Can you believe it’s November already? It’s true, so let’s do our first-Tuesday-of-the-month thing and review some records together! This time, we’ve got two albums with a connection to Montana, including one by an artist I know a little, plus some other interesting stuff. Dive in with me, and let me know what you think in comments.

Bill Kautz is a composer, trumpet player, and DJ I connected with not long after moving to Montana. He’s based in Missoula (about two or three hours’ drive south of me) and has a weekly radio show on which he regularly plays Burning Ambulance releases. Back in 2024, he wrote and premiered a piece, And the light from which you came is now the [love] work we must do, which was inspired by the life and death of his infant son. Now he’s released a recording of it on the Vancouver-based Redshift label.

And the light… is a chamber jazz composition in four movements, featuring Kautz on trumpet, Jeremy Drake on guitar, Aria Peters on violin, and Jessica Catron on cello. Despite its bleak inspiration, it’s a very beautiful piece of music, partly composed and partly improvised, that incorporates sounds and ideas from European and American folk music (some of the violin lines reminded me of Bartók, and at one point I swear I heard a melodic quotation from “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”) and has a deeply felt and romantic atmosphere. In some ways, it reminds me of the music cornet player Ron Miles and guitarist Bill Frisell made together; Kautz’s playing is patient and considered, more suited to a church than a jazz club. Occasionally, one player or another will throw a curve ball, like when Drake steps on a distortion pedal for just a few seconds out of nowhere, but overall this is a unified ensemble performance that will enthrall you and put you in a thoughtful mood. And it’s perfect for fall.

International Anthem is obviously the Chicago label of the moment, and has been for a while. But Division 81, a smaller and more focused imprint, is doing some terrific work, too. They’ve released several albums by saxophonist Isaiah Collier, with and without his band the Chosen Few, as well as titles by Laraaji and the Italian post-jazz project Oraculu, and they’ve put out two albums by bassist and composer Dr. Emma Dayhuff, whose family is from Bozeman. The first, Innovations & Lineage – The Chicago Project, was a live set featuring Collier, percussionist Kahil El’Zabar, and vocalist Dee Alexander. She’s followed that up with Mountains, a studio set offering nearly 90 minutes of music by an ensemble including Corey Wilkes on trumpet, Collier on tenor sax, Paul Cornish on piano and keyboards, Andrew Renfroe on guitar, Jonathan Pinson on drums, and Akenya Seymour on vocals. The first four tracks, “Sentinel,” “Capricorn,” “The Wind,” and “Scorched Bark and Wildflowers,” blend together in a seamless 37-minute suite, and the whole album has an expansive, spiritual-but-free-but-grooving feel that will likely remind you of Kamasi Washington, minus the strings and choirs. (Here’s a good DownBeat profile of Dayhuff by Aaron Cohen.)

I first wrote about Holy Tongue back in 2023, when a recommendation from Kevin Martin (Techno Animal, Zonal, The Bug, etc.) got me to buy their first three EPs and their first full-length, Deliverance And Spiritual Warfare. They’re a trio: Al Wootton on synths and various other instruments, Susumu Mukai on bass and percussion, and Valentina Magaletti on drums and various other mallet and percussion instruments, including piano. (Piano is a percussion instrument; you make noises by hitting things.) A lot of the rhythms on the new album seem programmed on vintage drum machines rather than played on live instruments; the cowbells and hard snares remind me of old Schoolly D tracks at times; meanwhile, the bass clarinet on “Orange 28” could be Shabaka Hutchings (it’s not). On two tracks, “Coca” and “Bloom in D Minor,” they’re joined by Dali De Saint Paul, a Moor Mother-esque song-poet. This is macro dub music, using dub techniques to mix ominous melodies, pounding ritual rhythms, postpunk grooves, and field recordings into a swirling, trancelike sound that will remind you of any number of things, from PIL to Dub Syndicate, while remaining unique and surprising.

I mentioned the metal band Smoulder the other week, when their new album Witch Wife In An Alien World was released and one of the metal blogs I read, Hate Meditations, had thoughts about the band’s promotional approach. But I’m no longer interested in discussing that, because the album is rapidly becoming one of my favorite metal releases of the year. I’m a big fan of traditional/old-school metal with female vocals, and always have been. Bands like Znöwhite, Huntress, Christian Mistress, Lucifer, and Crystal Viper offer big, doomy riffs and soaring choruses, and get dramatic without slipping into corn. Smoulder have carved out a place for themselves in that realm. Their two previous albums, 2019’s Times Of Obscene Evil And Wild Daring and 2023’s Violent Creed Of Vengeance, were a little more polished, even theatrical, than Witch Wife…, but honestly, it’s a pretty subtle difference. This album is heavy as hell, as their work always has been. What really sets it apart are Sarah Ann Vincent’s vocals, which are less conventionally melodic than they’ve been in the past, at times verging on an unhinged shriek. But that works with the material, and again, the differences aren’t that stark. If you liked the band’s first two albums, you’ll like this one. I know I do.

I first heard the Japanese noise-metal power trio Zeni Geva (K.K. Null on vocals and guitar, Mitsuru Tabata — also of Boredoms — on guitar, and Eito Noro on drums) in the early ’90s. Their music was harsh and at times clanging in the manner of classic-era Swans, but the guttural vocals seemed inspired by extreme metal. Total Castration, their second or third album, depending how you count, first came out on Public Bath, a small US label that specialized in Japanese noise. It was recorded in Chicago with Steve Albini, inaugurating a creative collaboration that would continue for several years. (Earlier this year, the compilation Superunit: Maximum Implosion was released; it gathered up the studio recordings Nai-Ha and Superunit, and the live album All Right You Little Bastards!, all of which featured Albini on guest guitar.) Now Null has remastered TC and reissued it on Skin Graft, and I have a much greater appreciation for it now than I did 35 years ago. It’s loud and pounding, with the big drums you’d expect from an Albini engineering job, but the twin guitars — one riffing, the other emitting squeals and bursts of staticky noise — have a surprisingly math-prog edge to them, and even some psychedelic passages, and Null’s vocals are more prominent in the mix than you might expect, though they’re left fairly dry and free of reverb. The songs are like a weird cross between Swans and, I swear, Red-era King Crimson. This deluxe edition also contains four extremely raw-sounding live tracks originally released on a split LP with the band LEWD, which are unnecessary but fine.

Wadada Leo Smith interview! The Tonearm Podcast had Wadada on this week to talk about his new album Constellations And Hemispheres, his unique graphic notation language Ankhrasmation, and more. Go listen.

There’s also a feature version, by Lawrence Peryer, which is well worth reading if you don’t have time to listen. Here’s what Wadada has to say about the track “Dark Matter, Particles of Light, Mirror of the Unseen”:

Building that piece probably took at least seven or eight sessions. But when I recorded it, I manipulated everything so fantastically. For example, all those strokes that are happening with the ensemble after that little intro—every one of them was recorded individually, every single one. So when I get ready to construct it, I know what I want, because it’s in the score. The score shows what should be done. But I may have one or two versions of that stroke that I want to use, so I’ll manipulate whichever one I want and have that be the one.

Sometimes the resonance is not full. You know, somebody does it a little bit weaker than the other person, so that stack of sound has a little bit different sound. So I’m looking for the one that has a much fuller, much more resonant sound. So that’s the first layout. And then pulling in the various ensembles to overlay and underlay and construct was just like a dream.

That little harmonic that keeps popping up in the interaction of the first part was only done once in the real performance. And the guitarist is my grandson. He’s the one who did that. And when I heard it, I said, “Oh, that’s really a great sound.” I laid it in, and then I went through it, and then something popped in my head: Wow, that’s a good marker that doesn’t stop the flow of stuff, but it gives it a little bit more mystery. Because the unknown or the unseen, that’s kind of unique. Like the core of the Earth is unseen. The backside of the Earth is unseen. No matter which side you stand on, it’s unseen. It’s all unseen, but even when we look at each other, we know we have organs and things inside us, and yet they’re still unseen. So all of that in the context gives meaning for me for how this works.

Most of all, I wanted to lay out the ensembles horizontally so they would illustrate how light moves and keeps moving. And whatever ensemble’s there, it just evolves into that, and evolves into the next. It ends with a trio, coming out of nine people, which, to me, is the first time I’ve tried that.

Wadada’s music is also featured on the latest episode of Such Music. Hosted by Rihards Endriksons, journalist and artistic director of Latvia’s Skaņu Mežs festival, Such Music is devoted to new works of free improvised music, either previously unheard or created specifically for the show. The show is produced in collaboration with Burning Ambulance, and this month includes music from London Concert by Space, the trio of Lisa Ullén, Elsa Bergman and Anna Lund, out now on John Chantler’s label Fönstret. You’ll also hear new music by guitarist Finn Loxbo, whose Lummernikt was recently released by the aforementioned label. A track from Constellations and Hemispheres is also heard, alongside Godzilla’s Quantum Sneeze by the guitar duo of Anla Courtis and Masami Kawaguchi, as well as B-A-N-S, a new “supergroup” that brings together John Butcher, Sophie Agnel, Ståle Liavik Solberg and Pascal Niggenkemper. And, finally, polish players Kornel Popławski, Jerzy Mazzoll and Waldemar Knade made an interesting record with Calvin Weston, who recorded the drums remotely, with the other musicians playing around the recording as a starting point. “Monastic Trip”, a triptych from their new album Whatever Lovely Is, is played in full. Listen on Mixcloud.

Last week, I got Ken Liu’s All That We See Or Seem from my local library. (Get it from Amazon.) It’s a near(ish)-future techno-thriller about a hacker taking on an evil billionaire. The protagonist gained fame as a teenage hacker, and now lives a reclusive life, only taking on work that matches her moral code. But a lawyer gets in touch to ask for her help tracking down his missing wife, who was an “oneiromancer,” an artist who sculpts vivid, communal dreams for live audiences with the help of AI (and occasionally one-on-one dreams for extremely wealthy clients).

AI plays a significant role in the story — in the novel’s future, it’s much better than it is now, and is used for a variety of purposes. Our plucky hacker has a personally coded AI that allows her to dig through the missing woman’s files, explore fortress-like facilities via a bot with extended sense receptors, and do other cool sci-fi stuff. But Liu never comes off like an AI evangelist, and neither do any of his characters, because he’s set the story just far enough in the future that it’s just a tool, and everyone accepts it. The fight is over. And indeed, a big plot point revolves around the idea that even in an AI-powered future, content with a genuine human feel is still better at attracting algorithmic attention.

I wouldn’t call the book brilliant, but I enjoyed it. I only realized at the end (on Amazon, it says Book 1, but the hardcover’s jacket bore no such text) that he’s planning on making it into a series, following his protagonist on various altruistic (or at least righteous) hacking adventures, but it doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, so I feel no obligation to check back in a year from now or whatever. One was enough.

I also recently watched the Robert Rodriguez movie Hypnotic. It stars Ben Affleck, Alice Braga, and William Fitchner, and the trailer made it seem like a movie where a detective (Affleck) chases a criminal (Fitchner) who has, basically, magical powers — he’s a super-psychic who can convince people to do things like rob banks for him. Well, I’m not gonna tell you what it is, but it’s not that. It’s basically a pulpier version of an early Christopher Nolan movie, and it’s surprisingly good. Affleck isn’t quite on Ethan Hawke’s level when it comes to 100% commitment to pulpy genre roles, but he’s good here. I can’t remember the last time I saw a Robert Rodriguez movie — doesn’t he mostly do children’s movies now? — but this was very well done. Recommended.

And now, here are some links to things I found interesting this week.

Was Cormac McCarthy actually a good writer? In Harper’s, Benjamin Kunkel takes a new biography as a springboard to reconsider McCarthy’s actual work, and comes down on the side of… maybe. “Above all, it’s in McCarthy’s prose that the tradition of what [D.H.] Lawrence called classic American literature often seems to have reached its final fruition in something like a lurid pastiche.It might, in fact, be fair enough to judge McCarthy’s work as a somewhat ridiculous effort to extend a tradition that looked exhausted by the Fifties, if not earlier, by refashioning it as a mode of apocalyptic prophecy… Why insist, then, that McCarthy remains a great writer, philosophical dubiousness and stylistic pastiche notwithstanding?”

