From ‘Old Shep’ and ‘Old King’ to ‘Cracker Jack’ and Campfire Songs with its crackling ode to an aeriform doggy, the small corpus of music about losing a pet has tended to focus on old Caninae, yet the Heligoland vocalist and experimental musician Karen Vogt bears a more feline persuasion. For the second release on Penelope Trappes’ new Nite Hive imprint – the first by a fellow artist following Trappes’ own starkly poised Heavenly Spheres – Vogt carves out through a process of erosion seven tracks from three improvisational sessions which she partook soon after the death of her beloved cat Luis, saying ‘I cried so much during that time. I felt frustrated by my grief, and by how emotional I am when I give myself space to feel. I literally felt like I was waterlogged and weighed down with tears’. Through throbbing synths and vocal loops which string together like choral levitations, on Waterlog which is full of fondness as well as sorrow the sensation of circling the drain becomes both transportive and monumental.
The durational maestro Kali Malone returns to the pipe organ for a more song-like collection of liturgical chants and steeped polyphonies, performing alongside the Ideologic Organ co-founder Stephen O’Malley on the historical meantone tempered pipe organs of Église Saint-Françoise de Lausanne, the Orgelpark in Amsterdam and Malmö Konstmuseum. Composing in fractal patterns with splinterings and other iterations of her harmonic themes, All Life Long marks a shift for Malone who introduces the earthy tones and nubby forms of choir and brass by way of the Macadam Ensemble conducted by Etienne Ferschaud in Nantes, and Anima Brass dug out from The Bunker Studio in New York City, with lyrics pulled from the homo sacer philosopher Giorgio Agamben and the symbolist poet and critic Arthur Symons.
On the threshold of the sacred and the secular, in February of 1971 the pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane released Journey in Satchidananda before embarking on a live performance at Carnegie Hall as part of a benefit for her favourite swami’s Integral Yoga Institute. The singer-songwriter Laura Nyro and The Rascals were also on the bill, while Coltrane was joined by an all-star cast including the saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp, bassists Jimmy Garrison and Cecil McBee, and drummers Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis. Almost implausibly if it weren’t for longstanding concerns around the audio fidelity of such archived sets, Impulse had commissioned a recording of the Carnegie Hall concert at the time but left it unreleased for all of these years, until Hi Hat a jazz label of dubious provenance issued a 28-minute version of ‘Africa’ as a long-play in 2018.
Now as part of a wider celebration of Alice which is set to include appearances by Ravi Coltrane, Michelle Coltrane and Brandee Younger at Birdland in New York, the full Carnegie Hall concert is set for release on Impulse! Records, featuring the title track and the ravishing ‘Shiva-Loka’ from Journey in Satchidananda plus ‘Africa’ and another of her husband’s compositions in the form of ‘Leo’, which was performed by John and the drummer Rashied Ali in the summer of 1966 then recorded shortly before his death in 1967, but only released posthumously in the mid-seventies on Concert in Japan and as an expansion of Interstellar Space.
Elaborating his familiar trio of Jorge Roeder on bass and Dave King on drums through Levon Henry’s winnowing clarinet and the riverrun keys of Patrick Warren and Kris Davis, the guitarist Julian Lage belies the conceit of ‘Nothing Happens Here’, which serves as the penultimate track from his impending Blue Note album. Through pitch-shifted vocals and the arcing descent of a sort of fricative robotic bass, Shabazz Palaces musters a final-days funk as he dabbles in myths of the occult alongside the District of Columbia rapper Japreme Magnetic.
Joel Ross plays vibes with a shimmer but on tracks like the title piece from his latest album nublues a certain queasiness enters the fray, entailing a bit of that old intestinal fortitude. It’s a trial which the dextrous improviser overcomes with aplomb, adding a bit of oomph to his swing on ‘ya know?’ before the final sunset splurge of ‘central park west’, one of two Coltrane covers on a record of ballads and freeform blues which features Immanuel Wilkins on the alto saxophone, Jeremy Corren on piano, Kanoa Mendenhall on bass, Jeremy Dutton on drums and a special guest in the form of the flautist Gabrielle Garo.
Broaching life in the post-pandemic as a weekly jam session between Brooklyn music veterans with a shared penchant for Americana, Southern Gothic and the outsider blues, Zachary Cale, Phil Jacob the voice behind Psychic Lines, Ben ‘Baby’ Copperhead, and Uriah Theriault and John Studer formerly of Woodsy Pride have since flourished as a fully-fledged band, with the instrumental quintet capturing cosmic lightning while the tape was running as Vague Plot on their unbound debut. Woozy yet formidably headstrong, the baritone saxophonist Dave Sewelson and guitarist Ava Mendoza interrupt the torrents and currents of free jazz with a cask of turnip wine whose lyrics stem from the sage mind of William Parker.
And the surrealist blues poet, storyteller and community activist Aja Monet follows up her debut record when the poems do what they do with something between an epilogue and chaser, drawing thematic inspiration from the 1938 text of ‘Kids Who Die’ by the jazz poet and Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes, which decries the old, rich and thoroughly corrupt power brokers of his day who would beat down both figuratively and literally on idealistic young organisers. While Hughes can imagine only a ‘living monument of love’ raised in the hearts of survivors some time after the fact, Monet instead dedicates her poem to those kids who live in the present moment, from refugees and the inhabitants of food desert boroughs to sandcastle builders and rope jumpers and the environmental stalwarts of today, to those kids who still reside somewhere inside of us ‘resting in the dimples of a mirror, stretching through a glance’, and those kids who will in turn survive us, ‘indigo rosebuds or sunflowers risen of landfills, voices made of tire swings and milk crates, stick figures in sand drawn by fallen twigs’.
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Dave Sewelson & Ava Mendoza – ‘Turnip Wine’
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Shabazz Palaces – ‘Myths Of The Occult’ (feat. Japreme Magnetic)
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aja monet – ‘for the kids . . .’
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Julian Lage – ‘Nothing Happens Here’
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