies on the first three – and most recent – Reigning Sound records, and I knew he leads Toy Trucks but hadn’t really dug into that material, so this first solo record under his name – with Graham Burks Jr co-producing and filling in the sounds around Scott’s bass and vocals – was both a surprise and a delight. This tune, with a delightful apo koinou of a title, is a joyously surreal trip of discovery, trying to find something new. “Coughing man wants you to know he’s seen the ocean burn and grow; the stars throw a misty light upon his path. He’s got the proper pedigree to travel through the galaxy cause now he says the earth’s no place for polymaths. He tore the books in half.” 
• Jacques Greene, “Memory Screen + Fantasy” – Another journey of exploration, parallelly outward and inward, comes from this charming slice of techno from Toronto-based producer Greene. While he uses brighter, more ‘70s and ‘90s tones – the echoing keyboard stabs and snares stretched into handclaps and back again, over chunky disco basslines and chopped vocal samples. 
• Charlotte Adigéry and Boris Pupul, “Ceci n’est pas un cliché” – The Magritte nod in the title would have probably been enough to get me to check this song, and I’ve liked everything else I heard from the Charlotte Adigéry and Boris Pupul collaborations, but this took that appreciation into outer space. Sharp, crisp rhythms and a fraying around the edges vocal recall classic Ze Records’ mutant disco but without being chained to some platonic ideal of a throwback. “I was standing in the rain, I wanted to cry in your arms again. I was crying on high until you took me to the river.” 
• Hurray For The Riff Raff, “Pierced Arrows” – Singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra writes some of the most urgent dispatches of the present day, grappling with our world holistically in a way you want every writer to but very few do with her level of engagement and specificity, and her band Hurray for the Riff Raff supplies perfect, churning, charging backdrops for those words and melodies. Their last record, The Navigator, blew my mind and this one, Life on Earth, their first for venerable edge-of-the-center label Nonesuch, is a fucking masterpiece. There’s nothing monochromatic in these songs, laughing and crying at the state of the world, interior and larger apocalypses but faced head on. “This was the place that fell apart – you were the one to break it. I don’t believe in anything, this whole fucking world is changing.” 
• Shovels and Rope, “Domino” – One of my favorite duos, Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent, return with their most three-dimensional, hard to classify record, Manticore. I was a fan the second I heard them, opening for Hayes Carll in 2011, and they’ve consistently impressed me with their evolving soundscapes and ever deepening songwriting. This propulsive song sets their voices up perfectly with a sticky bass line and a classic skip-rope rhythm. “I’m the face that free wheelin’ dealer’s making. Queue all the girls and the boys, and their parents’ hearts racing. Did I die last night? Am I walking around? I’m here but not me, I’m a ghost. I’m a domino.” 
• Khruangbin and Leon Bridges, “B-Side” – I liked that first Leon Bridges record but with every release since he’s impressed me more and more, bringing in more elements and expanding his range without losing sight of the core. I’ve especially loved these undefinable collaborations with Khruangbin, his vocals roughing up their classicist low-rider/lounge tendencies and them highlighting a smoothness he hasn’t hit before. This has a classic couples-skate hip swaying, humid vibe I can’t wait for an appropriately hot night to play it for friends. 
• Wordcolour, “Bluster – Djrum Remix” – London electronic music producer Wordcolour, in a remix by fellow Londonite Djrum, made a track that encapsulates everything that intoxicated me about drum ‘n’ bass, jungle, and acid house when I was in my teens/early twenties, but bringing in the wider palette and youthful energy of what’s happening around them. This took me on a journey and made me want to move. 
• Sarah Shook and the Disarmers, “Stranger” – When I saw Sarah Shook and their band, right after tours started rolling through again, I was struck by some of the new material, darker and thornier, with new rhythms, some of it had almost a Roy Orbison cast. Their new album, Nightroamer, pairs them with Pete Anderson and it takes those new colors and makes them pop. The use of uncanny autotune on songs like this, meshes and sparks against the pedal steel in a fascinating way I’ve never quite heard before, setting this classic hungover-with-your-regrets narrative in a place wholly unique but familiar. 
• Carlos Franzetti, “In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning” – Another classic late night/early morning ballad, most famously interpreted by Frank Sinatra, gets a gorgeous read as the title track of the new record by Argentinean pianist Franzetti, with sympathetic accompaniment from David Finck on bass and Billy Drummond on drums. 