In the Metropolitan Review, Brighton Grace reviews Percival Everett’s novel The Trees, which he disliked not only for its plot and characters but also because it’s apparently riddled with typos and grammatical errors which make the actual reading experience more difficult than it should be. “There is no gentle way of putting it: my edition, worryingly a second edition boasting of the novel’s shortlisted status for the Booker Prize and thus one that had the opportunity to address any mistakes, was littered with typos and marred further by a major inaccuracy in a flashback sequence. Referring back to this laurel on the front cover whenever I encountered an error — around 20, based off my count — made my reading remarkably jarring and baffling. These basic mistakes, which I’ll argue demote the book to an objectively flawed status, only form one layer of the messy midden, however. The Trees makes some extremely questionable decisions that I see as ‘macro typos’ — thematic and stylistic mistakes made in haste that alter the appearance and feel of the entire text — which deflate its satirical power and social utility.” He expands this into a deep analysis of larger conditions within literature; it’s a long piece, but well worth reading.

As part of his coverage of this year’s Berlin Jazzfest, Stewart Smith conducted an in-depth interview with trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, whose blend of Arabic music and jazz is fascinating and beautiful; his albums thrill me in that way you only get when you’re hearing something genuinely new. In it, he talks about the recordings available on the Cecil Taylor Orchestra Humane At Iridium 2004 set, on which he plays: “I think it’s a rewarding listen because it’s somewhere between what we know Cecil’s music as. This is very explosive and free, but at the same time there’s a lot of structure to it, and being part of the ensemble I was able to understand how much his music was structured. If you listen, I think the first set of each night on that box set, we start with the same piece, so you hear the same melody played in radically different iterations. So that’s an interesting way to understand not just the beauty and the power of what Cecil was doing, but but also the structural rigour to it and the compositional beauty. It was really his music. The materials themselves are, you know, sometimes it sounds, I don’t want to say light, but you can hear some Gil Evans type of harmony in there. You can hear some Stravinsky or Bartok in there. But he had his own harmonic language that was an amalgamation, or maybe an absorbing of many, many different musics that he lived in, and maybe even inherited ancestrally, that he formed into something that was really entirely his own, beyond the performative aspects. I’m just talking about the melodic and harmonic side of things.”

Brigitte Fontaine was born in 1939. She moved from her small hometown to Paris in the 1950s to become an actress (stage, not film), but in 1963, she turned her attention to singing. Her first two albums, 13 Chansons Décadentes Et Fantasmagoriques (13 Decadent And Phantasmagorical Songs) and 12 Chansons d’Avant Le Déluge (12 Songs From Before The Flood), the latter a collaboration with rock singer Jacques Higelin, was released in 1966. Fontaine regards these as juvenilia and doesn’t really talk about them.

Her third album, Brigitte Fontaine Est… Folle (Brigitte Fontaine Is… Crazy), was released in 1968. It was produced and arranged by Jean-Claude Vannier, who also worked with Jane Birkin, Juliette Gréco, Françoise Hardy and others, but Est… Folle is not at all a typical 1960s French pop record, because Fontaine didn’t come up on the pop scene. She was a writer and actress who co-wrote and co-created her own avant-garde theater pieces, and later published novels. She was using pop music as a vehicle for bigger ideas, including social commentary. 1968 was a big year for that in France, and elsewhere in Europe, you may recall.

In 1969, Higelin introduced her to Areski Belkacem, a Kabyle (a Berber tribe from northern Algeria) musician he’d met while they were both doing two years of mandatory military service. Fontaine and Areski partnered up almost immediately, working together on Niok, a largely improvised stage show that ran for months in Paris.

1969 was also the year Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, and Malachi Favors arrived in Paris. The trumpeter and his wife, singer Fontella Bass, had put up most of the money, gambling that the group — then simply called the Art Ensemble, formerly the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble — would break through in Paris in a way they hadn’t done in their home country. Their ship, the SS United States, docked in Le Havre on June 2, and ten days later, they were performing at the Théàtre du Lucernaire… the same venue where Fontaine had been presenting Niok. Exactly three weeks after their arrival, they entered Studio Saravah to record A Jackson In Your House, the first of 14 albums they would make over the next three years.

Fontaine invited the members of the newly christened Art Ensemble of Chicago, as well as trumpeter Leo Smith (not yet Wadada), to be part of Niok. As Paul Steinbeck explains in his book Message To Our Folks, “Like other French musicians of the 1968 generation, Fontaine was charting a path away from the traditional chanson, and she found the Art Ensemble’s music to be perfectly suited for the song style she was developing with her creative partner Areski Belkacem, the French-Algerian percussionist.” Before long, they had decided to make an album together, and on November 15, 1969, they recorded Fontaine’s fourth album, Comme À La Radio (Like On The Radio).

The Art Ensemble were not the only musicians featured on the record. Smith, Areski (who used only his first name professionally), bassist Jean-François Jenny-Clark, cellist Jean-Charles Capon, lute player Albert Guez, and zither player Kakino De Paz also appeared here and there, and Higelin played guitar on one track. Sometimes it’s hard to know who’s doing what; there are a few seconds of piano on “Leo,” but no one is credited.

The music is pretty varied. There are a cappella tracks where an overdubbed Fontaine harmonizes with herself; pieces where she and Areski sing together as he plays percussion; one where she’s accompanied by cello and bass; and others with the horns present, but rarely all together. (It’s worth remembering that at this time the Art Ensemble did not have a full-time percussionist; Famoudou Don Moye wouldn’t join until 1970.) The production is careful and polished, with instruments moving across the stereo field sometimes and mixed in order to keep Fontaine’s soft murmur of a voice front and center, without dominating.

The album was very well received. It received the Académie Charles-Gros’s Grand Prix du Disque in 1970, the French equivalent of a Grammy. And the collaboration between Fontaine and the Art Ensemble didn’t end in the studio. They performed together in the months following the recording, and a series of Monday night shows at the Théàtre du Vieux-Colombier in particular drew the attention of the national press. In Message To Our Folks, Steinbeck quotes Phillippe Koechlin of Le Nouvel Observateur as saying, “Brigitte Fontaine is crazy enough to form a connection with the sorcerers from Chicago,” though there was some exoticization in the coverage as well. The review was entitled “Brigitte et quatre Noirs,” and the Art Ensemble’s music was described as a “strange and beautiful jungle.”

Comme À La Radio has always been pretty easy to find; I owned it on CD in the 1990s, and the Wewantsounds label has just reissued it as a deluxe 2LP or 2CD set. The second disc contains English-language versions of the title track and “J’Ai 26 Ans” (I Am 26); instrumentals of several tracks; and a pair of non-LP singles, none of which feature the Art Ensemble.

The reissue is being joined, in a few weeks, by a companion release, Comme À La Radio: On Air. It’s a double LP/single CD which gathers up previously unreleased live recordings from the early 1970s by Fontaine, Areski, Higelin, and guests (including saxophonists Robin Kenyatta and Ronnie Beer on one track), as well as studio recordings from the Comme… sessions. These include two instrumental versions of the title piece, and an extended “Leo” — cut down to under four minutes on the original LP, it runs more than 10 minutes here. (Who’s playing piano remains an open question.)

Many of the musicians on these sessions are gone now. Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, and Malachi Favors passed years and in some cases decades ago, and Areski died earlier this year. But Roscoe Mitchell, Brigitte Fontaine, and Wadada Leo Smith are all still around and working. (Buy Wadada’s new album!) And Comme À La Radio remains a fascinating record, well worth hearing even if, like me, you’ve long forgotten your middle-school French.

Pianist Carolyn Hume has been working with drummer Paul May for close to 30 years. They have released multiple albums together on Leo Records, including Zero, By Lakes Abandoned, Flames Undressed By Water, Wet Map, Come To Nothing, Kill The Lights, Shape Of The Night, and Godless Rapture. They’ve also collaborated with saxophonist Alexey Kruglov and percussionist Oleg Yudanov on the album Last Train From Narvskaya. The music they make together is dark and dramatic, a sonic blend of techniques drawn from modern classical and free jazz, but with a lush Gothic side, too; Hume plays synth as well as piano, and these are carefully assembled studio recordings, not quickie improvised performances.

Hume has also released the albums Solo Piano Works and Gravity And Grace, as well as Light And Shade, a collaboration with vocalist Katja Cruz. Her solo music is gentler and more romantic than her work with May, though titles like “Edge Of Restraint,” “In This Dark Silence,” and “Solitude & Madness” prove that she’s still essentially working in dark tones, and often rumbles at the low end of the keyboard.

Gravity And Grace features chamber music compositions, performed by Hume, cellist Oliver Coates, and vocalist Sonja Galsworthy. But as with her work with May, these are not merely performances captured. We hear multiple overdubbed cellos on certain tracks, and Galsworthy’s voice is recorded with astonishing purity even as the whole thing is gently brushed with reverb. This is a very beautiful album with a vibe well suited to cool October weather. In fact, all of the Carolyn Hume albums on Leo, with or without Paul May, make excellent autumn listening. Check them out.

My latest Stereogum column is out now; it starts with an essay about David Murray, whose first recordings arrived 50 years ago, in late 1976. It’s paywalled, so you’ll have to subscribe to read it, but here’s the beginning:

Tenor saxophonist David Murray is one of the most important jazz musicians of the last five decades, though it sometimes seems like he’s slipped into elder statesmanhood quietly and without fanfare.

Born in Oakland, California in 1955, he grew up in the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ and began playing music there after receiving an alto saxophone at school. “I took it to church the first night I got it, and I played in the band,” he told me some years ago. “Even the reverend commented; he says, ‘I see young David’s got a saxophone.’ I was playing a lot of squeaks. Probably sounded like some of the squeaks I play now. It probably sounded avant-garde or something. He says, ‘That young David, when he learns how to play it, it’s gonna be – he’s very exuberant.’ And that kind of sped up my progression in music… Of course, I wanted to start a band after I had it for a week. You know, you get excited when you’re a kid. Anyway, everybody knew that there was promise there for me.”

Murray eventually switched to the tenor and studied at Pomona College with poet and jazz critic Stanley Crouch and trumpeter Bobby Bradford. This led him to make a fateful trip to New York, while he was still thinking about possibly becoming a writer. He recalled, “When I came to New York, I came on independent study from Pomona College… and interviewed four artists: John Cage, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and McCoy Tyner… and they were all, in their own way, very helpful to me in entering my career. People associated with them – I met Billy Higgins and Dewey Redman [and] Dewey was the guy that said, ‘Put down the pencil and pick up the saxophone,’ which I was going to do anyway.” He added, “I think I could have had two careers. But the music took over. Next thing I know, I’m making records, and this and that.”

Murray and Crouch moved to New York in 1975, taking up residence in a loft above the Tin Palace jazz club in the East Village. They quickly made inroads on the burgeoning and largely DIY scene, performing together (Crouch was at that time a free jazz drummer) and putting on shows. In his book Riding On A Blue Note, critic Gary Giddins recalled an early project. “In July 1975,” he wrote, “David Murray organized a loft concert that introduced a new generation of Californian musicians to New York — Arthur Blythe, Stanley Crouch, Ray Anderson, and Mark Dresser were present, while James Newton, Butch Morris, and Bobby Bradford were represented through their compositions. ‘These are some of the players who will keep the music honest,’ I wrote at the time…”

And now, here are links to some articles you may find as interesting as I did.

