Some Things To Think About
And no attempt to sell you anything!
So… I’ve decided to start taking a different approach to Friday newsletters, which for some time have consisted of an opening section describing a record (or multiple records) which are for sale via either Burning Ambulance Music or the Leo Records Bandcamp page, and then a bunch of interesting articles on a range of subjects, tucked behind a paywall for paying subscribers.
But I can see the stats, and I’m realizing two things: 1) Not that many people are buying the records I’m promoting in that initial section, and 2) even fewer people are converting from free to paid subscriptions.
So what I’m gonna do instead is continue to provide links to interesting articles on a range of subjects each Friday, but now some will be available to everyone, and others will be tucked behind the paywall. And I’m going to simply remind you of the existence of Burning Ambulance Music and the Leo Records Bandcamp page (which now has nearly 300 titles available), only going into full promo mode when there’s something new to promote (basically, the first Friday of each month). If you want to buy some music, fantastic. Click those links.
In the meantime, here are two interesting articles I read this week, a radio show to listen to, and a great video conversation, that I think might also be of interest to all of you.
The online radio show Such Music, hosted by journalist and artistic director of Latvia’s Skaņu Mežs festival Rihards Endriksons, is devoted to new works of free improvised music, either previously unheard or created specifically for the show. The show is produced in collaboration with Burning Ambulance, and the final episode of 2025 rounds up some recent releases including the latest BA CDs from Spanish guitarist Diego Caicedo and the duo of Ivo Perelman & Nate Wooley; Satoko Fujii’s new album with an avant-jazz rock quartet on her own Libra label; Taku Sugimoto & Stefan Thut’s riverside-recorded duo on Ftarri; Kelsey Mines & Vinny Golia’s human voice-colored new album on Relative Pitch; and another excellent album by The Last Dream of The Morning (the trio of John Butcher, John Edwards, and Mark Sanders) on Fundacja Sluchaj. Listen on Mixcloud.
I am not a Smashing Pumpkins fan at all. And when I’ve read interviews with Billy Corgan, he’s often come off as kind of a prick. But this conversation between him and Vernon Reid (of Living Colour, Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society, and many other projects, and someone I’ve interviewed myself twice) is utterly fascinating. Two very high-level musicians communicating with real openness, building bridges and walking across them together.
Matt Merewitz, noted jazz publicist and artist manager, has some thoughts on the “trade imbalance” between American and European jazz. As someone who only put one non-US artist on his Top Ten for 2025 (coming soon to Stereogum), I am apparently part of the problem. “The dependency that once defined the relationship between American and European jazz cultures is quietly fading, and a new dynamic is taking hold: one where Europe is asserting its independence — creatively, institutionally, and economically,” Merewitz writes. “It’s not hard to understand why. Europeans are increasingly aware that, historically, American musicians and their advocates have often treated European contributions to the music as secondary — something derivative rather than original or at the very least, less than…I think it’s fair to say there’s been an unspoken core belief for decades among both Americans and many foreigners, that jazz music made by Americans is irrefutably ‘the real thing,’ and everything else is a respectful approximation at best. A bastardization at worst.” But in the Europe of 2025, “European festivals and many clubs are programming predominantly European or non-American artists, with lineups filled with names that even deeply connected Americans might not recognize.” And why shouldn’t they? America is in the process of closing its borders and withdrawing from the world. Why shouldn’t the world just go on without us, in the arts as in everything else?
Saxophonist and thinker-about-music Chris Pitsiokos, whose recent essay about stagnation in “creative music” was also worth reading, has turned his attention to musical complexity, particularly as manifested in contemporary jazz from Brooklyn. “The use of randomness or the use of irrational numbers to generate rhythms is a reproducible mathematical approach. But deep rhythmic study and deep rhythmic discovery doesn’t have to involve that, either. Personally, practicing and trying to internalize uncountable rhythms (irrational rhythms are by definition uncountable) was interesting because I knew, scientifically, I was playing something that could not be internalized or conceptualized in the normal way we conceptualize rhythms. It also was different from understanding a rhythm as simply being a pushed or pulled countable rhythm. The only way to play them is by really feeling it in your body and remembering the sound itself. In this way you have to get into the sound and deep-time without relying on counting. However, one can also achieve something similar by practicing how Billie Holiday subtly plays behind or ahead of the beat, how blues musicians push and pull time, how baroque interpreters stretch certain notes, or how folk musicians from around the world create complex uncountable, or partially uncountable rhythmic patterns. One would also be hard-pressed to fit some Ornette Coleman Prime Time recordings all on the grid, and even if you could, I daresay you would be missing the point of the music.”
OK, free subscribers — that’s the end of today’s newsletter. Paying subscribers will find three more articles of interest dealing with the writing of David Foster Wallace, the worst pop music of 2025, and a new book purporting to tell the history of capitalism. Please consider a paid subscription.
