This was the year of sliding doors as live venues reopened from the coronavirus pandemic, when Béyonce and Drake almost single-handedly salvaged the safe spaces and sweaty traces of house music, and where Latin figures from Bad Bunny and Rosalía to Lucrecia Dalt and Mabe Fratti stretched out at the experimental borders of pop. This was the year of the bass clarinet and Dutch gabber, of sticky and sultry tarraxinha swagger, where Krzysztof Kieślowski and The Double Life of Veronique met the humble recorder, of slender saenghwang pipes for milky boys and yanggeum hammered dulcimer odes to the lighthouse at Trwyn Du. It was the year of Midnights and Boat Songs and the Preacher’s Daughter, of Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, of CAPRISONGS and Aethiopes and everything perfect is already here. It was a year of soul insurgency and sweet synergy, of metallophones and visceral drones, where the centres of jazz and ambient and other forms seemed more gloriously far-flung. A year which opened with the rise of Dawn FM ended as artists from SZA and Little Simz to Slikback, Sauce Walka, and Skee Mask made last-gasp bids for critical acclaim. Big Thief unleashed their inner dragon and Zoh Amba came down from the Appalachian Mountains, and Culturedarm caps a calendar of weekly roundups with this list of some of the best albums of 2022.
‘I’ve got a feeling just out of reach, it’s a feeling that won’t go away’ sing the tremulously dovetailing voices of Ashley Paul and Otto Willberg, an apt introduction to an album where melody seems to linger on the tips of one’s fingers while sense and contingence teeter just out of frame. Through thickets and plumes of fog using a plangent yet plummy blend of saxophone, clarinet, voice, prepared guitar, and percussion, the multi-instrumentalist Paul renders themes of escape and restraint in the company of the double bassist Willberg and bass clarinetist Yoni Silver, for a scrapbook of smudged jazz on Orange Milk Records which was winsomely described as like Joan La Barbara on methadone.
Atte Elias Kantonen – POP 6 SUSURRUS
Guided by the paradox of an anxious mind, Atte Elias Kantonen bubbles and toils on his first for the Slovakian label Mappa Editions. If the album opener ‘Main Character’ would seem to herald an extended frolic, from the magick-infused ‘Sheet Musick’ on POP 6 SUSURRUS applies pinpoint sound design in a way that feels both forlorn and apprehensive. With surgical precision Kantonen conjures the sounds and atmospheres of the private bathroom, like tweezers, toothbrushes, gargling throats and swirling sinks, but not without a sense of warmth, like Sung Tongs at its most wistful. ‘Had A Thought Once’ introduces pitch-shifted vocals, wantonly stacking debris on the contours of ‘Rhubarb’ by Aphex Twin, while more acrid than labelmates Andrew Oda and Nighte, the closer ‘You’re A Fairy’ sounds more far-flung still, handling the clutter of more outré contemporaries like the Hausu Mountain stalwarts Fire-Toolz and RXM Reality like submerged relics.
Battle Trance – Green of Winter
The culmination of nineteen days of rigorous rehearsal in southern Vermont plus a decade’s worth of compositional study under the Harmonic Experience author W. A. Mathieu, this year America’s self-styled favourite tenor saxophone quartet returned to complete their trilogy on New Amsterdam Records. Following their work on Palace of Wind and Blade of Love, as Battle Trance the foursome of Travis Laplante, Patrick Breiner, Matt Nelson, and Jeremy Viner augment their focus on tonal harmony, melody, and counterpoint with skronking swirls and breathy lulls as Green of Winter reaches a climax. Like whirlpools and river rapids rushing downstream or creeks and rivulets finding their way ineluctably seaward, the record resolves in short choral motifs as the tenor quartet explore every inch of their instrument.
Big Thief – Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You
Between the Rocky Mountains and Upstate New York, sweltering Tucson and the crevices of Topanga Canyon, shadowed by crackling fires and train whistles and fortified by ritualistic dips in ice-cold creeks, on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You the indie beacons Big Thief stirred out of their shell for a freewheeling and kaleidoscopic double album. Full of supple melodies and a captivating sense of sprawl, the band deal with certainties sure as the tide, celebrate the little things, and mull over the bolting horses and crooked courses of modern living.