Shelley at Hate Meditation delves into meta-analysis of the new Smoulder album, Witch Wife In An Alien World. Specifically, he finds their social media presence annoying. “The days that follow a new release are a delicate time, especially if there’s been a change in direction. For Smoulder, the [sonic] changes were presentational more than stylistic, but resoundingly clear with even a cursory listen. To my mind it’s essential for an artist to be silent during this period to allow audience reaction to form naturally even as opinions collide off one another in heated debates. This is an increasingly challenging prospect in an age of instant feedback. Smoulder were formed in the crucible of social media. The brand must be managed. The narrative around them must not be permitted to form organically even if the music itself was in some sense a celebration of free spirited authenticity.”

I enjoy reading Hate Meditations, and had I not gotten this email I wouldn’t even have known there was a new Smoulder album, which is upsetting, because I bought their first two albums, 2019’s Times Of Obscene Evil And Wild Daring and 2023’s Violent Creed Of Vengeance, and enjoyed them quite a bit. They do an old-school power metal thing, with a forceful, dramatic lead vocalist, Sarah Ann. If you like Crystal Viper or Castle Rat, you’ll probably like Smoulder. Anyway, the new record is a little more raw and unpolished than their previous work, particularly the vocals, which slip in and out of tune in a way that’s sometimes compelling and sometimes alienating. Which is what the band has felt the need to pre-emptively defend, via this Instagram post, which I, unlike Shelley, don’t have a problem with, because I have been on the internet for something like 30 years at this point and I understand How Things Are. Nostalgia for how life used to be, before artists had to frantically sell their own work, when “we” could just sit with a record and form our own impressions outside the asteroid field of others’ (often idiotic) opinions, is pointless and frankly reflects poorly on the person behind it. This is a good album (Shelley agrees), and it will remain a good album even if the band’s vocalist decides to get argumentative about her artistic choices on the internet.

German producer and multi-instrumentalist Markus Reuter writes about the quiet cruelty of the music business for All About Jazz. “There is a strange, fierce myopia in modern idol-worship, a culture of fandom that treats music not as a living dialogue, but as a static mirror for their own egos. You can stand on a stage with a band for twenty-five of its thirty years of existence, and to a subset of the crowd, you will always be the interloper. Your contributions, sometimes the very bedrock of the music they claim to love, are overlooked, uncredited, and entirely unmentioned. Often, listeners simply lack the musical vocabulary to understand what they are actually seeing or hearing. They misattribute the genius of a collective to a single figurehead, leaving the essential people, the musicians without whom the magic would literally not exist, invisible. The erasure is physical as much as it is critical. You can arrive at a venue as a working trio, and watch as local promoters literally look right through two of the members in their rush to greet the one with the legendary status. It is a striking, quiet humiliation to realize that the people facilitating the concert do not actually care about the music you are about to play; they only care about their proximity to a recognized name.”

Ethan Iverson has an excellent piece this week discussing Babs Gonzales (who I’ve never heard; I only know the name because Sonny Rollins worked with him very early in his — Rollins’s — career) and Ben Webster. He mentions a Proper box, Big Ben, that catalogs much of Webster’s early work; I own the box but have never had time to dig into it. I think I’ll pull it out this weekend. And I would love to read Gonzales’s autobiography, I, Paid My Dues, Good Times…No Bread: A Story of Jazz. As Iverson says, “Much of the memoir is hilarious but at times it is very bitter. All the black jazz greats were slighted, of course, but few of them discussed those slights at this level of detail. According to the book, Gonzales stood up for himself, using pepper spray, broken bottles, and a pistol to fight back against agents and club owners.” It sounds like it will make an excellent companion volume to Hampton Hawes’s Raise Up Off Me, which is one of the greatest jazz books I’ve ever read.

At No Fences Review, David Cantwell talks to RJ Smith, author of Chuck Berry: An American Life. “[Berry] took the American idea that one might declare their love for this place and that doing so would make you a beloved American in the eyes of your fellows. And when it did not happen for Berry, he shifted into a second-half life of stealth warfare and deep resentment. His music can feel remote, maybe, to modern listeners, but his life seems so resonant today. Like, think of all the lyrics about auto-mobility, motivating over the hill, and so on. Freedom to drive and to lose yourself on the open road was so central to his ideas of being American. And today ICE is pulling people out of cars in Chuck’s St. Louis and so many places, staging traffic stops, throwing folks to the pavement and telling them they are not American citizens while denying them basic rights. I see his life in that arc.”

I was a metalhead first. Judas Priest was my entry point — Unleashed In The East: Live In Japan, Hell Bent For Leather, British Steel, Point Of Entry, and the then-new Screaming For Vengeance, all heard in a rush. Then I got into punk: Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, a bunch of more obscure bands, and Motörhead, the only metal band punks were allowed to like, or so I was told by the older kid loaning me records.

When I was fifteen, I discovered jazz via Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue. I had no one to guide me on that road, so I figured it out myself, one album at a time, some purchased with the meager paychecks I earned at ice cream parlors and convenience stores and some taken out from the library. (The second Davis album I heard was his newest release at the time, You’re Under Arrest.) I was beginning my journey into hip-hop by then, too, starting with Run-DMC’s Raising Hell and, by 1988, Ice-T, Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions, Eric B. & Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, and on and on.

The one area I never could figure a way into, though I wanted to, was electronic music. House music, techno, club music — as far as I knew they were all versions of the same thing. I liked some of it, but while I could learn about punk, metal, rap and even jazz by reading Rolling Stone, Spin, and the Village Voice, I had no source for consistent information about house or techno. I bought the occasional compilation, like this one or this one, but I didn’t know if these were canonical artists, if I was hearing the best of the genre, or what. It was extremely frustrating, honestly, because the one thing I knew for sure was that there were almost no album artists in electronic music, that the way to consume it “correctly” was to accumulate a million 12” singles. I didn’t have the time or the money for that. So my interest in the genre waned fast. I would occasionally buy mixtapes put together by DJs I’d never heard of, with, again, no way to judge the quality of what I was hearing. I became convinced that this was not for me. I liked what I heard, but I could not explore with confidence, so I mostly walked away.

Of course, I eventually discovered electronic artists who did work in album format, and I became a big fan of (among others) the Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Leftfield, the Orb, Witchman, Photek, and of course Autechre. (I tried with Orbital, but they’ve never done a thing for me.)

In the last couple of years, though, I have begun listening to more electronic music than ever before. You see, in the part of Montana where I live, I spend a fair amount of time on the road. There’s a grocery store five minutes away, but the grocery stores I actually like are a half hour away by car, most of that spent on long, straight, two- or at most four-lane highways. And it turns out there’s nothing better for highway driving than electronic music. So I’ve been buying compilations and DJ mixes on Bandcamp and putting them into my digital Walkman for the car.

I have thirteen volumes of the fabric presents series now, including entries by Carlita, Confidence Man, Max Cooper, Floorplan, Mount Kimbie, Red Axes, Rødhåd, salute, DJ Tennis, and four different compilations/mixes by Laurent Garnier. I also have sixteen volumes of the DJ-Kicks series, by Brandt Brauer Frick, Maya Jane Coles, Dam Swindle, Marcel Dettmann, Djrum, Peggy Gou, Honey Dijon, Robert Hood, Kode9, Sofia Kourtesis, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Lone, Modeselektor, Motor City Drum Ensemble, Photek, Smith & Mighty, and TEED. I have all 26 volumes of the Kompakt label’s annual Total series, too, and some other compilations and mixes from here and there.

Some of these do just one thing and do it extremely well. Robert Hood’s DJ-Kicks mix, for example, is 72 minutes of pounding minimal techno, a blast from beginning to end. (Note: The thing I like about the DJ-Kicks and fabric presents series is that you not only get the DJ’s mix, which is a single continuous track; you also get the individual tracks, which allows you to make up your own playlists, or listen to it all as a compilation, which can sometimes add up to almost three hours of music.) Similarly, Hood’s other project, heard on fabric presents Floorplan, presents an hour-plus of ecstatic gospel-infused house music that’ll have you waving your hands in the air.

Other mixes, though, like the ones by Motor City Drum Ensemble and Brandt Brauer Frick, cover a much wider range. The former begins with a Sun Ra track and includes music by legendary Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, Nigerian bandleader Geraldo Pino and the Heartbeats, house pioneer Mr. Fingers, and Finnish jazz saxophonist Timo Lassy. The latter jumps from Jan Jelinek to William Onyeabor to Thundercat and beyond. Listening to them as a compilation, rather than a DJ mix, is like tuning into a particularly wide-open college radio station.

I still have no greater understanding of the electronic music world/ecosystem than I did when I was in high school. But I subscribe to two different newsletters by friends that give me a narrow window into that universe. Michaelangelo Matos’s Beat Connection shares a collection of five DJ mixes once a week, with more content for paying subscribers, and Philip Sherburne’s Futurism Restated offers album reviews, interviews, and much more, and has inspired many purchases. If you’re reading me, you should be reading them.

And if you’d like to hear and/or buy any of the music discussed above, feel free to check out my personal Bandcamp collection. It includes tons of electronic music, as well as metal, jazz of all stripes, modern classical and experimental/avant-garde music, and much more.

CDs are here! Last week, the jackets and inner sleeves for Wadada Leo Smith’s Constellations And Hemispheres and Michael Sarian’s In This Desert arrived from Stoughton Printing. They’re absolutely beautiful — heavy cardboard stock, textured outer paper, gatefold mini-LP covers. And all 500 copies of each have been assembled, and mailed out to distributors, a few wholesalers, and everyone who pre-ordered copies. As of right now, almost half of the Wadada albums and a third of the Michael Sarian albums are already gone, so if you want either or both, order now!

This week I’ve been watching the show Mayor Of Kingstown on Netflix. It’s trash, or at least it was trash to start — by the end of its third season (a fifth and final season is currently in production), it had tipped over into garbage.

The show is about Mike McLusky, an ex-con who serves as the titular “mayor” (the actual, elected mayor is never seen) of a Michigan city that hosts multiple prisons. He acts as a go-between for the convicts, the gangs who operate in the city, and the police, while fighting with certain gangsters and with the District Attorney. It has elements of Michael Clayton and of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, but it’s more thickheaded and goonish than either of those. McLusky, played by Jeremy Renner, is constantly beleaguered and under stress as he pinballs from one catastrophe to another.

This is one of those crime stories that takes place in a world where there are no regular people, only cops and criminals, and the cops are more than half crooked themselves. I can count on one hand the number of scenes in the roughly thirty hours I’ve watched so far where any primary character has an interaction with someone not directly or indirectly linked to crime. It’s also a relentlessly macho show. Women are primarily there to be victims. Every once in a while one of them will dare to have an idea of her own, but she’s quickly put back in her place. But Mike McLusky is above everything. One character, a sort of super-hooker, is brought in to seduce and thereby disempower him, but he refuses to sleep with her, and for the rest of the first three seasons they have this weird dynamic going where he’s helping/saving her, and she’s acting like she’s in love with him but still asserting her independence, and the villains all think she’s his weakness but she’s not, and it’s all much less interesting than it sounds.

Honestly, I don’t know why I’ve made it this far. The characters are paper-thin, the moral dilemmas the show posits are nonexistent, the story is wildly implausible even within the parameters it’s set for itself, the number of bodies that drop unremarked is frankly astonishing… it’s a completely ridiculous show, and not in a good way, like Banshee. It doesn’t have the courage to be that lurid, to revel in itself. Instead, it pushes an unearned grimness like it’s trying to teach you something. I guess I’ll watch season four; I mean, it’s just sitting there waiting for me. But I do not recommend that you waste your time with Mayor Of Kingstown.

All that said, what’s an inarguably low-quality/trashy TV show you can’t stop watching? Throw me your most half-hearted, I-know-this-says-bad-things-about-me recommendation, and I’ll give it at least one episode, I promise.

There’s a biography of the late novelist Cormac McCarthy on the way. Because relatively little (though more than people commonly think) was known about his life while he was living it, and he liked it that way, it apparently contains a lot of new and previously un-collated information.

