Music Notes

I saw the great Jason Moran last weekend at the Berkelee School of Music, performing his Duke Ellington repertoire, which you can read a bit about here. It was astoundingly good. A solo show, Moran is both compelling as a pianist and as a speaker on this music. One of the things that make Moran so wonderful is that he both moves the music forward while paying respects to the past, which so many of the nostalgic jazz world–fans and performers–struggle with. Moran is not interested in 1965 for 1965. He’s. interested in 1965 for 2025. Or in this case, 1935 too. He helps listeners understand what Ellington was about, the man he became, why he performed in the way he did, why he continued to have big bands around him when that was pricey and unpopular, and how he himself came to understanding these compositions. He also plays around during the show between straightforward renditions of songs to really reinterpreting them, such as on a blistering verison of “Black and Tan Fantasy” that blew my mind with his piano skills, doing incredibly complex work on the low notes in ways that even the Duke himself might not have thought of. Amazing, definitely see this if you have the chance. This my 3rd Moran show–each very different. As he pointed out, he gets brought to Boston a lot, which is great for me. I’ve seen him in a trio with Mary Halvorson and the late great trumpeter Ron Miles and I’ve seen his big band James Reese Europe project. These are three very different shows, all of which demonstrate the huge range Moran covers in his art. Really, he’s one of the greatest living jazz musicians. We can probably all agree that Sonny Rollins is the greatest living jazz musician. When he finally passes, Moran is going to be in the conversation to take that title.

I also had the chance to see Robbie Fulks in Providence. This was my 5th Fulks show. He was at his hilariously misanthropic best. It was a weird venue in that it is a long-time dive bar with a lot of regulars who usually come for karaoke and reggae night and other stuff like that who found themselves in a real show and some people making noise had a slight confrontation with people who were there for the show. Robbie just played through it. Anyway, he started with a song about being left alone that included the line “Why do you want to hold my hand/I’ve already given you a golden band.” Then he was onto classics such as “Rock Bottom Population 1,” “Tears Only Go One Way” and thanks to a request, “I Told Her Lies.” He played “Aunt Peg’s New Old Man” which is a hilarious song if you know it. He was with the great bluegrass bassist Missy Raines and another guitarist, which was nice and really filled out the sound. In fact, here’s the setlist. The other thing about this show was, as they came out for the encore, Raines mentioned they had stopped that day at a Chipotle in The Bronx, which led Fulks to improvise an entire ridiculous song about it on the spot. Of course the song was terrible if it was a real song, but that’s not the point. The point is that you can see a songwriter just be able to do that and make things rhyme and not really run into any moments where he stops because he can’t keep it going. And it went on for like 5 minutes. It was an interested window into how a songwriter operates.

We lost a giant this week. Roy Ayers is a critical figure in the history of jazz. He was already an important vibraphonist in more straight ahead jazz when he made a mid-career shift to a form of fusion known as “neo-soul,” becoming a big influence in both funk and hip hop. He was sampled an unbelievable amount of times in the hip hop era, most famously by Deee-Lite’s huge hit “Groove is in the Heart.”

The New York Times “5 Minutes to Make Love You Jazz” series continued with a great list of Chicago-based jazz, covering a huge range of artists. Definitely check this out.

Have to mention the death of Angie Stone, beloved in both the hip-hop and R&B communities. I was also struck by how rarely you hear about people dying in car accidents anymore. Actually it was a pretty tough week in the world of Black pop music. Proto-disco pioneer Gwen McGrath died at 81 and, in a death that made me feel particularly old, D’Wayne Wiggins of Tony! Toni! Toné! died at 64.

NPR is starting a fun timeline of women in music over the last century. The first twenty-five years are up.

Toad’s Place in New Haven is a somewhat legendary shithole, the kind of place where every major band over the last half century has played and also that’s the last time the bathrooms were cleaned. Anyway, it is celebrating 50 years.

On the rise of the Brazilian funk scene

A list of the 20 Worst Music Videos of All Time

The Louisiana swamp pop scene lives!

