Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a confluence of jazz’s past and present, an unsung modernist classic from 1974.

The Jewel in the Lotus

One summer night in 1972, Herbie Hancock’s group Mwandishi was booked to play a show in Seattle, Washington. The group, named for a Swahili title Hancock had adopted meaning “composer” or “writer,” also included bassist Buster Williams, drummer Billy Hart, and multireedist Bennie Maupin. Capable at not just saxophone, but also bass clarinet and flute, Maupin was the most recent addition to the group. The Detroit native was 32 years old at the time, slowly establishing himself as sideman so he could no longer work days at the Jewish Memorial Hospital in New York. By the time he joined Mwandishi, Maupin and the band picked up on a thread started at the sessions for Miles Davis’ 1970 album Bitches Brew—where Maupin and Hancock first played together—incorporating rock and R&B rhythms while still retaining the free improvisation and harmonic complexity of the era’s most forward-looking jazz.
As Hancock remembers it in his memoir, the Seattle show did not take place under ideal circumstances. The band had arrived the night before, and, after playing their first gig, commenced an all-nighter of partying across town. “By the time we straggled back to our hotel, the sun had not only risen—it was already beginning to set again,” Hancock wrote. After only two hours of sleep, Hancock did not feel up to opening with solo piano, as he did most nights. He passed the buck, calling the song “Toys,” which begins with a bass solo.
What happened next was transformative. Buster Williams began to play so brilliantly, Hancock let him continue alone for ten minutes, instead of the two or three he’d intended to give him. “His hand looked like some kind of crazy spider, crawling up and down the length of the bass,” Hancock remembered. When the band finally came in together, they were invigorated, going on to play a set that reduced some of the audience to tears.
Afterwards, Hancock cornered Williams, awestruck, and asked him where he’d found the vitality to play the way he did. Williams was more than willing to explain. While everyone else had been trying to sleep off the previous night, Williams had been in his room chanting. He repeated the syllables “Nam Ryoho Renge Kyo,” the core mantra of Nichiren Buddhism, based on the ancient text of the Lotus Sutra. Williams had been introduced to the practice by his sister, and had already inspired Bennie Maupin to explore it. The three of them, Williams, Maupin, and Hancock, became lifelong adherents, spending the rest of the tour visiting Buddhist community centers instead of parties.
The chant translates to “the mystic law of cause and effect through sound,” and for the Mwandishi group, it became embedded in their approach to music. Bennie Maupin described the chant in musical terms to jazz magazine Down Beat in 1975, saying “the rhythm itself is such a basic rhythm that I feel I’m getting more in tune not only with myself but with other people too.”
The following year, Hancock went in a different direction, disbanding Mwandishi, but retaining Maupin, whom he saw as “most open to change” among his collaborators. A new group, including the percussionist Bill Summers, recorded 1973’s Head Hunters, one of the most successful attempts of the era to unify jazz and funk. Its most famous song, “Chameleon,” includes a melody written by Maupin, a dramatic fanfare over a hypnotic bassline played by Hancock on an ARP Odyssey synthesizer. Maupin later told musicologist Steven Pond that the theme came to him at the Wattstax concert in Los Angeles earlier that year. While watching concertgoers doing a dance called the funky robot, he heard the notes come together in his head. The result is unquestionably both funky and robotic.
It was in 1974 that Bennie Maupin released his first solo album, The Jewel in the Lotus, on the relatively new ECM label, joined by Williams, Hart, Hancock, Summers, and additional percussionist Fred Waits. The title is a translation of another Buddhist chant, “Om Mani Padme Hum,” which evokes an ancient story. The Buddha once stood in front of an assembly of monks to deliver a sermon, and instead of speaking, silently held up a lotus flower. The lotus became a powerful symbol in the religion, a flower that can grow without roots, from muddy water.
The chant evoked by the album’s title is immediately apparent on the opening track, “Ensenada.” It begins with Buster Williams playing a droning, two-note bassline, over which Fred Waits adds accents on marimba. The melody begins, with Maupin at the forefront on flute, and Hancock adding shimmering harmony underneath. The flute is so unadorned as to hardly add up to a melody; Maupin plays only a single note per measure of music for most of the composition’s duration. This was a principle, he told Down Beat, that he had explored with Hancock, Williams, and Hart in Mwandishi: “We did, in many instances, eliminate the idea of notes. A lot of things that we did might imply chords, but in a lot of instances it wasn’t. It was just that we discovered so many different areas of sound that we could use to create certain illusions.”
This approach seems almost incomplete when interpreted by way of conventional wisdom about jazz. In the mainstream reading of the jazz tradition, the music is an expression of heroic individualism, as embodied by a soloist who leads the ensemble with a complex improvised melody. That assumption has long made the drawing of political conclusions irresistible. “We believe jazz is a metaphor for Democracy,” says the mission statement of Jazz at Lincoln Center, founded and directed by traditionalist Wynton Marsalis. At an event in tribute to jazz at the White House, Barack Obama asked, “Has there ever been any greater improvisation than America itself?”
In its most oversimplified version, this is principle is reduced to a sequence of solos—everyone gets their turn to speak. But in “Ensenada,” there is no lone hero. The players almost seem to be accompanying a missing melody, or accompanying each others’ accompaniment. This kind of musical structure is more familiar to modern listeners; the measure-by-measure textural approach has since become characteristic of ambient and electronic music, from Brian Eno to Basic Channel. “Ensenada” is prescient enough that minimal techno producers Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer used it as the basis for a track on their remix album Re:ECM.
“Mappo” takes on a more recognizable jazz structure, including the addition of trumpeter Charles Sullivan. With the exception of an opening and closing statement by Sullivan and Maupin (on flute), the majority of the track is given over to the rhythm section alone. Hancock plays the closest thing to a familiar jazz solo on the album, still allowing bass and percussion to share equal space. The composition’s title also comes from Nichiren Buddhism, referring to the present historical moment as charted by Buddhist philosophy. This preoccupation with temporality comes up again on two short interludes, “Past + Present = Future” and “Winds of Change.”
Allusions to Asian musical forms had been present in jazz for some time, including album-length explorations by fellow Detroiters Yusef Lateef, on 1961’s Eastern Sounds, and Alice Coltrane, on 1970’s Journey in Satchidananda. Williams’ bass often sounds like it is the setting for a raga, and on “Excursions,” Maupin can be heard literally chanting. It’s not a stretch to see the music as an extension of a chant—the joining of multiple voices in the same syllables and notes. The title track, with its chant-derived name, shows how far this can be taken. It brings us closest to the sound of Mwandishi, with Hancock on pulsating electric piano and Maupin on saxophone. Here the leader takes his only long solo on the album, but he maintains the method established on “Ensenada,” rarely playing more than one note per measure.
This emphasis on texture over narrative, even if it is accessed through an international lens, is not a full departure from the jazz tradition. Histories of jazz that emphasize the development of the melodic line—as epitomized by the emergence of bebop in the mid-’40s—tend to overshadow the changes in the underlying musical environment. Bebop is often dated to 1939, when Charlie Parker discovered, while soloing over the pop song “Cherokee,” that he could draw from the entire musical scale rather than just the chords. But the modernization of jazz could just as well be traced to Walter Page’s basslines in the mid-’30s, with various iterations of the Count Basie Orchestra. His “walking” style made for a less divided rhythmic pulse, matched by drummers like Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, and more seamless transitions across harmonies, which pianists could carry further with chord substitutions. The players on The Jewel in the Lotus all came from this tradition, finding common ground between modern jazz, contemporary R&B, and ancient music from the African and Asian continents.
Though Bennie Maupin is listed as the leader, The Jewel in the Lotus defies assumptions about the hierarchy of musical composition and performance. “A more selfless album is hard to imagine,” said the review in Down Beat. Maupin may have taken his cues from Buddhism, but the resulting music implies a more expansive principle, about jazz in particular and self-expression in general. The most heroic soloists in the jazz canon—Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and others—accomplished their inventions with the assistance of an attentive ensemble, to whom they paid equal attention. Even when an individual speaks alone, it suggests, the collective listens together, and there is no higher calling than accompanying others.


Standing on the Corner is the collaboration of two jazz-inclined oddballs from New York City. Their dazzling, invigorating Red Burns project is a freeform response to recent world events.

