Welcome music lovers once again!
Below is the next installment of my ongoing series highlighting new and upcoming albums that I think are worth seeking out (my previous new release round-ups can be found here, here and here). Eight records are featured this time around. Most of them are jazz but not all and except for the first recording spotlighted, all are fairly outside of mainstream attention.
I’d love to know what new things you’ve been listening to recently that have got you excited. Let me know by dropping a comment.
It was my pleasure to collaborate on a piece that
of has written about Marianne Faithfull who passed away on January 30. I’ve always found her sixties recordings utterly beguiling and was pleased to write briefly about one of my favourite recordings by her. Check it out!Until next time, may good listening be with you all!
Late last year, as there usually is, there was the rush of essays and articles collecting the best recordings of the soon-to-be-past year. I enjoyed reading many of them, not only because they confirmed that there is a lot of good new music being released but that for many of the lists, there wasn’t a whole lot of duplication. There was also the thrill of seeing a recording listed that I had heard and enjoyed. That’s not really all that remarkable, I grant you.
As a music writer and critic, I should have a reasonable pulse on what is new and, more pointedly, what is good, but before 2024, I had not really done so. And even then, I only started doing so in March and didn’t really keep good track of all the new stuff I had listened to beyond what I needed to do in order to write a few round-ups of new and upcoming records that I thought were worth checking out.
This year, I’m being more diligent. I’m writing down everything new I have listened to in the hopes of joining the fray come December with my own best-of list. So far, I’ve bent my ear for 40 albums. Of them, eight have got me really excited.
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I’ve been a Brad Mehldau fan for over 20 years and any time there’s news of him appearing on a small-group date, it’s an event. Last September’s release of Better Angels by guitarist Peter Bernstein with Mehldau, bassist Vincente Archer and drummer Al Foster lived up to its promise as a thoroughly New York affair. Two months later came Solid Jackson (Criss Cross Jazz) by M.T.B., a supergroup led by Mehldau, tenor saxophonist Mark Turner and Bernstein. Bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Bill Stewart round out the quintet. The recording is a reunion of sorts with all save for Stewart teaming up way back in 1994 for Consenting Adults.
If that album is laced with the energy of the musicians as young lions, Solid Jackson is the sound of them as some of jazz’s most accomplished veterans. The album is relaxed—the kind of all-star, small-group jazz recording that used be a dime a dozen but is less prevalent today. It’s a joy to hear Mehldau, Turner and Bernstein together. They are all lyrical players—Bernstein is the earthiest, Turner the most ethereal and Mehldau somewhere in between.
Five of the eight songs on the album are originals with Mehldau’s ballad ‘Maury’s Grey Wig’ particularly pretty. None of the three covers are obvious choices. It took me more than a moment to realize that ‘Angola’ was a Wayne Shorter tune and I’ll need to flip through my Hank Mobley collection to remember exactly what album ‘Soft Impressions’ is on as well as to figure where ‘Ode to Angela’ fits in Harold Land’s discography.
Solid Jackson is a recording that most connected jazz fans will have heard about. But what about the albums that are condemned to pass us by? Exits (Dekatria) by Hamilton, Ontario guitarist Strat Andriotis is surely one. It’ a trio recording with bassist Tom Altobelli and drummer Vincent Waters on five of eight tracks and bassist Joel Banks and drummer Alex Karcza on the other three. The album has a nervous energy and a spaciousness quite similar to Ornette Coleman’s classic Atlantic sessions, especially on the shifting meter of ‘Timer.’ Androitis is a rock player in addition to being a jazz guitarist and his lines unspool like a horn player such as on the mid-tempo ballad ‘While We Wait.’ He eschews flash and prioritizes originality. I’m sure glad Exits got on my radar just as I was glad to be contacted by Montreal guitar Ron Ledoux.
His sophomore effort, Views, Visions & Destinations (self-released) features his quartet with keyboardist Paul Schrofel, bassist Gilbert Joanis (he is also the band’s arranger) and drummer Rich Irwin. A preview track available on streaming services, ‘Drive It For Miles!,’ is a good representation of one side of the sound of Ledoux’s group: fusion with drive but not at a velocity that obliterates subtlety or space.
The other side is an exploration of the kind of bucolic soul of early Pat Metheny on ECM. Ledoux’s lines and chords are clean and fragrant. They make tracks like the opening ‘A Stone’s Throw Away,’ ‘Autumn Breathes Through the Park’ and the closing ‘Stillness of Summer’s Evening’ soothing salves that are sorely needed these days. I dig Ledoux’s brand of jazz.
Tenor saxophonist Jon Irabagon’s Server Farm (Irabbagast Records), coming out on February 21, is conversely a product of our, ahem, interesting times. Irabagon confronts the conundrum of artificial intelligence (AI) and constructs in five tracks an album-length narrative of the move from authenticity to artificiality.
