Whatever you think of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, you have to admire Michael Peter Balzary’s efforts to establish an aesthetic hinterland beyond the unit-shifting funk-rock of his regular band. Even at the height of the Chilis’ socks-on-cocks tomfoolery, Flea was telling anyone who’d listen that Gang Of Four were the greatest band who ever lived, acting in indie movies like My Own Private Idaho, investigating Transcendental Meditation and playing lounge jazz with Mike Watt. Since the turn of the millennium, he’s ramped up his extra-curricular activities, forming supergroups with Damon Albarn and Thom Yorke, and guesting with the likes of Patti Smith, Tom Waits and Morrissey.
He’s also gravitated back towards his first instrument – trumpet – and his first musical…
Tag Archive: Nonesuch
Hurray for the Riff Raff release Live Forever, a new live record on the exact two-year anniversary of The Past Is Still Alive-named one of the Best Albums of the 2020s So Far by Pitchfork, and one of the Best Albums of 2024 by the New York Times, Atlantic, Associated Press, NPR Music, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Out, Mojo, Uncut, and a multitude of others.
Live Forever was captured over the course of two sold-out summer nights at the Old Town School of Folk Music in bandleader Alynda Segarra’s new home of Chicago. Spanning 14 songs, Live Forever presents The Past Is Still Alive in its entirety, as well as a selection of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s show-stopping, set-defining staples: decrying ICE on the poetic “Precious Cargo”…
As indicated by the title, Forward Into Light is a hopeful album, suggesting that history is tilting toward something brighter and more positive. This attitude may be in short supply these days, but its rarity makes it all the more essential. The bookends are carefully chosen, as the album begins with a piece inspired by the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S., which eventually succeeded, and ends with a “meditation on resilience” that might be applied to multiple nations and situations, from Ukraine to Gaza and points afar and in-between. These pieces, titled “Forward Into Light” and “Something for the Dark,” work in tandem to identify the spiritual struggle and speculate on its eventual outcome. The image of Synder like a supplicant bathed in a beam of light…
There’s a sincerely grounded quality to A Djinn and a Hunter Went Walking. The new album from balafonist Neba Solo and donsongoni (hunter’s harp) player Benego Diakité – their first as a duo – shines a light on two Malian musicians who are masters of their repertoires. Each performer hails from a different cultural background, with Solo trained in Senufo traditions and Diakité rooted in the Wassoulou region, and they come together here with an understated ease. It makes for a soothing work from start to finish, but with enough moving parts to reasonably grab and hold the attention of a range of audiences.
This is no ordinary celebration of genius. There is no bombast in this combination, at least not in the fully produced pieces. Solo’s and Diakité’s…
…includes the original album and nine bonus tracks: seven previously unreleased tracks plus a 2025 remaster of “City of Refuge” and a 2025 mix of “Memphis Shakedown.”
The problem with flirting with old music styles in the digital speedway of the 21st century is the curse of revivalism, a tendency to reduce contemporary stresses and pressures to a perceived better time in the safe and distant past when things were simpler, clearer, and, well, more pure. But of course it’s always now — it’s never then or when — and musical revivalism can suffer from a kind of strictly enforced and ultimately empty artifice. A facsimile is still a facsimile — it can never, by definition, be the thing itself.
This is the dilemma for the Carolina Chocolate…
Taking a classical work and playing it on different instrument is not exactly new, but it can still be quite thrilling. Musician Chris Thile’s Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 2 doesn’t use piano or organ or guitar, but it shows the mighty mandolin. A rather plucky instrument that already thrums with a Baroque or Renaissance sound, it seems a good choice. Harp would have sounded overly dreamy and trumpet would have been totally out of the running (though maybe saxophone in the right hands). The release included Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004; Sonata No. 3 in C major, BWV 1005; and Partita No. 3 in E major, BWV 1006, piece originally written for violin solo. And unlike his first volume of Bach in 2013, Thile has decided to take some liberties with the scores.
Birthed via a Black Country communion which saw Robert Plant and his new, largely unknown bandmates enjoy a lengthy courtship off-radar, Saving Grace feels guileless, almost serendipitous.