Red Burns

Standing on the Corner is a sonic workshop for 21-year-old artists Gio Escobar and Jasper Marsalis: two jazz-inclined oddballs and tinkerers fascinated by rap drums, warped vocals, and improvisation. After releasing their debut last year, the duo shared a stranger and more personal chronicle called Red Burns on September 11. The project is a scrapbook made with assistance from artists in their New York community, which includes rising rapper MIKE. Its title became a reference to the generational scars left by imperialism, how deeply the tendrils of oppression burrow into the shared histories of black and brown people. “It’s a curse that I think people of the diaspora have,” Escobar told The Fader. “I guess the root is, ultimately, manifest destiny—this willingness of colonial white settlers from Europe who chose to violently alter the history of another people for the rest of time. We can never undo these things.”
Red Burns isn’t actually about any of that conceptually; there isn’t a “concept,” per se. Instead, Red Burns is a collective response to recent world events (like Trump) from a team of black and brown musicians manifesting as a “weird ass album.” The project is a freeform, hour-long, continuous track, which feels like an act of purposeful subversion in the playlist era. Red Burns is a dazzling sensory experience, a city tour in which each track is like a street sign. Escobar has expressed his frustrations with the confines of musicianship—“Not everything you feel can come out in a song”—and Red Burns seems designed as a sort of multidimensional diagram of New York City, the diverse perspectives it shapes, and the varying journeys inside its city blocks. The album’s website, a collage of memes, serves as a visual and emotional moodboard for the project. This is a tricky, experimental manifesto of sorts for young brown New Yorkers, a burst of raptness and poise amid the busyness and noise.
In the first minute, Red Burns establishes its stakes: “The inability to breathe is what this record is all about.” In the background, you can hear Eric Garner’s final pleas for air. The project forces the listener to parse the data and find meaning. Each segment captures a complicated space from a new angle. The piecemeal delivery of info and scenery only heightens the sensations, and odd details will catch the ear each uninterrupted playthrough: conversation fragments, lyric fragments, background noise, glitchy vocals, distortion effects, five-percenter rhetoric. Some moments are serene. Others are jagged. Some seem to happen just out of the frame—the feelings associated with the minutiae of Medina life. Some are panoramic. There’s spoken word à la the Last Poets, and hypemanisms, and soul singing, and Puerto Rican music. But everything feels connected, even despite the constant tensions.
The main thing tying the Red Burns snippets together is a free-flowing narrative that primarily pivots on the five recitations scattered across the hour, titled “nate sees the storm,” “red burns comin!,” “cleb sees the storm !,” “what about the planet?,” and “the devil Meets Red Burns.” Each soliloquy seems to dictate which corner the project turns down next. The first is a series of seemingly unrelated snapshots from a city in constant motion: “You know these young niggas run up old school, with a gun and a mask, and the cops don’t stop cuz they scared. And the kids skin their knees. And somebody daddy barbecuing on the sidewalk in the summer. Somebody gonna miss they daddy. Somebody always gonna miss they daddy...And somebody’s mother’s crying for her baby. Somebody got a new baby, sadly, or happily, you can never really tell.” The findings here seem to suggest a truth of Red Burns in general: Make observations fast or you might miss something; glean what you can from everything you hear and see.
The sounds of Red Burns are just as eclectic and thrilling as the city they hope to contextualize: sketches of sensual Marvin Gaye soul and Tribe alt rap, tributes to free jazz maestro Albert Ayler and milly rocking (with a subtle cameo from Playboi Carti’s “Magnolia”). There is a bona fide MIKE deep cut and an offering from an Afro-Cuban tradition honoring both the Catholic St. Lazarus and the African-inspired Oricha Babalú-Ayé. “Sellin Soap” starts as a drum-happy, fidgety coke saga and then suddenly, refreshingly melts into mellow, glowing keyboard fills. DJ airhorns intro “Wont U,” a psychedelic slow-roller that builds to whirrs and whooshes, sounds usually associated with space travel. Across Red Burns, you can hear Standing on the Corner and friends navigating the city they love with both despair and optimism (“Survived 9/11, I’ll be damned if we don't make it to heaven”). Their interpretations of the city’s echos are helping to reinvigorate its stagnated hip-hop scene.


Jay-Z’s first solo album since 2009’s The Blueprint 3, released initially on Samsung mobile devices, finds him working with marquee names including Timbaland, Swizz Beatz, Pharrell Williams, Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé, and Nas.

Magna Carta... Holy Grail

Jay-Z and Kanye West's Watch the Throne was introduced by Frank Ocean parsing the respective qualities of gods and kings. Two years later, both rappers have new solo albums that expound on the distinction. Kanye infamously proclaimed “I Am a God” on Yeezus; you could either gape in awe or call it heresy, but you couldn’t doubt his conviction. And just as the brutal and blasphemous Yeezus is true to its title, Magna Carta… Holy Grail offers a jumbled juxtaposition of the regal and divine—hear Jay-Z gasp, “You in the presence of a king/Scratch that, you in the presence of a god,” on “Crown.” It’s one of the few lines here that scans as wishful thinking. The album is a celebration of unlimited financial privilege and power that even used its literally game-changing release as a Samsung Galaxy app to separate Jay-Z’s fans into haves and have-nots. Only a small subset could acquire Magna Carta… Holy Grail on its release date, and it seems safe to say that fewer still will relate to it in a meaningful way.
Which is problematic, since here the “voice of the young people” seems bent on addressing the public. “I ball so hard on ESPN/See my name come across CNN/About six minutes you gonna see it again,” he later claims on “Crown.” Between his newborn daughter, budding sports agency, political controversies, and his equally famous wife, Magna Carta has the most personal material to work with since The Black Album. But the songs rarely go deep. On “Picasso Baby,” Jay boasts “House like the Louvre or the Tate Modern/Because I be goin’ ape at the auction.” I doubt he meant it to be “Poppin’ Tags” for the Sotheby’s set—a vulgar display of net worth that puts him in the tax bracket of shipping magnates and NBA owners—but it comes across as a context and appraisal-free recitation of famous names, a Winner’s History of Modern Art.
The same can be said of the collaborators. Like The 20/20 Experience, the latest album from his Legends of the Summer tourmate, Justin Timberlake, Magna is a hedge-betting, black-tie/Black Card affair that’s not just an account of luxury, but an accessory to it. Marquee names Timbaland, Swizz Beatz, Pharrell, Timberlake, Beyoncé, and Nas all lend their talents—and all appear on “BBC.” The money isn’t totally wasted, as these are some of the stranger beats Jay’s rapped over in some time. Witness the contorted, metallic pings of “Tom Ford,” “Somewhereinamerica”’s drunken ragtime horns, or the codeine-laced, dubby “Crown.” Jay is at least trying to interact with a hip-hop mainstream that has evolved a great deal since his last true solo album, though relegating the production of reigning MVP Mike Will Made-It to a one-minute interlude ("Beach Is Better") smacks of unintended elitism.
At its best, Magna is a record that only a 43-year-old Jay-Z could make. “Heaven” is the most thought-provoking spiritual meditation he’s written, and the willful misreading of “Losing My Religion” is used to powerful effect. “Jay Z Blue” ruminates on the responsibilities and cyclical pathologies of fatherhood with warmth and self-doubt rather than the bitterness that marked what had previously been his most family-minded LP, The Dynasty: Roc La Familia. But Jay also manifests a worst case scenario for “dad-rap.” Twelve albums in, he’s still Muhammad Ali, he’s Michael Jackson, he’s Michael Jordan, he’s Frank Sinatra—the latter is the most deflating comparison, if only because Jay-Z is using him as a prop for yet another lyric about how he did it “my way.” As tedious as these hoary references can be, it’s worse when Magna Carta dabbles in contemporary name-drops and Jay-Z becomes Jay Leno—mentions of Homeland, Instagram, Scott Boras, and Miley Cyrus’ twerkin’ incident bomb like failed monologue jokes between idle chatter.
Unlike Watch the Throne, Jay-Z lacks a foil to bring out an emotional or sociological underpinning, someone to help Magna Carta resonate beyond “look at my shit.” Timberlake is in “my name is Bob and I work at my job” mode during the laughably overblown “Holy Grail,” cycling through every tortured artist cliché short of a crucifixion metaphor. And as bad as the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” interpolation reads on paper, once you hear JT and Jay-Z duet on “And we all just entertainers/And we’re stupid and contagious,” the Nirvana song becomes just another forgettable status symbol. And where Kurt Cobain felt compromised by his fame, Jay and Timberlake are doing everything in their power not to offend the money people—whether it’s Samsung, Target, or someone dropping $250 to see them at the Rose Bowl.
Jay-Z rapping about the incomprehensible awesomeness of his life is nothing new, and the corporate synergy is hardly a novelty: The Black Album doubled as a retirement party, Kingdom Come was launched by a Budweiser commercial, American Gangster coincided with a Hollywood blockbuster of the same name, and, in hindsight, The Blueprint 3 was made with full knowledge that Jay-Z would be Coachella’s first hip-hop headliner. He’s a businessman and a business, man. After all, while Samsung shelled out seven figures for exclusive access to the Jay-Z brand, Shawn Carter was the guy signing the contract and cashing the check. But the best of those joint ventures seemed determined to reach a new audience and create a connection. The weirdly distant and safe Magna Carta… Holy Grail abides by the tried and true business principle that the customer is always right: You just have to remember who the customer is here.


Cheena is composed of members from noise and hardcore outfits like Pharmakon and Anasazi, but on their debut, they are a rock band, pure and simple, channeling the New York Dolls.

Spend the Night With...

It’s been a long time since New York City sounded like Cheena. In a year that’s seen some of the city’s greatest venues and record stores shutting their doors, Cheena’s New York is undoubtedly a figment of the past. On their debut album, Spend the Night With..., the band longs for an instantly recognizable but long-gone locale: home of CBGB’s, leather jackets, cheap rent, the New York fuckin’ Dolls. Like the band’s Instagram-ready pose on the album cover, these aren't just sounds you stumble upon in the wild. You have to summon them specifically. It makes sense, then, that Cheena is a band composed not only of lifelong New Yorkers, but also of long-time New York musicians from the city’s noise and hardcore scenes, notably including Pharmakon’s Margaret Chardiet on lead guitar and Keegan Dakkar of the gothic punk outfit Anasazi.
While the members of Cheena share a history of using their music to provoke and push boundaries, Spend the Night finds them settling into more comfortable territory. The reference points are clear and shameless, channeling the rockabilly swagger of the Gun Club, the coked-out blues rock of *Goats Head Soup-*era Stones, and, of course, plenty of the Dolls. With such a specific set of influences, Cheena emerges both too confident to be deemed just a side project yet too understated to feel like a supergroup. Instead, Cheena is just an old-fashioned rock band.
In accordance with their old school philosophy, *Spend the Night With... *is an old-school kind of album. It’s a fast-paced, ten-song ordeal, over in just thirty minutes. The hit-after-hit structure lends the album a breezy, amiable flow, but one that occasionally threatens to steer them into monochromatic territory. Vocalist Walker Behl, who cut his teeth in the hardcore band Crazy Spirit, has a snarly growl that aims for attitude over melody, a quality that fails to make most of the songs any greater than just the sum of their riffs. Overall, the album has the feel of a solid, well-paced live set. You might not leave humming the songs, but you’ll still have fun.
Aside from “Liberated Animal,” whose gnarly, dissonant riff reminds you that Chardiet is a musician with a history of “effectively convey[ing] the disturbing nature of corporeality,” Spend the Night With... is mostly content to just be a good time. The moments that stick with you then are the ones where the band amps up the melody and energy, like on infectious single “Stupor,” or when they just switch things up entirely, as they do on mid-album country weeper “Electric Snoopy Gang.” Aside from that song’s deeply literal balladeering (“Knick knack paddy whack, my doggy’s gone”), Cheena specializes in late-night party anthems. When you can make out what he’s saying, Behl is usually just flirting with you, looking for something to do, or sayin’ it like he sees it, as in the album’s quintessential line: “I think New York’s okay.”
Between Biehl’s blase lyrics and Logan Montana’s drunken, yawning slide guitar—the unabashed MVP of the album, oozing through the mix like a snake on the subway tracks– there’s an attractive sense of ease to Cheena. Cheena is not trying to blow your mind. In fact, they’re not trying to do much of anything. But that spirit rings true, and it feels less like a pose the longer the album goes on. Cheena knows that the least New York way to live is to be constantly perplexed and amazed by where you live. As Joan Didion wrote, to merely live in New York is to “reduce the miraculous to the mundane.” After all, she writes, “one does not ‘live’ at Xanadu.” For the span of ten songs, Cheena spends the night at Xanadu, absolutely trashes the place, and, in the end, decides it’s just okay.


