Guitarist and composer Mike Johnson has co-led or led Denver-based avant-rock ensemble Thinking Plague since 1982. The band’s music has been roughly within the aesthetic orbit of Henry Cow and Art Bears, but with a distinct compositional bent. In that sense, it is arguably a more “American” sound based on tightly notated angularity, abrupt pivots, and timbral choices that are influenced as much by 20th-century classical as rock.
This is Johnson’s first solo album that he seeks to distinguish from his work with Thinking Plague. While a number of familiar collaborators from that outfit contribute on The Gardens of Loss (e.g., Elaine diFalco, Dave Willey, Bill Pohl, and Mark Harris), so does an 11-piece orchestral section of strings, reeds, and brass.
Tag Archive: Cuneiform
London’s Led Bib were a quintet for 22 years. During that time, they established a well-founded reputation as architects of the rather short-lived anarchic jazz movement. Keyboardist Toby McLaren was a founding member and a co-architect of the band’s sound. He left after 2017’s Umbrella Weather and was temporarily replaced by Elliott Galvin on 2019’s It’s Morning. Following a tour, drummer Mark Holub, bassist Liran Donin, and saxophonists Pete Grogan and Chris Williams, decided to tour as a four-piece. It proved difficult. Led Bib returned to Cuneiform for Hotel Pupik. It was written for quartet and plays to the group’s strengths as composers (tunes were written by three members) improvisers, arrangers, and gifted, instinctive instrumentalists.
In 2011, the venerable Cuneiform label released Flashpoint: NDR Jazz Workshop April ’69, an audio and video document of John Surman‘s live ten-piece jazz orchestra delivering five hard original tracks that reveal his canny depth and diversity as a young composer, arranger, and bandleader. The saxophonist was busy throughout 1969: He’d just completed recording his second album, How Many Clouds Can You See (released in 1970) and played on 11 additional albums in 1969, including John McLaughlin’s Extrapolation.
2025’s Flashpoints and Undercurrents amounts to a historic document. It contains the five selections from the 2011 release — here, all are extended takes — and replaces the video with a second audio disc from the same sessions that…
Heat On is Lily Finnegan’s debut as a bandleader and composer. In fact, while this CD is credited to a band called Heat On, the quartet played several gigs under the name Lilly Finnegan Quartet before it took on its current moniker.
Finnegan is an emerging presence on the Chicago scene. Since moving back here after school in 2022, she has drummed with every iteration of Ken Vandermark’s Edition band, and has participated in other combos with locals Katie Ernst and Sarah Clausen, among others. She’s also curated concerts for the Option Series, a schedule of salon-style concerts hosted by Experimental Sound Studio, is a member of the musician’s collective, Catalytic Sound.
If that combination of playing and organizing…
Since its beginnings, Cheer-Accident has been one of the primary American exponents of jarring and difficult rock music. But what musicians create and what they love can be two very different things, and as it turns out, many of the members of the band have had a great fondness for some of the music often labeled as Easy Listening.
…essay from the band’s linchpin Thymme Jones explains that it had been the band’s ambition for some twenty-five years to make a Burt Bacharach-styled ‘easy listening’ record. Jones traced his own fondness for the music back to his parents’ Herb Alpert records, revealing what got the composer, singer and multi-instrumentalist Jones to become a trumpet player himself.
Vacate isn’t terribly long: thirty-five minutes of…