Links, Links, Links

A preview of things to come in 2025

Beginning in February 2025, there will be more exclusive content offered to paid subscribers of this newsletter. Specifically, every Friday, I will offer a post like this one, full of links to interesting things I’ve read in the past week or so. And three times during the year, when there are five Tuesdays in a given month, that fifth Tuesday will bring a paid-subscribers-only post. Oh, and every time Burning Ambulance Music releases an album in 2025 (we’ve already got two planned), paid subscribers will be entitled to a free download of said album. So please consider a paid subscription — it’s $5 a month, or $50 a year, and it will help keep this whole operation running.

For a while now, Burning Ambulance has partnered with Rihards Endriksons, journalist and artistic director of Latvia’s Skaņu Mežs festival, on the monthly Resonance.fm show Such Music, which is devoted to new works of free improvised music, either previously unheard or created specifically for the show. This month’s episode includes the premiere of “Split Tides”, a lengthy solo piece by saxophonist Tom Challenger, recorded exclusively for Such Music. The episode also features a piece from the new collaborative record by Marek Pospieszalski and Zoh Amba, as well as an exclusive early preview of Thomas Rohrer and Philip Somervell’s new album on Scatter. Listen now on Mixcloud.

Here are some links to things I have found interesting recently.

First, this incredible video of the Albert Ayler Quintet live in Munich in 1966. It’s only 11 minutes long, but this band — with Donald Ayler on trumpet, Michel Samson on violin, Bill Folwell on bass, and Beaver Harris on drums — is my favorite of Ayler’s groups. There’s a double CD of live recordings that’s my favorite Ayler record, period, so for my money this ultra-rare footage is an absolute treasure.

More video: 3/4 of Sonic Youth (Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, and Steve Shelley) reunited at The Stone last week for an instrumental improv performance, and it’s quite beautiful:

Good news: JazzTimes is back! The new editor, David R. Adler, is a good writer and a good dude. I look forward to seeing what he does with a title that had its well-deserved good reputation thoroughly sullied by a maniac.

Why are car headlights so hellishly bright? The Ringer investigated.

There’s a new book about Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who for 10 years in the late 1940s and early 1950s were the most popular comedy team in America but are almost completely forgotten today. Here’s a history lesson.

In his book Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, Edwin Frank offers the theory that unlike 19th century authors, their successors “exist in a world where the dynamic balance between self and society that the nineteenth-century novel sought to maintain can no longer be maintained, even as a fiction.” This review sold me the book, which I am currently reading.

Jennifer Higgie has written a book called The Other Side: A Story of Women in Art and the Spirit World. According to Jessa Crispin, it’s very bad. I’m unlikely to read the book (I saw the Hilma af Klint exhibit she talks about, and had my own thoughts) and/but even if you won’t be reading it either, the essay is worth your time.

Finally, this essay by an American living in Sweden (a country I have visited, and would definitely consider moving to) is perceptive about both places:

Wine-Dark America

So…you get the idea. Become a paid subscriber, and you’ll get stuff like this every week, plus as a welcome gift, I’ll give you a free download of the Burning Ambulance Music release of your choice!

Thanks, and I’ll see you next week, when we’ll be celebrating the 10th anniversary of D’Angelo’s Black Messiah.