Back again! January’s always a pretty slow month but I found a lot to like. A mix of things that hit my radar as I read other people’s year end lists, advance singles of Spring records I’m salivating over, and a smattering of new records.
Where to buy selections here available on Bandcamp, courtesy of Hype Machine’s Merch Table feature – https://hypem.com/merch-table/7BKaiIU7RORD4z0VEkLQEy
Read on for notes.
I tried to break out this year’s playlist into a few zones to make them a little less unwieldy. What’s fun about this is it lets me make room for songs I played constantly, even if I didn’t love the whole record. Also putting these in different posts so it’s not too much to bite off.
Songs features tunes that lean a little more pop-oriented, usually with lyrics or dance beats.
Spaces deals in compositions and improvisations that are a little more abstract and usually instrumental.
Obviously, more than a few things could have fit on either.
Parting Gifts features people who’ve passed this year – heavier on jazz because it feels like COVID took a bigger bite out of living legends in that category, but obviously loss doesn’t miss any of us.
Here’s the first batch, mostly “songs.” For notes, basically, what I’d blather at you when I queued it up on a jukebox, continue reading below.
Merch Table Link courtesy Hype Machine: https://hypem.com/merch-table/3ENpeOuJ31RoF6c6CKkdjm
2020 Best Of – Recorded Music (And Playlist)
Music was the single biggest balm for me in this fucked-up time. I tried to take advantage of the additional time at home to dig into records with a fervor I’m sorry to admit I’d let slip away from me for a few years.
I heard a couple hundred new records in full and it was hard winnowing down to 40ish, even harder getting to these 20 but these felt like they glowed together when I started looking at the track I kept. I’d be surprised if I’m not still taking these out and talking fondly in a few years.
I’ll also have a couple playlist posts last week of the month with songs from each of these and other songs I loved throughout the year.
Man, this was a great month for recordings. There’s also far more stuff that is a contender for my year end list that didn’t make this – my rule for instrumentals is they have to work with the larger song-based contexts, I’ll almost never drop a fifteen minute movement of an extended minimalist suite in here; it never feels like it works.
Like most autumns, I find myself drawn toward the reflective and the melancholy even a little more than usual. I tried to keep this from being monochromatic but time and you will tell. Thanks for listening. Continue reading for notes on each song.
Working up that Pink Elephant Greatest Hits reignited a love for me of making playlists. It also reinforced that I had a few years of not taking in much new music – my time on the bus (or walking) had mostly fallen into a rut of playing the same feel-better playlists. I never had a problem getting more than I needed for my year-end list but loving 35 records in 365 days to pare down to 20 didn’t feel like me, looking at prior years when I had almost 100 contenders to cut down to a top list.
I also miss writing about records, and I’m grateful for the promos that still come through. On the third hand, as winter comes and the pandemic rages on, I need some structure and some fun projects to get through it. So I’m going to try a monthly playlist of things I’ve heard recently. This first one covers the last couple months, things still fresh in my mind since the idea occurred to me a couple of weeks ago. From now on, it’ll be (mostly) stuff I heard in the last month.
Using Spotify because of ease; I’ve thought about Mixcloud – home of one of my perennial recurring playlist inspirations, Tutti Time – and SoundCloud but haven’t committed to the learning curve yet. If you have a preference, hit me up.
I’d love to do this on Bandcamp if there was playlist functionality, but we finally got Chromecast on it so I’m keeping hope alive. Obviously, especially when we’re not going to shows and buying merch, I encourage you to buy music that speaks to you.
September 2020
Recorded Music: The Anthony Braxton Project by Thumbscrew
I’ve been thinking a lot about teachers and passing music down. There’s magic in folks removed from the source remaking material and finding their way, but there’s something special about people who have played with and studied with a composer. There’s no greater living American composer than Anthony Braxton – and precious few even in the same league – and his ensembles and classrooms gave legions of the finest genre-bending musicians to the new music scene.
My favorite of the tributes in time for his 75th birthday is this concise look at rarities from the Braxton book by Thumbscrew, a collective trio balancing sharp originals with a keen command on jazz history, featuring two members who worked directly with Braxton (Mary Halvorson on guitar and Tomas Fujiwara on drums and vibes) and Michael Formanek on bass.
Only two tracks on this project – honed in a residency at Pittsburgh art space City of Asylum – break the seven-minute mark and they cram twists, turns, and an almost overwhelming sense of delight into that space. “Composition No. 68” features thick, juicy arco playing from Formanek while Fujiwara’s high-wire vibes spark off Halvorson’s flurry of barbed guitar. “Composition No. 35” also stakes out space for the vibraphone, especially in a joyous cat-and-mouse intro.
