Three Really Good Jazz Albums
I wanted to cover all of these for Stereogum, but couldn't
This month, my Stereogum jazz column will be taken up by my list of the Best Jazz Albums of 2022. Consequently, there are several records I will not be able to write up there which are nonetheless very much worth your attention. So I’m gonna talk about them here.
Before that, a couple of links:
• Last week on Shfl, I wrote about albums by Loop, Main, Lamb, Pole, Thomas Köner and Kevin Richard Martin. Link.
• As I mentioned in a special Friday email, I interviewed critic and author Walter Chaw about his new book A Walter Hill Film. You should listen to the interview, then buy the book, and then watch every Hill movie you can track down. His first five (Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, The Long Riders and Southern Comfort) are one of the all-time runs, and he’s got plenty of other classics after that, including 48 Hrs. and my personal favorite, Extreme Prejudice (finally available on Blu-Ray in the US! You don’t wanna know how much I paid for my Japanese copy).
• I’ve posted an excerpt from Chapter Three of my in-progress book on Cecil Taylor over at Patreon. The chapter, which in full form is 8000 words long, deals with his work from 1956-59, so, the albums Jazz Advance, At Newport, Love for Sale, Looking Ahead!, and Hard Driving Jazz (later reissued as a John Coltrane album called Coltrane Time). Drop a nickel in the bucket and read.
• Aaron Parks, a pianist I like (and whose music I like, too), has written about bipolar disorder and how/why it caused him to abruptly cancel his European tour. He’s a good dude and I’m glad he’s feeling better. Go listen to some of his records; they’re great.
And now, three really good jazz albums!
Patricia Brennan, More Touch
When I listened to this album for the first time something popped in my brain. What the fuck is going on?, I asked myself. What is making that noise? You see, the instrumentation — composer Brennan on vibes, Kim Cass on bass, Marcus Gilmore on drums, and Mauricio Herrera on percussion — did not correspond to what I was hearing. I was sure there was an extra instrument in there; specifically, I thought I was hearing Mary Halvorson’s guitar. But in fact, Brennan has hooked her vibraphone up to electronics in a way that it squiggles and slides much the same way Halvorson’s trademark delay pedal makes her notes sound like the tape has slipped free of the playback head and is spooling out onto the floor. There are even times when she sounds like an ultra-abstract “illbient” DJ scratching up kosmische music albums amid a haze of reverb and static. (Seriously; there are tracks here — “The Woman Who Weeps,” “El Nahualli (The Shadow Soul)” — that remind me of DJ Spooky’s Necropolis: The Dialogic Project.) It’s not just her, either; Gilmore’s drums sound processed, albeit subtly, and Cass’s bass is huge and reverberant. The album as a whole is like a dark and shimmering cloud. Stick your head in.
Soweto Kinch, White Juju
Saxophonist Soweto Kinch is a genuinely fascinating and incisive artist who makes music that blends jazz, classical music, hip-hop and whatever else is required in order to foreground his sharp social critique of British society. His previous album, The Black Peril, started out as a stage show, initially performed in London in 2019. It was a metaphorical exploration of the years 1919-21, when the Spanish flu hit and anti-Black race riots broke out in the US, UK, and even in Jamaica. Kinch was interested in exploring the idea of how Black men were scapegoated then, and drawing the comparison into the present day. His new album, White Juju, is a sort of companion piece; it’s a live recording of a performance with the London Symphony Orchestra, and the piece itself is deeply engaged with the hypocrisy and so-pervasive-you-can’t-even-see-it-anymore imperialism of British society, manifested in everything from museums and the cult of the royal family to the rhetoric surrounding the Covid-19 lockdown. Samples from political speeches are blended with orchestral and martial music, jazz and hip-hop, including some incisive rhymes, and the whole thing is a really stunning work of theatrical agitprop.
RA Washington/Jah Nada, In Search Of Our Father’s Gardens
This is one of two really fascinating records released this year that seem to be exploring a kind of psychedelic spiritual jazz methodology. The first is I AM’s Beyond, a sax-drums duo disc featuring Isaiah Collier on horns and Michael Shekwoaga Ode behind the kit, with producer Sonny Daze adding hazy reverb and even dubby echo at times. This one, a collaboration between RA Washington of Mourning [A] BLKstar and Jah Nada of Obnox and Bloody Show, with a large supporting cast (guitar, bass, synths and keyboards, horns, and backing vocals), is even trippier and more soul-probing—there’s a lot of singing about Jesus, which didn’t bother me but I’m letting you know. Make your own decision. It reminds me of work by Damon Locks’ Black Monument Ensemble and/or Angel Bat Dawid, but I also hear echoes of Burnt Sugar (RIP Greg Tate, gone one year today; go read some of his work in tribute). They perform a fascinating trick in that Sides B (“Planting Seeds,” “When the Angels Sing”) and C (“My Father, the Butcher,” “Wrath of Dawn”) are mixed together on the digital version as a new piece labeled “Side E” which is even more stoned and beguiling than the two sides played separately. This is a real lay-back-and-let-it-wash-over-you kind of album.
That’s it for now. I’ll be back next week with a list of the 50 best albums from July-December (a sequel to my half-year roundup), and then I’m gone until 2023. Do me a favor, wouldja? Buy some music. The artists deserve your attention, and the revenue split is very fair. The complete bundle (six CDs and a digital-only compilation for $60 plus shipping) in particular is a fuckin’ bargain.