McCarthy was married three times, and (as was revealed in a Vanity Fair article shortly after his death) conducted a years-long affair with a woman named Augusta Britt, whom he first met when she was sixteen. As Wyatt Mason puts it in a New York Times essay, “By any reasonable measure, McCarthy comes across as delinquent and double-dealing and selfish.” But he continues:

“If we are disappointed in what we now see of McCarthy, it’s important for us to remember why. It’s because we have been so invested in how he saw. Britt’s story forces us to ask the question: How is it that someone could be that and yet, on the other hand, do this? Daugherty does not directly raise the question, but his detailed account of McCarthy’s life may do something better — give us the means to consider whether the art was able to transform, even transcend, the life.”

Many of our great artists force us to wrestle with the question of how someone could be that and yet, on the other hand, do this. Two of the best and worst of them were born 100 years ago: Miles Davis, whose centennial was celebrated in May, and Chuck Berry, whose centennial arrives on Sunday, October 18.

Chuck Berry was one of the greatest and most important artists in the history of US pop music. The 1981 compilation The Great Twenty-Eight is basically the Big Bang. Berry’s music was part jump blues, part R&B, part country and a tiny bit of jazz; you can hear the influence of Nat “King” Cole, Muddy Waters, Louis Jordan and T-Bone Walker, but it was his urbane-hillbilly personality and his wily lyrical brilliance that changed the world. Songs like “Too Much Monkey Business,” “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” “Maybellene,” “Thirty Days,” and “You Can’t Catch Me,” among others, were witty broadsides from a keen observer of American life, and when he began to aim explicitly at the teenage market with “School Day,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Johnny B. Goode,” and more, he created a global audience that was conscious of itself, which is how gods are made.

What’s astonishing, nearly 70 years after it was recorded, is how much bite this music has. Mostly backed by pianist Johnnie Johnson, bassist Willie Dixon, and various drummers, Berry’s bluesy guitar leads slash at the listener like a switchblade. (Berry-indebted punk rock guitarists like Billy Zoom and Steve Jones actually sound cleaner than the man himself.) It’s immortal music; it’ll leave you giddy and gaping at its power the first time you hear it, and the thousandth.

And yet, it was all the work of a very nasty man. Reading RJ Smith’s Chuck Berry: An American Life is an often chilling experience. For all his wit, intelligence, ambition, interest in literature and love of poetry, Berry comes across as a cold-eyed sociopath. Although he was married to the same woman from 1948 until his death, and was a good father according to his children, when he was on the road he would have sex with pretty much anyone who caught his eye, including a 14-year-old girl whom he’d brought to St. Louis from out of state to work at a nightclub he owned. (After two trials beginning in 1960, he served nearly two years in prison, re-emerging in 1963 into a radically changed musical market.)

Berry is quoted in the book as saying, “The business side of music is more important than the pleasure because I play music to satisfy people and my satisfaction is minimal.” And Chuck Berry the businessman was a paranoid, corner-cutting shark. He’d tour alone, recruiting local bands to back him, and demanded cash before taking the stage. He would write songs in the studio, and not in a “sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike” way but in a “I’m gonna write these ten songs, and then we’re gonna record them, and we’re gonna be gone by dinnertime” way. And then there’s the issue of “My Ding-A-Ling,” a truly embarrassing dick joke that somehow became his only #1 hit. Smith devotes many more pages to this song than almost anyone would argue it deserves, but somehow makes them worth reading.

Berry came up, and did his greatest work, in the singles era, and never truly became an album artist. (The closest he came was 1969’s Concerto In B Goode, a psychedelic blues album with four short songs on the A side and the title track — a nearly 19-minute, side-long instrumental jam — on the flip.) But the songs he wrote defined America, and rendered him somehow inextricable from the country itself. America — racist, greedy, violent, punitive America — made him, and he returned the favor, sometimes with a kiss (“Back In The USA”) and sometimes with a slap (“Promised Land,” the lyrics of which are a series of oblique, if-you-know-you-know references to the Civil Rights movement).

The lurid tales of perversity and predation that defined his later life cannot overshadow the brilliance of Chuck Berry’s best music. He was that, and more, but he did this. And a hundred years after his birth, his music retains every bit of its charm and power.

Physical CD versions of our two latest releases, Wadada Leo Smith’s Constellations And Hemispheres and Michael Sarian’s In This Desert, are now available! The jackets have just arrived from Stoughton Printing, and we’ll be assembling them this weekend and shipping copies to everyone who’s already ordered one or both.

Constellations And Hemispheres is the lead review in the upcoming issue of DownBeat; Jim Macnie says, “Constellations And Hemispheres reintroduces a sense of active adventure to Smith’s work… From a riveting chatter of multiple percussionists to the seismic whomp of two electric bassists, this mélange — some of the captured music is boldly reorganized post recording — crackles with a seductive ardor.”

Get your copies now — we’ve only made 500 of each!

I recently stumbled across Mother’s Day on Netflix, a Polish action movie from 2023 about a former soldier who reemerges from hiding to rescue her kidnapped son. Pretty straightforward, right? In fact, there was an American movie, The Mother, released on Netflix that same year; it starred Jennifer Lopez as a former soldier who has to rescue her kidnapped daughter. Both movies are good in their own way. But several things surprised me about Mother’s Day. First, the brutality of the violence. If you’re a fan of Indonesian action movies like The Raid or The Night Comes For Us, this isn’t quite as over-the-top and gory as those, but it’s a lot harsher than US movies. Second, the stylish visuals and weirdo characterizations. Everybody is some kind of freak, from the politicians overseeing everything to the gangsters hired to do the kidnapping (if an American remake ever comes about, there’s a role here for Nicholas Hoult), and the way it’s shot and lit and cut gives it an almost Crank-ish energy at times. If that reads as a compliment to you, you’re the audience for this movie. Here’s the trailer; for some reason, English subtitles aren’t offered, but you’ll get the idea.

I am of two minds about reading anthologies by critics. Some of them — Lester Bangs’s Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung and Mainlines, Blood Feasts & Bad Taste, Amiri Baraka’s Black Music, Greg Tate’s Flyboy In The Buttermilk and its sequel, and Robert Warshow’s The Immediate Experience — have been immensely important to me, and have shaped not only how I write about music (and other things) but how I think about writing about art. Others, like Gary Giddins’s various anthologies and Francis Davis’s OutCats, are primarily useful as archives, places to harvest quotes when writing about an artist myself, in order to either agree or disagree with old opinions.

See, I’m fundamentally a journalist. I have a journalist’s mindset and approach to writing and life, which boils down to: Find an interesting story; tell it in an interesting way; repeat. And don’t look back. What are you writing about next? I barely remember most of the pieces I’ve written, unless the experience of writing them was somehow memorable, like the time Tom Waits called me back 24 hours after our 2002 interview because he felt like he had more to say, or the two days I spent hanging out with Cecil Taylor in 2016. And reviews? Forget it. I’ve been doing this for thirty years. I’ve reviewed literally thousands of records, and honestly, I think about those reviews like paper airplanes sailed off a cliff into the ocean. I definitely don’t consider them the Verdict of History, or anything like that.

Behind the paywall, my thoughts on a new book from journalist Nik Cohn.

Read more

It’s a new month, so let’s review some records together! This time, we’ve got a bunch of music that may not seem at first to have much in common, but in fact these albums are all dwelling in semi-adjacent spheres, and if you put them all into one big playlist and shuffled it, I think it would make for a surprisingly coherent listening experience. Dive in and let me know what you think in comments.

I’m not as familiar with the work of trumpeter Jon Hassell, who died in 2021, as I maybe should be. I remember reading about him in David Toop’s book Ocean Of Sound, but the facts of the case: that he’d studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pandit Pran Nath, worked with La Monte Young, collaborated with Brian Eno… all of that felt more like a warning than an enticement. Guys like Eno and Hassell — whose big idea was what he called “Fourth World” music, which combined his trumpet and electronics with rhythms and ideas from around the world — often seemed to me to give off a patronizing, “look what I found in the trash!” vibe when it came to what they “borrowed” from non-Western cultures, rarely seeming to acknowledge the astonishing depth of those cultures and their indigenous musical traditions. It was all just superficial inspiration and sample fodder for mildly diverting, tripped-out art music, was my impression. But maybe I’m just querulous by nature, and was receiving the wrong message from ignorant journalists.

Anyway, Hassell’s final studio albums, 2018’s Listening To Pictures and 2020’s Seeing Through Sound, both of which were part of a series called Pentimento, have now been joined by a live album, Music Is Invisible. Interestingly, it documents (kinda) a trio performance featuring Rick Cox and John von Seggern, multi-instrumentalists who appeared on the aforementioned studio discs, but was actually recorded in 2015. “Pentimento” is a painting technique defined as “the appearance in a painting of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over,” and if one was a cynical prick, one could call this a smartypants way of saying he’s rehashing old ideas. And in fact, he’s literally doing that at times; there are sampled sounds from previous Hassell records buried in here. But as you’ll see here and in the reviews below, I think that’s just called having a style.

The three records absolutely work as a trilogy, if not a suite; they’re available separately and as a 3CD set, but I can’t imagine wanting to own one but not the others. The music is so thoroughly processed that the only immediately recognizable instrument is Hassell’s horn, and even that is warped by electronics. I recognize affinities with the work of Arve Henriksen and Nils Petter Molvær, but Hassell, being American, has an extroverted quality they lack, even when he sounds like he’s floating in an isolation tank as he plays. And while I believe that the raw material for Music Is Invisible was recorded live, it sound 100% of a piece with the two studio discs. This is all one big shimmering cloud of tones and concepts. You could as easily turn them into a shuffled playlist as listen to them in sequence.

(There’s a very interesting piece about the new album by Blake Leyh at The Tonearm. He knows much more about Hassell’s music than me, and interviews one of his collaborators, Jeff Rona. Go read that.)

Bana Haffar is from Saudi Arabia, but currently based in Montreal. Her music is made with modular synthesizers, as well as samples and field recordings. Ancient Future is her sixth album, and her third for the Touch label. In the press kit, it says, “Bana Haffar is an electronic music composer working with the materiality of sound. Through research-creation, she works with sound design and sample based music sequencing as they relate to various non-musical systems.” This kind of art-gallery language often prejudices me against the artists that use it. But the album is beautiful and compelling enough that I’m willing to look past the high-flown bullshit and just sink into the music. A lot of modular synth stuff is intentionally blissful, trying to suffuse you in a peach-colored haze and align your chakras. Haffar’s music is more aggressive than that; sometimes it reminds me of Autechre, or like the distant, muffled explosions at the beginning of Blade Runner. Her synths are often groaning with frustration and poorly contained anger. The first single, “Like Branches,” does have a gentle and drifting quality that nods to Pink Floyd or The Orb, but don’t be fooled. There’s a lot more grit to this record than that.

German producer Michael Fiedler released a bunch of singles and three albums under the name Jah Schulz: 2020’s Dub Over Science, 2021’s Dub Showcase, and 2023’s Dub Over Science Chapter II. It’s good stuff, ranging from relatively traditional Creation Rebel-esque dub to more dub-informed electro and techno tracks. But lately, he’s been working on music I really like under the name Ghost Dubs. The first GD album, Damaged, came out on Kevin “The Bug” Martin’s Pressure label in 2024, followed by a companion remix EP, Extended Damaged Versions, in 2025. Then there was Implosion, a split album credited to The Bug vs Ghost Dubs, and Imploded Versions, another remix EP. Now the second Ghost Dubs album, Oblique, has arrived, preceded by the single “Low Times,” which received three remixes, one by Fiedler and two by Martin.

I recommend listening to this album two different ways. Through speakers — especially, I imagine, through far bigger ones than I have in my house — this is music you feel as much as hear. It hisses and pulses, steady as a gigantic mechanical heart. The bass pushes gently at your torso. Through headphones, it’s like having your brain squeezed. Each track consists of minimal variations on a simple melodic pattern, mostly consisting of changes in the way it echoes, or dropping elements out and then bringing them back. You know — dub. It’s deeply soothing, though at times ominous as well.