Hip Hop: Mmaso by Ecko Bazz, Ramona Park Broke My Heart by Vince Staples, Nothing To Declare by 700 BLISS, I Told Bessie by E L U C I D, Cold Cuts by Wiki & Subjxct 5, His Happiness Shall Come First Even Though We Are Suffering by Backxwash, while on Tuqoos from the heart of Palestine the producer Julmud bends space and time, sculpting dense basslines and bittersweet melodies in a bid to subvert confinement.
In a year which saw so many attempts to recuperate the story of dance music, Björk’s aim was typically discrete. With references to A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes, calling for unity amid the throng and clamour over six bass clarinets and beats from DJ Kasimyn, her tenth album Fossora arrived to recalibrate gabber almost thirty years on from its Rotterdam peak. Crunchier kicks and a plethora of woodwinds and strings made for a fleshier biosphere. On ‘Ancestress’ she tallied with familiar collaborators James Merry and Andrew Thomas Huang, her son Sindri, and the Siggi String Quartet for a ritual trek across an Icelandic valley by way of tribute to the foibles and idiosyncrasies of her mother, ‘Sorrowful Soil’ with the Hamrahlíðarkórinn managed plangent syllabistic choralism with unusual dexterity and grace, while the beckoning screams of ‘Troll-Gabba’ sounded like rumpnissar and vildvittror from the eighties childhood fantasy Ronja Rövardotter. Meanwhile on ‘Ovule’ through the fanfare of retreating horns, processed timpani drums, and a subterranean bass squelch Björk steadied the glass submersible of a romantic relationship.
Serenading the Greek gods through guitar loops and a specious sixties croon, Bobby Would descends swampiest Styx on his first for Kashual Plastik. Grungy and leftfield with a touch of Bobby Darin or Roy Orbison, submerged surf pop melodies ripple and then glide with an angular descent over woozy, slowed-down motorik beats. The result is something scuzzy and lowbrow, deliciously old school, and conceptually complete, as Would turns the role of psychopomp into a musical genre.
A doleful interpretation of the dying ballad of Billy Strayhorn, who was suffering from terminal cancer as he completed ‘Blood Count’ from the confines of a hospital bed, introduced Trio of Trios by Charles Lloyd, the visionary saxophonist who describes his music as ‘having danced on many shores’. Three records for Blue Note found his tenor in fine fettle alongside Bill Frisell and Thomas Morgan, Anthony Wilson and Gerald Clayton, and the guitarist Julian Lage and virtuosic tabla player Zakir Hussain. Taking cues from the ocean before blowing into the bows on desolation on the roving finale Sacred Thread, this was pensive and lyrical music with a devotional spirit, from billowing blues and Latin grooves to the whooping reveries of Hussain, who handles vocals with gusto as Lloyd evokes West African and Hindustani classical music on tracks like ‘Kuti’, ‘Tales of Rumi’, and the briskly meditative ‘Nachekita’s Lament’.
Following on from Ku Mwezi, his debut extended play, which offered a raucous pan-African blend of gqom, kuduro, and trap-influenced Afrohouse mutations while featuring the Egyptian underground star and mahraganat innovator Yumis on the title track, on Makila the Hakuna Kulala and Nyege Nyege Tapes in-house producer Chrisman slows things down a little, tackling skeletal rhythms and electrified likembé melodies within the sticky, sultry confines of the tarraxinha dance. Rickety bells shape the space over a bed of low-end kicks and droning, stomach-churning sub-bass.
Jazz: Pacifica Koral Reef by Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Kaiser, and Alex Varty, Regrowth by Kalia Vandever, Horizons by Jasmine Myra, A Better Ghost by Jeremy Cunningham, Dustin Laurenzi, and Paul Bryan, Every Motherfucker Is Your Brother by Oort Smog, A Woman With A Purple Wig by the Eri Yamamoto Trio, while the percussionist Günter Baby Sommer, staunch veteran of the European free jazz scene, and the alto and soprano saxophonist Raymond MacDonald linger like old friends as Sounds, Songs & Other Noises abounds in beguiling rhythms with a roving pastoralism.
