Twelve Slices of Good, New Music
The only new release radar you need
Hello again music lovers!
Today, I have another installment in my ongoing series of sharing what new and upcoming albums I think are worth checking out. As usual, the picks lean toward jazz but there’s also a few choice selections from the indie singer-songwriter and country-music scenes. I hope you'll find something here that you like and I also hope you’ll share what new albums you’re enjoying that you think I’d love. Drop a comment right below.
Until next time, may good listening be with you all!
Twelve Slices of Good, New Music
By: Robert C. Gilbert
There is no such thing as rest for the music lover. Yes, it’s nice to luxuriate in the old favourites and find something new in albums long committed to memory but the hunt for something new, something exciting, something electric never ends, or at least it shouldn't. As the year continue to roll (or is that roil) along, I continue to try to bend my ear to new music as much as possible (211 albums and counting). I’ve shared my favourites twice before this year (read them here and here). Here are 12 more.
Lost in the hype of recent archival releases that have come our way (I wrote about three of them here) is one from 1979. That year, keyboardist Jason Miles with a crack group of players, including reedmen Gerry Niewood and Michael Brecker, drummer Jeff Williams, tabla player Badal Roy and a very young Marcus Miller on bass, laid down a series of tracks that mixed the crisp spirit of fusion with the adventurousness of the earliest experiments of meshing jazz with rock and added a hint of world music; in essence, creating a vibrant portrait of New York both electrifying and edgy.
The results were locked away for over 20 years and then released in Japan and France. In late March, they received a proper worldwide release as Cosmopolitan (Symphonic Distribution), a title that well captures what Miles and crew got on tape. This is music that is melodic and sophisticated so that it can be called jazz but also has the polish that could lead it to be damned as smooth jazz.
No matter how it should be labelled, if at all, what matters is that Cosmopolitan is good music that quickly grabs the listener, especially ‘Powder,’ which spotlights Niewood on flute and ‘Kashmirian Twist’ featuring Roy’s tabla.
Miles’ latest, The Lisbon Electric 4tet (self-released), which has been out since the end of April, is also worth checking out. If it’s smooth jazz, it’s smooth jazz done right. Eat your heart out, Kenny G!
Resting far more easily within the jazz taxonomy is saxophonist’s Joe Lovano’s new recording with the Marcil Wasilewski Trio of Wasilewski on piano, Slawomir Kurkiewicz on bass and Michal Miskiewicz on drums: Homage (ECM). The album has the spaciousness long associated with ECM, providing plenty of room for Lovano to fill it which he does thrillingly on ‘Golden Horn,’ for example, soloing on both the tenor and soprano saxophone. Wasilewski also plays some shimmering, spiritual runs on ‘This Side - Catville.’ There is a lot of energy in the music beyond its surface calm. Homage sounds like the kind of recording Wayne Shorter may have made if he had recorded a small-group jazz album during the glory days of Weather Report.
The halcyon days of Blue Note Records are what come to mind when listening to Impact (Inner Music) by the Steve Holt Jazz Impact Quintet, released in mid-April. Holt is a Canadian pianist and is joined by Kevin Turcotte on trumpet and flugelhorn, Perry White on tenor saxophone, Duncan Hopkins on bass and Terry Clarke on drums. Impact is a crisp, bright, straight-ahead session with six of the album’s nine tracks written by Holt. He knows how to write a good hard-bop line. As well, there’s a particularly ace cover of Tom McIntosh’s ‘The Cup Bearers’ plus a piece by Larry Coryell (‘Tender Tears’) and a closing solo-piano version of the Canadian national anthem by Holt. What adds to the welcome ease and comfort of the album is Holt switching between a grand and an electric piano throughout. It adds just a little bit of spice.
Ultimately, Impact is a statement about renewal in the tradition. The grammar may be well worn but the expression is fresh. I think that’s also why vocalist Tyrese McDole’s debut, Open Up Your Senses (Artwork), coming out on June 6, registers so strongly. On the album, McDole ranges across the wide panoply of jazz singing. He gets deep into a standard like ‘Under a Blanket of Blue,’ giving respect but not reverence to the lyrics as well as demonstrating taste in selecting it to sing—it’s a part of the Great American Songbook that hasn’t been done to excess and with its graceful cadence, permits the vocalist to demonstrate his or her ability to extract sublimity. McDole aces that test with flying colours.
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He also turns Thelonious Monk’s ‘Ugly Beauty,’ with lyrics by Mike Ferro, into a closely felt ballad and brings new energy to ‘The Creator Has a Master Plan,’ with a tenor saxophone solo by Tomoki Sanders, son of Pharaoh Sanders.