Juliana Venter is a South African vocalist — a trained opera singer and much more — currently resident in Norway. She performs with drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, saxophonist Rolf-Erik Nystrom, and others. Home Galactic is a solo album, mostly solo voice, recorded inside a water tower. Naturally, this gives her a lot of reverb to play with, but the microphone(s) must actually have been pretty close, because it’s a very intimate-sounding record; she’s right in your ear. She sings in multiple languages, including Afrikaans, Arabic, English, German, Japanese, Nama, Norwegian, and Zulu. And while some of her singing is very clear and traditional, she also goes into more extreme registers — not as extreme as Diamanda Galás or Blixa Bargeld, but enough to make you jump in your seat. On certain tracks in the album’s second half, she plays performs traditional African instruments, including the Makhoyane musical bow from Eswatini and the Umrhubhe bow of the AmaXhosa people, both of which sound to me like the Brazilian berimbau, as well as water bowl and bell. This serves to draw the listener even deeper into the experience, giving it the feel of a ceremony.

Justin Broadrick (another Kevin Martin collaborator; check out their work as Techno Animal and Zonal, and dig up the long-out-of-print CDs by God and Ice if you can find them — and here’s an interesting bit of trivia; Jon Hassell plays on Techno Animal’s Re-Entry) is retiring Godflesh soon, after nearly 40 years. The group’s six-song debut EP was released in 1988, and since then there have been ten albums, several remix albums, and a bunch of singles, EPs, and the like. It’s a deep catalog, and surprisingly varied — some albums are sludgy and crushingly heavy, others (comparatively) lighter and more electronic. Decay is one of the final two Godflesh albums; the next one isn’t done yet, but will be out before too long, we’re told. Broadrick has experimented with the group’s core sound (big riffs, programmed drums, electronics around the edges) in various ways over the years, even bringing in live drummers sometimes. On Decay, he’s returning to old ground, kinda; there’s a beat on “Living/Ending” that sounds like “Spite” from 1992’s Pure, and “Feral Colony” reminds me of the Killing Joke homage of “Life Giver Life Taker” from 2014’s A World Lit Only By Fire. The last Godflesh album, Purge, was also a conscious attempt to reckon with the group’s past work, and apparently this music was made during the same sessions. But again, that’s called having a style. There are some subtle elements buried within the agonized pounding that reward careful listening; check out the (I assume sampled) wordless background voices on the nearly 12-minute closer, “Consume Me.”

Trumpeter Michael Sarian has been leading the band Esquina for about six years. They first came together, more or less, on his 2020 album New Aurora, though at that point Dayeon Seok was on drums. He was replaced by Nathan Ellman-Bell on Living At The End Of The World, and the lineup’s been steady since. They’ve subsequently released Esquina, Live At Cliff Bell’s Vol. I and Vol. II, and now In This Desert — their first double CD, and ours.

I liked Esquina and the twin live albums quite a bit, and wrote about them, praising the band’s collective voice and their version of Portishead’s “Glory Box.” Still, I was surprised when Michael reached out about releasing the band’s next record. (I’m always surprised anyone wants to work with us. But given our catalog to date, I need to get over that. Imposter syndrome is real, folks. Don’t let it get you.)

Anyway, In This Desert is a double CD containing seven tracks and about 82 minutes of music. The opening suite was originally one long piece; breaking it up was my idea, which Michael agreed to. To my ear, the album is like a cross between ’70s Miles Davis tracks like “Maiysha” or “He Loved Him Madly” and music you might have heard on the mid ’90s Headz compilations on the Mo’Wax label.

On Bkln.de, Daniel Jakob wrote a nice review; he says, “The music moves between spacious trumpet lines, analogue keyboards, deep electric bass, and loose, exploratory grooves, connecting the electric experiments of 1970s jazz with the darker textures of trip-hop and contemporary improvisation. Recorded together in the studio, the quartet retains the immediacy of a live performance while leaving plenty of room for abstraction. In This Desert is immersive, slow-burning electric jazz — psychedelic, atmospheric, and beautifully open-ended.” Buy it!

The folks at ARK, a site run by the False Walls label, invited me to write about an album of my choice. I decided to talk about Main’s Hz, which is not an album, nor meant to be heard as such, but a collection of six brilliant EPs.

There are 20 new titles available on the Leo Records Bandcamp page this week. They represent a wide variety of music by artists like Lauren Newton, Carolyn Hume, Urs Leimgruber, Ramon Lopez, the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra and more, so whether you’re interested in solo piano, solo saxophone; solo bass; solo bass trombone (with electronics); vocals and Korean percussion; solo drumming on doors; drum duos; piano, cello and voice; two different avant-garde orchestras (one here, one here); or something else entirely, we’ve got you covered. This is wild, adventurous stuff, so strap in and check it all out.

The first time I saw Amon Amarth live was in May 2003. They were part of an ill-fated package tour headlined by Testament and then-former Judas Priest singer Rob Halford’s solo band. Amon Amarth were on early, right before black metallers Immortal. Their short set (five songs, probably?) was head-down and focused; frontman Johan Hegg was a burly, hair-flailing presence, leaning out over the crowd to gesture with muscular arms as he barked the words. I was very close to the front and was immediately impressed.

The second time was on my birthday in 2006, at the Nokia Theatre; they were supporting Children Of Bodom, and Gojira and Sanctity opened. They were still climbing the ladder, a tight, aggressive band with plenty to prove, but the crowd was with them all the way. I remember being really into Gojira that night, too. (Years later, I’d work with Gojira at Roadrunner Records.)

The third time was in February 2014, at Irving Plaza; they had long since graduated to headlining status, and frankly could probably have played a bigger room. They had support from Enslaved and Skeletonwitch, both of whom were just OK. By that time, Hegg had evolved from a gruff warrior to a Falstaffian entertainer and party host, drinking from a horn between songs and exhorting the crowd to roar between songs.

The last time I saw Amon Amarth live was in October 2019, at the cavernous Hammerstein Ballroom. They were headlining again, and had put together an all-Swedish package that included Arch Enemy, At The Gates, and Grand Magus. I never thought I’d have the chance to see Grand Magus live — they’re not popular enough in the US to justify a tour — so I got tickets immediately, and they were the band whose T-shirt I bought. Amon Amarth’s stage set was gigantic and elaborate, worthy of an even bigger band, and they had fully embraced Viking kitsch, adopting a cosplay-esque warrior identity. But the songs remained good enough, and stylistically uniform enough, that they were more than able to stack a 75-minute set with fist-pumping anthems.

I came on board the Amon Amarth longship when a lot of other people did, with their fourth album, Versus The World. It opens with what’s still my favorite of their songs, “Death In Fire”:

That was the album they were supporting the first time I saw them. I’ve read in interviews that if it hadn’t succeeded, they were probably going to break up. Well, it turned out to be their breakthrough release, and as you can see from the description above, they’ve gotten bigger and bigger with each album. These days, they headline festivals in Europe, and play the largest clubs and theaters in the US. They’re not arena-sized over here yet, but I wouldn’t bet against them.

From the time of Versus The World on, Amon Amarth were honestly one of my favorite bands. I bought their albums With Oden On Our Side, Fate Of Norns, Surtur Rising, Deceiver Of The Gods, and Jomsviking as soon as they were announced. Amon Amarth was a brand I could trust. (Their 2008 album Twilight Of The Thunder God, one of their best releases, was released while I was the editor of Metal Edge magazine; several members of the group came by the office to promote it, so my copy is signed.)

They do basically one thing, and when they’re really dialed in, they’re the best on Earth at that one thing. All their songs are fist-pumping, hard-riffing metal anthems, set to a simple, pounding beat (they’re often described as death metal, but they don’t blast), with lyrics about Norse mythology and being a Viking warrior. Sometimes they get goofy — their 2022 album The Great Heathen Army has a song about a mythical goat — but other songs are surprisingly introspective, taking the listener deep inside the warrior’s mind and grappling with existential dread and despair.

And then they stumbled. Their 2019 album, Berserker, was the first one I didn’t buy a physical copy of. I downloaded the promo from the label, listened to it, and thought… Eh. It’s an Amon Amarth album. It’s fine. And when I saw them on tour that year, they played some songs from it, which fit into the set perfectly well, but I was really there for the old stuff. I still wanted to hear “Death In Fire.”

Their 2022 album, The Great Heathen Army, was an even bigger stumble. The first single was “Get In The Ring.” Watch the video.

What the fuck is that, I ask you? Quonset huts? Jeeps? Guns? What does any of this have to do with being a Viking? This (video and lyrics) is some Five Finger Death Punch-ass bullshit. And the rest of the album, while mostly sticking to their tried and true subject matter, just felt rote and unimaginative. I didn’t buy that one, either. Frankly, I was starting to lose interest in Amon Amarth entirely.

Well, my interest was rekindled about a year ago, when the song “We Rule the Waves,” came out. Here’s the video:

Now that’s the old-school Amon Amarth I once loved. A big, dumb, chant-along song about being a Viking. No modern affectations in the video, pure cosplay. I’m sure it goes over huge at their shows.

Now, they’ve got a full album, The Allfather Awakens, coming out on Friday. The promo arrived in my inbox last week. They’ve made two other videos so far, for the opening track, “Gjällarhorn,” and “Eight Legs of Thunder.” Unfortunately, the latter is another attempt to modernize their image — with the horses, guns, and pickup trucks, it comes off like they’re hoping for a cameo on a Taylor Sheridan TV show. The song’s good, though.

And that’s the thing about the new album. They’ve written some genuinely good songs this time out, ones that sit among the best in their catalog, in fact. And they’ve experimented with some new ideas — “Upphaf” is an acoustic number, with female vocal harmonies, and it works really well. (It would have worked better if Hegg had sung it in a clean baritone; speak-singing the lyrics in his usual growl just makes him sound more like Cookie Monster than ever.) Some songs are slower, heavier, and doomier than usual; “Die With a War Cry” is pure punch-a-stranger-in-the-face. Others are faster and more aggressive than usual; “Oden’s Hunt” is practically thrash, absolutely charging along. And the last track, the nearly seven-minute “Ascending Like an Eagle,” is as epic and thrilling as its title. Track for track, this might be their best album since Twilight Of The Thunder God.

Earlier this year, Amon Amarth toured the US with what’s currently being passed off as Pantera. My brother went to see them in, I think, Maryland, and bought me a T-shirt. If The Allfather Awakens had sucked, I might have felt weird about wearing it. But I am fully back on board the Amon Amarth longship. And if you’ve never listened to them before, this album will make an excellent entry point.

Supplemental reading:

Daniel Ekeroth, Swedish Death Metal (Bazillion Points, 2006)

Robert Ferguson, The Vikings: A History (Viking Penguin, 2009)

Neil Price, Children Of Ash And Elm: A History of the Vikings (Basic Books, 2020)

Eleanor Barraclough, Embers Of The Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (W.W. Norton, 2024)

Before I tell you about the new Wadada Leo Smith album Constellations And Hemispheres, out today, I want to express my gratitude that you’re reading this at all.

This newsletter has over 5300 subscribers at this point. I found out the other day that a newsletter by a writer I admire, who is extraordinarily knowledgeable in his area and writes for much bigger outlets than I do, about much more popular music than I cover, has roughly 1/3 that many. That tells me that this newsletter is serving a real purpose. You’re getting something here that you aren’t getting elsewhere.

I am immensely grateful to everyone who reads Burning Ambulance, or who buys our CDs. Whether you’re a free or paying subscriber, you are a valued member of what I absolutely consider a community. I have bought books you have recommended to me, and learned things from your comments. If you can afford to upgrade to a paying subscription, fantastic. But the fact that you’re here at all is a gift, and one I don’t take lightly. Stick around; I’m glad you’re here.