The debut from the London musician is a culmination of her eclectic journey to the vanguard of electronic music. It is a marvelous paradox: Despite the music’s rigidity, it breathes like a living thing.

Workaround

Most producers in electronic music tend to work in a linear fashion: They start with a chosen style or set of ideas and move gradually forward with them, making incremental progress toward their larger vision. Not Beatrice Dillon. An unsuspecting listener presented with a half dozen of the London musician’s releases might easily assume they were the work of six different people. A 20-minute cassette with Germany’s Gunnar Wendel collected fragments of a noise performance; a pair of albums with composer Rupert Clervaux alternated percussive concision with freeform drift. Themed mixtapes—like a journey through Smithsonian Folkways’ archives or a guided tour of RVNG Intl.’s idiosyncratic catalog—comprise a surprising proportion of her discography. In the absence of anything like an identifiable sound, she has developed a singular sensibility: inquisitive, inventive, attuned to textural nuance and the power of a well-timed surprise. She may be everywhere and nowhere at once, but her catalog suggests its own hidden logic when taken together.
Workaround, her debut album, doesn’t sound much like anything she has done before—which is to be expected—but it’s readily apparent that this is her most ambitious record yet. Putting her rhythmic instincts front and center without bowing to convention, she reconciles her fondness for dance music with the more esoteric tastes she developed working at London’s Sounds of the Universe, a record store with deep holdings in global rarities. Though the 14 tracks range in style and duration, from hypnotic club cuts to brief, abstracted etudes, they all share a palette of scratchy drum machine and glistening FM synths; virtually all are paced at roughly 150 beats per minute, so that they feel less like standalone compositions than variations upon a single, overarching theme.
That uncommon tempo, pitched somewhere between techno and drum’n’bass, is an inspired choice. For one, it removes Dillon’s music from the workaday context of most contemporary dance music; the body registers the beats’ power, but the brain struggles to find a precedent. It’s also an unusually flexible tempo, conducive to both quick syncopations and laid-back, half-time grooves. Informed by dancehall reggae’s lurching cadence, her rhythms lunge and snap, complementing the synthesizers’ staccato attack. And even at such comparatively high speeds, the machine-tooled drums and electronics leave plenty of negative space. This all results in a marvelous paradox: Despite the music’s rigidity, it breathes like a living thing.
Over this skeletal rhythmic framework, Dillon drapes a surprising array of sounds sourced from friends and collaborators: the liquid bounce of UK bhangra musician Kuljit Bhamra’s tabla; scraped strings from cellist Lucy Railton, who played on Mica Levi’s Jackie score; rainbow-streaked pedal steel from Jonny Lam, whose CV includes credits with Norah Jones and Pharaoh Sanders. On “Workaround Two,” Laurel Halo’s vocoder and synths intertwine with Verity Susman’s airy saxophone contrails; UK bass musicians Batu and Untold also turn up in the credits, along with Senegalese griot Kadialy Kouyaté. But the form these pieces take is more like collage than real-time collaboration: With the exception of “Workaround Two,” in which Dillon dictated exactly what she wanted from her players, most of her guests’ contributions were created around a pair of demo tracks that Dillon eventually scrapped, freeing her to edit, manipulate, and recontextualize their parts as she would any other sample.
Those dueling processes—improvisation vs. cut-and-paste, real-time exchange vs. the infinite possibilities of digital editing—are the unspoken theme at the heart of Workaround: It’s a record about control. “The computer always wins, that was my phrase,” Dillon told The Guardian of her philosophy going into the record. The album’s noticeable lack of reverb, she pointed out, banishes any illusion of musicians jamming together in real time, in a single room. Instead, the album’s airless, clinical atmospheres intentionally suggest the pristine, brushed-metal gleam of a brand-new laptop, fresh from the box. At a time when so many dance musicians strive to emulate vintage sounds (whether by means of battered analog equipment or digital plugins that emulate effects like tube distortion and tape warble), the album’s unsentimental polish is all the more exciting. It’s that rarest of creatures in electronic music: something we haven’t actually heard before.
Dillon cites the influence of visual artists Tomma Abts and Jorinde Voigt on the album’s interplay of shape and hue, an inspiration that can be detected in the music’s flattened, two-dimensional quality. Individual sounds like kora and standup bass become severed from their origins and reduced to abstractions—blocks of color, shapes on a page, forms being dragged about within the empty white rectangle of a computer screen. There, detached from the messiness of meatspace, Dillon can make the most of their contrasting textures: the graceful curl of the pedal steel set against the unerring linearity of digital drums; crisp, “Diwali”-like claps cushioned by dub-techno memory foam.
Despite the nimble rhythms, there’s a prevailing sense of patience, even stasis. It’s a factor of the music’s repetitive nature, both within individual tracks and across the album as a whole. But that lulling serves a secret purpose, setting you up for a surprise when a particularly captivating sonic object comes rolling across the stereo field. There’s a four-note riff in “Workaround Two” that sounds like a cross between Japanese city pop and a smartphone ringtone, and the fact that it happens just once and disappears in the blink of an eye only makes it that much more riveting.
Though Workaround’s second half is anchored by one of the album’s highlights—“Square Fifths,” a fractal waterfall of icy rave stabs over tabla and a groove that hints at dembow—that song is followed by a sequence of short, largely interchangeable percussion sketches that all sound like minor variations on the same basic idea. In another context, those might be taken for DJ tools—rhythmic loops for DJs to juggle to their hearts’ content. But even that nod to club functionalism seems appropriate for this curious and captivating record. In an album as intentional as this one is, the choice to include these passages is surely significant: they feel like pages torn from Dillon’s notebook, equations worked out in pursuit of electronic music’s version of a theory of everything.

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Paradise Gallows finds the Richmond, Virginia five-piece alternatively aiming to be both the world’s heaviest act and also the prettiest.

Paradise Gallows

Few metal bands in recent years have emerged with all their parts so immediately perfected as Inter Arma: every pummeling, slow-as-molasses drum fill; every seasick, punishing guitar solo; every ounce of reverb on Mike Paparo’s pained, death metal howl; every blast of feedback swelling in the mix like a bolt of thunder forecasting a biblical storm. For a band so wild and untamable, every aspect of Inter Arma’s records sounds as if it was deliberated upon and perfected for hours in a studio before reaching our ears. This was true on their 2013 Relapse debut Sky Burial, and it was even truer on their 2014 follow-up EP The Cavern. A single 45-minute track, *The Cavern *showcased a band uninterested in resting on their laurels. They had established a signature sound, with their moody amalgam of death metal, black metal, doom metal, and Southern rock, and were now focused on crafting compositions as interesting and distinctive as their sonics.
Such is the mission statement for Paradise Gallows, an album that finds the Richmond, Virginia five-piece alternatively aiming to be both the world’s heaviest act and also the prettiest— and they don’t waste any time. Brief opening number “Nomini” pairs acoustic fingerpicking with soaring David Gilmour-indebted solos and leads right into “An Archer in the Emptiness,” their most guttural, atonal slab of sludge to date. The juxtaposition of the two songs is an almost too-perfect summation of what Inter Arma is capable of (see also track titles like “Violent Constellations” and “The Summer Drones”), but Inter Arma is too smart to become formulaic. On Paradise Gallows, their songwriting is consistently sharp and challenging, making the album’s 71 minutes of shapeshifting feel not only coherent but also wholly natural and downright triumphant.
Like The Cavern, Paradise Gallows is most impressive when taken as a whole, but it is not without its individual highlights. “Violent Constellations” finds Paparo quoting both Rainer Maria Rilke and Waylon Jennings over some of drummer T.J. Childers’ most powerful rhythms. The proggy “Summer Drones,” meanwhile, is one of the shortest tracks here at just under seven minutes, but is also one of its most stunning: a psychedelic burst of swirling mayhem, with chanted vocals that illustrate the common ground between early Swans and the Doors. The clean vocals return on “Where the Earth Meets the Sky,” the quiet, gothy closing number that proves that Inter Arma—a band with the ability to sound like a windstorm sweeping through deserted swamplands set on fire—can also sound like Death in June (and sound pretty good doing it).
“As a young man, I’ve ventured far from youthful realm,” sings Paparo in “An Archer in the Emptiness,” and it rings true throughout. Paradise Gallows, despite being only the band’s third full-length LP, occasionally feels like a release from metal elder statesmen, summarizing a long discography spent dabbling in various genres and experimenting with different sounds. Inter Arma might have been expected to use this album as an opportunity to present a more distilled version of themselves, after affirming a multitude of sonic possibilities on their last two breakthrough releases. It’s worth noting that Neurosis—the seminal and similarly unclassifiable band to whom they are most often compared—released the restrained, folksy Souls at Zero at a similar point in their career: an album that identified and exercised a specific mood in their arsenal, while alienating some of their core metal fanbase in the process. But on *Paradise Gallows, *Inter Arma seems uninterested in refining anything, choosing instead to indulge all of their strengths at once. The result is a captivating, dizzying record by a band aware that they can do anything—so they’re doing it all.


