Category: Music

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.

It’s the season for best-of lists, but for this and that reason I wasn’t able to put together a new version of Lecta Delecta, my annual collection of the “best ancient literature of the year.” (My friend Patrick Burns at NYU/ISAW is carrying on the tradition — scope it out at his site.) In lieu of oddball Latin, here’s some of my favorite music from 2016:

• Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Real Enemies
  As one review points out, Real Enemies was imagined some time before this November’s presidential election, and it doesn’t have an overt political agenda, but it’s a fitting soundtrack as the credits roll on 2016: the album explores “the broader themes of cultural paranoia and false truth.” Regardless of these topical considerations, Argue’s mish-mash of jazz, electronic sampling, and symphonic modernism is solid from start to finish.

• Kadhja Bonet, The Visitor
  I think I originally found Bonet’s album through NPR, which has covered it a couple times. She’s a striking vocalist, and her classical training as a violinist shows in the strings that she incorporates throughout the album. It’s hard to pin down the decade that this album could fit in, a good sign of its freshness.

• Isabelle Faust, Il Giardino Armonico, and Giovanni Antonini, Mozart: Violin Concertos
  I love Isabelle Faust’s violin performances, and her collaboration with Alexander Melnikov on Beethoven’s Sonatas for Violin and Piano remains a favorite classical album from the past several years. Mozart isn’t normally my composer of choice, to be honest, but the playing here on period instruments is top-notch.

• Johnnie Frierson, Have You Been Good to Yourself
  Found in a thrift store, Frierson’s Have You Been Good to Yourself is a lo-fi, immediate picture of the American South. It’s a reminder of my former life in rural Arkansas and all its characters — in Frierson’s Memphis, for instance, we find a “Space Man” who performs the everyday miracles of auto shop work.

• Fred Hersch, Sunday Night at the Vanguard
  Another great jazz album, from Evans-style ballads like “For No One” to more erratic tracks like “We See.” Hersch’s own “Valentine,” played as an encore for this recording, has the lyricism of a melancholic Christmas standard and perhaps is an appropriate final track for the year.

Post Scriptum: This year I also unearthed some older gems: German music from early 20th-century cinema, including works by Friedrich Holländer and Robert Stolz, and this 1979 new wave from Japan. Not new, still great.