The new Wadada Leo Smith album, Constellations And Hemispheres, is out today. It’s a set of five tracks recorded between 2017 and 2022 with four different ensembles; the collective personnel includes pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, vibraphonist Bobby Naughton, guitarist Lamar Smith, bassists Bill Laswell and Melvin Gibbs, drummers Pheeroan akLaff and Marcus Gilmore, and percussionists Mauro Refosco and Brian Jawara Gray.

It’s extraordinarily beautiful music, and there have been some great reviews written already. At Paris-Move, Thierry de Clemensat gives it the site’s highest possible praise (“Indispensable”) and discusses it at length. He writes:

“Wadada Leo Smith has reached a point in his career where the distinction between composer, improviser, philosopher and listener becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. All four roles seem to exist simultaneously in his work. He listens in order to compose, composes in order to question, improvises in order to discover and continues discovering because the questions have never stopped. That is also why his music can feel so personal to those of us who listen to it closely. The listener is not simply being shown what Smith has discovered. We are being invited to participate in the discovery… Constellations and Hemispheres is less interested in giving us conclusions than in creating the conditions under which we might arrive at our own. That is a quality I value deeply in music, particularly at a moment when so much culture is designed to tell us immediately what something means and how we are supposed to feel about it.”

At Spinal Tapdance, Dan Lawrence incorporates discussion of the album into a larger essay that also encompasses a novel by W.G. Sebald and a live gig by Nduduzo Makhathini. He writes:

“Constellations & Hemispheres is an album that is as easy to lose one’s bearings in as it is easy to enjoy — to listen to for the simple purpose of musical pleasure. The album’s five songs were recorded over a span of six years (2017-2022) with multiple configurations of personnel, and yet, when approached as a holistic album, it doesn’t feel at all like disjointed and cobbled-together bits. Instead — and perhaps counterintuitively — it is so fractured and decentralized that it may cause one to question the value of approaching art with the expectation of discovering a unified narrative.”

Go read both those pieces in full. I’m stunned and proud that work I helped bring into the world could inspire such writing.

Unfortunately, physical copies of Constellations And Hemispheres — and the new Michael Sarian album, In This Desert, also out today (I’ll talk about that one in more detail next Friday) — are delayed. Stoughton Printing was doing the jackets, and the mill where the paper we requested was being manufactured was hit by a tornado(!). Luckily, they found just enough paper stock to cover our order, and the jackets will be printed early next week and on the way to us a few days later.

If we were willing to put out a shitty, generic jewel case or digipak release, we wouldn’t have these problems, but our releases come in beautiful gatefold mini-LP sleeves printed on heavy cardboard; they’re art objects, and as a result, we sometimes have problems like this. We apologize, and promise that when they do arrive, they’ll be totally worth it.

A few brief notes: I recently read Callan Wink’s Beartooth. It’s a novel about two brothers living an economically precarious life in rural Montana. They get an offer to do something illegal, and they take it. But what they are asked to do is atypical; how they approach it is fascinating; and the writing is mostly beautiful, with a few overwrought passages. If you’re a Cormac McCarthy or Jim Harrison fan, you should read this book. Here’s an Amazon link.

Did you know David Mamet made a movie last year? It’s true! It’s called Henry Johnson, and it’s an adaptation of one of his recent plays. If I had to sum it up in a sentence, I’d say it’s the story of a man who can be talked into things. There are only four characters, and I think four long scenes in 85 minutes, but it’s riveting. It’s streaming on Amazon and probably elsewhere.

That’s it for now. See you on Tuesday!

I wasn’t exactly keeping track, so I only gradually realized that in the last few years, I’ve spent a significant amount of time listening to avant-garde music by Korean and Korean-American artists. In 2020, I interviewed pianist Eunhye Jeong, who combines the traditional Korean art form of pansori with free jazz. A year later, I profiled guitarist and vocalist (and writer about disability) Johanna Hedva. This spring, I spoke to free jazz gayageum player DoYeon Kim for DownBeat. And I’ve been listening to cellist Okkyung Lee for many years, including at Cecil Taylor’s final public performance in April 2016. (The show has been released on CD; I wrote the liner notes.)

Before any of these artists emerged on the scene, though, there was Jin Hi Kim. A composer and master of the komungo, Kim studied at the San Francisco Conservatory and Mills College, currently teaches at Wesleyan University, and has won a Guggenheim fellowship, written for the Kronos Quartet, and accomplished far too much to list here. She’s major.

She has recently released a 9CD box, simply titled The Jin Hi Kim Collection, offering five CDs’ worth of her composed music, performed by various ensembles, including the Kronos Quartet, the Sirius String Quartet, the Either/Or Ensemble, and more; and four CDs of her improvising encounters with luminaries of the avant-garde jazz and free music scenes, including guitarists Derek Bailey, Bill Frisell, Henry Kaiser, Hans Reichel, and Elliott Sharp; percussionists Gerry Hemingway, Susie Ibarra, and Tony Oxley; saxophonist Oliver Lake; bassist William Parker; and many others.

There is a lot of music here — nearly nine hours’ worth, more than 50 tracks. And astonishingly, because it’s created as an educational archive, it’s available for free/name your price download via Neuma Records’ Bandcamp page, and you can get a physical version for $1 plus shipping. Below, I’m going to talk about five tracks that particularly stuck out for me.

Eternal Rock is a piece for komungo and orchestra, performed by Kim and the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York on March 18, 2001, with Dante Anzolini conducting. It’s a heavy piece, somewhat “traditionally” avant-garde, with powerful percussive accents and horn fanfares that remind me of Schoenberg, Thorvaldsdottir, and Jerry Goldsmith’s soundtrack to Planet Of The Apes. Kim’s komungo doesn’t dominate the music; it’s an element within the larger piece, sometimes functioning rhythmically, which is pretty fascinating.

Nori is a piece written for the ensemble Zeitgeist (Pat O’Keefe on clarinet, Susan Billmeyer on synths, Heather Barringer and Patti Cudd on percussion) and Kim on electric komungo; it was recorded at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN on June 1, 2002. Again, there’s lots of percussion, playing patterns that sound to me derived from Korean music, but occasionally adding a slight sense of swing, and the electric komungo creates an eerie effect; every note seems bent. The synthesizer is an incongruous element, like something from a low-budget horror movie or video game soundtrack. But the interaction between Kim, O’Keefe and the percussionists is suspenseful and fascinating.

“Circle of Time” is a duo improvisation featuring Kim on electric komungo and janggu and Susie Ibarra on kulintang and percussion, performed as part of the Asian Sound Revolution Concert in Chicago on October 13, 2024. Ibarra has spent many years creating her own musical language that blends jazz, Filipino music, field recordings and environmental sounds, and extended percussion techniques. Here, she’s playing a jazz drum kit and a few other instruments, and Kim starts out on the electric komungo, but for most of the piece is playing the janggu, a double-headed, hourglass-shaped Korean drum. The dialogue between the drums is intense and almost ritualistic.

“Companies” is a trio performance by Kim (on electric komungo), Derek Bailey (electric guitar), and Tony Oxley (percussion) from Company Week in London, July 22, 1992. Bailey’s scratching, pinging approach to the guitar complements Kim’s twanging, groaning electric komungo very well, and Oxley sounds like he understands the role of percussion in Korean ritual music, whether he ever studied it or not. This is the sound of two people who know each other pretty well already figuring out how to best support a newcomer, and everyone sounds excited by the opportunity.

“Quagmire” features Kim on komungo, Oliver Lake on flute and saxophone, and William Parker on bass. It was recorded in concert in Buffalo, NY on September 29, 2000. With no percussion instrument present, this is a quiet and thoughtful three-way interaction; Parker in particular seems subdued and supportive, while Lake takes the lead in a somewhat conventionally out-jazz manner. He’s listening to what Kim is doing, but seems to view her as an accompanist, exploring the limits of the alto saxophone’s range in an almost Roscoe Mitchell-ish manner as Kim and Parker strum and throb along behind him. I wonder what might have happened if he had decided to support her, perhaps with long tones as she went off on high-energy runs.

These are just five examples of the wide range of music on this box. Jin Hi Kim is a fascinating artist whose work merits immersion, and a nine-CD set is a pretty good start. And at that price, how can you say no?

The latest two releases from Burning Ambulance Music, Wadada Leo Smith’s Constellations And Hemispheres and Michael Sarian’s In This Desert, are out this Friday! Get your copies now!

Big Ears 2027 announcement! The full lineup for Big Ears, the Knoxville, TN-based festival of adventurous music, was announced this week, and among a million other cool-sounding shows, Ava Mendoza will be performing with drummer Hamid Drake. Which means you should prepare yourself by buying Ava’s latest CD Alive Alone, Alive Together, which features Hamid on four of its eight tracks. Click to purchase!

New Shfl reviews! I was in a mood for religious music, so I wrote about Deathspell Omega’s Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice; Diamanda Galás’s You Must Be Certain Of The Devil; and Mary Lou Williams’ self-titled album (aka Black Christ Of The Andes).

I recently read two books, one of which I liked a lot and the other of which I fucking hated. Let’s start with the good one.

Nnedi Okorafor’s Death Of The Author is the second of her books that I’ve read, after 2014’s Lagoon. (A lot of her other books are YA fiction, which has kept me away.) It’s a fascinating and formally exciting novel, published last year, that tells two stories in parallel. I got it from my local library.

The first narrative revolves around Zelu, a struggling author who writes a bestselling science fiction novel, Rusted Robots, which brings her money and fame, but doesn’t do much to improve her strained, even combative relationship with her parents and siblings, who all seem to pity or resent her to one degree or another (she’s in a wheelchair thanks to a childhood accident). The book puts us deep inside Zelu’s head and lets us eavesdrop as she grapples with professional frustration, anger at being second-guessed and/or treated as less-than by a variety of people, from lovers to fans. She’s often snappish and unpleasant, but it’s a testament to Okorafor’s skill that I was never fully turned off to her.

Continued behind the paywall…

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You’re reading the title wrong if you think it’s just a pun on “introducing.” DJ Shadow’s full-length debut, Endtroducing….., which came out 30 years ago this week (September 16, 1996), was actually intended to be the end of a phase, which is why everyone who’s waited and hoped for him to return to the kind of music he made on that astonishing album — ultra-dense, but moody and atmospheric, sample collages that sounded like much more than instrumental hip-hop beats — was always destined to be disappointed.

As he explained in an interview with his friend (and noted hip-hop journalist) Jeff Chang for The Believer: “People always ask whether I’ll make another album like Endtroducing, but it was always intended as an ending — it was exactly what I wanted to do at the time, so why would I do it again?”

He elaborated on the point in a 2012 interview with Lainna Fader from XLR8R, saying, “I felt like I was on to something when I was doing ‘In/Flux,’ my first single for Mo’ Wax, ‘Lost and Found,’ my second single, and the What Does Your Soul Look Like EP. All of that preceded Endtroducing….., and the reason why it’s spelled with an ‘E-N-D’ is because it signified the fourth and final chapter in a series of pieces that I was doing for Mo’ Wax with a certain sound, a certain tone, a certain atmosphere. And I feel like my work really changed after that. It was the summary of this sound, and [the album] wrapped up the series. I had this vision at the time that every album I did after that would be completely different, and that’s something I’ve been trying to be adamant about — maintaining that autonomy from record to record.”

“In/Flux” (originally credited to DJ Shadow and the Groove Robbers) is a 12-minute excursion over a simple, looped beat; there’s some halfway virtuosic scratching, a few melodic samples, and a ton of vocal samples from here and there. It reminds me of the Coldcut remix of Eric B. & Rakim’s “Paid in Full,” but slower — many people call it a key early example of trip-hop. “Hindsight” is less of the same. “Lost and Found” is a 10-minute track released on a split 12” with DJ Krush. There are fewer samples, they’re looped more frequently, and there’s more scratching. These three tracks are all versions of one idea; they’re the sound of Shadow finding his voice.