The Los Angeles band struggle to find an identity on their third album of dramatic rap-tinged alternative rock.

The Neighbourhood

“Cry Baby” is only the Neighbourhood’s fifth-most popular song on Spotify and it has 45.3 million streams—are you responsible for any of them? Did you know that they took Travis Scott, BROCKHAMPTON’s Kevin Abstract, and the 1975 on their first American tours? Did you know that their fans identify as “Hoodlums” and that you missed your chance to buy a Hoodlum beanie at Urban Outfitters? Do you know that they’re not even British?
There’s a decent chance the answer for all of the above is “no,” and that’s why the L.A. band’s self-titled third LP is singularly focused on a market share that’s been dwindling ever since they emerged out of their KROQ petri dish sporting a black-and-white visual motif, a severe and vowel-less 2013 typeface (“THE NBHD”), and their colossal No. 1 hit, “Sweater Weather.” It was a bummer summer jam that balanced the attraction of beautifully doomed California stereotypes with an anti-California message that the rest of the country could get behind. Lead singer Jesse Rutherford might’ve pictured himself as a damaged rock star trying to write a Lana Del Rey song, but he just had the fortune of being a few years ahead of G-Eazy. And so the more pressing question five years later on The Neighbourhood: Who do these guys think they are?
Imagine if the Chainsmokers didn’t at least have the decency to be as crass and shameless as their music in real life. Or, imagine if Halsey and Khalid didn’t hard-sell their voice-of-a-generation pitch to clueless cultural gatekeepers with titles like “New Americana” and “American Teen.” Or, imagine Twenty One Pilots chose a Benz instead of a backpack. Or, just imagine a combination of all of the above that somehow feels less organic.
The band’s 2013 debut I Love You took itself way too seriously, but it was hard to hate as the Neighbourhood tried their luck with chillwaved R&B, cloud rap, and major-label indie rock like a desperately horny frat boy at last call. By 2015’s Wiped Out!, the Neighbourhood had their eureka moment: They are, in sound and spirit, the guys who wanted to recreate the Weeknd songs that sampled Beach House without the attorney’s fees. At the very least, the Neighbourhood are proof that alt-rock still exists, and that new bands have about as much use for the sounds of the past as 03 Greedo and Lil Xan do for Tupac. The Neighbourhood is as ponderous as any forgotten post-grunge also-ran record selling for one cent on Amazon. Rutherford strains on every single line under the weight of substance abuse, his traumatic upbringing (“Always feel inadequate/The same way my daddy did”), and the obligations of being a beautifully damned sex symbol. But instead of the herniated howls of Eddie Vedder or Kurt Cobain, Rutherford models the gaslight anthems of Drake and Abel Tesfaye, guys who will say or do anything to get you into bed and turn it swiftly into a therapist’s couch.
If you take the Hoodlum annotators at their word, much of Rutherford’s self-pity stems from his band’s inability to create anything that has stuck like “Sweater Weather” and it’s not for lack of trying. The Neighbourhood has at least six producers and 18 writing credits making them, at any given time, one degree of separation from Scarlett Johansson, White Lung, G-Dragon, and Maroon 5. Even with all of the topshelf talent on hand, The Neighbourhood bizarrely opens with the sputtering, AutoTuned blog-pop throwback of “Flowers.” The Neighbourhood are almost deserving of empathy here—this is the best Columbia’s money can buy and Rutherford can do little but watch his band’s moment pass them by.
A third of The Neighbourhood already appeared on the band’s two recent EPs and its every thwack of a processed, priapic snare is a reminder of just about every pop-rap trend you’re trying to forget. “Sadderdaze” and “Too Serious” litter profoundly dopey wordplay over acoustic guitars and can’t even beat Post Malone at this game. Their actual attempt at trap-pop is so offbeat it actually makes this kind of production sound novel again (“Revenge”). With the occasional triplet flows and sotto voce ad-libs, Rutherford often sounds like the Hoodlum type personified, that guy from the suburbs rapping along to Migos in his car, hoping not to be caught in the act. Otherwise, the bulk of The Neighbourhood is every bit as inane and interchangeable as the last Tory Lanez or Travis Scott song you heard, but the Neighbourhood are the only ones who still get to play KROQ’s annual Weenie Roast festival.
That’s not the Neighbourhood’s fault. These guys have done nearly everything in their power to opt out of rock music, including commissioning a mixtape called #000000 & #ffffff featuring Casey Veggies, Dej Loaf, Danny Brown, and YG. And while there is no amount of public shaming that will stop white rock bands from doing hip-hop covers, you’d think someone who has personally collaborated with rappers would have the good sense to choose something other than “Me and My Bitch” for a Red Bull session. Or at the very least, to not sing, “pussy stay wet like she was mixed with Mexican” with an utterly straight face. Not that anyone should take this as a mandate for more of the same, but “Me and My Bitch” and the rest of #000000 & #ffffff feels way more honest than The Neighbourhood trying to convey gravity by swapping out a This Guy Fucks pose for Sad as Fuck t-shirt—it looks like the last time they had any fun.


The collaborative album by Jay Som’s Melina Duterte and Palehound’s Ellen Kempner tells compelling and rarely heard stories, but doesn’t reach the same highs as their respective solo work.

Doomin’ Sun

Last year, on a lark, I picked up Amy Kaufman’s book Bachelor Nation: Inside the World of America’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure. I came away convinced that everyone involved in the long-running reality television franchise ought to be tried for crimes against humanity. Jay Som’s Melina Duterte loves the show; Palehound’s Ellen Kempner is baffled by it. “I couldn’t get over the fact that one of the gayest people I know,” says Kempner—meaning, fondly, Duterte, “is obsessed with the straightest piece of media.”
Tongue planted firmly in cheek, the two women appropriated the show’s title to christen their new supergroup. A square-jawed Chad, a bouquet of roses—that, says Kempner, “is the complete opposite of what we are.” And yet, their debut album, Doomin’ Sun, is the furthest thing from a fistful of Pride confetti. In several songs, Duterte and Kempner tell compelling stories about the tension and joy found in relationships between women, refuting the notion of queerness as an idyll.
The narrators of Doomin’ Sun’s 10 tracks have one thing in common: They yearn for someone who simply cannot love them in return. In the opening track, “Back of My Hand,” Duterte and Kempner pose as Beliebers, whispering their love in low voices: “Got a seat for your show/Couldn’t swing the front row/Could you hear me from the nosebleeds/Screaming every word?” Beneath their lust lies a more complex question: “Do I wanna be you?” It’s a sentiment familiar, no doubt, to every kid for whom Jungkook is #transitiongoals. In other songs, reciprocity is even less plausible: an apparition in a sex dream, a one-sided conversation with the moon. The narrator of these songs loses sleep in her loneliness, deprives herself: “I skip a meal, I drink some tea.”
And yet, there is a certain safety in these fantasies. When real people enter the equation, a more sinister shade of songwriting does, too. In “Stay in the Car,” our narrator watches a “fuming” woman with “eyes like two shrieks of fire,” and burns with lust: “I want us to get along/Be the ice cream left out in her sun.” On “Anything at All,” she gets her wish and regrets it. The woman who seemed alluring in the light of day is predatory by night; our narrator shakes in her bed, watching her approach, waiting for her to “wrap me in silk and bite off my head.”
Most tragic of all, the narrator of Doomin’ Sun doesn’t seem to believe she deserves better. She’s too anxious to find a new lover, too scared to defend herself against the one she’s got. For every portion of hope, there’s always a dash of resignation. In “Sick of Spiraling,” her partner flips RuPaul’s maxim on its head, spitting at her: “If you can’t have your own back/How the fuck can you have mine?” She struggles to name what’s happening to her, even as she vents her anger at “a grown man” who hurt her “best friend,” on “Spin Out.”
It’s easy, throughout Doomin’ Sun, to pinpoint moments that come distinctively from Duterte or Kempner: a quiver of Jay Som synth here, a vividly carnal Palehound lyric there. Kempner grounds Duterte’s dreamy abstraction in gritty reality, creating a dissonance that works best when it mirrors the album’s treatment of the darker edges of relationships. At times, though, the collaboration limits these artists’ strengths. Duterte’s synthesizers never seem to fully bloom, and Kempner’s earthy, plainspoken guitar is relegated to just a couple of fingerpicked tracks. The best showcase of what each has to offer is still their respective solo albums.
Doomin’ Sun is still a worthwhile listen for anyone who loved Everybody Works or A Place I’ll Always Go. It’ll be especially indispensable for young queer women working through their own experiences. If television’s Bachelor crafts a manipulative and artificial version of romantic love, this Bachelor provides its opposite: a wrenching depiction of walking on eggshells, giving vulnerable people the vocabulary to get free.
Editor’s Note: The original version of this review inferred the album was about abuse. It has been updated to clarify that the album does not strictly concern abuse, and some language has been changed to reflect this.

Buy: Rough Trade
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"Damn right I love this life I live/ 'Cause I went from negative to positive/ And it's all... good ...