GANNA – HomeRaised between Ukraine and Germany, the composer Ganna Gryniva returned to her roots on a trek through the Carpathian Mountains which included spontaneous invitations into private homes and stops with members of the Drevo choir in Poltava and Barvinok Choir in the village of Fasova near Kyiv. The resulting album, titled simply Home, features songs of farewell and impromptu departure, lullabies, odes to motherhood, and paeans to the female spirit, patriotic marches alongside traditional Hutsul folk songs, some of which came to prominence in the streets of Ukraine and on social media during the Euromaidan protests or following the Russian invasion of the country last February. Contributing vocals alongside the music and arrangements, Gryniva heads up an ensemble of old friends and fresh faces which includes Tom Berkmann on upright bass, Mathias Ruppnig on drums, Povel Widestrand on piano, and Musina Ebobissé who rounds out the quintet on tenor saxophone.
Félicia Atkinson – Image Langage
Drawing inspiration from the desert retreats of Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin, the life and death of Sylvia Plath, and the reflexive cinema of Jean-Luc Godard while working from La Becque on the shores of Lake Geneva and the windswept coast of her Normandy home, the French musician Félicia Atkinson explores a world of luminous interiors and reiterating landscapes through wispy vocal fragments and orchestral drones and dubs. Expanding her instrumental palette through sunken horns, fraying strings, treated piano, and swathes of white noise while alternating between short passages in French and English, words gesture while remaining oblique and close textures cultivate the space for creative listening.
With a wind-up, whirligig sense of momentum and an habitual scream which rises from the gorge of the stomach like shredded strings up and out through the throat, the songs of Shunka Ryougen, another smouldering ode to the spring, might sound delirious if it wasn’t for Haru Nemuri’s steely sense of purpose, their sometimes glacial builds, and their composition during the depths of the pandemic which imbues the whole with a certain bucolic restraint. Embodying the artistic ideal of creation through destruction, Nemuri finds proof of life through reckless abandon and the urge to disappear. So following the organ-led opener ‘sanctum sanctorum’, she tears at the diaphanous borders of J-pop as the punk poet with a Derridean consciousness collides hip hop, noise rock, and hardcore through progressive movements and stormily swirling crescendos, reciting a vestigial prayer before bowing to the beauty of life with a clenched fist.
Heavenly – Tragic Tiger’s Sad Meltdown
With the crackle and hiss of an old blues record and a high-pitched caterwaul which lies somewhere between Grouper and Skip James, from the living room of her house in the seaside town of Fremantle in Western Australia surrounded by a small group of friends, Tiger Hutchence-Geldof goes under the name Heavenly for a heartfelt and potent tribute to her sister Peaches. The synthwave reprise to the album standout ‘I Know What You Mean’ places Heavenly on a cosmic plane as if through astral projection, an atmosphere swiftly washed away by the album’s interlude. But the ocean only stirs another swell of keening catharsis.
Experimental Voice: Voz by Dania, Aura by Hatis Noit, in february by Isik Kural, Pripyat by Marina Herlop, Evergreen by Caroline Shaw & Attacca Quartet, Fonetica Amara by Vanessa Amara, while on LIVE A LITTLE in one sitting the guitarist and saxophonist Sam Gendel and the eleven-year-old ingenue Antonia Cytrynowicz recorded a suite of offbeat torch songs which lie somewhere between a daylit Julee Cruise and seasick Blossom Dearie.
Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer – Recordings from the Åland Islands
‘Lush with a gentle, brackish breeze’ is how Jeremiah Chiu recalls the Åland Islands, an archipelago of around 6,500 skerries and islands which lie between Sweden and Finland at the entrance to the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic Sea. After visiting the islands to help set up the Hotel Svala, which would host workshop programmes and artistic retreats, in 2019 the designer and electronic composer and the violist Marta Sofia Honer performed a concert at the Kumlinge Kyrka on Åland, now adding their musical improvisations on the viola, organs, and synthesizers to field recordings and voice memos in the form of a meticulously crafted and briskly evocative postscript.
Following the death of the laptop pioneer and Editions Mego founder Peter Rehberg, the fabled Parisian electroacoustic institute GRM announced that three of its labels would move over to the Shelter Press, home of the publisher Bartolomé Sanson and sound poet Félicia Atkinson. Resuming the Portraits GRM series was the drone minimalist Kali Malone, who composed Living Torch at the institute between 2020 and 2021 before debuting the work at the Radio France Auditorium, stalking the ground between early modern music, American minimalism, and musique concrète, kindling the textural fires which unite the trombone and bass clarinet to Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 modular synth and the boîte à bourdon, an experimental drone box inspired by the shruti box and hand-cranked hurdy-gurdy.