What Does Your Soul Look Like represents a breakthrough. A 32-minute, four-track EP, he’s said that it was originally meant to be the first half of his debut album, but then Mo’Wax label head James Lavelle decided to release it as an EP, forcing him to start over. The four sections of “What Does Your Soul Look Like” (which run out of sequence, 2-3-4-1) are a long and patient journey, groove and atmosphere blending together to create a kind of lucid dream state in which lines of movie dialogue float past, shadowed (no pun intended) by saxophones, flutes, guitars, choral voices, and more. The music is deceptively simple, lulling you into a trance that makes you receptive to a message, and gradually convinced you’re receiving one. But it’s also more lush and arranged/orchestrated than anything before it, and lays the groundwork for what was to come on Endtroducing.

There are absolutely no live instruments on the album. Everything is sampled from somewhere — sometimes incredibly obscure records, sometimes well-known ones (there are snippets of Björk, Tangerine Dream, and Metallica buried in there) — as well as the eerie monologues from the 1987 John Carpenter movie Prince Of Darkness.

In a 1996 interview with Tape Op, Shadow told Eric Stenman, “I grew up on sample-based music. Breakbeats are the foundation of what I do. I like the fact that, even though it doesn't always sound the greatest, someone could go out and find the beats. They are out there. Everything I use can be found somewhere else if you look hard enough. I think that makes it very interesting. I love finding other people's samples. It's great to not only find the sample but then to also see how it was used. It's great when people aren't lazy and take the sample as a whole. I like it when people chop up stuff and flip it around.”

Describing his equipment, he said, “Mainly, I just use an Akai MPC-3000… When I first started using my MPC-60 Mach II back in early ’92 it was so new. No one was using them. Everyone was still so SP-1200, SP-1200, SP-1200. Now, it’s time for something new. I think that when you change your instrument, you change your sound. But, I still want to keep it simple… My home studio would still fit on a dinner table. Turntables and my 3000.” He added, “Endtroducing was recorded to ADAT because that was all that we could afford back then.”

In a 1997 conversation with Greg Rule for Keyboard magazine, he said, “There are lots of overdubs on the album, as well. But all the record was 100% sample- or vinyl-based. All the sampling was done on the MPC. It all went straight from turntable to the MPC to tape. And any other things you hear were done straight off the turntable, pitched in. Like, if a song is in a certain key, and I overdub a string bit, I have to manipulate the pitch control on the turntable until it works.”

He described sampling not just loops, but individual drum hits and even the “air” on a record, the soft hiss and crackle of the space between sounds, and using that to construct entirely new beats that nonetheless sounded organic and smooth. “That way I can reconstruct the beat from the record for some bars, but then I can create new beats for others. The big tip I learned on the MPC is about the fade function. I never like my chops to sound really choppy, unless they’re intentionally supposed to be choppy, if you get my drift, like in a jungly kind of way… If it [the drum pattern] sounds complex, it’s supposed to. I want people to get the impression that I spent a lot of time on every detail of the samples. I treat the sampler the way some people treat the electric guitar or a drum kit. I want to be the best at it.”

The finished album is an absolutely stunning work of audio collage. It begins with a jump-cutting 46-second mix of scratching and braggadocious samples, before the first full track, “Building Steam with a Grain of Salt,” kicks off. That piece blends piano, a big beat, and a wordless female voice with the sound of a man describing his own progress as a musician (“I’m a student of the drums… but I’m also a teacher of the drums”), a woman talking about astrology, and more. Shadow’s ability to finely chop sampled drum breaks is demonstrated by his creation of what sounds for all the world like a drum solo, but it’s clearly been played on the pads of the MPC-3000.

Over the course of its 63-minute running time, Endtroducing….. jumps back and forth between moody, midtempo pieces like “Building Steam…” and “Changeling” and more aggressive, pounding tracks like “The Number Song” and “Mutual Slump.” Three tracks simply labeled “Transmission” 1, 2 and 3 borrow the aforementioned creepy voice from Prince Of Darkness. Two tracks from What Does Your Soul Look Like are repurposed on the album; we get a shortened version of “Part 4” about a third of the way through the record, and its final full track is a “Blue Sky Revisit” of “Part 1.” One of my favorite tracks, though, is the under-two-minute “Organ Donor,” on which he chops up an organ solo into a lunatic eruption.

This album transcends categories. It’s not just a collection of hip-hop instrumentals, because it’s impossible to imagine anyone rapping over these tracks. But to suggest that it “elevates” hip-hop and sampling to the level of high art would imply that such “elevation” was necessary, which is obviously a bunch of classist bullshit. I would compare Endtroducing….. to an album like Larry Young’s Unity, which was simultaneously a brilliant work of avant-garde jazz and an organ trio record like a thousand others. It’s a demonstration of what can be done within a seemingly defined and limited form… if you’re a genius. And it’s utterly timeless; it sounds as stunning today as it did the day it came out. If you’ve never heard it before, I envy you.

DJ Shadow will be performing a live set based entirely on Endtroducing….. on tour beginning later this month.

My first book, New York Is Now!: The New Wave of Free Jazz, was published by a small Brooklyn-based record label and publisher, The Telegraph Company. I wanted to accomplish two things with it: I wanted to document the scene I saw happening in New York, based around free/avant-garde jazz musicians like David S. Ware, Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Roy Campbell, Daniel Carter, and Joe Morris, and I wanted to publish a book before I turned 30.

I worked fast, writing a chapter a week while holding down a day job as a magazine editor, and I achieved both my goals. Although I had advance copies to sell at the 2001 Vision Festival (I gave one to Rashied Ali), my book was officially scheduled for publication on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

I rode the train into New York that morning as usual. By the time I arrived at the offices of the magazine where I worked, the first plane had struck the World Trade Center; the second plane hit shortly thereafter. Our offices were located close to the United Nations building, and the Israeli embassy was directly across the street from our building, so my bosses told us all to leave for our own safety. I walked across Manhattan to Penn Station, and was sitting on a NJ Transit train, ready to go back to New Jersey, when it was announced that no more trains would be departing and that the station was being shut down.

I went back up to the street, and walked down into Greenwich Village, which was chaotic, as people were waiting for victims to be delivered to hospitals. None were. I turned around at 14th Street and walked back uptown, finally arriving at my aunt’s apartment in the lower 80s. I got there and hung around on her couch for a few hours; when word got out that train service in and out of Manhattan had been restored, I walked back downtown again, and went home.

Anyway, a 25th anniversary edition of New York Is Now! is currently in production via Zer0 Books, publishers of my 2022 book Ugly Beauty: Jazz In The 21st Century. I hope it will be out by year’s end.

The book will consist of lightly revised versions of all the original book’s chapters save one, and each chapter will also feature a postscript discussing the artist in question’s work from 2001 to the present (or until their death, in the case of David S. Ware, Charles Gayle, and Roy Campbell). The original book was generally well received by the scene and community it documented, and I think the new version is better. I hope others will agree.

Behind the paywall, you’ll find some articles about the meaning of music criticism, sex workers with guns, writers’ processes, and producer/engineer Martin Bisi. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber.

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John Coltrane was born 100 years ago this month, on September 23, 1926. There’s going to be a lot of writing about him and his work for the rest of the year (and beyond, of course; Coltrane is a jazz immortal, whose life and work will be discussed somewhere as long as humans have ears).

I wrote about late Coltrane for the Brooklyn Rail, a piece which has generated some heat, particularly on Facebook, where people go to share their most conservative takes on art. Anyway…

Coltrane’s former record label, Impulse!, is focusing their centennial product rollout around The Tiberi Tapes, a collection of amateur recordings made in the early 1960s in New York and Philadelphia nightclubs by obsessive fan (and fellow saxophonist) Frank Tiberi. It’ll be released later in the year, and I may have more to say about it at that time.

The Tiberi Tapes is far from the first unofficial John Coltrane recording to be made available by Impulse!, though. Over the last 25 years, there’s been a string of these releases, and while the playing is always at a high level, the quality of the recordings and the intense, unforgiving nature of much of the material makes them some of the most alienating, for-diehards-only music in his catalog. So let’s talk about which ones the merely Coltrane-curious might actually want to hear.

The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording, released in 2001, was recorded on April 23, 1967 in New York, roughly three months before Coltrane’s death from liver cancer on July 17. It featured his final group — Pharoah Sanders on tenor saxophone, Alice Coltrane on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Rashied Ali on drums — joined by percussionist Jumma Santos and bata drummer Algie DeWitt. They play two numbers, a 29-minute “Ogunde” and a 35-minute “My Favorite Things.” This is a crude recording, made at Coltrane’s behest by an engineer he knew. Sonically, it’s a blown-out, distorted mess, and to my ear it has little to recommend it unless you’re a total free squall diehard. The studio version of “Ogunde,” released on Expression, is a beautiful three-minute ballad. Stretched to ten times its length, and sounding like it’s coming from a malfunctioning public address speaker… no thanks.

Four years later, One Down, One Up (Live At The Half Note) arrived. It featured recordings from March and May 1965 by Coltrane’s “classic quartet” of pianist McCoy Tyner, Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones. The music had been taped by DJ Alan Grant of New York radio station WABC, and copies of the recordings sat in Coltrane’s personal collection until his son Ravi rescued them and got Impulse! to put together a 2CD set. Because they were recorded professionally, for broadcast, the sound quality is excellent, even if the first disc does begin with Grant announcing the performers over a Garrison bass solo already in progress. The subsequent title piece, nearly 28 minutes long, is one of the best live Coltrane performances ever captured, full of the lyricism and passion of his best work. After this, he would dive headlong into the high-intensity free blowing of his final years, but if you’re a fan of his work from My Favorite Things through A Love Supreme, this set is worth checking out.

Offering: Live At Temple University, released in 2014, was another glorified bootleg, recorded with a single microphone planted center stage. It was recorded November 11, 1966 and features Sanders, Alice Coltrane on piano, Sonny Johnson on bass, Ali on drums, and a slew of guests: Algie DeWitt on bata drum, three conga players (Umar Ali, Charles Brown, and Robert Kenyatta), and two local alto saxophonists, Arnold Joyner and Steve Knoblauch, both of whom just asked to sit in. It’s not quite as badly recorded as The Olatunji Concert, but it’s close; the sound is relatively clear, but Coltrane, Sanders, and the drummers are the only audible players 90 percent of the time, and if you’re someone who believes Coltrane lost his way, creatively speaking, after 1965, the performances here will support your position. They are blowing hard, and there’s almost nothing conventionally beautiful about it. The 21-minute version of “Leo,” which has the feel of a vodou ritual, especially when Coltrane begins vocalizing, is of some interest, but still… enter at your own risk.

A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle, released in 2021, is a pretty amazing discovery. Recorded October 1, 1965, the night after a flame-throwing show captured on the Live In Seattle double LP, it’s only the second known live recording of Coltrane’s most famous work, the other having been taped in France a few months earlier, with only the quartet that made the studio album onstage. This features an expanded ensemble — the quartet of Coltrane, Tyner, Garrison, and Jones, plus Sanders, alto saxophonist Carlos Ward, and second bassist Donald Rafael Garrett — and together, they stretch ALS out to over 75 minutes, expanding its four movements and breaking them up with several improvisatory interludes. It’s quite well recorded, and the music is brilliant. The way they segue from the sections of ALS into the more exploratory passages, then bring it back in and keep the piece flowing, is fantastic. I like this even better than the French performance, which is now available on the 2CD ALS deluxe edition.

Evenings At The Village Gate, recorded in 1961 and released in 2023, is co-credited to Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, and also features Tyner, bassists Reggie Workman and Art Davis, and Jones. It was recorded on a single microphone dangling over the stage, so like Offering, it’s in mono, and Jones’ drums are the loudest element in the mix, with Coltrane’s saxophone sounding surprisingly subdued, Dolphy only slightly more present, and the piano seeming to drift in from far away. It’s all really good, but the obvious highlights are tracks that can’t be heard on multiple other Coltrane live albums, like a version of the standard “When Lights Are Low” and a 22-minute “Africa,” only recently recorded for the Africa/Brass album and featuring an extended pas de deux between Workman and Davis. This music was recorded during an era when Coltrane was reaching the first in a series of artistic peaks, and it’s quite beautiful despite the sonic limitations.