The Blueprint

"Damn right I love this life I live/ 'Cause I went from negative to positive/ And it's all... good." --Biggie Smalls, "Juicy"
"H to the Izzo" wasn't a summer jam for me. No TV, sadly, means no BET. I'm too far from ATL to get good radio, and the only thing bumping out the trunk at stoplights was that fucking White Stripes album. I was so deprived that when Nas pondered if Jay-Z might be "H to the izzo/ M to the izzo," I didn't even get the damned reference. Approaching a Jay-Z album in a cultural vacuum is a dangerous venture-- something I haven't done since his 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt-- and my hopes were a lot lower for this new one, which was rumored to be short on bigger-than-Jesus superproducers and entirely free of perpetual Roc-a-Fella sidemen Beans and Bleek (both of whom I've come to like far better than Jay himself). Honestly, I was expecting mediocre shit-- the worst kind of boredom that comes with return-to-my-roots formalism, or maybe a chorus or two from a children's musical. What I got was the plush defining statement from hip-hop's last great personality.
The Blueprint is possibly the least sonically inventive hip-hop chart topper in years-- stunning and captivating for sure, but still loungily comfortable enough to sleep to. The songs are spare, but the care of assembly holds any leftover interest that Jay isn't already commanding. The unexpected flourishes are subtly beneficial, like the fanfare that sneaks in at the end of "All I Need," or the incredible clap-clap break of "Heart of the City." Retro soul samples are dull white, picked clean of lint and sanitized. They're wielded like pieces of a glitch track around Jay's words, coming in at all the right moments and corporealizing into a clipped skeleton to drape his ego on. Disregarding "Takeover" (which is a separate world, anyway), he's left behind all the dirty funk of so many jams past; too powerful, too rich, too fucking refined to even be touched by such filthiness. It's easy-listening because his life is almost entirely easy living, and his only nuisances (bitch-ass rappers and the media, naturally) are shortly addressed in two quick jabs: laid-back dis track and Eminem guest shot.
"Takeover" is the dis track. Casually flowing over a marching bassline and carbonated harpsichord flourishes, Jay slowly and confidently explains to you that Nas and Mobb Deep's Prodigy are the most wack, fake-ass thugs in the universe, and how he must destroy them. After it ends, you realize he was simply performing an obligation-- responding to a glove slap that's far beneath him, but entirely within his capacity to address. The abrupt final verse is the topper as Jay laughingly exhorts that, "All you other cats throwin' shots at Jigga/ You only get half a bar, fuck y'all, niggaz." How does Jadakiss even begin to respond at that?
As for the rest, well, there's nothing really awful (the cringeworthy track or two that seems to lurk at the end of every Jay-Z album is notably absent), but there's nothing really shocking, either. But the other tracks are so forward-moving and hallucinatory that even Timbaland can't stab his way out of the haze. What holds it together is Jigga's overwhelming self-assuredness-- the kind of justified confidence you can imagine witnessing from a world conqueror or cult leader. When the pitchshifted chorus of "U Don't Know" exclaims, "You don't know... what you're doing," Jay is quick to respond: "Sure, I do." He then goes on to casually add up his yearly earnings and ponder the total like Mos circa Mathematics if possessed by Gordon Gekko, and you realize that this is for real: Shawn Carter finally entirely synchronized with the Jigga-man rapping persona for an entire album.
Gradually, the other tracks start to make sense; "Hola Hovito" is a Swizz Beatz eulogy with Roger Troutman shouting nonsense from the bathroom. "Jigga That Nigga" is all the lovely French females from "Girls, Girls, Girls" asking him to kick it 1998-style once again. "Heart of the City," possibly the best song that actually works in the style of the album, deftly grinds with tiptoeing smoothness like a bugged-out Cluster track while Jay makes a convincing case for holding it down six summers straight. "Niggaz pray and pray on my downfall/ But every time I hit the ground I bounce up like round ball."
Bouncing up means coming down, and he does for "Renegade," teaming with the world's other greatest MC to whine about the perils of being the world's greatest MCs and all. I shouldn't have to mention the brilliant rhymes, but (surprisingly, after a few bombs on the d12 album) it's almost ridiculous how good Eminem's beat is-- strings, synth and "Good Vibrations"-style theremin tones roll easy like 1987. After that, Jay puts focus in full on his rep, bigging up Reasonable Doubt more times than every other cut of his career combined. Jay's always been moving towards abolishing the hardcore production style that originally went with being gangsta, but the funny thing about this is how overwhelmingly post-gangsta he is-- the fruits of a thug life that was too long ago to dwell on.
"If I ain't better than B.I.G./ I'm the closest one," he says on "Hola Hovito," and that's an important clarification; when Puffy and Easy Mo Bee were laying pop beats under Biggie's real-life crime stories, the old school heads complained about how the rugged and rough aesthetic was on the way out. But "Juicy" shut the haters up by simply explaining that Biggie was pop only because he didn't need that dirty funk-rock life anymore. And so, while frat boys went buckwild for screeching thugs like Cypress Hill and Onyx who boasted of a running crime rate, Biggie had already gotten over it and just wanted to live his life in peace. But everyone knows what actually happened, and after his crime style finally caught up with him, the new generation of pop thug was ushered in. After Biggie's death, no one comes closer than Jay-Z.


While Classixx have made a name for themselves as internet remixers du jour, that by no means guaranteed a strong original debut album. But Hanging Gardens shows the duo to be great producers and songwriters. It's bright, warm, and breezy, making its early summer release perfectly timed.

Hanging Gardens

Los Angeles production duo Tyler Blake and Michael David achieved prominence through a constant presence on the internet remix circuit, but their tendency to reference and recontextualize runs deeper. Before the pair adopted the nostalgic-by-design Classixx moniker, they cranked out a few electro-chintz remixes as Young Americans, an assumed allusion to the classic David Bowie LP of the same name. The debut single from Blake's solo project Fingerpaint, last year's "Lunar", leaned heavily on a sample of Arthur Russell's "This Is How We Walk on the Moon". The cover of Classixx's debut LP, Hanging Gardens, is a double-vision homage to the sleeve for Tangerine Dream's 1988 album Optical Race, while its title track pilfers the melody of Fleetwood Mac's glistening Tango in the Night cut "Seven Wonders".
Internet-age producers who frequently create with others' raw materials aren't necessarily guaranteed a similar level of success when left to create worthwhile music on their own-- take last year's debut album from mashup outfit the Hood Internet, the astoundingly tepid FEAT. With Hanging Gardens, Blake and David soar above any low expectations; they've put together a cohesive, impossibly lush record that pays adequate lip service to a variety of pop sounds while loading the decks with glossy, head-cleaning dance. Classixx remixes frequently possess the slick expansiveness of disco, with a touch of nocturnal mood-shading to boot. By contrast, Hanging Gardens is bright, warm, and breezy, and as the summertime approaches, its release couldn't have come at a better time.
Classixx excel at creating a textured push-and-pull within the framework of their own productions, and Hanging Gardens provides several wordless moments to get lost in. Take the contemplative 4/4 of "A Fax From the Beach", which plays like a post-post-comedown sequel to Fred Falke's indelible, wistful 2008 single "808 PM at the Beach"-- as well as a killer transition or two, like when the rollin'-and-scratchin' bump of "Rhythm Santa Clara" gently bleeds into the declarative synth stabs that open up "Dominoes"' positive, propulsive Balearic structure. Album highlight "Holding On", meanwhile, elicits comparisons to Discovery-era Daft Punk, uncannily combining "One More Time"'s repetitive pulse with the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed purity of "Digital Love".
Classixx are very good producers-- their sonic excursions are placid and stylistically considered, with plenty of surface beauty, if not a ton of depth-- but the biggest surprise of Hanging Gardens is that they're great songwriters, too. It's astonishing how many of the guest appearances simply work, and in such a satisfying way, too: Take the all-caps kiss-off anthem "All You're Waiting For", featuring a typically tart vocal from ex-LCD Soundsystem member and DFA fixture Nancy Whang, and Sarah Chernoff's dizzying "A Stranger Love", reminiscent of Saint Etienne's glassy-eyed club gestures.
Jesse Kivel of L.A. electro-pop duo Kisses does effective mush-mouthed romanticism all over the palm-muted synths of "Borderline", while chillwave castrato Pat Grossi (whose monastic Active Child project has benefitted from Classixx's touch before) does his weightless choirboy thing over the airy bells of "Long Lost", an ethereal R&B-leaning tune that's a silkier, less pathos-heavy version of what AC did on 2011's just-okay You Are All I See. The record's most potent punch, ironically, is more than three years old: "I'll Get You", which saw release as a single in 2009 on the waning tastemaker imprint Kitsuné, wields Jeppe's brash vocal beams as an effective weapon, as the former Junior Senior vocalist asks repeatedly and somewhat ridiculously, "Do you like bass?" It shouldn't work, but it does, and pretty well.
More than anything else, the pure pop cuts on Hanging Gardens leave the listener wanting more, which is exactly the record's paradoxical flaw: although it runs to nearly an hour long, a good deal of space is relegated to the more instrumental cuts, which aren't quite distinctive enough to push the five-and-six-minute mark as they frequently do. The less impressive material loses its effectiveness when isolated from the sequencing of the album, which flows impressively as a front-to-back listen. Hanging Gardens is a decadent trifle to lose yourself in, a deceptively simple record that has the potential for great longevity.


Free jazz drummer Milford Graves has a nice trick that he performs at his shows: He brings someone in the ...