This week’s playlist:

1. Nick Drake, Pink Moon
2. Buddy Tabor, Earth and the Sky
3. Bill Callahan, Apocalypse
4. Sir Douglas Quintet, Live from Austin, TX
5. Sun Ra, Of Mythic Worlds
6. Tom Zé, Estuando o Pagode
7. Mount Moriah, Miracle Temple
8. Corin Tucker Band, 1,000 Years
9. Patterson Hood, Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams
10. Richard and Linda Thompson, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight
11. Drive By Truckers, English Oceans
12. Wet Leg, self-titled
13. Gillian Welch, The Harrow and the Harvest
14. Wussy, Ghosts
15. The Beths, Jump Rope Gazers
16. The Carter Family with Johnny Cash, Keep on the Sunny Side
17. Tom Russell, Song of the West
18. Matthew Shipp String Trio, By the Law of Music
19. John Coltrane, Live at the Village Vanguard
20. The Sonics, This is the Sonics
21. Muhal Richard Abrams Orchestra, Blu Blu Blu
22. Guided by Voices, Alien Lanes
23. James McMurtry, Live in Aught Three
24. Neko Case, The Tigers Have Spoken
25. Jason Isbell, Something More than Free
26. Screaming Females, Rose Mountain
27. Orchestra Baobab, Pirates Choice
28. Sleater-Kinney, One Beat
29. Waylon Payne, Blue Eyes, the Harlot, the Queer, the Pusher, & Me
30. Bonnie Prince Billy, Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You
31. Smog, Wild Love
32. Johnny Paycheck, The Lovin’ Machine
33. Tom Russell, Road to Bayamon
34. Modern Lovers, self-titled
35. Dave Alvin, Ashgrove
36. Ennio Morricone, The Legendary Italian Westerns
37. Marvin Gaye, What’s Going On
38. Wussy, self-titled
39. John Coltrane, Blue Train
40. Iron & Wine, The Creek Drank the Cradle
41. Wussy, Left for Dead
42. John Prine, Bruised Orange
43. Duke Ellington, Masterpieces by Ellington
44. No Age, Waiting Here
45. Torres, What an Enormous Room
46. Brandon Lopez/Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, No Es La Playa
47. Janelle Monae, Dirty Computer
48. Vijay Iyer Sextet, Far from Over
49. Reyna Tropical, Malegria
50. H.C. McEntire, Every Acre
51. Roberta Flack, First Take
52. Soccer Mommy, Clean
53. Christian McBride’s New Jawn, Prime
54. Soul Sok Sega: Sega Sounds from Mauritius, 1973-1979
55. Bert Jansch, Bert at the BBC, disc 1
56. Coathangers, Parasite
57. Daddy Issues, Fuck Marry Kill
58. Run the Jewels, RTJ 4
59. Camera Obscura, Let’s Get Out of This Country

Album Reviews:

Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas Las Flores

Lafourcade does such lovely versions of Mexican torch singing music. It’s a bit targeted intentionally for global audiences, making the listen real easy and familar for those not deeply in touch with these Mexican traditions. It’s just jazzy enough with just enough “global” influences to create a deeply accessible music. I often think this can blunt the power of the music into something anodyne and boring, but that’s never the case with Lafourcade, who has fantastic control over her voice, not relying on showing off in the Mariah Carey style so popular on The Voice and stuff like that. She doesn’t need gimmicks to get it over.

A-

Benjamin Lackner, Last Decade

A 2022 ECM album of this German pianist, this is extremely ECM, i.e. tremendously tasteful but unadventurous jazz as background music. I have nothing negative to say about any of the musicians here, but it doesn’t much seem to have the spirit of jazz as pressing the music forward in some way. As I mentioned in discussing Jason Moran above, that doesn’t mean that jazz can’t look into the past or be played to an extent in a historical way, but it does need to have a vision for the future that is different than just the influences. This however feels like it would be pretty comfortable at a corporate party. But they are good enough that they could probably charge a lot to play that party.

B-

Patterson Hood, Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams

Drive By Truckers’ frontman doesn’t release very many solo albums–this is his fourth going back to 2004. But when he does, the songs really are different than DBT songs. Here Hood revisits his past, not so much about his drinking and wildness of his 20s, but memories from childhood. “Exploding Trees” for instance is about a winter storm that hit Alabama when he was a kid. Mostly, these songs are nice rather than great. A few do reach toward greatness, especially “Mrs. Coldiron’s Oldsmobile”, “The Pool House” and “Pinocchio.” There’s some nice guest appearances on various tracks too–from Lydia Loveless, Waxahatchee, and Wednesday. But this album is almost intentionally minor, the album of an aging guy thinking about long ago. That’s going to have limited upside. That’s also completely fine, albums like this are more than welcome when well done and this is well done. So it’s not a good DBT album and it’s not his best solo album either, but it’s more than fine.

