Blog – Charles McNamara

a century’s quarter note

In the album notes for First Dance, the Freedom Art Quartet says their “purpose is to explore … the limitless dimensions of the art form.” Sign me up, folks. Right out of the gate, “Counterbalance” explodes into energetic interplay, hurtling toward chaotic culmination and eventual dust-settling. “Song for the Old Ones,” a twelve-minute almost-ballad, never drones and never spins out, in large part thanks to masterful drumming. Even with its formalist devotion, First Dance isn’t some exercise in tired, mid-century nostalgia: “Nature of the Past” foregrounds sonic and instrumental expansiveness that you might well find on some new post-rock album.

Nicole McCabe — A Song to Sing

This release is one of many produced by a constellation of jazz musicians in Los Angeles this year. Nicole McCabe, a young saxophonist, combines her own instrumental talent with bold, even lush production. Sometimes it feels like you’re listening to Homogenic but with a saxophonist taking the place of Björk’s improvisational vocals. Elsewhere, tracks like “San Benito” present McCabe through the lens of a kind of baroque pop. Her co-producer Pete Min released his own album this year (alongside Joey Waronker) with some great stuff, on which Tortoise’s Jeff Parker occasionally plays. (Tortoise had their own worthwhile release this year.) Parker has been around for years, but these other associated musicians are also worth watching.

Joanna Mallwitz and Konzerthausorchester Berlin — The Kurt Weill Album

There’s more Kurt Weill out there than just The Threepenny Opera. This recording opens with the gripping, dissonant chords of Weill’s 1921 Berliner Sinfonie, a work that never rests even in its Andante religioso. Another collaboration between Weill and Bertolt Brecht—a scored ballet on the seven deadly sins (Die sieben Todsünden)—occupies the album’s middle section. I have found it interesting not just to look for translations of its sharply satirical libretto (“He who does no wrong will atone for it on earth,” for instance) but also to read accounts of the work, whose listeners “start by laughing and then discover in their laughter a certain pain.” (Other superb classical releases this year include the music of Bohuslav Martinů and Tarquinio Merula.)

The Kasambwe Brothers (self-titled)

Hailing from Rwanda and recording the first release for a new label out of MASS MoCA, the Kasambwe Brothers sing over instruments of their own making: sometimes developing a melody over repeated strumming, sometimes ceding the floor to their guitars and percussion. Listening to this album reminds me of sitting in the back seat while the worn cassette of Paul Simon’s The Rhythm of the Saints plays for the fourth time in a row. Amid so many global crises, this joyous release—its ecstatic hollers, its rhythmic heartbeat—reminds listeners that there is still a world of brotherhood out there.

Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band — New Threats from the Soul

I’m hardly the only person to praise this bundle of poetic, winding alt-country (or “punked-up country gunk“). Ryan Davis’s new album sounds like some hybrid of Wilco and Lucinda Williams, combining genre-bending production with the hyper-local backdrop of pawn shops and small-town bars. One track can’t “tell the cattle roads from the chemtrails of our past lives”; another track documents how “Dionysus hits the urinal.” It’s an album that falls just on the right side of the boundary between allusiveness and inscrutability—like modernist literature recited on a Great Plains radio station. Its dense, almost-enigmatic lyricism is part of the reward of repeated listening. Davis asks, “Are we getting any closer to me knowing what the point of this is?”—well, not really, thank goodness.

December 31, 2025

the gladiator & the gadfly

In a brief essay for the latest issue of Commonweal, I consider the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk and make the case that “robust discourse” in academic settings can never be entrusted to political pundits. Instead, colleges and universities need to defend “substantive principles like toleration, moral freedom, and openness to doubt,” and doing so will require institutional recommitment to teaching advanced literacy and the “slow-paced rituals of humanistic learning”:

In my view, colleges and universities already have monuments to “open, robust discourse.” They’re called libraries. In their quiet stacks, one can find John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice not far from Robert Nozick’slibertarian response, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Library patrons can read Frantz Fanon’s defense of political violence in The Wretched of the Earth, but they can also pick up a copy of Hannah Arendt’s On Violence, her rejection of bloodshed in the pursuit of political power. Spirited disagreement can be found on every American campus. We simply need to pull it off the shelf.

I realize how naïve this may seem amid the chorus of articles reporting that college students can’t read selections from demanding books, let alone entire volumes. Even so, colleges must promote their own literate vision of “robust discourse” and hold firm to their identity and mission against opportunistic political actors. They make a grave, self-destructive error if they accept that intellectual life is best represented by a tent emblazoned with the insincere taunt “Prove Me Wrong.”

This essay picks up on some ideas that I considered years ago in a review of Zena Hitz’s book Lost in Thought—that review remains one of my favorite contributions to Commonweal. On a related note, I was happy to be consulted alongside Hitz and others for a report in The Guardian on the state of humanities education at US universities.

November 6, 2025

saint augustine on posting

“The sin of the sophist is that he denies the necessity of subject matter and believes that forma alone is desirable. An opposite vice, one to which historians of rhetoric have never given a name, depends upon the belief that the man possessed of truth will ipso facto be able to communicate the truth to others. It is a dependence upon materia alone. Its chief proponent in ancient times was the young Plato, and it would seem fair to label it the “Platonic rhetorical heresy” just as we apply the term “sophistry” to its opposite theory. This is not to say that the ecclesiastical writers of the fourth century looked to the Gorgias and Protagoras for a theory of communication, but rather that their reactions to the pagan culture of Rome led many of them to take up a somewhat similar attitude toward the rhetoric which was a part of that culture. Augustine apparently recognized a danger in this aspect of the cultural debate of his times, and used the De Doctrina [Christiana’s fourth book] to urge a union of both matter and form in Christian preaching.

Only if one views the book as part of the great debate of the fourth century, therefore, does its historical importance emerge clearly. The reader is struck by the author’s insistence upon the folly of abandoning a useful tool to the enemy.”

—James J. Murphy, “The Debate about a Christian Rhetoric,” in The Rhetoric of St. Augustine of Hippo, eds. Enos, Thompson, et al. (2008)

October 11, 2025