Konjur Collective – Blood In My Eye (A Soul Insurgent Guide)
For their debut album as Konjur Collective, the trio of Bashi Rose, Show Azar, and Jamal Moore were inspired by radical Black politics and the throbbing pulse of their home city of Baltimore. The fiery heart of Blood In My Eye (A Soul Insurgent Guide) traces a day in the life of Jonathan Jackson, who on 7 August 1970 launched an armed invasion of the Marin County Civic Center where Superior Court Judge Harold Haley was presiding over the trial of the San Quentin inmate James McClain. The younger Jackson took five people hostage in an attempt to secure the release of his brother, the activist and revolutionary theorist George Jackson and the Soledad Brothers, with four men including Jackson and Judge Haley killed in the ensuing shootout with police. Furiously free, full of roiling drum patterns as Azar and Moore cauterize and interlace on synthesizers and alto sax, Blood In My Eye (A Soul Insurgent Guide) served as the first release on the Astral Spirits imprint cow: Music, part of the Creative Outlets and Works programme which aims to curate music, publishing, performance, and the visual arts through a Black lens.
Following the smeared samples and whinnying reeds of Strada, on an album of dappled light, optical illusions, and nightswept mystery Laila Sakini draws inspiration from amateur dramatics and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s arthouse darling The Double Life of Veronique with its haunting score by Zbigniew Preisner, attributed to the fictitious composer Van den Budenmayer within the film, swapping out the flute and a sense of operatic grandeur to spotlight the humble recorder with all of the scale and tactility of the puppet theatre, no strings attached as a spirit of hope hikes the ceiling and suffuses every wall.
Interpretations and Tributes: Frederic Rzewski: no place to go but around by Lisa Moore, Julius Eastman Vol. 2: Joy Boy by Wild Up, Grey Parrots by Troposphere 7, Philip Glass: Piano Etudes, Book 1 by Vicky Chow, Christian Wolff: A Complete Anthology of Solo and Duo Violin Pieces by String Noise, Elevation by Susanna, while on LeAutoRoiOgraphy the twelve-piece Heroes Are Gang Leaders continue to expand the aural legacy of the poet Amiri Baraka, combining an original composition by James Brandon Lewis devoted to the late author’s wife Amina with excerpts from the play Dutchman and collection of jazz essays Digging as part of a set recorded at the Sons d’hiver festival in the Val-de-Marne.
Laura Cannell – Antiphony of the Trees
Fresh from feral lands, Laura Cannell takes flight on an album which figures the antiphonal call and response of birdsong. Soaring out over the marshes, furrowed fields, and scattered treetops of the fen valley, the composer arms herself with bass, tenor, alto, and double recorders as chordal drones and oscillating tones conjure a minimal chamber music. With a ritual for every season, Cannell rounded out the calendar by unlocking the dormant memories of a 120-year-old East Anglian pipe organ, with more live improvisations from behind the oak and iron doors of St Andrew’s Church in Raveningham, and finally with a collection of Christmas carols alongside her fellow medievalist André Bosman armed with her signature overbow violin.
In three movements that flit seamlessly between past and present, the bassist and improviser Mali Obomsawin blends traditional ballads with contemporary chants, and ancient Indigenous tales with original compositions. Centring learning and legacy within the fiery frames of love and defiance, on ‘Odana’ she traces the voice of her relative Alanis Obomsawin, and at a turn in the album on ‘Pedegwajois’ hands over to an archival recording by the first-language speaker and Odanak storyteller Theophile Panadis. Meanwhile the bristling heart of Sweet Tooth folds an ancient Wabanaki mourning song into the body of a Catholic hymn, translated from Latin into the Abenaki language by an early French Jesuit priest who lived among the Abenaki. Setting the Harrowing of Hell, which tells the story of Jesus’ descent to liberate lost souls at the time between his crucifixion and resurrection, in Obomsawin’s hands the reconstituted free jazz squall is equal parts feverish and recriminatory, with the music video directed by Lokotah Sanborn set inside the thrice-burned Catholic Church of the Odanak First Nation.
Impaired when her left hand was almost amputated in a car accident at the age of seven, for her latest album on New Amsterdam Records the artist Molly Joyce engaged the perspectives of 47 disabled interviewees, ranging from veterans, activists, and pageant models to academics and musicians like JJJJJerome Ellis. Buttressed by the torrents and drones of her vintage toy organ, Joyce received probing and often conflicting answers to questions about weakness, interdependence, and resilience on a piece designed to be listened to alongside a series of open-caption videos.
