From the first Ayleresque thrum and steeped ritual of ‘Miserere’ to the wailing blues, doleful horns and overlayed piano on ‘Wonderful Words Of Life’ whose wispy middle section soon scrambles to a rapt climax, and from the percussive roils which shake up ‘Inhaling and Exhaling’ to accompany a reading from a book called Solo Gig by the avant-garde guitarist Davey Williams to ‘Ut Queant Laxis’ whose overtures to the didactic hymnal are carried away on the airs of the shakuhachi-like bass flute, a stellar and multi-generational group of players tread a misty line between Gregorian chant and Downtown experimentalism on the full-length Miserere, a quixotic jazz album whose noxious vapours might emanate from a terraced paddy, a spice bazaar or a wine-soaked brasserie whose musty tablecloths are flung out onto the rain-damp street.
The saxophonists Chad Fowler, George Cartwright and Zoh Amba, pianist Chris Parker, bassist Luke Stewart, drummer Steve Hirsh and vocalist Kelley Hurt holed up in Little Rock to connect musical communities as far-flung as Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Washington DC, Minnesota and New York, with Fowler and Amba also airing their spellbinding proclivities as flautists, the Curlew founder Cartwright wielding the electric guitar, and Parker’s intonations adding to the sense of liturgy as they abut or echo Hurt’s coiled calls. Described as an attempt to evoke ‘both desperation and hope in a time rife with strife’, the title ‘Miserere’ which is Latin for ‘have mercy’ refers to the setting of Psalm 51 which was originally composed in the 1630s for exclusive use in the Sistine Chapel during the Tenebrae services of Holy Week. Replete with Gregorian recitations and late-Renaissance polyphonies, the traditional Tenebrae service in the Latin Church took place over three days and was marked by the gradual extinguishing of fifteen candles, then a ‘strepitus’ or great noise which occurred in total darkness.
The guitarist Ava Mendoza and bassist Devin Hoff have circled each other’s musical orbits over the years and become fast friends without ever working together on record. Heading up Mendoza Hoff Revels the duo catch sparks like steel and flint, joined for their debut album Echolocation by Ches Smith on drums and James Brandon Lewis on tenor saxophone. Citing the thrifty punk ethos of Minutemen and the stunning tempo shifts of mid-eighties Black Flag, the harmolodic funk of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time and the saxophone screeds and lurching sprawl of Fun House-era Stooges, the track ‘Diablada’ serves as an encapsulation of the record where the breathless clatter and kaleidoscopic patterns of Smith’s drums and the yearning arc of Lewis’s sax shape and smooth the serrated edges of their twin guitars, on a song which evokes the Andean folk dance performed on the highest plateau of South America.
Named thrice after a Tibetan syllable which means to cut through, for his latest outing as phét phét phét the composer and multi-instrumentalist Jarrett Gilgore opened up byways from his old base in Baltimore to Mexico City, Guatemala City and Caracas. A decade’s worth of careful collaboration comes to fruition on Shimmer, where Gilgore is joined by Gibrán Andrade on drums, I. La Catolica on guitars, bass and other percussion and Mabe Fratti on vocals and cello, whose mouth mantras on the halting declaration of ‘Se Siente Como’ over fraying spirals of synth fittingly capture an air of breathless yet placid anticipation.
For his debut on Nonesuch Records the trumpeter and composer Ambrose Akinmusire rails against the onslaught of the information age, bidding in his own words to ‘create something that’s oriented around open space’. On the album opener ‘Owl Song 1’ his trumpet pushes warily carving fresh furrows into the ground or wafting up into the aether, while the six-string of Bill Frisell rounds corners or turns wafts into plumes as Herlin Riley on drums creates the possibility of movement in space, like a groundsman raking up leaves or a curler sweeping a rock as a means to decrease friction.
On her latest alula, sometimes called a bastard or spurious wing which birds manipulate to create lift and prevent stall at slow speeds or during landing, the saxophonist and vocalist Caroline Davis pays tribute to birds of captivity from the Waldensian ascetics Agnes Franco and Huguette de la Côte who were interrogated for many months before being burned as heretics in the 1320s, to contemporary activists like Jalil Muntaqim, Keith Lamar and Joyce Ann Brown who were repeatedly denied parole or fair trials or were else wrongfully convicted. Playing alongside the bassist Chris Tordini, the drummer Tyshawn Sorey and the turntablist and sampler Val Jeanty, some of the proceeds from Alula: Captivity will go the grassroots organisation Critical Resistance which strives to end the prison industrial complex.
Created in his garage studio during lockdown, on ISOLASHUN the virtuosic Karnatik vocalist Aditya Prakash explores the discrimination and upheaval which elides or otherwise animates life across his two homes, questioning the weight of privilege which informs Indian classical music and the Karnatik tradition, while on ‘XenoF.O.B.’ he examines a history of political rhetoric around immigration to the United States, juxtaposing Lyndon B. Johnson’s remarks upon signing the Immigration Act of 1965 with the incendiary bombast of the Trump presidency.
Weighing the same themes of solitude and confinement, the drummer Mike Reed assembles some of Chicago’s finest improvisers including the poet and spoken word artist Marvin Tate, the cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, and Rob Frye, Cooper Crain and Dan Quinlivan of the Bitchin Bajas for the first installment of a three-album cycle as The Separatist Party, which takes as its cue a New York Times article on ‘The Lonely Death of George Bell’, a 72-year-old hoarder who passed away sequestered inside of his Jackson Heights apartment. Mariah the Scientist splits sides with Young Thug, the violinist Rakhi Singh traces a solo score by Alex Groves on the latest phase from her upcoming full-length Purnima, while trenchant albums by Bad Bunny, Kate Gentile and the New York rapper MIKE complete the latest roundup of best new music.
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Ambrose Akinmusire, Bill Frisell and Herlin Riley – ‘Owl Song 1’
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Mendoza Hoff Revels – ‘Diablada’
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phét phét phét – ‘Se Siente Como’
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Caroline Davis – ‘the promise i made [for Joyce Ann Brown]’
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Mike Reed – ‘Floating With an Intimate Stranger’
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Mariah the Scientist – ‘From A Woman’
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Bad Bunny – ‘ACHO PR’ (feat. Arcángel, De La Ghetto and Ñengo Flow)
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