Category: Music

Freedom Art Quartet — First Dance

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.

I’ve admired the music of both Aaron Diehl and Darcy James Argue for years—the former as an inheritor of and innovator in the tradition of pianists like John Lewis and Mary Lou Williams, the latter as a composer and bandleader whose works stretch the idiom of American big band in cerebral directions while augmenting its musicality. Fantastic stuff all around.

This past weekend, Diehl (who took over the 92Y “Jazz in July” series from Bill Charlap last year) hosted Argue and his band for the final night of the concert series. After performances of some of their earlier works, they premiered Argue’s new three-movement suite “A Banquet for the Birds.” (Major thanks to the 92Y for continuing to sell digital access to concerts, even years after the worst of 2020’s ambulance sirens. I was so happy to be able to watch while on a trip to rural Michigan.) This new work draws inspiration from Emily Wilson’s recent translation of Homer’s Iliad (which I haven’t read yet), and Argue’s title comes from one of its opening lines, which recounts how the Trojan War “made men the spoils of dogs, a banquet for the birds” (αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν / οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι).

The first movement (“The Sparrows and the Snake”) begins with a continuo organ, quickly giving way to trumpet flourishes that remind me of Kill Bill (complimentary!), a muslcal echo of the Iliad‘s martial backdrop. After just a minute so, Diehl plays—unaccompanied—over sparse harmonies whose mode recall Debussy’s Little Shepherd, with both perhaps drawing from the musical vocabulary of rustic Greece. The second half trades this simplicity for piano runs and chords less rustic and more Rachmaninoff-showstopper. Have we we entered a blood-and-guts scene from later in the Iliad? Those Tarantino flourishes return in the final measures of the movement, so yes, this is all drawn from Homer’s epic of gory swordfighting.

The second movement takes its title—”The Most Meaningful of Birds”—from Homer’s description in Book 8 of an eagle who proves ominous (as birds often do in Greco-Roman literature). As a side note, I’m interested in (but very open to) Wilson’s choice of “most meaningful” as the translation of τελειότατος (αὐτίκα δ᾽ αἰετὸν ἧκε τελειότατον πετεηνῶν)—perhaps “most perfect” or “most authoritative”? Anyhow, we begin with Diehl on the piano again. This time hamonies sound a little less foreign, less of-some-other-mode, but still with bare melodies. Especially when the band kicks in, Argue’s lone woodwind lines evoke something like Copland … or perhaps a Stravinsky chorale? (I love how both Argue and Diehl walk the tightrope between classical and jazz, and this movement is a great example of that balance.)

After some smoothed, almost gentle piano lines—is the eagle soaring away?—the final movement starts with disorderly, muted trumpets. Drums and piano and bass soon add to the chaos. So begins “A Tangled Cry,” the last movement. Diehl comes back with some of those Copland/Stravinsky cadences before returning to percussive chords—soon joined by more trumpet flourishes—that remind us that we’re still in the ninth year of the Trojan War. Indeed, the sombre saxophone and trumpet lines that come shortly before the final, grim harmonies of the suite signal how the Iliad is not a tale of Greek triumph or really even of Achilles’ kleos aphthiton but of the shared, tragic annihilation of warfare.

breaking stretch // patricia brennan septet

So glad I discovered this tour-de-force album only a few weeks before the end of the year. The drums on its opening track maintain just enough stability to keep everything from spinning out of control, and that controlled chaos sets the tone for the remaining eight. Not every track is relentless exuberance: “Sueños de Coral Azul” brakes to let Brennan’s swirling vibraphone (a bit like Mary Halvorson) come to the fore. Even though the album features just seven players, the sound is so big it sometimes reminds me of Darcy James Argue’s full jazz orchestra—”555” would fit right alongside the tracks on Argue’s Real Enemies.

diamond jubilee // cindy lee

Maybe it was just the nostalgic excitement of downloading an album as raw .wav files from GeoCities of all places … in 2024? But this unslick album isn’t just some forced exercise in retro, “lo-fi” aesthetics. Some tracks sound like The Jesus and Mary Chain cranked out a rockabilly album, others embrace the wordplay and narrative at the heart of the best country songwriting, others just goof around with guitar pedals within the productive constraints of Americana harmonies. A double album to listen to from start to finish.

slow burn // baby rose (with badbadnotgood)

I had never heard of BadBadNotGood before discovering this album, but they’ve apparently been in the hip-hop-meets-jazz-meets-something producer business for years. And the production on this little EP is solid, but the outstanding, deep vocals of Baby Rose are the real draw: sometimes her singing reminds me of the late Sharon Jones, elsewhere Baby Rose uses her contralto voice—with a lispy authenticity—to serve up the kind narrative development that shines on the best Cindy Lee tracks above. The analog instrumentation—jazz flute!—complements her vocals in just the right way.

orchestras // bill frisell

For decades Bill Frisell’s guitar work has pushed the boundaries of the instrument, especially in small-scale works and even solo reimaginings. And I’ve been lucky to see him play with regular collaborators like drummer Rudy Royston at up-close venues like the Village Vanguard and the Dakota here in Minneapolis—that’s all to say that hearing Frisell play with a 59-member orchestra is a new take. If you’ve come to think (erroneously!) that he has stagnated in staid “boomer soundscapes,” turn up the pulsing dissonance of Electricity and the noir harmonies of Strange Meeting for a Frisell you haven’t heard before.

take 3 // patricia kopatchinskaja

I first heard Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s great interpretations of Beethoven over a decade ago, but she has since championed “pieces from the borders of the current repertoire.” Sometimes she reaches pretty far beyond those borders. On Take 3, she strikes an interesting balance: familiar names like Poulenc, but also tracks that veer into a kind of Bacchic, inspired madness. In her telling, Kopatchinskaja doesn’t want a “perfectly polished and beautiful world,” one that would be “rather one-dimensional, and boringly kitsch.” Here she reminds us that disorder isn’t always destruction and that the outer reaches of creative freedom aren’t to be confused with absurdity.