This week the pianist Lisa Moore pays tribute to her longtime mentor Frederic Rzewski, tackling five of his most lyrical pieces of work beginning with a setting of Andrew Marvell’s carpe diem poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’. Hatis Noit figures the stormswept angel of history by way of Paul Klee, Walter Benjamin, and artificial intelligence, while Ashley Paul partners up with Otto Willberg and Yoni Silver for an album of smudged jazz on Orange Milk Records which is winsomely described as like Joan La Barbara on methadone. Swaya blends indie rock and bossa nova, J. Albert spins cool dub with carbonated techno, and Maral and Lara Sarkissian dispel the chaos through shafts of light on the downtempo collaborative single ‘entropy & kindness’.
The visionary saxophonist Charles Lloyd offers 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. His friend and bandleader Duke Ellington debuted the composition at Carnegie Hall before recording the tune a few months later for the tribute album …And His Mother Called Him Bill. For Lloyd, who describes his music as ‘having danced on many shores’, the piece serves as an introduction to Trio of Trios which finds his legendary 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.
Inspired by a partial rewrite of the Turangalîla-Symphonie by Olivier Messiaen, the Trondheim trio I Like To Sleep explore thunderous riffs and seasick grooves for Rune Grammofon, while Ronnie Foster reboots his Hammond B3 organ for a fusion blast on Blue Note Records which marks his first album of new material in a whopping 36 years. From the District of Columbia the trio of Amal, James Bangura, and DJ Nativesun return for their second volume as Black Rave Culture, from Copenhagen the synthesist Sofie Birch imagines the human body as a heliotropic organ equally inclined towards the white moonlight as the pinkish sun, and tracks by Bad Bunny, Horsegirl, and The Koreatown Oddity complete the latest roundup of new music.
Playlists: Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube
* * *
* * *
Black Rave Culture – ‘Something Else’
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
The Koreatown Oddity – ‘Aggro Crag’
* * *
Bad Bunny – ‘Tití Me Preguntó’
* * *
* * *
Maral & Lara Sarkissian – ‘entropy & kindness’
* * *
Sofie Birch – ‘Observatory’ (feat. Nana Pi)
* * *
Lisa Moore – ‘To His Coy Mistress’
* * *
* * *
* * *