Elevating the wide intervals and dazzling harmonics of the great trumpeter Woody Shaw, opening up chasms in the rap game alongside AKAI SOLO and the singer-songwriter justmadnice, and breaking cycles of surveillance and violence with a chaos poem recited alongside the Saint Mela singer Wolf Weston, on the crackling centrepiece to Jazz Codes the spoken word artist Moor Mother reaches back beyond the birth of the form to the Fisk Jubilee Singers or to misters Tambo and Bones, under the limelights of Broadway or out there on the Mississippi River, broaching the devious and complex history of the minstrel show. From the cakewalk and the two-step to Scott Joplin or Buddy Bolden with his cornet, brass band, and blues, Moor Mother rekindles the fires of jazz and lays the template for a future rag alongside the dramatic soprano Alya Al-Sultani and trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, still summoning spectres to light up the present.
Juke: Dark Humor by Jana Rush, City Stars by DJ Hank, Audio Assault by Heavee, LSD Lakeshore Drive by Sirr TMO, Good Music Mixtape Vol 2. by J. Albert, BRC2 by Black Rave Culture, and on HiTech the duo of Milf Melly and King Milo combine for a record of slick footwork and rippling ghettotech.
Described as an experiment in immediacy, back in 2020 the Portland-based label Sahel Sounds doubled down on its commitment to the music of the Southern Sahara with its searing blend of psychedelic jams, crackling choral textures, roiling dub rhythms, and boisterous desert blues. Familiar faces like Etran de L’Aïr and the Nigerien techno pioneer Hama plus newcomers from Bounaly to the Wodaabe guitar group Andal Sukabe were invited to record and send short sessions to Sahel Sounds via WhatsApp, with each performance hosted for one month on Bandcamp while all of the proceeds were wired directly to the musicians. On Music from Saharan WhatsApp for the first time Sahel Sounds compiled some of its favourite tracks from the series, starting with the supple guitar of Amaria Hamadalher from the bittersweet folk band Les Filles de Illighadad.
One Small Step – Gol Variations
The tap dancer Janne Eraker, fiddle player Vegar Vårdal, and bassist Roger Arntzen dropped with the click of a heel on the Lisbon-based jazz label Clean Feed Records, as from the depths of the pandemic the unique trio emerged to unveil their debut album Gol Variations. In fact the birth of the record stretches all the way back to the twelfth century and the stave church of Gol from the Norwegian valley region of Hallingdal. With its soaring portals and carved motifs, when the stave church was up for demolition around 1880 it was saved by Fortidsminneforeningen or the National Trust of Norway, one of the first organisations for cultural heritage preservation in the world. Relocated and rebuilt where it still stands today at the heart of the Norsk Folkemuseum on Bygdøy in Oslo, the trio spent a full day recording inside of the church, whose old floorboards emphasise the snapping and cascading physicality of Eraker’s dancing buttressed by the sinewy bass, smacking vocals, and staggered strings of Arntzen and Vårdal.
Gaining momentum following the long-form rhythmic workouts of Quixotism and Hubris, the indomitable guitarist Oren Ambarchi bands together with Joe Talia, Sam Dunscombe, B. J. Cole, Johan Berthling, Chris Abrahams, Julia Reidy, and Jim O’Rourke for the billowing tones and reticulated melodies of Shebang, which summons such disparate references as Albert Marcœur, early Pat Metheny, and Henry Kaiser’s wistful and rollicking It’s A Wonderful Life.
Park Jiha & Roy Claire Potter – To Call Out Into The Night
Recorded at the onset of 2020 for the experimental music programme Late Junction on BBC Radio 3, this year Park Jiha and Roy Claire Potter’s beguiling session received a physical release via Cafe OTO and the Otoroku series, which also issued stellar albums by Ecka Mordecai, Maggie Nicols, and Billy Steiger. Staggered and lilting, To Call Out Into The Night combines Liverpudlian spoken word with traditional Korean instrumentation on the yanggeum, saenghwang, and piri. Waifish melodies and sustained pulses which ring out like alarms serve as a counterbalance to Potter’s lyrical streams, whose subject matter is at once utterly mundane and voyeuristic in a way which conjures trauma through the accumulation of almost negligible details. On ‘Saenghwang for the milky boys’ where Jiha blows in long multiphonics to set the pace for Potter’s words, boys jump carelessly while a woman about to commence a swim gets ready to dive through a sustained squat which ‘looks like supplication’. More piercing, Potter describes the lighthouse at Penmon as ‘like an Everton mint in the Irish Sea’ before recalling her mother wrapped in a long skirt to keep from cold on the beach, ‘her cheek blooming darker but not cut’ as the fog bell sounds every half-minute.
