Trombonist and composer Jacob Garchik returns with his eccentrically futuristic, hard-nosed collective Ye Olde, a guitar-centric sci-fi jazz act featuring two quartets – Ye Olde and Simulacrus (the resurrected version of the former) – inspired by the Omega Point, Spinal Tap, fascinating concepts in science and sci-fi, and Hungarian contemporary classical composer György Ligeti. Ye Olde 2: At the End of Time arrives a decade after the release of Ye Olde (2015), prompting a smile of wonderment as it channels a distinctive compositional style that feels entirely unique.
“One Can Only Go Up” opens the album in scalar form, with a rising two-octave scale played on on Barndon Seabrook’s 12-string electric guitar. Multiple layers accumulate with both…
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Tenor saxophonist George Coleman decided to leave the orbit of trumpeter Miles Davis in 1964. Or he got an elbow to the ribs and a hip check to leave the quintet, to be replaced by Wayne Shorter in the saxophone slot. Three top-notch live albums came out of the group that featured Coleman: In Europe: Live at the Antibes Jazz Festival (1964); My Funny Valentine: In Concert (1965); and “Four” and More: In Concert (1966). Add the studio outing, Seven Steps to Heaven (1963), and it is a wrap on the Coleman/Davis collaboration. Each of the hornmen went his own way, Davis to his second Great Quintet with Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and the powerhouse young drummer Tony Williams, and Coleman to a prolific leader/sideman career.
When people say something is “Lynchian,” they usually mean that it’s uncanny or almost imperceptibly off. Or they mean something pure and lovely and innocent, presented in a frame that makes you sense the unseen insects crawling over one another, just below the surface. As you have no doubt noticed, a lot of art and a discomfiting percentage of current events meet this description. It’s a useful term, which is why it’s overused. Yet it rarely evokes the odd sentimentality at the heart of David Lynch’s films. Think of how the sinister drones of “Laura Palmer’s Theme,” from Twin Peaks, are suddenly overwhelmed by a brightly sad piano sequence meant to reflect the real pain hidden within surreal events. Should you need a reminder, Chicago post-punk…
Cuban Cubism is central to Aruán Ortiz‘s musical identity — but in this album, his vision extends far beyond. While the 1930s Negritude movement was a literary endeavor, Ortiz seeks to embody that movement not through words but through music. His compositions channel their spirit with abstraction, tension, and a deep sense of diasporic reflection.
Ortiz, born in Santiago de Cuba — the island’s second-largest city — is shaped by its distinctive sonic culture. His influences stretch widely, encompassing American and European 20th-century composers such as Schoenberg, Ligeti, and Xenakis, as well as icons of funk and soul like James Brown and Sly Stone.
Now based in Brooklyn, Ortiz is a pianist,…
NoRinTon (Alireza Fatemi Jahanabadi) has only been recording for a few years, but Leviathan exhibits a degree of maturity and thoughtfulness that makes it a perfect jumping off point to explore his discography. Consisting of 12 short tracks – each between 2 and 5 minutes – the album is a mixture of deep drones, sophisticated overlapping melodies, and airy textures.
The album exhibits a strange brightness that counters what might otherwise be viewed as a dark ambient release. Arpeggiated chords, echoing notes, sequenced patterns, and soft vocalizations provide a drifting counterbalance to the shadows. As a result, NoRinTon manages to strike a balance between uplifting and melancholy.
Like many albums on the Cryo Chamber label,…
With Polygon Reflections, Galya Bisengalieva has become the latest artist to release an entirely remixed and reimagined version of her latest album – virtually a new work – joining Glacier, The Cure and Hatis Noit, the later who also appears on this set. This is not only a great way to draw welcome attention to the original compositions, but to amplify subtle nuances and add fresh perspectives.
But first, it’s important to remind listeners of the album’s original intent: to focus our attention to the ravaging of sacred Kazakh land by the Russians, who irradiated the steppe known as the Polygon with 456 nuclear tests, destroying the local ecosystem, taking what they claimed was “uninhabited” and turning it into the uninhabitable.