• Kate Ellis, “Bluebirds and Rye” – Shifting from New York to London’s vibrant Americana scene, Kate Ellis’s Spirals is everything I love about that genre of music, great songs telling stories, often obliquely, and with a warm, glowing sheen on the backing. Joseph Paxton’s violin and her smoky voice vibrate a string right down my spine and draw me into the gravity of the lyric. “The waters around you are rising and you don’t know if you’ve got the fight. Just stop holding your breath and find a soft place to rest. There’s nothing but bluebirds and rye.” 
• Sarah Borges featuring Eric Ambel, “Rock and Roll Hour” – Together Alone further cements the power and beauty of the collaboration of one of my favorite voices and songwriters, Sarah Borges, with one of my favorite writers and producers, Eric Ambel. This has a swinging, shuffling beat, with a gritty guitar and burbling organ as it tells a touring story decidedly lower to the ground and realer than we usually get in songs, with a riff I haven’t gotten out of my head since I first heard it. 
• Cherry Cheeks, “Go Outside” – This squealing organ and drum machine record from Kyle Harms under the Cherry Cheeks guise is exactly the kind of snotty, youthful record Total Punk has a line to that always warms my middle aged, often nostalgia-drunk heart. 
• Etran de l’Aïr, “Adounia” – I’ve liked everything I’ve heard from the Agadez scene but when I heard Etran de l’Aïr it struck a special chord with me, swinging just a little more, with a lighter touch than the other bands I’ve heard come out of the Tuareg region. A marvelous, expansive world built in song. 
• Immolation, “The Age of No Light” – A similarity in guitar tones and expansiveness tied this delightful Immolation record, Acts of God, to the earlier track to me, and there’s even a healthy bit of swing and dynamics here. A classic band of the death metal genre that’s been doing it since the early 90s and still find new things to say, fresh takes on their genre without alienating any of the true believers. 
• Tanya Tagaq, “Do Not Fear Love” – As my excitement for this year’s Big Ears Festival builds to a fever pitch, I’ve been revisiting and delving into some of my favorite sets from previous years – I’d heard of Tanya Tagaq but didn’t know her work until that afternoon at the Bijou Theatre that ripped my throat right out, one of those handful of sets that turns your whole world around. The Inuk singer’s new album, Tongues, plays with other textures and tones without sacrificing any of that fury or righteous fire that blew us all away in that room those years ago. 
• Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, “Fried Soul” – The band I’m probably most looking forward to coming back through Columbus, Portland’s hard rocking organ trio’s Cold as Weiss, invigorated by a new drummer and punchy, fire-cured tunes, left some added material just as good as the record off it, including this swaggering B-side. 
• Swamp Dogg, “I Need a Job” – Swamp Dogg (Jerry Williams) has been making wild, idiosyncratic soul records since the ‘70s and he follows 2020’s rootsier Sorry You Couldn’t Make It with this year’s sprawling, gloriously messy I Need a Job…So I Can Buy More Autotune, wrapping his wry observations and overproof-whiskey voice in slathers of autotune, earworm horn sections, and grinding grooves. 
• King George, “Keep on Rollin’” – I was way too much of a sucker for the “authenticity trap,” looking for bullshit identifiers, in my 20s so I’ve been trying to catch up with the more synthesizer-heavy Southern Soul genre in the last few years. Newish artist King George’s catchy single-entendre tribute to polyamory is a classic, raunchy example of that genre when all the cylinders are firing.  
• Kendra Morris, “This Life” – Kendra Morris, who I mostly knew through her work with the great New York singer-songwriter Julia Haltigan, really comes into her own with the sun-dappled soul of Nine Lives. The vocal here perfectly rides the subtle bounce of the groove on this song, buoyed by rising strings.  
• Sweet Nay, “Whooped” – Another contemporary Southern Soul banger, I especially love the synthesized accordion sounds and the ferocious wit of the vocal. “I put that nookie on him (yes, I did), now he’s looking for me. I put that thing on him, got my name on it.” 
• Eric Krasno, “Lost Myself” – I became a Krasno fan with Soulive and then realized how far-reaching his work was. This album, Always, helps synthesize his various work, in collaboration with producer Otis McDonald, and brings him to the front as a lead singer with a limited but appealing and seductive voice. A finger-snapping groove, laced with his inimitable funk guitar and shuddering horns sets this party track on fire. “You shook me to my bones, and I was looking kinda crazed. You said, ‘To me, love is free in this world. I just want something I can save.” 