Something Else: Regards/Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer by Matmos, Psychonautic Escapism by The Ephemeron Loop, A Guide to DJ Hobby Horsing 01 by MONIKÉ, World in World by Julia Reidy, Sent from my Telephone by Voice Actor, K E K K A N by Slikback, while taking their name from Jean Dubuffet’s twelve-year-long Hourloupe cycle, on Sleepwalker the musicians and poets Anar Badalov and Frank Menchaca dispel the silence of New Orleans crypts and Moorish reflecting pools with a burnishing warmth, an owlish hoot and a ravenous holler.
As Touch celebrated forty years of fierce resistance to the status and trappings of ‘record label’, the prolific yet never profligate multi-instrumentalist Patrick Shiroishi marked his debut for the renowned audiovisual company with an unusual approach to the genre of field recording. From a couple of trips to Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles where several generations of his family are buried, Shiroishi emanates from within the dotted landscape rather than skirting its borders or imposing melodies atop or alongside of an enveloping hum, the stately and plangent sounds of his woodwinds and the quivering and summoning of synths peeking between the rustle of leaves and background oratory for a stirring treatise on stillness and presence.
From the opening bars of ‘Saoko’, with its faintly clattering drums, distanciated vocals, and scuzzily industrial synths which bear traces of her sometime collaborator Arca while almost sounding like an interpolation of the Yeezus track ‘New Slaves’, it becomes clear that on her third album Rosalía intends to hit different. Toques and other flamenco dramas still serve as the emotional key of the record, inflecting her voice on ‘Candy’ and some of the ballads while finding a home on ‘Bulerías’ amid communal chants and castanets, but on MOTOMAMI brimming with a devil-may-care confidence the artist expands her palette, shredding at the fraying borders of reggaeton, bachata, and avant-garde electropop. ‘Chicken Teriyaki’ details a whirlwind trip through New York City, ‘Sakura’ compares the brief span of fame to the flowering of a cherry blossom with echoes of the musical Evita, while adroitly chosen samples move seamlessly from Wisin and Daddy Yankee to Burial to the Cuban singer Justo Betancourt. The deluxe edition of the album stretches farther still, as Rosalía the street racer reverses over the misdeeds of a former lover, making haste for the club where she embraces the merengue in the spirit of the iconic Dominican accordionist Fefita la Grande.
Silvia Tarozzi & Deborah Walker – Canti di guerra, di lavoro e d’amore
On Canti di guerra, di lavoro e d’amore the improvisational duo of Silvia Tarozzi and Deborah Walker reinterpret the protest songs of mondine rice workers through choral chants, bicycle bells, and the visceral strains of the violin and cello. Mondine or mondariso were seasonal workers in the Po Valley whose protests at the beginning of the twentieth century inspired the emancipation of working class women and partisan resistance fighters during World War II. Adding folk music to their repertoire, Tarozzi and Walker recite this cross-pollination of songs from their youth in rural Emilia with alacrity as well as searing pathos. ‘La lega’ features the Coro delle Mondine di Bentivoglio, a female choir made up of the daughters and granddaughters of mondine workers which has been active since the seventies, while ‘Il bersagliere ha cento penne’ highlights the doleful voice of Ola Obasi Nnanna, introduced by the elegant mbira pluckings of Andrea Rovacchi. Sometimes Walker’s cello provides a caustic undercurrent to the plaintive strains of Tarozzi’s violin and sometimes strings swoop and slide together in winnowing counterpoint. At other times their instruments rub and butt against each other in a physical manifestation of labour, uncouth and rhythmically free-form, while following the purely percussive ‘Meccanica primitiva’ from ‘Dondina’ and the spare ‘La campéna ed San Simòn – Ignoranti senza scuole’ songs gloam with a spectral portent.