The original “Alash-Kala,” the opening track…
In a Digital Audio Workstation world producers have more tools at their disposal than ever before, with a seemingly endless supply of plug-ins to help create anything the mind imagines. It can lead to analysis paralysis, as anyone who’s tested out a series of possible kickdrums can attest, but electronic music still sounds most vital when the rhythms are fiery and the arrangement pops.
Guedra Guedra’s second album is an exhilarating fusion of African sounds with intricate beats, drawing inspiration from techno, breakbeat and old-school electro.
The percussion of ‘Calling Out’ is initially stark and bass-heavy, as various ticking, knocking sounds interact with pattering hi-hats and a drum-machine cowbell. When the track’s vocal…
It’s only been a year since guitarist Oren Ambarchi, bassist Johan Berthling, and percussionist Andreas Werliin released Ghosted II, their second album as a trio. If the making of that extraordinary record was as intense as the experience of listening to it, then you could have forgiven them for taking a longer break. But, to everyone’s benefit, they’re right back in the saddle with the third installment of Ghosted, and it’s a pleasure to report that it’s every bit as impressive as the other two.
There has, inevitably, been some evolution. Now more than ever they feel less like three distinct musicians and more like that nebulous and magical entity we call a band. The playing is looser and more live (and more alive) than ever before, which might be a result of more time…
Newly remastered and reissued as part of Lo Recordings’ campaign to excavate all Susumu Yokota‘s Skintone releases, Image 1983-1998 might be the most revelatory of the lot.
It’s not the Japanese artist’s most enjoyable record by any means, but it contextualizes everything he’d go on to create in the years that followed, from Magic Thread to Sakura. The earliest material dates from 1983 and 1984, and it’s rudimentary stuff, jammed on guitar and organ. And here’s where it gets interesting – over a decade later, between 1997 and 1998, Yokota recorded a response to those early miniatures, and that’s where we get to hear exactly how his process evolved. In the interim of course, he came in contact with acid house, which led him towards electronic…
…expanded release includes two extra tracks (‘Line Open’ and ‘Landscape’) released on a CD single promoting the soundtrack more than 30 years ago, but were not included on the original soundtrack album.
1492: Conquest of Paradise was the Greek musician’s second time scoring music for a Ridley Scott film, the pair having worked so effectively on 1982’s Blade Runner. The film celebrated the 500th anniversary commemoration of Columbus’ voyage to the New World.
The album, which won Vangelis an Echo Award for International Artist of the Year and an RTL Golden Lion Award for the Best Title Theme for a TV Film or Series in 1996, was nominated for Best Original Score – Motion Picture at the 50th…
…Bad Debts are another new roots-oriented Ozzie band, and here they offer up their debut LP Under Kalimna Skies for us to contemplate.
Bad Debts hail from Castlemaine, Victoria, about 2 hours from the cultural hotbed of Melbourne. Apparently, this medium-sized regional semi-rural outpost has a rep’ as an ‘artsy town’ and a renowned local music scene from which Bad Debts have emerged, fully fledged and raring to go. Local music scenes are unquestionably a good thing, either remaining defiantly ‘local’ or, as they very occasionally do, attracting attention from further afield and growing to much greater prominence. They offer up loyal audiences that enable artists to develop at their own pace, give artists the chance to collaborate with each other until,…
A Mostly Quiet Life is something of a hybrid album. Most of the songs were written between 2010 and 2012 when Beck lived in Portland. During a break in touring, he mentioned to his friends and bandmates Ryan Spellman (drums), Jesse Bates (bass) and Thor Jensen (guitar) that he had a group of songs he wanted to record and quickly laid down the basic tracks as demos in a single afternoon in Jon Burbank’s basement.
When Beck was stuck at home during COVID, he lost two heroes in 2020: John Prine and Jerry Jeff Walker. As a tribute to them, he recorded some lesser-known songs of theirs: ‘Blue Umbrella’ and ‘Every Drop of Water’, doing all the parts in his home studio in Brooklyn.