• The Greyboy Allstars, “I’ve Got Reasons” – I was digging back into Greyboy Allstars’ catalogue since Andrew Patton tipped me off to their impending trip through Woodlands Tavern in April and I realized they’ve been putting out new singles for the last year or so that stand up to the best of the work that got me hooked on them back in college. This Mary Jane Hooper cover features a blistering keyboard solo from Robert Walter and Elgin Park’s guitar shooting through multipart harmonies. 
• Taru Alexander, “Kojo Time” – Drummer Taru Alexander pays tribute to his father, the great tenor player Roland Alexander and other mentors on this knotty, joyous record Echoes of the Masters. This tune, written by the elder Alexander in honor of Taru’s birth, roars to life and gets a passionate reading with a killer solo from Antoine Roney on sax and a blistering rhythm from Alexander, Rahsaan Carter’s bass, and James Hurt’s piano. The way they shift the mood and movement of the piece underneath solos without undermining the structural integrity of the song is a masterclass in what I’m looking for in small group jazz. 
• John Hébert, “Duke Ellington’s Sounds of Love” – I fell for the majesty of Hébert’s bass playing though his long collaboration with one of my favorite guitarists, Mary Halvorson, especially stripped down to a trio in the old Jazz Gallery where my mouth was open so long my throat dried out. As a bassist-leader-composer, the specter of Charles Mingus looms large and with Sounds of Love, Hébert meets that legend head on. This Mingus tune I didn’t know as well, grappling with one of his biggest compositional and bandleading influences, starts with a lush, evocative solo bass introduction and when the colors of the rest of the band come in, Fred Hersch’s piano, Ches Smith’s drums mostly played with brushes, and the snaking lines of Tim Berne’s alto and Taylor Ho Bynum’s cornet, we land somewhere between the sunlight over the mountains as the orchestra makes itself known on Beethoven’s 9^th and those first perfect notes of Coltrane’s Crescent. And the rest of the record lives up to that. 
• Lara Downes, “Euphonic Sounds” – I’ve raved so much about Lara Downes in the last year-plus I’ve thought about renaming the damn blog. But she keeps blowing me away. I found Scott Joplin (and ragtime as a genre) through a Charlie Brown special when I was a kid and it fascinated me. The paired benefits of a good library system (with a lot of records even at my suburban branch) and when I was just a little older, one of the great practitioners of the closely associated form of stride piano, Terry Waldo, working in my town (now setting the trad scene on fire in NYC) made sure I never went too far from that love. Downes’ excavation and illumination of one of the true towering giants of American music, is the kind of labor of love I hope we all get at least a taste of. This piece captures the rhythmic clarity and popping cells of surprising, joyful melody that made Joplin’s name but also highlights the sophisticated harmony he didn’t always get credit for, produced in a way to feels in your face, you could roll around in it. 
• Big Thief, “Blue Lightning” – Big Thief is one of those bands it seemed like I should like, people with similar tastes raved about them, but they didn’t click for me until the sprawling Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. And as with many things, it was John Wendland’s radio show playing one of the singles that made me dig into this in a way I hadn’t previously. This song conjures the same wry, windswept terrain as the best Gillian Welch and Iris Dement, with enough rough edges and surprising turns, especially in Buck Meek’s cracked and fraying guitar line and the dragging rhythm, to put it at an angle from the tradition, not unlike a favorite underrecognized band of mine, D. Charles Speer and the Helix. “Blue angel, yeah, you’re in my dreams, swearin’ every night. And a spider just beside her, larger than a hill. It’s plain to see if she don’t comfort me, the rattlesnake will.” 
• Amanda Anne Platt and the Honeycutters, “Dallas” – As I think I said when one of Platt and her band’s singles struck me for an earlier playlist, my pal Claire Badger turned me onto this band, and their full-length, The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, is the kind of road trip country I love and don’t hear nearly enough of. This example features classic honky-tonk piano from Kevin Williams, pedal steel from Matt Smith like afternoon soon bouncing between a half-full glass of beer and a copper bar, and a vocal that’s all lamp-oil and warm breezes. Ending the playlist here, with a song that sums up so much of the hope and regret that spoke to me in art this month, maybe reflecting my turbulent mind that wishes it was better at stillness. “Now I can’t be here, I can’t leave her, worrying the knots and scars in the wood. I can’t stop looking in the rearview, tryin’ to find a way to do just a little bit of good. If I could stop the sky from falling, don’t you think I would?”