What might happen, Plant mused, if he shipped what he’d learned from T Bone Burnett, Alison Krauss et al home and duetted on choice blues, alt-country and folk covers with Brum-born former music teacher, Suzi Dian? Across 10 intimate songs deftly ornamented by guitarists Matt Worley and Tony Kelsey and cellist Barney Morse-Brown, magic happens.
As much avuncular vibe-master as Golden God, Plant cedes some lead vocal terrain to Dian (‘Too Far from You’) and Worley (Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Soul of a Man’) while bringing…
With Ride Into the Sun, pianist/composer Brad Mehldau returns to themes he introduced in the wake of his rumination on the COVID phenomenon, Suite: April 2020. That very same year’s revisitation of influence from the Beatles, Your Mother Should Know, presaged a rediscovery of his roots in progressive rock titled Jacob’s Ladder.
The latter two works set the stage for this recognition of Brad’s rapport-by-proxy with the late Elliott Smith. However, it’s not really necessary to be familiar with the source works to come away impressed by the ingenuity on display here: that surplus of inspiration lends itself to enough solo piano from Mehldau to anchor the narrative and remind us why he is so worth listening to in the first place.
Molly Tuttle, following back-to-back Grammy-winning albums with her band Golden Highway, along with a Best New Artist nomination, releases her new solo album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine, on Nonesuch Records.
Recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce (Orville Peck, Miranda Lambert, Lainey Wilson), the fifth full album from the singer, songwriter, and virtuoso guitarist marks a sonic departure from her recent work and features twelve new songs—eleven originals and one cover, of Icona Pop and Charli xcx’s “I Love It.” The album’s first single, “That’s Gonna Leave a Mark,” which she co-wrote with Kevin Griffin (Better Than Ezra). After a summer of festival sets and headline shows, Tuttle and her new live band lead The Highway Knows tour…
Three months ago, Nonesuch brought out an updated version of its superbly comprehensive survey of Steve Reich’s collected works. The 27 discs included the first recordings of Reich’s most recent scores, Traveler’s Prayer and Jacob’s Ladder, and now, for those who already owned the set from its previous incarnation, it has released those two works together on their own. Both pieces were composed during the Covid lockdown, and are scored for four singers and an instrumental ensemble; in both cases, too, they have Hebrew texts taken from the Old Testament.
In almost every other respect, though, the two pieces are very different. Traveler’s Prayer, first performed in 2021, is meditative and static, floating, almost ritualised.
However edgy and angular Mary Halvorson’s music gets, powerful melodies and inviting harmonies always drift below even the stormiest surface, giving the much-lauded New York composer and guitarist an appeal way beyond the avant garde. About Ghosts features an expanded version of her Amaryllis ensemble, which made one of 2024’s standout jazz albums, Cloudward. The lineup retains Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), Jacob Garchik (trombone), Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), Nick Dunston (bass) and Tomas Fujiwara (drums), augmented by Blue Note Records’ fiery, gospelly alto-sax star Immanuel Wilkins and the rugged, Wayne Shorter-like tenorist Brian Settles.
These two players give this release a crucially different feel, lending richer tonalities…
Nonesuch Records releases Steve Reich Collected Works, a twenty-seven-disc box set featuring music recorded during composer Steve Reich’s forty years on the label, on March 14, 2025, available to pre-order here.
The collection represents six decades of Reich’s compositions, ranging from It’s Gonna Rain (1965) to first recordings of his two latest works: Jacob’s Ladder (2023) and Traveler’s Prayer (2020). Two extensive booklets contain new essays by longtime Nonesuch President Robert Hurwitz, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, Steve Reich and Musicians percussionist Russell Hartenberger, producer Judith Sherman, and composer Nico Muhly, as well as a comprehensive listener’s guide by pianist and composer Timo Andres.
The debut album from cinematic electro-pop duo Ringdown, featuring Danni Lee Parpan and Pulitzer and Grammy winner Caroline Shaw, Lady on the Bike. The album celebrates the feeling of possibility in myriad forms: the possibility of love; the possibility of creating connection and community in a world trying to pull those things apart; the possibility of making music in new ways. This feeling of possibility glimmers like a disco ball throughout the album, radiating with a sense of movement, transformation, and wonder. “Ecstatically blissful,” says Night After Night’s Steve Smith. “There haven’t been too many duos like this one,” says Oregon ArtsWatch’s Matthew Neil Andrews. “If Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush had made a whole album of songs…