I love a lot of John Coltrane’s music, from all his various eras. But I do not put bootleg recordings on the same level as finished, polished studio albums (or professional live albums). None of the albums I have discussed in this essay will ever replace A Love Supreme, Crescent, Meditations, Soultrane, Traneing In, or Settin’ The Pace for me.

(There is one recently unearthed, and somewhat overlooked, Coltrane collection I can wholeheartedly endorse: Blue World, a 2019 release of a 1964 studio session on which the quartet performed new versions of older tunes like “Naima,” “Like Sonny,” and “Traneing In.” It’s great.)

Worse, the proliferation of crude live recordings like these has two potentially negative effects: It risks distracting the new listener from genuinely important works that should be heard first, and it risks turning John Coltrane into a subject for study, rather than a musician whose work can be listened to by normal people for entertainment. So as good as some of the albums reviewed above are, if you’re new to or curious about Coltrane’s music, my advice is to avoid all of them, at least until you’ve checked out the canonical works. Once you’ve done that, by all means dive deeper. But none of the records here should be anyone’s starting point.

There are 20 new titles up on the Leo Records Bandcamp page this week. They include albums by John Wolf Brennan, François Carrier, Frank Gratkowski, Carolyn Hume, and Szilárd Mezei, among others. All of them are worth your time and money, but I recommend two in particular:

Tenderness Of Stones is a set of duos between Joachim Gies on saxophones and electronics, and adventurous vocalist Lauren Newton.

Albert features pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, Ikue Mori on laptop, and Mark Nauseef on percussion and synth, improvising around recordings of Albert Hofmann, the chemist who synthesized LSD.

You can also pre-order the next two Burning Ambulance Music releases, Wadada Leo Smith’s Constellations And Hemispheres and Michael Sarian’s In This Desert. CDs will be shipping soon!

Last week I went to my local Barnes & Noble and picked up several books: Joyce Carol Oates’ Fox (my first Oates); Callan Wink’s Beartooth; and Kaoru Takamura’s Lady Joker, Volumes 1 and 2 (recommended by a commenter). I also stopped by my local library and picked up Nnedi Okorafor’s Death Of The Author and Lou Berney’s Crooks, and got a copy of The Selected Poems Of Steve Dalachinsky in the mail from City Lights; it’ll be out in December. So the problem of what to read has been solved, for the moment. (The Okorafor book was up for a Hugo Award this year. It did not win, but I plan to finish reading it anyway. NO TROPHIES FOR ART.)

Grayson Haver Currin is a writer whose work I enjoy… sometimes. He’s a smart guy, but he often chooses to profile or review musicians whose work is very much Not For Me. He recently wrote an excellent review, for Pitchfork, of the Eagles compilation Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975), which may be the best-selling album in the history of American music. And he gets the fundamental thing about their work, which is that while their singles are uniformly good to great, all their other songs kinda suck. “[Don] Henley hated the idea of a greatest hits collection, because he claimed it was ‘the forced and hideous marriage of art and commerce,’ ostensibly back when he claimed to care about that first part. He failed to understand, though, that Their Greatest Hits stripped away the misfires of the Eagles’ actual albums, leaving only 10 of the best songs they would ever write, that have ever been written in the realm of folk-rock. Their Greatest Hits is the only no-skips set in the catalog of a band that sometimes seemed to specialize in the skips. Put another way, I will always own a copy of Their Greatest Hits; I would not take copies of the first four Eagles albums from a free bin, Desperado debatably excepted.”

My latest Ugly Beauty column was published on Stereogum last week. It included a profile of Henry Threadgill, who has two new albums out. Behind the paywall, I present the only slightly edited transcript of my entire conversation with Threadgill. I hope you’ll enjoy it. And if you haven’t heard his new albums Cut You Where You Was (with his long-running band Zooid) and Fifteen (with pianist Vijay Iyer and drummer Dafnis Prieto), you should really get on that.

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It feels like forever since I’ve done one of these posts, but it’s only been a month. This time, we’ve got some crunchy technical death metal; a veteran organ trio; a collection of saxophone quartets; an electronic album from a jazz drummer; and an exciting out-jazz collaboration. Let’s dive in!

Assimilated Transdimensionalization is a solo project of Jøzsef Tøth, aka Tisza Kara, of Budapest, Hungary. To date, he’s released four EPs — Xenobiotic Annihilation Doctrine, Neuroflesh Incubation Through Cosmic Machinery, and Cosmic Erasure Of Biogenesis — and one full-length album, Neuroforged In The Womb Of Wires. His latest release is Exo-Cognitive Matrix, a four-song EP.

All of this music has been released in less than two years, so there’s not that much stylistic evolution to be heard. The Xenobiotic Annihilation Doctrine EP lays out the template, which is basically chugging, technically complex death metal that reminds me of Wormed or Defeated Sanity. Kara is a really good drummer and bassist, and a competent guitarist. There are occasional jazzy bass passages, but no squiggly guitar solos, just riffs. So many riffs. I like the fact that the snare drum sounds like a snare drum, and not like a metal ring being hit with a hammer. There are a few quiet moments here and there, where Kara actually lets the atmosphere breathe, instead of hitting you with a dialogue sample from some horror movie, and he’s got one production trick I really like where everything drops out except the guitar, and that’s muffled like it’s coming through the wall from your neighbor’s apartment.

The muffled-guitar trick is absent on the new EP, which is unfortunate, but the vocals are great, a mixture of guttural demonic roars and anguished screams, and there are some other interesting touches, like a robotic voice reciting… something… in Hungarian. The whole thing blasts by in just 10 minutes — if you buy the entire Assimilated Transdimensionalization catalog on Bandcamp, like I did, you could fit it all on a single CD.

Organist Larry Goldings, guitarist Peter Bernstein, and drummer Bill Stewart have been making music together for 35 years. I believe their first album was Intimacy Of The Blues, released on the Minor Music label in 1991 as the Larry Goldings Trio, with saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman guesting on three tracks. They’ve also recorded under Bernstein’s name, and served as a backing band for other artists. But somewhere around 15 years ago, they started billing themselves under all three of their names. Anyway, Rhombus is their six hundredth album or so, and it’s a collection of nice, pretty tunes, some of which you may recognize. They play Keith Jarrett’s “Everything That Lives, Laments,” Randy Weston’s “Hi-Fly,” Thelonious Monk’s “In Walked Bud,” Wayne Shorter’s “Penelope,” Irving Berlin’s “They Say It’s Wonderful,” and Abdullah Ibrahim’s “Mamma,” along with two original compositions. Everybody plays clean, and nobody lurches sideways into free jazz or psychedelic rock, though Goldings’ “Rhombus” gets close. It almost sounds like a Doors instrumental, or some of John Zorn’s recent music for organ trio, so of course it’s the shortest piece on the record. There are a few unexpected bursts of energy from Stewart on the Irving Berlin number, too. It probably seems like I’m dismissing this record, but look up at the title of this newsletter again. This is an album you need to hear, because these three men know each other like brothers, and they do their collective thing brilliantly. They’ve chosen tunes that allow each person room to make a statement without Making a Statement, and sequenced them in a way that flows. It’s an album that understands how albums work. It’s one of the best examples of craft I’ve heard all year. And it snuck up on me; I didn’t decide to share it with you until I’d heard it three times.

Alto saxophonist Julius Hemphill loved writing for saxophone quartet, and later for saxophone sextet, occasionally adding flutes and clarinets to ensembles as needed. He co-founded the World Saxophone Quartet with fellow members of the Black Artist Group (BAG) Hamiet Bluiett and Oliver Lake, plus David Murray. After leaving the WSQ, he formed his own ensembles and continued to perform saxophone choir music. On this 2CD set, Marty Ehrlich — who played on the Julius Hemphill Sextet albums Fat Man And The Hard Blues and Five Chord Stud — has assembled a pool of players including Allan Chase, Rob DeBellis, Brian Landrus, Andy Laster, Jeff Lederer, Lisa Parrott, and Jason Robinson to record all 40 of Hemphill’s saxophone quartet compositions. And they are absolutely compositions, with a beginning, a middle, and an end (OK, some of them fade out). The harmonies are stacked up beautifully, with Ellingtonian lushness and string quartet gravitas. There are solos, but they’re not the point — the orchestrations and conversations between horns are the point. Indeed, 11 of these pieces are under two minutes long; they’re intended as statements, potent and precise. At the same time, put a swinging drummer underneath these pieces and you’d have the whole room dancing.

I know – and you may know – Lesley Mok as a jazz drummer: a member of pianist Myra Melford’s Fire And Water Quintet, whose next album Sure Grand Out is arriving this month, who appeared on Anna Webber’s Shimmer Wince, and made a terrific album, A Reflection Distorts Over Water, with saxophonist Camila Nebbia and pianist Marilyn Crispell. Mok’s first album as a leader, 2023’s The Living Collection, had horns, strings, and electronics. Transient, on the other hand, is an almost entirely electronic effort. Yes, it features live drums, most obviously on “in the funhouse,” but they seem to be used as source material more than anything else. They’re often surrounded by electronic patterns, reshaped by studio effects, and otherwise disguised or downplayed. When I listen to this album, particularly on speakers (as opposed to headphones, which is my usual listening practice), I’m reminded of Autechre, but also of early Tangerine Dream and even of ultra-minimalist early 2000s works by electronic music artists like Bernhard Günter, Sogar, Taylor Deupree and Motion. I’m particularly impressed by the deep but precise low-end pulses on “midland.”

Sulida is a Norwegian trio — Marthe Lea on tenor sax, flute and percussion; Jon Rune Strøm on bass; Dag Erik Knedal Andersen on drums — whose debut album, Utos, was released on the recently shuttered Clean Feed label in 2024. The following year, they played a concert with trumpeter Axel Dörner, which has now been released as Etiwe. I wasn’t sure what to expect going in; I had this idea of Dörner in particular as a “lowercase” improviser, the kind of guy who makes very soft hissing and kissing noises into the trumpet rather than, you know, playing music through it. But this is very definitely a type of free jazz, one that reminds me at certain points of Other Dimensions In Music, at others of Irreversible Entanglements, and at others of the work of Don Cherry, whether with Ornette Coleman’s quartet, with Sonny Rollins, or with his own groups in Scandinavia in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Dörner fits right in with the ensemble, never feeling like a “special guest” or like he’s being deferred to. Strøm and Andersen are an excellent team, creating forward momentum without “swinging” in the conventional sense, as the horns carry on intriguing conversations. And when Lea begins to sing, Dörner is a friendly shadow/interlocutor, spurring her on.

My latest Ugly Beauty jazz column is up now on Stereogum. I got to talk to Henry Threadgill(!) about his two new albums Fifteen (came out last week) and Cut You Where You Was (comes out today), and reviewed new records by (among others) Stefon Harris, Sullivan Fortner, Isaiah Collier, Linda May Han Oh and Melissa Aldana, and saxophonist Mārā Sējāne, who I stumbled across on Bandcamp. The column is paywalled, so you’ll have to subscribe to read it, but you should do that. Stereogum is a great site that deserves your support.

(I will publish the full transcript of my interview with Henry Threadgill in next Friday’s newsletter. It will be behind the paywall, though, so you’ll want to upgrade to a paying subscription for that.)

Thanks to everyone who recommended books, movies and TV shows in the comments to last Friday’s newsletter. Some of that stuff I was already familiar with, but a lot of it is new to me and will be going on the list.

For the last several weeks, I’ve been watching Furious, a show on Hulu that will air its final episode this weekend. It stars Emmy Rossum, who I know from the Showtime show Shameless, as a former NYPD detective turned rookie FBI agent, and Lola Petticrew (who I previously saw playing an IRA bomber in Say Nothing) as a young sex worker who’s tracking down and murdering a short list of men who did something very bad to her and a now-dead friend of hers.

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