Throughout, Thumbscrew highlights Braxton’s approachability, his sense of infectious melody, without ever dumbing down or selling out his idiosyncratic vocabulary. “Composition No. 14” threads the record as a solo showcase for each player. “Guitar” projects a wide-screen constellation of Halvorson’s signature melodic string-bending. “Drums” leans into Fujiwara’s sense of understated drama, drenched in an almost symphonic mood. “Bass” showcases Formanek’s sense of space and texture.
It’s hard to go wrong with The Anthony Braxton Project as an introduction to either Thumbscrew or Braxton’s compositions. It’s my favorite thing to write to for the couple weeks it’s been out, and it works beautifully on an intellectual and visceral level.
Live Music: The Adonis Rose Sextet, presented by the New Orleans Jazz Museum and Jazz at Lincoln Center.
At the end of a long workday – I was logged back in at 6:30 pm when they started and went well past their hour set – this unknown-to-me band was the perfect, refreshing tonic. Loose-limbed, intense classic hard bop led by Rose’s exciting, suspenseful drumming. They covered classic repertoire (including a burning take on Horace Silver’s Jazz Messengers classic “Ecaroh”) with a singular focus and passion, mastering the balancing act this mid-century American music requires to breathe and live: a fine-tuned interlocking machine of love for the world.
Live Music: Movement In Stasis, Day 2, presented by Experimental Sound Studios and Sonic Transmissions Fest.
Experimental Sound Studios, already one of Chicago’s treasures, has filled a much-needed niche in these COVID times by providing a steady streaming home for experimental music of all stripes, often teaming with other players in the scene like Ken Vandermark or Corbett V. Dempsey gallery.
This collaboration with Austin festival Sonic Transmissions Fest single-handedly justified my (scheduled earlier) mental health day from work. I caught three sets (out of four, I sadly missed Mars Williams).
Ingrid Laubrock and Tom Rainey, broadcasting from their home, showed off the continuous refinement of their unique language and telepathy. The first piece, with Laubrock on tenor, danced through growling almost-R&B, nudged by Rainey’s jostling, lively drum part then dropping out for Laubrock to lean into almost Brotzmann-esque stuttering and disruption of the gorgeous melody. The latter piece with soprano used instrument’s vocal textures to devastating effect with Laubrock’s unmistakable tone, Rainey’s drums almost acting as hypeman and instigator.
Wendy Eisenberg played an undulating solo electric guitar piece with a subtle rhythm track by the reservoir she stood next to. Glowing crystalline cells of melody stuck in my blood, then dissipated into a foam of something confounding and even more beautiful. Eisenberg built this piece on the glory of disjunction, on the surprise and delight of nature and humanity, and reminded me what keeps me hungry for new music.
Blacks’ Myths, the DC duo comprising Luke Stewart on bass and Warren G. “Trae” Crudup III on drums, streamed an intense, enticing duet from their respective homes. Painting surreal landscapes with the colors of a traditional rhythm section, their set was as surprising as it was deep. In Crudup’s hands, rolls and ride time exploded into flurries reminiscent of Sunny Murray, Stewart used string noise and mutes to create a rich negative space and long, organ-like tones of distortion to provide narrative propulsion.
As is tradition, I submitted my top records of the year to Agit Reader. I wrote about my #1 and the site’s #9 – Pillars by Tyshawn Sorey, a new benchmark for mixing contemporary classical/new music and improvisation, in this post: http://agitreader.com/wp2/the-agit-reader-top-10-of-2018/
The full top 10 of mine and their other writers are at this link: http://agitreader.com/wp2/staff-picks-for-the-best-albums-of-2018/
My 11-20:
11. IDLES, Joy as an Act of Resistance
12. Lea Bertucci, Metal Aether (reviewed for Agit Reader)
13. Jlin, Autobiography
14. Sons of Kemet, Your Queen is a Reptile
15. Neko Case, Hell-On
16. Brian Fallon, Sleepwalkers
17. Cecille McLorin Salvant, The Window
18. Motel Mirrors, In the Meantime (Half of the singing-songwriting core of this band, John Paul Keith, also put out an exquisite solo record, Heart Shaped Shadow whose songs dotted every time I had people over to dance, but this was the one that kept me up at night)
19. JD Allen, Love Stone
20. US Girls, In a Poem Unlimited
Trying this as a memory exercise as much as anything else. Two-three things I’ve really enjoyed in the past week (or so) and one thing I’m looking forward to, irrespective of what I’m assigned to write about. Plan is to post one of these every weekend when I usually have at least one day off.
Memphis Rent Party by Robert Gordon (link to purchase). Robert Gordon had a front row seat for some of the most exciting movements in Memphis music for this last 30 years. He’s shared the fruits of his keen eye, searching curiosity, and big-picture sense of the intersecting threads of history with us in books (his It Came From Memphis is a Rosetta Stone for cracking the code of American music and his books about Stax and Muddy Waters are essential), liner notes, documentaries, music videos (including Cat Power’s “Lived in Bars” filmed in one my favorite bars in Memphis, The Lamplighter).
This collection of short pieces about artists from Tav Falco to James Carr to Otha Turner to Jeff Buckley with the grace and gravity of someone who lived alongside them and cared enough to go deep. The additional context in the notes and restored material is worth the price of admission alone. In whole, Memphis Rent Party struck me as a loving admonition to dig into and do more of the things that give me solace and light me on fire. As he says:
“Memphis is not about perfection but about the differences, the flaws. It’s the kinks that mark beauty and define us, not the lack of them. How remarkable to create something unlike what anyone else can, that even the artist can’t repeat. That recorded moment – like Dickinson said – why preserve it if you can recreate it every day? Preserve instead the best ever take, the most unique version, the unrepeatable presentation.”
And later: “In a government housing tower or over on the finer side of town, someone is composing a song or recording a sound or performing a show that that might change how we think, how we hear the world and understand our place in it. What happens in Peoria, Pittsburgh, and Petaluma may not become emblematic of a generation, but the expression of something different can still challenge the mind and thrill the heart. That still, small voice, it won’t be immediately familiar, and it takes a moment to come in clear, but listen for it, note how near – it’s just down the road or right across the river.”
The Sadies, Rumba Cafe
The Sadies (Rumba Cafe, June 9, 2018)
Dallas and Travis Good returned to Columbus with their crack rhythm section of Sean Dean on bass and Mike Belitsky on drums and took us all, in turns, to the purifying fire of the honky tonk and the sweaty erotic energy of a tent revival. Years ago, seeing them, a good friend said, “They’re great but they need an Elvis Costello,” referring to their The Band/The Roots propensity for backing other artists (Neko Case, Jon Langford, Jon Spencer) often creating some of that person’s best work but overshadowing their own.
It had been a few years and I’m ecstatic to report that if that was ever a problem of theirs, it’s a problem no longer. Beyond those uncanny sibling harmonies, the personalities of Dallas and Travis, switching off on lead vocals and lead guitar were charming and riveting.
They took roots music and reminded me that it’s a wriggling, profane, beautiful, still glistening and alive thing. They graced originals like “Riverview Fog” with a Byrds/REM jangle and chime and “God Bless the Infidels” with a snarling fiddle and allusions to the Louvin Brothers’ classic Satan is Real.
They conjured up the dark underbelly of the history of song with a raging “Pretty Polly” and channeled honky-tonk heartbreak on “Cut Corners” with lines like “Here’s to the lucky ones, let’s drink to better days: you and yours everywhere, this one’s on me (for a change). Don’t cry for me, remember that no one and nothing is free.”
As many of my friends were down at Twangfest, this was a restorative, a sweet connection to those memories and the taste of a little knife’s-edge of that celebration.
Neko Case, Hell-On
Neko Case has been one of my favorite voices since I first heard Furnace Room Lullaby. Some of my all-time favorite shows have been her work, in whole or in part – opening for Nick Cave at the Chicago Theater, a Little Brothers show with out of town friends that ended in a snowball fight and a raging after party at the St James, a night at the Beachland Ballroom with The Sadies opening for and backing her.
Every record she’s made is worth checking for though I confess she lost me a little around Middle Cyclone. Her new one, Hell-On, a few listens in stands proudly with her strongest work. It’s the perfect record for the glow of a solo summer afternoon. Thick and sticky, all Edward Hopper green and long shadows, a little frayed at the edges but shot through with hope.
Coming Up:
Bava Choco’s Clowns Release Show (June 15, 2018 at Ace of Cups)
Patrick Monroe’s been one of Columbus music’s most vocal boosters for years and in his last couple bands, Intercontinental Champs and his new one, Bava Choco, his own songs have come into their own.
Bava Choco adds sticky stoner riffs and ’70s grind to the pop hooks for an intoxicating mix. For this release show for their second EP, they assembled a killer night of music front to back. Lizard McGee of Earwig opens with a rare solo show. Moodshifter, the new project of Aaron Pauley on guitar, Andy Hindman on bass, and Larz Raymond on drums play next. I caught Moodshifter a few weeks ago and the material is still gelling but there are already sparkling riffs and some really fresh songs that hint at what’s to come. The Damn Thing merges the songwriting of Marcy Mays, from Scrawl, and Dave Holm, of Ugly Stick and Bigfoot, with the crunching riffs of Pat Murphy (of Bob City and, with Marcy, Night Family). One of the best, most fully formed bands to emerge if the last few years – every time they play it’s not to be missed.
Screen of Distance 