Server Farm is sprawling and ambitious. Joining Irabagon is his working unit of keyboardist Matt Mitchell, bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Dan Weiss. Filling out the quartet are six other musicians, including guitarists Miles Okazaki and Wendy Eisenberg, both of whom released major albums, Miniature America and Viewfinder respectively, last year.
Irabagon wrote the intricate ensemble passages—the outrageous funk march on ‘Singularity’ is just one example of the recording’s often-exhilarating heights—as if he were an AI, looking for patterns in the playing of his colleagues on the album and synthesizing them in the album’s written material.
The thing that strikes me most about Server Farm, which is rooted firmly in the avant-garde, is its organic form, the feeling that the shifts in texture and tempo within the pieces seem to occur spontaneously. There is an excitement to knowing that where a composition begins is not where it will end.
That feeling is also present on Xhosa Cole’s On a Modern Genius (Vol. 1) (Stoney Lane Recordings). The modern genius in question here is Thelonious Monk. Does the world need another salute to Monk? You would think not but Cole, a celebrated young tenor player from across the pond in London, finds new angles in the pianist’s more-than-shopworn compositions. Recorded live in 2023 in Birmingham, England, with Steve Saunders on guitar, Josh Vadiveloo on bass and Nathan England Jones on drums, Cole interprets nine of Monk’s tunes in frequently surprising ways. There’s a clever shift in tempo throughout ‘Let’s Cool One.’ There’s also two medleys, one pairing ‘Misterioso’ with ‘Straight, No Chaser’ and the other moving from ‘Criss Cross’ to ‘’Round Midnight’ and then ‘Brilliant Corners.’ On both, Cole languidly shifts from one to the other.
A tap dancer, Liberty Styles, joins the group on four of the album’s seven tracks, a gambit that must have more interesting to see in person than on record. Coles concludes with a measured interpretation of Duke Ellington’s ‘Come Sunday’ with an appealing vocal by Heidi Vogel.
Another album, if more compact than Cole’s latest, is Breath of Fresh Air (ZSAN Records) by pianist Diane Roblin and her ensemble Life Force comprised of trumpeter and flugelhornist Kevin Turncotte, reedmen John Johnson (soprano and alto saxophone) and Jeff LaRochelle (tenor saxophone and bass clarinet), bassist George Koller and drummer Tim Shia. As alluded to above, this is a brisk album: six tracks and just under 35 minutes but far from insubstantial.
The jazz here bounces between hard bop, the early days of fusion and a floating, pastoral sound. There’s a nice flow to the melodies of Roblin’s compositions—check out the resolution to the lines in ‘Ladyfinger’ and ‘Now’ and the hovering undercurrent of ‘Drifting Into Dreamland,’ influenced in part by Terry Riley.
Breath of Fresh Air closes with Roblin solo on the appropriately titled ‘Cadenza,’ a benediction similar to the ‘Epilogue’ that closes both sides of Everybody Digs Bill Evans.
One of the happy by-products of consciously trying to soak up new music is being introduced to artists you would have never been exposed to otherwise. That’s certainly the case with Dorothea Paas, a Canadian singer-songwriter whose second album, Think of Mist (Telephone Explosion), came out in mid-November of last year.
Here, there is a sensibility rooted in the mysticism of Judee Sill and Linda Perhacs’ cult classic Parallelograms. By this, I mean that there is a hypnotic quality to Paas’ voice, both when it is opaque sounding as on the short opener, ‘My Hand Creates Ripples on the Surface of the Water’ and the start of ‘Diver’ and in its evocation of the glory days of Laurel Canyon on arguably the album’s standout track, ‘Autumn Roses.’
We sorely need such wonderous things as Paas offers these days but we also need things that speak to the blitzkrieg of events that compromise the news cycle. Ava Mendoza, a Brooklyn-based guitarist as well as a singer-songwriter recently released a solo guitar album, The Circular Train (Palilalia), that seems to take the constant noise and reflect it back in a defiant barrage of blues licks, psychedelic asides and dense clouds of chords drenched in reverb such as on ‘Dust From the Mines.’
Mendoza sings on two of the album’s six tracks with ‘The Shadow Song’ presenting her as a prophet with an axe in hand imploring to “treat your shadow kind and it might treat you right.” Sound advice, I think.
Nice read! Probably my favorite jazz-adjacent thing this year is the post-electric Miles group called Deepstaria Enigmatica and their album The Eternal Now Is The Heart Of A New Tomorrow., released by the legendary ESP Disk! Check it out. https://open.spotify.com/album/2fKD7BkQiDMneVVzzOCaKo?si=tJRphBJnSjisorKjFFMV8g
Thoroughly enjoyed this, Robert! Big fan of Brad Mehldau here, and I appreciate meeting all the others included in this piece. Thanks for keeping us in the loop with these newer releases. Glad you included links to your previous new music posts, too. Very helpful.