Surya Botofasina – Everyone’s Children
From his upbringing at the Sai Anantam Ashram where daily bhajans were led by Alice Coltrane to more recent collaborations with Joey Badass, Dezron Douglas, and Georgia Anne Muldrow, the keyboardist Surya Botofasina brings his unique approach at the intersection of hip hop and jazz to a devotional suite which basks in the sun and skips against the shore, accompanied by Carlos Niño, Mia Doi Todd, Jesse Peterson, and his own mother the acclaimed harpist Radha Botofasina. ‘Sun of Keshava’, the third single from his debut album Everyone’s Children, was written in a reflective mode and dedicated to his son.
Metallophones: The Parable of the Poet by Joel Ross, Chasing the Phantom by Dewa Alit & Gamelan Salukat, More Touch by Patricia Brennan, In These Times by Makaya McCraven, New World by the Martin Fabricius Trio, Glow in the Dark Moon by Tokyo Ambient Collective, while on Cloud Shadows to mark his 80th birthday the composer Daniel Schmidt returns to Recital with poetic lied performed by Gamelan Encinal and Mills Student Ensemble.
The Brother Moves On – $/he Who Feeds You…Owns You
From Johannesburg fronted by Siyabonga Mthembu, who sings lead vocals for Shabaka and the Ancestors and curated last year’s collection of South African improvised music Indaba Is, the six-piece jazz ensemble The Brother Moves On draws inspiration from the words of the revolutionary Thomas Sankara through a set of sweet paeans and screeds in the name of food sovereignty and land rights. ‘Itumeleng Revisited’ interprets a piece by the popular seventies Sowetan fusion band Batsumi, while ‘Hamba The Reprise’ adapts a traditional South African funeral hymn. Named after Brother Mouzone, the besuited and erudite drug enforcer from The Wire, for The Brother Moves On the nine pieces which make up $/he Who Feeds You…Owns You mark the culmination of eight years of live performance, constituting a stirring debut on Native Rebel.
Tyshawn Sorey – The Off-Off Broadway Guide to Synergism
Following the delicate harmonies and swinging melodies of Mesmerism, the album of standards which Tyshawn Sorey released in the summer alongside the bassist Matt Brewer and pianist Aaron Diehl, the drummer returns to the repertoire for something more freewheeling in the form of a three-and-a-half hour live recording from a performance at The Jazz Gallery in New York. Enlisting Russell Hall on the bass to accompany Diehl, while adding the esteemed alto saxophonist Greg Osby to elaborate the trio, The Off-Off Broadway Guide to Synergism finds Sorey leading his group through searing and spontaneous renditions of songs by Fats Waller, Thelonious Monk, and Billy Strayhorn, by Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and McCoy Tyner, and by Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Jimmy Van Heusen, and Johnny Burke. At the heart of the set, ‘Ashes’ draws out the grace notes embedded within Andrew Hill’s ballad, finding Osby in fine fettle on a tune which originally appeared as the opening track of his 2000 album The Invisible Hand.
The Buenos Aires composer Victoria Barca captures sound as a series of digital squiggles and sunny exaltations on her first record for the spry Oregon-based label Moon Glyph. From the synthesized chirrups and loading-screen scrubs of ‘Minyatiri’ and the sniffly introduction to ‘Ni Oro’ to the exuberant choruses of ‘Gran Izo’, which serves as a particular highlight, each track on Burung sounds like the first awakening of the senses, not without the occasional industrial chug or ambient disquiet, as on ‘Lili’ which like the Todd Haynes movie Safe suggests senses surreptitiously open to attack through an enveloping atmosphere of heightened sterility.
Like the triumphal march of truth which comes in fits and starts and whose course is furious and vexed or at best only circumambulatory, on O Life, O Light Vol. 1 alongside the legendary bassist William Parker and percussionist Francisco Mela, the tenor saxophonist and flautist Zoh Amba emerged from the Appalachian Mountains bearing the folk patterns, swirling incantations, and full-throated sonority of Albert Ayler at his peak. It was on Bhakti however that the Tennessee transplant turned closer to home, twisting her tenor through windswept songs of devotion alongside Micah Thomas on the piano, Tyshawn Sorey on drums, and Matt Hollenberg on guitar. In an autumnal profile for The New York Times the artist described the record as her definitive statement to date, with Sorey dubbing her a ‘fearless’ improviser as influences like Frank Wright and David S. Ware along with the skronking spirit of Ayler bubbled up over three tracks for the Hot Springs label Mahakala Music.