Rounds

Free jazz drummer Milford Graves has a nice trick that he performs at his shows: He brings someone in the audience up on stage and asks them to feel for his heart rate. It starts out steady, but as the person holds both wrists, it slows, and Graves begins to diverge his bloodstream on either side of his body, finally achieving an internal polyrhythmic pulse between the two points. Then he jumps behind his kit and clatters away in ecstasy.
Four Tet's lone member, Kieran Hebden, is fascinated with the impossible rhythms that the free-form jazz greats could bang out as they pleased. Whether or not he's taking a page out of Milford Graves' book is debatable, but he opens "Hands" with a cardiac sample fibrillating into a multi-limbed percussive rattle of densely edited and seemingly random drum hit samples that just starts to stroke Barry Altschul's beard before locking down into a hip-hop groove. He fades the cymbals' sizzles into the pseudo-Clyde Stubblefield sticks of "She Moves She", a cycling song evenly spaced with wheeling rimshots, scattered gongs, and funky string plucks that veer around the car horns that bleat past.
"My Angel Rocks Back and Forth" gently blows iron-lung sighs through ride cymbals and dirty, run-out grooves while an austere piano twinkles, hinting at the sort of gentle sounds Hebden will soon weave around English folk legend Vashti Bunyan. Verging on the lugubrious is the nine-minute "Unspoken" (whose piano riff is lifted from, of all sources, Tori Amos' "Winter"), but Hebden's touch keeps it from morass. Here, he controls his ingredients-- fictitious soundbytes of early Gato Barbieri sax, a plaintive finger or two from McCoy Tyner, broken chimes, backwards feedback, and a DJ Shadow kickdrum-- keeping them at a contemplative simmer, rather than allowing them to come to a full boil.
"Chia" is a tabla-bubbling conduit to the mod bass and shimmying sitar of "As Serious as Your Life", namechecking the crucial free-jazz text by Val Wilmer, yet standing much closer to Miles Davis' On the Corner, with those odd-metered handclaps and that stuttering punch of a Jack DeJohnette hi-hat. With metallophone ripples at a wake, "And They All Look Broken Hearted" is an abstract and solemn affair, recalling the oddly melodic cadence of a player like Bobby Hutcherson, and with spliced drum solos swirling around some affected harpsichord and vibraphones like club smoke, Hebden captures the cool sadness of old Blue Note posters. It sounds like a shoo-in for the album's closing track, but it instead leads up to "Slow Jam", which has that long goodbye of the best melancholy closers, a circle game of echoing footsteps, fitful static, gleeful kazoos, lulling guitar repetitions, and shadows surely sinking in, revolving all disparate sounds to resolution.
Freely moving in and out of cycles, able to coalesce or evanesce in a heartbeat, straight up and down, or else banging about like a toddler on the pot shelf, Rounds funnels every element through the drum, which always remains at the forefront of the mix. But what gives this record its internal order, and allows it to stand out against previous laptop explorations of immense record collections, is the other genres Hebden dabbles in and draws upon to flesh out the beat. Though hardly obvious the first time through, there's the supple, propulsive fun of funk, as well as the pastoral placidity of folk, both moving over the cut-up rhythms like cumulous clouds, allowing hot light through at some junctures, but cooling things out with a darker umbrage in others. Rounds may not be "as serious as your life," as one track proclaims, but it does feel that pulse.


Now that her peers have caught up to her visual provocations, Lady Gaga seems less like an audacious pioneer than one among many, and Joanne feels tentative, an affront to the Gaga of yesteryear.

Joanne

At the start of the decade, Lady Gaga worked hard to reposition pop as a high art or vice-versa—both absorbing and extending a lineage that included oddball visionaries like Andy Warhol, Klaus Nomi, Prince, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Elton John, Madonna, and Missy Elliott. Most of her avant-garde gestures were extra-musical, a string of cheeky, absurdist visions realized entirely outside of the studio and only tangentially in conversation with her bloodless dance jams (Gaga herself has referred to that early work as “soulless electronic pop”). It’s not hard, now, to recall these stunts from memory: she was sewn into a dress fashioned from slabs of flank steak for the VMAs. She hatched herself from a semi-translucent egg at the Grammys. She hired a self-described “vomit artist” to puke a steady stream of syrupy green liquid onto her bosom during a SXSW performance. Her repeated and earnest disavowal of anything remotely normative was (and remains) plainly empowering for anyone sitting at home alone in her room, feeling like a true weirdo. The idea was always to fracture and reestablish a hierarchy. Only Gaga could turn “monster” into a term of endearment.
And regardless of whether you find those moves electrifying or tedious, it's hard to overstate the value of that work as a public service—every generation’s freaks elect a champion, and Gaga was tireless, proud, and wholly devoted to the job. Her commercial success also meant that her chart peers were, for better or worse, free to get stranger, artier, and less predictable; Gaga helped usher in an era of pop in which hardly anything is too far-out (or pretentious) to play. Visual provocations of one sort or another are expected now: Sia performed “Chandelier” at the Grammys with her back to the audience, wearing a bobbed, platinum wig, while Kristen Wiig and the then-twelve-year old dancer Maddie Ziegler frolicked around her in nude bodysuits. Miley Cyrus gyrates among furries as a matter of routine.
But now that her peers have caught up, Gaga is starting to feel less like an audacious pioneer and more like one among many.  Joanne, which is named after her late aunt—a sexual assault survivor who died of lupus at nineteen—experiments with rootsier idioms like country and folk, maybe as a kind of goofy gesture toward authenticity, or maybe just to distance herself further from 2013’s overblown and gloppy ARTPOP. Gaga has always sounded most comfortable belting out rich, brawny pop songs while wiggling around a piano bench, and her best tracks, like the deeply irresistible “Yoü and I,” from 2011’s Born This Way, are reminiscent of the more virtuosic fringes of glam-rock (“You and I” features inimitable Queen guitarist Brian May, a drumbeat that nods directly to “We Will Rock You,” and harmonies that very nearly recall “Bohemian Rhapsody”).
Glam—its blatant preoccupation with fame and stardom, its mischievous and inelegant tendencies, its emphasis on the theatrical, the visual, the decadent, the garish—made sense for Gaga, both for her voice (while robust and often lovely, it is not exactly nuanced; the little fissures and breaks that typically animate folk songs aren’t instinctive to her) and for her fantastical, psychedelic-leaning visual taste. A move toward singer-songwriter earnestness now—especially following Cheek to Cheek, the collection of jazz standards she recorded with Tony Bennett, itself a purposeful expression of seriousness, maturity—feels unnecessary.
Gaga has repeated Warhol’s claim that “art should be meaningful in the most shallow way,” but Warhol also insisted on a kind of surreal detachment from flesh—“Sex is so abstract,” he once said. Gaga’s disembodiment feels less deliberate. Joanne never reveals much of a narrative or stylistic through-line, and even her brief dips into indie-rock—her collaborations with Father John Misty on “Sinner’s Prayer” and “Come to Mama” (Misty is also credited as a writer on Beyoncé’s Lemonade), and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker on “Perfect Illusion” (Rihanna covered Parker’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” on Anti)—feel familiar.
Joanne is rife with visitors, though none make themselves especially known: Mark Ronson (who co-produces), Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine, Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age. “Dancin’ in Circles,” a song she co-wrote with Beck, is a clubby paean to self-love with a grody pre-chorus: “Up all night, tryna’ rub the pain out,” she chants. In 2016, masturbation-as-engine-of-escape isn’t a particularly titillating topic (in the decades since “She Bop,” Hailee Steinfeld, Nicki Minaj, Pink, the Pussycat Dolls, Britney Spears, and plenty of others have recorded tracks about getting themselves off), nor the instance of Beck-Gaga collusion anyone was hoping for (imagine, for a moment, if he had brought her “Debra”).
Though Gaga addresses a handful of serious concerns here, some topical, some personal—the murder of Trayvon Martin; what happens to a person after she dies—her treatment of them often feels clumsy if not performative (in “Angel Down,” an ode to the Black Lives Matter movement, she sings, “Angel down / Why do people just stand around?” while Ronson sadly plays a Mellotron).
Elsewhere, there are hints of a smaller, more personal arc: Gaga’s got it for someone she knows is bad news, but she’s not sure if she can walk away just yet. “Perfect Illusion,” the record’s first single, struggled to chart (it debuted at number fifteen on the Hot 100), but has a propulsive, dizzying quality that feels like a pretty good analogue for the process of completely losing your mind over someone, only to realize later you’ve been hoodwinked: “Mistaken for love, it wasn’t love, it was a perfect illusion,” Gaga bellows, her fire-hose voice big, unchecked, wild. She sounds indignant but also vaguely unhinged—like she’s figured out she’s playing a rigged game, but still refuses to fold her hand. Opener “Diamond Heart” has Homme on guitar, but the best moments are Gaga’s: “Young wild American / C’mon, baby, do you have a girlfriend?” she wonders in the chorus.
It’s the same story on “Million Reasons,” co-written with Hillary Lindsey (who collaborated with Carrie Underwood on “Jesus, Take the Wheel”), an undeniable power ballad Poison would’ve murdered in 1988: “I bow down to pray,” Gaga sings at her piano. “I try to make the worse seem better.” This kind of semi-desperate negotiating will be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has tried to will a doomed situation into something viable. Her man’s already given her a million reasons to split. “But baby, I just need one good one to stay.”
Sartorially, Gaga has recently come to favor civilian get-ups; just last week, she returned to the Bitter End, the tiny, Greenwich Village venue where she got her start, wearing short-shorts and a sheer, Bud Light-branded tank top (Bud Light sponsored her Dive Bar tour). In the video for "Perfect Illusion," she wears denim cutoffs, black combat boots, a black t-shirt, and a blonde ponytail. I sported a similar look—though with far less success—nearly every school day between 1995 and 1997. But nobody wants to immediately recognize herself in Gaga’s aesthetic; we want her to suggest a path we hadn’t thought of before, to nurture and clarify a beauty we didn’t even realize was there. Joanne feels too self-conscious, an affront to the Gaga of yesteryear—the truest self, after all, isn’t always the quietest.


Mute remasters and reissues the first four albums from Pitchfork faves Can, whose music anticipated both the musical trend toward decontextualization via electronics, post-production, and editing, and the cultural trend toward collective experience and shared information.