B

Jon Irabagon, I Don’t Hear Nothin’ but the Blues Volume 3 Part 2: Exuberant Scars

Irabagon has never been a big editor of his work so there’s a ton of albums and he just lets his ideas flow. This is part of a long series of albums he has with Ava Mendoza and Mick Barr both on guitars and Mike Pride on drums, while he blows into his saxophones. This is pure improvisation, as is the rest of the series. I often am mixed on Irabagon’s work, in part because of the seeming lack of self-editing, but this one I think is pretty great. Part of it is the interplay between the two guitars, with Pride banging away below and Irabagon soloing on over the top. It almost layers in my ears in a comprehensible way that may or may not be intentional, but which appeals to me quite a bit.

It doesn’t seem like any of this album exists on YouTube, but here’s a track from one of the earlier albums, which just included Irabagon and Pride.

A-

Kevin Holliday, Ladybug

Not at all bad R&B album, nothing overly original here, but a completely functional set of songs. The ones with the guest vocalist Isa Reyes are a little better than the others. Definition of functionally listenable music.

B-

Jenny Owen Youngs, Avalanche

Youngs has been around for close to forever now, but I had never gotten around to hear her. But I had this album from 23 on my list and I am glad I heard it. Very solid set of songs. It had been 11 years since her last album and since then was coming out, two marriages, a divorce, and a baby. Plus, you know, the world. So that’s a lot. In fact, she has a song about doomscrolling. guess she has a popular podcast too. Largely this fits into the depressive singer world, but there’s some humor here too. I liked “Everglades” especially.

B+

Kneecap, Fine Art

Debut album from this Belfast hip hop band, released last year. Not the easiest accent to understand for the American, as you can imagine. Belfast is however, how shall we say, ripe for social commentary and Kneecap offers plenty of it. Oh, plus a lot of it is actually in Gaelic, so you aren’t understanding it. This is pretty leftist music too. In fact, the band notably pulled out of SXSW one year after finding out that American military contractors sponsor it. A lot more principle than most Americans have about their imperialist defense industry. The sheer fact of recording in Gaelic is a political act given the history of Ireland and the British attempts to exterminate the language. Either way, the music is pretty good and you have to respect the act at least.

B

The Reckless Night Ensemble, Pan Americanos: The Songs of Raymond Scott & Lalo Guererro

Reckless Night Ensemble is led by the Chicago jazzman Skip Heller and generally works as a sort of big band tribute thing. Here, his group covers two very different artists–the composer Raymond Scott, whose sold his work to Warner Brothers in the 40s and then became the soundtrack to a lot of Looney Tunes and the California Mexican-American songwriter Lalo Guerrero. My only critique of this lovingly done album is that it’s a weird combination. Yes, the band can cover 40s music from the big band era and from the southern California Chicano scene with equal fluency, but the connection is hard to see and the transition kind of jarring. That said, both sides of this are certianly enjoyable, so I am not going to complain too much.

B

Shabazz Palaces, Exotic Birds of Prey

A short but sweet release that explores the boundaries of Afrofuturism combining hip-hop, electronica, jazz, and a lot of spacey effects. Maybe not a great album, but a good one, and a quick introduction to the kinds of interesting sounds Afrofuturism brings to the table.

B+

Tumi Mogorosi, Group Theory: Black Music

Mogorosi is an interesting South African drummer and composer. He’s a perfectly good drummer, but I find this more interesting from a compositional and arrangement front. A lot of vocal chorus here, which I often don’t care for, but as a backing instrument, the chorus is kind of great. There’s a lot of this vocal background and then here comes a cover of “Motherless Child” with a great lead and that powerful backing chorus. Loved it. Almost as arresting as Robeson doing it, which is high praise and of course this singer isn’t Robeson because no one is. One of the most interesting South African jazz albums I’ve heard in a long time.

A-

As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics.