Category: Music

These past several weeks of indoor life have been a good opportunity for all of us for catching up on music—whether brushing up that little piece we’ve always wanted to play, spending time with a challenging album, revisiting old favorites from a decade ago. I’ve found myself doing all of the above: anything to incentivize myself from defiantly marching out the front door. I’m also imagining (hoping, really) that I’ll appreciate hearing this or that quarantine-era song again in a few years and blurt out, “Gosh, remember social distancing?”

A couple months ago I grabbed guitarist Jeff Parker’s new album Suite for Max Brown, whose opening track is bound to be that mnemonic trigger for my future self. I mostly love its chunky, dissonant piano chords, but its opening lyrics are especially resonant in our new sheltered routines:

Everyone moves like they’ve someplace to go

Build a nest and watch the world go by slow

We didn’t quite anticipate nesting like this in the first months of 2020, nor did we anticipate our world’s abrupt slowness, but here we are. Have a listen–not like you’ve someplace to go, right?

During the past couple Decembers, I’ve listed five of my favorite recordings from the preceding year. It’s time to do the same as we resolve to the tonic for the decade:

Michael Tilson Thomas’ recording with the San Francisco Symphony of Charles Ives’ Symphonies 3 and 4 is a music history seminar in one album. I haven’t listened to a lot of Ives, but I found this collection of songs revelatory, with its ample supply of American folk and religious music that underlies Ives’ compositions. One of those albums that moves the composer from furniture music to an object of focused attention.

Esperanza Spalding’s 12 Little Spells was originally released in 2018, but an expanded version came out earlier this year. Some of the new material verges into the Björky, especially “Lest We Forget (blood),” still a really great song. But the whole album is a sonic smorgasbord—sometimes within one song, as in the title track—and it only cements Spalding’s upset win over J-Biebs as the crowning Grammy of the decade.

One of my jazz obsessions this year has been pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams, whose early self-titled album (1964) was reprinted on Smithsonian Folkways in 2019. The tracks on this disc appear on her later album Mary Lou Williams Presents Black Christ of the Andes, too. The choral harmonies on tracks like “St. Martin de Porres” and “The Devil” are so rich, flitting between traditional and almost avant-garde, like Duke Ellington and Brian Wilson made an album together.

Speaking of re-issues, a post on old-Internet-bulwark Metafilter sent me to Sora’s Re.sort, a guilty pleasure album of glitchy, collaged beach music originally released on CD in 2003 and re-released this year. Missed it then, happy to have stumbled upon it now. My affinity for this one might be some reflective nostalgia on the aughts, not even this present decade: it’s like an easy collaboration of The Books and Fennesz—the stuff I liked in college.

It’s appropriate, maybe, that one of the last great albums of the 2010s echoes one of the decade’s major losses and obsessively meditates upon a child’s death. That is, Nick Cave’s ambient, Eno-ish Ghosteen sounds like the 2010s have felt: for a lot of people and for a lot of reasons, it has been a long, even grievous ten years. Against that gloomy backdrop, it’s comforting and hopeful to hear repeated “I am beside you / Look for me” as we move into the 2020s—that there’s something good to keep our eyes out for. I wouldn’t call it the album of the decade, but reader, you might still call it your decade’s album.

Despite all the mayhem and mismanagement of 2018, I was able to enjoy some great live music this year, including that fantastic performance of Ogresse, Angela Hewitt’s virtuosic marathon of the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and a couple great Bill Frisell sets. Now that the year is mercifully coming to an end, I’m picking through albums that have held up over a bunch of listens. In no particular order:

Charles Mingus — Jazz in Detroit:

The never-before-recorded track “Dizzy Profile” is a tune that I just can’t get out of my head, even after several months. It’s a beautiful waltz, especially on the trumpet and on a melodic piano that tosses in some Art Tatum-ish runs. This five-disc release has long, long tracks, all with tons of little things to listen for here and there. You won’t be bored.

Prince — Piano and a Microphone 1983:

The second “newly discovered” release on this list, I picked up this album on the recommendation of a friend from college. Like Jazz in Detroit above, Piano and a Microphone lacks the glisten of hyper-produced pop: the first track starts with Prince calling out “Is that my echo?” and “Can you turn the lights down some in here?” shortly before singing “Good God!” and sort-of-beatboxing over his piano chords. “Turn the voice down a little,” he interrupts at 1:30–unvarnished stuff. How refreshing to hear someone working through songs at the keyboard, not the iMac kind.

Orquesta Akokán (self-titled):

Cuban music is normally off my radar, and I can’t quite remember how I found myself listening to this debut album, but it’s so fantastic from start to finish. All original songs, and you’ll want to change into dancing shoes by the second track. The production on this one stands out: it’s a big band sound that has a little grittiness to the horns and pianos exactly where you’d like it, and you hardly notice you’re listening to something released in 2018.

Minami Deutsch — With Dim Light:

The self-titled debut Miniami Deutsch a few years ago was just fine, but this six-track sophomore album is a lot tighter. Japanese krautrock, but with a dash of punkier Stereolab or My Bloody Valentine-ish vocals, and the first track (“Concrete Ocean”) dabbles in something like math rock. The most interesting actual rock album I came across this year, for sure.

Ivan Ilić — Reicha Rediscovered, Vol. 2:

Tipped by this write-up in the Times, I started listen to the music of Anton Reicha this year. Released as the second of Ivan Ilić’s five-disc series of Reicha’s piano works, these fugue(ish?) tracks really grabbed me–perhaps because this disc sometimes sounds completely non-fugal. The last track, for example, from Reicha’s “36 Fugues” has a playful, even ‘boingy’ feel to it, totally unlike what you’ll hear in the Well-Tempered Clavier.