Can: Monster Movie / Soundtracks / Tago Mago / Ege Bamyasi

Are we there yet? After 25 years of critical reappraisal and at least 15 years of indie and post-rock bands flaunting their influence, has Can finally gotten their just desserts? I don't think so. Not just yet. Can still seem just a little bit ahead of the curve. They really were "post-rock," as opposed to just futuristic. Can's music anticipated both the musical trend toward decontextualization via electronics, post-production, and editing, and the cultural trend toward collective experience and shared information. Other bands shone as brightly in this regard (The Beatles, for one), but Can arrived as a more finished product and more capable of translating their ideas onto record than any other. And they jammed: Any randomly picked moment from "Yoo Doo Right" or "Halleluwah" is as powerful now as when it was released. You can use them as make-out music, a drug soundtrack, or just stuff to listen to while driving. You can use them to blast off or come down.
Can formed in 1968, featuring two former students of avant-garde classical composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, a former free-jazz drummer interested in math, a rock'n'roll guitarist 10 years younger than the others, and an American sculptor living in Europe in order to evade the draft. Keyboardist Irmin Schmidt had visited America in 1966, hooking up with the Fluxus musicians (Terry Riley, La Monte Young, et al.) and becoming inspired to form a rock band. He and bassist Holger Czukay (who would issue 1969's Canaxis, which used primitive sampling technology) were keen to incorporate experimental composition and compositional theories into a rock setting, and when Czukay's student Michael Karoli turned them onto Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles, the band's fate was sealed.
However, Can would not become just another band. For one, they eschewed the idea of a frontman or long solos. Each member of the group served a specific function, but the band operated as a collective; no individual part was more important than the whole. They recorded music in a manner befitting a modern electronic artist, editing together tracks using source material culled from marathon improv sessions. This is also similar to what Miles Davis was doing at the time on In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew, though while the trumpeter was jumping into uncharted territory for a jazz musician, Can had already memorized their instruction manuals and covered more artistic and technical ground faster than any band had ever done.
But then, Can's music transcends those kinds of props: They made music that felt at turns desolate, euphoric, tense, and blissful. They were the best possible result of intellect and inspiration in rock, and these four remastered CDs argue they are as "important" as any band you could name. Their sound is very much improved. For one, there is no hiss (!) and the EQ is much better than the previously available CD versions (Can liked bass). They also come with liner notes by The Wire's David Stubbs; although his essays don't contain a lot new info, they'll be of interest to anyone who hasn't read much about Can.
Monster Movie was released in 1969, and is Can's most rock-oriented album by a considerable margin. Its songs are raw and aggressive-- very much informed by The Velvet Underground's larval trance-rock-- and they mark Malcolm Mooney as nothing if not an inspired amateur. "Father Cannot Yell" leaps out of the gate with a hi-speed keyboard flutter and the snap of Jaki Liebezeit's snare. Although the band would later perfect a kind of ambient funk, here they were brawny (though precise), determined rockers to the hilt; five minutes into "Father Cannot Yell", the song climaxes with a blaze of bass, drums, and fuzzed-out guitar, and an entire legacy of minimalist rock (from Neu! to Comets On Fire) is predicted. Of course, the 20-minute "Yoo Doo Right" is the centerpiece, and gives the best indication of what Can would do afterward. The murky, primal atmosphere of drums that dominates the track never allows the listener to escape the band's propulsion; like much of Can's best music, "Yoo Doo Right" seduces me into hypnosis, and winds through a seemingly endless array of textures and variations. Monster Movie is an amazing debut, but would be Mooney's last. He suffered a nervous breakdown onstage and returned to America.
Before beginning work on their second album, Can released the compilation Soundtracks, containing music they'd done for films. Soundtracks was released mainly to capitalize on the success of the band's debut in their native Germany, and is often overlooked by listeners expecting only throwaways and outtakes. In truth, most (but not all) of the songs don't extend the same artistic reach as those on either Monster Movie or the subsequent records, but they're hardly throwaways. In particular, "Mother Sky" has an intensity matching anything on the debut, and new vocalist Damo Suzuki's presence lends the tight-lipped drone a sedated, half-gone feel that only advances its tranced-out cause. "Tango Whiskeyman" and "Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone" are short, beat-dominated variations on Can's version of pop, while "She Brings the Rain" (featuring Mooney) cuts out the drums entirely in favor of jazzy torch balladry. Can would later compile a more satisfying collection of non-LP material (1974's Limited Edition, expanded to Unlimited Edition two years later), but Soundtracks is a good sampling of their more straightforward experiments.
1971's Tago Mago saw Can stretching out into the beyond, and it was their first full-length studio record to feature Suzuki. Originally released as a double-LP, Tago Mago confirmed what "Yoo Doo Right" had only suggested: Can knew trance-rock as if they'd invented it. However, unlike it did on Monster Movie, the band didn't necessarily lull you into hypnosis via bass and beats. "Aumgn" and "Peking O" are the most experimental tracks in the Can catalog, sharing more in common with the irreverent electronic music of Stockhausen or Pierre Henry than most anything related to rock-- Ummagumma was a possible exception. Their often-bizarre arrays of sound effects and reverb-drenched, murky guitar sprawl have driven more than one listener to put down the pipe. Of course, when the epic "Halleluwah" starts with Liebezeit's industrial strength funk pattern before winding through dark, echo-chamber ambience and minimalist drone (while never letting you forget those drums), the detours seem a lot less harrowing. The shorter songs, like the gray, faintly ominous "Paperhouse" or the flawless funk and dark impressionism on "Mushroom", are merely smaller pieces of the band's most exotic pie.
The following year's Ege Bamyasi drops the haze and hits with a sharp pang from the get-go. Often described as the "tense" Can album, Ege Bamyasi is actually the band at its most focused, bolstered in part by the surprisingly good performance of the single "Spoon". The proto synth-pop (or synth-rock) song was used as the theme to a popular German television show, and made enough money for the band that they could afford a better recording environment and a chance to do justice to their ideas. "Pinch" is reminiscent of concurrent Miles Davis; a tough, dissonant take on rock, always kept sparse enough as to be unsettling. Likewise, "One More Night" was dry and efficient in the extreme, though, musically having more in common with Steve Reich than Davis. "Sing Swan Song" was Can's best ballad, while "Vitamin C" is still the best funk ever to come out of Europe. The band would refine their sound even more in coming years, but they wouldn't really ever get better than this.


On his latest solo album, the breathless saxophone playing of Colin Stetson locks into familiar, albeit vastly impressive and evocative forms.

All This I Do for Glory

The music of experimental saxophonist Colin Stetson gives you an unusually heightened awareness that you are hearing a human body laboring to produce sound. That is human breath passing its way through a metal tube, yup; those are fingers clacking on different keys to manipulate tone and pitch. This hyper-awareness can feel like a distraction: If you’ve ever been deeply stoned in mixed company, focusing more on the moving mouth of your interlocutor than the emerging words, Stetson’s music might summon an uncomfortable déjà vu. But that palpable strain is in some ways the implicit subject of his art: Any interview or feature on Stetson eventually mentions his circular breathing technique, the Herculean way he keeps forcing air into the body of his saxophone to keep his music going. His album and song titles, too, often evoke struggle on an epic scale—New History Warfare, “Hunted” and “Brute” and “This Bed of Shattered Bone.”
His latest album is called All This I Do for Glory, and the six compositions on it survey the same blasted, rocky terrain. Stetson has his approach: You either know everything about him and the demanding way he makes his music going in, or you have your mind blown by it on first contact. His saxophone playing has reshaped people’s ideas of what the instrument can sound like, how it can be played, and how it can be used, and his trio of records,* New History Warfare,* is thus far his defining statement.
All This I Do for Glory, by contrast, doesn’t offer a single new idea during its runtime—it’s easy to get greedy with a fearless and inventive artist and hope they stay fearless and inventive forever. Glory instead settles into grooves and revisit territories. Stetson plies us with all his best techniques—his irradiated drones emerging from his bass saxophone are like Hans Zimmer film cues all by themselves, capable of shattering bedrock. He sings through the mouthpiece of his saxophone while blowing, producing a disembodied ghost vocalist crying an eerie melodic counterpoint to his own melody. The “thump” and “click” of percussion coming from the keypads slapping the body of his horn are so tactile it feels like he is drumming his fingers directly on the grooves of your brain.
He does all of this, in fact, in the first few minutes of the opening title track, which gives the album a strange “Stetson’s Greatest Hits” feeling. Even the dirge-like processional feels like a slight echo of something he’s played before. The differences here are in degrees—the whiplash percussive crack of “Like Wolves on the Fold” is one of the most violent sounds he’s ever made, and the track itself feels inexorable, even nightmarish, in its cacophony, like a village raid witnessed through a hole in the wall. “Between Water and Wind” is almost pure percussion, and the thumpa-thumpa-thumpa pulse of “In the Clinches” feels physically violent. These moments, when his music toes the line separating music from pure texture, are some of the most vivid.
But he's dug into all of these trenches before, and at times the forward march feels like a slog. There is a whiff of old-school machismo to what Stetson does—detectable in the steel-grey imagery of his titles, the muscular drive of his pieces, and, not least, the sight of his ropey arms wrangling sound from the hulking tank of an instrument he keeps strapped to his body. So when his sax flutters skyward on “Spindrift,” it is a relief. It is one of the only pieces that feels touched by warmth and sunlight, and its redemptive spirit breaks from the more serious stuff, a flower picked and studied before the slaughter resumes.
If you come away from Glory nursing suspicions that Stetson’s thrilling work might have grown a little one-note, try his reverent remake of Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony from last year, in which he enlisted a small ensemble including the violinist Sarah Neufeld and the virtuosic drummer Greg Fox to tackle the most fearsome territory of all: unabashed sentiment; or his muted full-length collaboration with Neufeld, Never Were the Way She Was, from 2015. Both of those albums bring Stetson’s well-developed ideas into thrilling contact with newer, unfamiliar ones. The repetitive throb of minimalist music is exceptionally good at taking the shape of whatever it comes into contact with. Maybe this is why he’s more inspired when he strays away from his intensely individualist solo albums—each an imposing continent of hands and breath—and instead soaks up energies with others.