The highlight of the album is Leon Thomas’ ‘The Sun Song (Precious Energy),’ on which McDole’s tone—inviting and deeply resonant, like Kevin Mahogany, for one example—is movingly employed. McDole is an important new voice on the scene.
There has been a couple of solo-performer recordings that have strongly moved me. Coming out on June 20 is pianist Amina Claudine Myers’ Solace of the Mind (Red Hook Records). It’s a remarkable recording of interiority with Myers’ piano hypnotic and reflective, striking a balance between compositions rooted in gospel and folk and others that ruminate in the spaces between the notes (Myers is part of the Association of the Advancement of Creative Music).
‘Ode to My Ancestors,’ with Myers on organ and offering a recitation, adds to the mystery and breadth of an album that will surely be a necessary corrective to the discourse surrounding the release of André 3000’s EP of piano sketches.
Warren Wolf’s recent Life (JTI), with him solo on vibraphone and marimba, is equally immersive. There’s a profound immediacy to Wolf’s playing, both in the unflappable syncopation of his marimba lines and clarity when he turns to the vibraphone, and the sustained decay when he plays chords. Just over an hour of this may seem to be an invitation to tedium but when the playing is as good as it is here, it’s all about the expectant wonder of what Wolf will play next and being open to that possibility.
Speaking of possibilities, the tribute album is one that often doesn’t deliver on its promise. To be sure, the results are almost always good but they don’t seem to offer much to further whatever artist or style is being given its laurels. I was definitely intrigued, however, when drummer Phil Haynes’ Return to Electric (Corner Store Jazz) with guitar Steve Solerno and bassist Drew Glass, came across my desk.
Released at the end of April, Return to Electric investigates the fertile early rumblings of the effort to fuse jazz with rock and in so doing, isn’t merely copying what Chick Corea, John McLaughlin or Miles Davis were doing but finds a new angle through the strut and thunder of a jazz power trio. There’s volume here but also space and in the case of a rumbling cover of Wayne Shorter’s ‘Paraphernalia,’ there’s both in abundance. The desire to not simply do covers but to prioritize original material furthers the case that Return to Electric does the tribute album right. More of this, please.
In early February, I recommended Think of Mist (Telephone Explosion) by singer-songwriter Dorothea Paas, describing it was having “a sensibility rooted in the mysticism of Judee Sill and Linda Perhacs’ Parallelograms.” What that meant was not only well-written songs or the arresting quality of Paas’ voice but also the lush instrumentation that complemented both. That’s something that is underlined with the release of the backing tracks of Think of Mist as a stand-alone release (purchase it at Bandcamp here). Hearing them deepens my appreciation of the recording and further places Paas in the lineage of he late-sixties Laurel Canyon scene.
That feeling also asserts itself in the opening flute-driven rush of Hannah Cohen’s Earthstar Mountain (Congrats Records), released at the end of March. Cohen is a singer-songwriter based in New York and born in San Francisco. The point of reference on Earthstar Mountain, her fourth album, are the years earlier this decade when she lived in the Catskills. It brims with a dreamy aesthetic. The grooves are relaxed and pleasantly lag behind the beat. Cohen’s vocals are often multi-tracked and float above a soundscape layered with synthesizers and other orchestrations.
Cohen’s songs have a way of insinuating themselves into your mind with subtle hooks and languid harmonic shifts that dovetail with, as noted, the album’s hazy sound. These things still come through when the music is more aggressively upbeat as on the lightly funky ‘Dreamin’.’
That kind of beat is laid over these lyrics: “I wear your cologne when you’re not alone / dress up in your clothes and dance to your favourite song.” They come from ‘Cologne,’ written by Taylor Rae from The Void (Missing Piece Records), her third album. It come out in the middle of April. Rae, based in Austin, would, I suppose, be considered a country artist although the music on the album would not be considered country by today’s standards. That’s the fault of the standards, not Rae, who is an astute synthesist of pop, rock, soul and yes, country, and in The Void, has created the kind of album that used to be in high demand. The closet corollary I can come up with is Bonnie Raitt (Rae’s voice and approach mirrors Raitt). The album ranges over a whole of territory, including ‘Celebrating Alone,’ an effecting song about the acuteness of loneliness over the holidays, and wherever Rae hangs her hat, is home.
Sterling Drake’s The Shape I’m In (Missing Piece Records) is, on the other hand, definitely country but in how it used to be defined. It’s his debut album and it came out at the beginning of May. Drake is someone well attuned to country’s traditions. The opening couplet of the lead-off title track mirrors the cadence and rhythm of Roger Miller’s ‘Husbands and Wives’ and that association fuels all that comes after, including (who knew!) a magnificent cover of ‘The House of the Rising Son’ and a grand chronicle of the life of the rambler, ‘Nothing to Lose.’ Drake is someone to watch. He’s on the rise. Human creativity is alive and well.