During the process, he stumbled upon…
“And no, we don’t need help carrying our guitars / We’ve been carrying our burdens for years,” opens world-weary Bonnie & the Mere Mortals lead vocalist Bonnie Ramone on the song ‘Bechdel Test’, an immediate standout from the band’s second full-length album Take Me to the Moon. For the uninitiated, the Bechdel test is a way to measure the representation of women in fictional media, and this is done by three main criteria: firstly, the piece of media must have at least two women in it. Secondly, those women have to talk to one another. Thirdly and finally, the women must be discussing something other than a man. While this seems simple enough, it’s shocking how many pieces of even revered popular culture do not pass, although ‘Bechdel Test’, somewhat…
Nashville-based Piper & The Hard Times burst onto the blues and soul scene like a lightning bolt. After winning the IBC in January 2024, they released their debut, Revelation, which made a meteoric rise to the top of the blues charts. That album later won at IBC for “2025 IBC Best Independent Produced Album,” and later garnered a Blues Music Award for “Best Emerging Artist.”
Suffice it to say that expectations are high for their follow-up, Good Company. Few bands have enjoyed such a 15-month run but what looked to be a promising tour schedule, came to a halt this past June when frontman Al “Piper” Green was diagnosed with cancer. The blues community is rallying around Green by throwing benefit concerts and setting up a GoFundMe account.
The jury is still out, 20 years after Chuck Berry’s pianist Johnnie Johnson’s passing, concerning what he contributed to the writing of some of the rock and roller’s biggest hits. It has never been in question how immensely gifted Johnson was, nor the influence of his playing on Berry’s early work.
That talent is clear on I’m Just Johnnie, an album recorded sporadically towards the end of his career (he passed in 2005) and finally released on August 29. The double-package features some of Johnson’s final music on the first platter and interviews with those who knew him on the second. Why this took twenty years to appear is unclear, but the results are inspirational.
Producer and Johnson friend Gene Ackmann coordinated the sessions, employing…
Haruomi Hosono was obsessed with American music. Growing up in postwar Japan, he ignored domestic artists and listened to foreign sounds broadcast by the Far East Network, radio stations operated by the U.S. military. One of his childhood favorites can be considered the most consequential track of his early solo career: Martin Denny’s “Quiet Village.” The song, which nabbed the fourth spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1959, brought exotica to the masses, ushering in new possibilities for sonic fantasy. “My music has always been fiction,” Denny said in 1998. “Everything comes from my imagination… it wasn’t about authenticity.” In the mid-’70s, Hosono was listening to Caribbean music but didn’t think he had the chops to make the real stuff. Exotica provided a way in…
Miguel Zenón has precious little left to prove. At 48, the alto saxophonist and composer has already run the gamut of prestigious grants — MacArthur “genius,” Guggenheim fellowship, Doris Duke Artist, among many others. He’s amassed a shelf full of academic laurels and critics’ awards, and earned the abiding love and gratitude of his fellow Puerto Ricans for exposing the world to their folkloric music through the prism of jazz. Last year, he even added a Grammy to the list.
But the Miguel Zenón Quartet remains criminally underrated, too often in the leader’s long shadow even as they give collective voice to his vivid conceptual genius — be it updating the song forms of jibara and plena, reworking the Great Puerto Rican Songbook, imagining…
Following the quintet album Polarity, a contemporary masterpiece released in 2023, Coordinates marks another remarkable outing from trumpeter and composer Dan Rosenboom whose commitment to breaking boundaries in jazz expands here through a powerful and cohesive aggregation of 28 players drawn from the LA jazz scene and Hollywood film recording studios. Taking four years to write and produce, the album — shaped by numerology — ventures across multiple genres and meter signatures.
Over the course of “Coordinate 1: Many Worlds, Many Dances”, the ensemble dives into funk territory, allowing an enthralling groove to unfold orgamnically. Horn consonance gives way to a trumpet solo that feels both…