As usual, more detailed thoughts on these will come – along with other songs that stuck in my chest – on the playlist posts later in the month. And while I no longer rank – though there’s a top 10 and an additional 10 – the record I came back to the most often, I turned over in my head repeatedly, and I kept finding new things to delight in was this year’s Hurray for the Riff Raff. Until Joy Oladokun’s new one came out, there wasn’t even a question about my “Record of the Year”. And while I’ve only lived with the Oladokun for a minute, it gives me that same blood-pumping feeling, and I can’t wait to see her come through the Newport in June.
David Murray Trio, screenshot taken from livestream and edited
Music: David Murray Trio and William Parker’s In Order to Survive Quintet
Free jazz holds a special place in my heart, no other music quite makes my nerves vibrate the same way. Like so many other traditions, William Parker’s fabled Vision Festival pivoted to online, and I was lucky enough to find out about it in time for the last day which featured two titans.
David Murray and William Parker were both gateway drugs for me. Murray, I think I discovered through Zach Bodish making a suggestion at Singing Dog Records in high school or early college, Parker I learned about through John Corbett’s Extended Play (if there’s a Virgil to my journey through music fandom, it’s probably Corbett). For the last 20+ years, seeing them in places like The Iridium, The Stone, the basement of CBGB’s, I’ve always found something new and refreshing from these wells.
Murray’s new trio of Luke Stewart on bass and Ronnie Burrage on drums, painted supple, sinewy backdrops for Murray’s gorgeous tone. He’s refined the vocal, gospel-tinged attack and warm, organic melodies feel lived in without sacrificing their surprise. There were righteous shouts, low whispers, and a tangle of melancholy and joy in an extended weaving-together of songs by California friends of his.
Parker’s In Order to Survive Quintet, one of my favorite of his smaller groups, did what they do: built universes out of engaged empathy and conversation. Rob Brown’s alto and James Brandon Lewis’s tenor jousted and danced, leaping into space and setting up landing pads for the rest of the band to play with. Parker’s thick, unmistakable tone seemed to create many centers of gravity at once, Gerald Cleaver’s chunky, melodic drumming and Cooper-Moore’s precious-stone-mosaic piano built towers for the music to run through.
Mary Halvorson, taken from livestream and edited
Music: Thumbscrew, presented by Roulette
I’m sure I’ve told this repeatedly in blogs but I still distinctly remember the first time I saw Mary Halvorson, playing in Trevor Dunn’s Trio Convulsant at Bowery Poetry Club on a stuffed art rock bill that turned me onto so many other great bands – Dr. Nerve, The Zs, Friendly Bears – I was there to see my pal Mike Gamble play in Mike Pride’s great band Snuggle/Stencil but Halvorson’s playing was the main thing I took away with me into the night.
I saw her two months later in one of Gerard Cox’s invaluable series, a duo with violist Jessica Pavone, at the much-missed ACME Art Company, cementing my fandom; she’s been one of my very favorite guitarist’s ever since. That rabid fandom still burns just as bright 15 years later.
Halvorson’s career is marked by immaculate taste, in her playing and in collaborators: the long-running collective trio Thumbscrew with bass player Michael Formanek and drummer Tomas Fujiwara is emblematic of this wide-ranging taste and approach.
To celebrate Halvorson’s 40th birthday, she and Thumbscrew played a gorgeous, riveting retrospective set at Brooklyn temple to the avant-garde, Roulette. It’s a tribute to the magic of improvisation and the intricate, organic writing of the trio that catchy cells of melody melted into rivers of cracked sound; mosaics slipped out of my grasp and new secrets blossomed in another light; wine-dark cascades parted to reveal silver melodies.
This was everything I want out of improvised and jazz-based music, and shows an artist with no signs of stopping. I hope to follow Halvorson’s guitar for another 30 years.
Nesba Crenshaw and Ro Boddie, taken from livestream and edited
Theater:Far Away by Caryl Churchill, directed by Cheryl Faraone, presented by PTP/NYC
Caryl Churchill has long been one of my favorite playwrights, but I’d never seen her 2000 short Far Away so this excellent streaming production from PTP/NYC was more than welcomed from me.
Far Away takes a variety of looks at a civilization crumbling, with Harper (Nesba Crenshaw) trying to explain to her niece Joan (Lilah May Pfeiffer as a child) and keep an unsteady balance with Todd (Ro Boddie) who also has a complicated relationship with Joan as an adult (Caitlin Duffy).
Faraone gets excellent performances and masterfully turns up a simmering heat that belies the distance of zoom. Every one of these four cast members knows how to shift from absurd, almost surreal details hinting at their grim reality, into bright humor, and a tenderness bent and twisted by a life lived under a heavy shadow. Far Away is a beautiful tonic that reflects our tumultuous moment – despite being written twenty years ago in a different darkness – that never inspires despair even as it acknowledges the storm.
Screen of Distance 