019: Future jazz, synth dreams, textural nostalgia, contemporary classical, etc.

New music from Dave Harrington, Max Jaffe, Patrick Shiroishi; Josh Johnson; Brian Harnetty; Jowee BasH! Omicil; Nick Schofield; and Paige Alice Naylor.

I’ll keep saying it until it’s true but I have plans to make this newsletter more of a regular occurrence this year. It’s not quite happening yet but it’s on the horizon. To all my new subscribers, hello! I hope you find something you like here. To all the subscribers I’ve already gathered, hello! Bless your hearts for being here. Bless all your hearts for being here. Let’s get into some music. 

✨Coming Soon✨

Dave Harrington, Max Jaffe, Patrick Shiroishi, Speak, Moment (AKP Recordings, March 8) • Listen & pre-order!

Lightly psychedelic, ruminative jazz that’s not afraid to get a little noisy and dirty. Strongly recommended if you dig Last Exit and Sonny Sharrock’s Ask the Ages, Jeff Parker ETA IVtet, Body/Head, jazz that embraces electronics, and yearning saxophone. (I borrowed ‘yearning’ from the album bio because it is simply the most accurate word choice.) This album is a textural dream, hypnotic and roaming in equal measure. I’m not familiar with either Dave Harrington (on guitar and electronics here) or Max Jaffe (drums, effects, and “sensory percussion,” which you gotta salute) but I’ve been following saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi for a bit (favorites include Descension and Hidemi) and I’m always excited when I see his name pop up. His credits on this one also include tambourine and bells, the latter of which is one of my faves: a sax player on the bells. See Interstellar Space! “Dance of the White Shadow and Golden Kite” has some of my favorite saxophone parts on the album and on top of that, the song as a whole reminds me of Can! 

Josh Johnson, Unusual Object (Northern Spy, April 7) • Listen & pre-order! 

I was all in on this album’s singular blend of processed saxophone and samples within 30 seconds of the first song, textured experimental future-jazz that sounds a bit like it might exist in a world of Philip K. Dick’s making. Josh Johnson is a saxophonist and composer who you should know from Jeff Parker’s records, including ETA IVtet’s Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy (one of my fave jazz albums of 2022) and Suite for Max Brown. The album bio draws comparisons to “Jon Hassell’s dreamworld tonalities” and that’s exactly right.

✨Out Now ✨

Brian Harnetty, The Workbench (Winesap Records) • Listen!

If you’re anything like me, prepare to cry with this one. Brian Harnetty is a composer and sound archivist and this album is described as a sonic portrait of his late father, Paul. The music is primarily piano, fleshed out with bass clarinet, cello, and violin, intercut with voicemails from Paul and the mechanical sounds that occurred at the titular workbench while he repaired things like watches and radios. The result is as haunting and touching as you might imagine. Jason Woodbury describes it as such for Aquarium Drunkard: “Harnetty creates space for a piece that is at once melancholy, uplifting, winsome, and profound.” Reminds me of the nostalgia-soaked vibes of Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods! 

Jowee BasH! Omicil, Spiritual Healing: Bwa Kayiman Freedom Suite (BASH! Village Records/Modular) • Listen!

Remarkable, powerful jazz from Haitian-Canadian musician Jowee BasH! Omicil, who plays woodwinds, clarinets, piccolo flute, and cornet. The music is a brilliant blend of free jazz and spiritual jazz, recorded in one uninterrupted take and divided into 21 sections. Each represents a step in the Bwa Kayiman ritual ceremony, an event which sparked the first major slave insurrection of the Haitian Revolution. This is a really fantastic album that deserves much more attention! The penultimate track (“ReDevanCe”)  might be my favorite but the album as a whole is an incredibly cohesive work that demands and rewards full, close listening.

Nick Schofield, Ambient Ensemble (Backward Music) • Listen!

This is an album I’ve been returning to repeatedly since receiving it because it is absolutely perfect music to have on while you are reading. Meditative and soothing, it creates an incredibly comfortable sonic atmosphere without drawing too much attention to itself, while also being a supremely lovely close listen. Schofield is a pianist, synthesist, and composer of ambient music who stretches into contemporary classical here with an ensemble that includes bass (fretless and double), clarinet, and violin. There are some vocals too but it’s not singing so much as breathing or a sort of humming. It’s one of the prettiest albums I’ve heard in some time. 

Paige Alice Naylor, The Unearthing (Monastral) • Listen!

Paige Alice Naylor is a classically trained vocalist, multimedia artist, and electronic musician. On this album, her enigmatic vocals are paired with Laurie Spiegel-esque synth loops, grainy textures, prepared turntable, field recordings, and 16th century Italian Renaissance dance music. I’m going to borrow some album bio language here because it’s so well-put: “The album moves in and out of story with repetitive, sonic textures in between, layered slowly and delicately. These tracks act as time warps, pulling you into their currents much like how humans remember loss: vividly and at times, supernaturally slowly.” Loops of sound pile on top of each other, grooves that haunt you with their repetition, like a child’s wind-up toy that can’t stop playing its creepy little tune. It’s beautifully odd and impossibly dreamy and I absolutely love it! Music for the pixelated antique shop in your mind. 

✨Recent Reviews ✨

For the April issue of Uncut, I wrote about five of Wayne Kramer’s best sonic moments and discovered that his 2014 free jazz album Lexington is pretty fucking good (rest in peace, Brother Wayne); long-reviewed Charles Lloyd’s stunning new album The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow and somehow carved out 200-some words out of a delightful half-hour conversation we had; and short-reviewed Keeper of the Shepherd, Hannah Frances’ spellbinding new album of avant-folk with the orchestral scope of progressive rock. 

For the March issue of Uncut, I reviewed two new reissues of excellent Joe Henderson albums: 1966’s Mode for Joe and 1969’s Power to the People. He’s one of my favorite saxophonists and I think he’s an underrated leader. Both of these are a good place to start if you’re new to him, but I also must recommend The Elements, his album with Alice Coltrane, Charlie Haden, and Michael White. Pretty much everyone who hears this album falls madly in love with it. Just one of those freak perfections.

Lastly, in the February issue I short-reviewed the languid romance of preeminent whistler Molly Lewis’ hypnotic On the Lips; Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu, and Marta Sofia Honer’s experimental electronic jazz collage collaboration The Closest Thing to Silence; and a reissue of Lee Morgan’s incredible 1966 adventurous hard bop record Search for the New Land.

Currently Reading: Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann, Exteriors by Annie Ernaux, and too many short story collections.

This is from Exteriors!