But You Caint Use My Phone is a mixtape in the true hip-hop sense, as it largely finds Erykah Badu putting her spin on other artists' songs. Created alongside a young producer and fellow Dallas denizen named Zach Witness in just 12 days, and featuring a guest spot from André 3000, the tape feels off-the-cuff, yet also steeped in history and wisdom.

But You Caint Use My Phone

When Erykah Badu found out that her friend and collaborator J Dilla passed away in February 2006, her mind reeled. The producer was just 32, felled by a rare blood disease that clogged his body with clots and a case of lupus that caused his immune system to go haywire. Badu thought of a story Dilla's mother told her about her son's dying days, when she would find him having conversations with an unseen companion. One time, when she asked him who he was talking to, he said it was Ol' Dirty Bastard, who had died in 2004. As Badu recounted years later, Dilla explained to his mom: “He was telling me what bus to get on when I cross over. He said, ‘Don’t get on the red bus, get on the white bus. The red bus looks fun, but that’s not the one.’” That memory inspired Badu to write a song called "Telephone", which starts: "Telephone, it's Ol' Dirty/ He wants to give you directions home/ Said it won't be too long."
"Telephone" originally appeared on Badu's 2008 album New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) and it's reprised in chopped-and-screwed form as a tribute to another late rap producer, DJ Screw, on the singer's new mixtape, But You Caint Use My Phone. For the 44-year-old ankh-worshipping R&B iconoclast, phones aren't just emoji factories or Candy Crush receptacles—they're mystic devices that can span time and space, heaven and Earth. According to Badu, phones can enhance our ability to communicate deep desires across oceans, but they can also jumble our meaning with static or frustrate with busy signals and voicemail. As an extension of ourselves, phones can be heartbreaking, lustful, smart, dumb, noisy, distracting, powerful.
But You Caint Use My Phone is a mixtape in the true hip-hop sense, as it largely finds Badu putting her spin on other artists' songs. Created alongside a young producer and fellow Dallas denizen named Zach Witness in just 12 days, the tape feels off-the-cuff, yet also steeped in history and wisdom. This paradoxical quality can be found in much of Badu's work over the last two decades as well as on her initial inspiration for this tape, Drake's "Hotline Bling", the SoundCloud loosie-turned-smash about late-night buzzes with a beat taken from Timmy Thomas' 1972 anti-war plea "Why Can't We Live Together". "Hotline Bling" is old and new, R&B and hip-hop, serious and fun—it's a song that might not exist without the pioneering work of Erykah Badu, so it only makes sense for her to reclaim it.
But rather than putting her stamp on a slew of 2015 hits, Badu reaches back across the last 40 years of phone-related pop, patching the Isley Brothers, Usher, Egyptian Lover, and New Edition through her own frequency. As a kid who grew up listening to her family's Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Chaka Khan records before falling in love with hip-hop in the '80s—her first concert was Run-D.M.C. and she began her musical career as a rapper known as MC Apples—Badu has always been ideally positioned between the reverence of classic soul and the irreverence of hip-hop. And on But You Caint Use My Phone she taps into her own language and influence along with everyone else's.
The title of the tape and its blaring opening suite reference her 1997 kiss-off "Tyrone", and the playful "Dial’Afreaq", a remake of the early electro-rap hit "Dial-A-Freak" by Uncle Jamm's Army and the Egyptian Lover, offers a brief history of Baduizm: "'On & On' and Mama's Gun/ Underwater ill motherfucker from the other sun." Further referential depth comes courtesy of producer Witness, a one-time child turntable prodigy who was a toddler when Badu started her career. He first came to the singer's attention through his remix of "On & On", and he melds his star's offbeat spontaneity and cosmic funk with a sleek SoundCloud-ready sheen. Another relatively unknown new artist Badu brought on for the project, rapper ItsRoutine, doesn't come off as well. His two Drake-impersonating verses ("Erykah on my hotline," he misdirects) are bizarrely, well, phoney—annoying prank calls on what should be a highly protected line.
Badu, a self-described "analog girl in a digital world," has a clear fondness for old-school, pre-cell models with buttons that pushed and dials that turned. It's a nostalgic stance from someone who became famous a decade before the introduction of the iPhone, but it can also be convincing. "Phone Down" has Badu pleading for someone to disconnect from the grid and plug into real life, but the track's sinister synths and her melancholy delivery suggest that she knows it's probably too late.
And yet. The mixtape's final track, a revamp of the Todd Rundgren/Isley Brothers '70s hit "Hello It's Me", features André 3000—aka the father of Badu's only son, Seven—leaving his phone on the table in an effort to find some clarity, and it works. In the late '90s, Badu and Dre were a much-celebrated hip-hop couple, a model of black enlightenment and creativity. They broke up after a few years but remained close, and André famously apologized to Badu's mother on OutKast's "Ms. Jackson", promising his commitment to fatherhood: "Know that everything's cool/ And yes, I will be present on the first day of school, and graduation." And as Seven turned 18 last month, his parents are still talking, still figuring things out, still collaborating on art. As their duet fades out here, both voices come together, and the conversation keeps going.


Prophecy is a live record capturing a 1964 performance by free-jazz pioneer Albert Ayler, one month after his epoch-defining Spiritual Unity. His trio crackles with life here, seemingly aware that they were ushering in a new era.

Bells/Prophecy

Albert Ayler’s music was defined by its excesses. He played tenor saxophone with too much vibrato and too much feeling, outlining melodies that were too simple and too catchy before descending into skronky noise that was too harsh and too unsettling. Where jazz had been defined by its relationship to form, with musicians practicing their craft within established idioms or inching beyond them to create something else, Ayler’s music was too amorphous for any container, a volatile liquid churning and splashing and running over and generally making a glorious mess.
Ayler’s epochal studio recordings were made for the tiny ESP-Disk label in 1964 and '65. The first released was Spiritual Unity, and it was immediately recognized by those who heard it as a landmark. Five years earlier, saxophonist Ornette Coleman had reconfigured his group so that it no longer contained a piano, the first crack in the fissure that would soon become free jazz. By de-emphasizing chord changes, which provide the harmonic foundation for improvisation that had defined jazz since its inception, Coleman opened the music to new possibilities but also created confusion: If you could play virtually anything when you soloed, what made one player or one composition better than another?
On his early recordings, working with the trio of bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray, Ayler helped clarify the answer to that question. The general shape of Prophecy, a live record capturing a date in June 1964 and reissued here in expanded form, hews very closely to that of Spiritual Unity, which was recorded in the studio one month later. Ayler’s trio begins a given piece by playing one of the sing-song melodies that were pouring out of him during this period, melodies often based on simple folk songs from Western Europe. These fragments are so simple and memorable, in fact, that they are pretty much the definition of what we would now call earworms, the kind of tunes you might hear a five-year-old humming—think "Patty Cake" or "The ABC Song"— or else melodramatic march songs, like Ayler’s "Spirits Rejoice," based on the French national anthem "La Marseillaise." Much of the tension in Ayler’s early work comes in waiting for these theme statements to splinter and fall apart and be pulled into unrecognizable shapes. Once that happens, beauty clashes with ugliness, lines between joy and mourning dissolve, and the music becomes a torrent of undifferentiated emotion.
Despite his music’s structural freedom, technique was essential to Ayler’s art. He had a booming, bottom-heavy tone reminiscent of the honking sax players who dominated 1940s and '50s R&B, but he could also reach to the shrillest higher registers, and he played with an ultra-wide, quavering vibrato that brought to mind the ecstatic trembling of gospel music. Bassist Gary Peacock alternated droning bowed lines with a spindly single-note attack, and Murray moved drumming away from its timekeeping role and, leaning heavily on his cymbals, into the realm of pure texture. All this comes together here on "Ghosts," Ayler’s definitive piece—he recorded it over and over during his early years, both live and in the studio, finding new possibilities every time he deconstructed its jaunty opening theme. Prophecy presents both the "First Variation" and "Second Variation" (Ayler’s song titles were often confusing, with the same titles sometimes used for different pieces), which both found their way to Spiritual Unity. The trio crackles with life as they present the song here, seemingly aware that they were ushering in a new era.
The original Prophecy consisted of five tunes; this expanded version presents those alongside the rest of the music recorded that evening, which initially appeared on the Holy Ghost box set in 2004. Having it all together in one place makes sense. The other music included on this reissue is the 20-minute piece "Bells," which was recorded live in 1965 and initially released as a one-sided EP. Though they have been paired together on CD for some time now, there’s no particular reason for "Bells" and Prophecy to be considered together, but early Ayler has been re-released and re-packaged steadily in the CD era.
If Prophecy found Ayler at the dawn of his game-changing new sound, "Bells" hinted at where he would go in his middle period, expanding his band and stringing together longer pieces built from smaller parts. (Though presented as a single piece, "Bells" is a number of shorter tunes that flow into each other.) Adding alto saxophonist Charles Tyler and his brother Donald Ayler on trumpet and switching Lewis Worrell for Peacock on bass, "Bells" explores how Ayler’s music worked in an ensemble. In another year he would add strings to his then-current touring band and they would become a bizarre and supremely moving sort of chamber orchestra (the peak recordings of this band can be found on The Complete Greenwich Village Sessions). "Bells" has hints of that development; it’s an essential snapshot of the moment if not quite one of Ayler’s essential releases.
One of the most telling sounds on this release exists outside the music. As "Ghosts (Second Variation)" ends in an impassioned stream of notes from Ayler and moaning vocals from one of his sidemen and he re-states the opening theme, we hear the applause of the audience, which sounds like it’s coming from 10 people tops. It’s true that this is Ayler at the start of his career, but it hints at the lonely road walked by an artist who sees the world differently. Ayler had a huge raft of great music ahead of him, but also a lot of heartache.