Since her last solo album Black Origami – which musically still feels of the present moment, but factually came out in something of a time that land forgot, way back when in the spring of 2017 – the Indiana composer Jlin produced scores for new dances by the choreographers Wayne McGregor and Kyle Abraham, wrote Perspective for the Chicago-based new music ensemble Third Coast Percussion whose acoustic rendition of the piece was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and subsequently released her own version of Perspective as a mini-album while for sustenance also partaking in pandemic-era fare like remix projects for Steve Lehman, Marie Davidson and Galya Bisengalieva, a duet with the late trailblazer SOPHIE and a live set at The Met Cloisters which drew upon the site’s Romanesque and Gothic architecture, its vaulted ceilings and collection of medieval art.
Stretching and snapping like putty the conventional patterns of footwork, evoking both the lavishness and sensuousness of sixties jazz and soul, the treble of the tabla in Hindustani classical forms and the warped strains of early-nineties intelligent dance music while her twining triplets and waxy polyrhythms continue to cut a swathe through the electronic narratives of the Midwest, her dark and skeletal sound at first seems iterative but shifts and evolves like a Rubik’s Cube with the curve and transparency of a crystal ball, routinely flouting all expectations. Thumbing her nose at loops and samples, her collaborations with Kyle Abraham and Third Coast Percussion pushed Jlin to experiment with organic percussion, the depth of her engagement with contemporary choreography and aspirations in the realm of opera coagulating to make her new album Akoma both a fitting recapitulation and flush with new ideas.
Like the track ‘Speed of Darkness’ which sets a template for the album, Akoma is not short of four-on-the-floor bangers but some such as ‘Summon’ are smothered in a tensile mesh or show a more balletic restraint. ‘Iris’ with its coiling synths is more interested in sci-fi terraforming, and ‘Open Canvas’ lurches forth with a syrupy swagger and the sting of a hornet’s nest. A high school science teacher with a penchant for mathematics, while the sound here is more refined and its alchemies more pure, the eleven tracks of Akoma are never academic but always closely attuned to bodies in motion, with seamless transitions and the dancefloor stretching into view as the logical endpoint.
There are snatches of house and shattered glitchtronics, snippets from movies and video game beat ’em ups, and collaborations with Björk who first contacted Jlin with a view to a track on Fossora, the renowned string ensemble Kronos Quartet and the iconic New York minimalist Philip Glass. Whereas the epigraphs and inspirations on Black Origami included birdsong and Hindi vocals, Baltic folk samples and Resident Evil, on Akoma – a term which signifies the heart in Ghanaian – doumbek and darbuka drums and dancehall riddims segue effortlessly into the drumlines or batteries of a marching band, with its bass and snares. That combination which appears on ‘Challenge (To Be Continued II)’ repeats on ‘Eye Am’ with added chants and shakers. ‘Auset’ has a more all-out techno vibe, while on ‘Sodalite’ with Kronos Quartet the composer suspends stringed instruments like so many spinning plates, never letting the bow complete a glide or scrape until a momentary final flourish plunges us into the plangent sweetness of ‘Grannie’s Cherry Pie’.
‘The Precision Of Infinity’ with Philip Glass proves the final helter skelter ride, the electronic maestro yoking and harrying the limpid piano runs of the New York minimalist as abstract rhythms, vertiginous bass drops, choral coos and moments of four-on-the-floor beat-work send Glass careening with a shapely stagger into the barest bosom of the club, before Jlin blows what feels like an early whistle, leaving the breathless punters rasping for more.
Arthur King provide the soundtrack to another Unknown Movie Night, with Carla Azar, David Ralicke, M.A. Tiesenga, Senon Williams and Peter Walker improvising against the backdrop of Michaël Dudok de Wit’s animated fantasy The Red Turtle, an international co-production between Studio Ghibli and several French companies in which a tousle-haired man becomes shipwrecked on a desert island and meets a giant sea turtle with a bright red shell.
The rigorously de-trained cellist Lori Goldston – whose recent works have sloshed the Salish Sea, struck sparks with her intrepid Pacific Northwest collaborator the trumpeter Greg Kelley, and explored the resonances of a shattered piano some decades after it was pushed out of a helicopter – shows that her instrument is equally capable of elegant restraint and even a quiet euphoria in the company of the pianist Stefan Christoff, with their duo album A Radical Horizon released to coincide with the spring equinox and described fondly as ‘a conversation between friends’.
Adding to a lineage of influential Sindhi musicians which includes his uncle, the famous kafi singer Muhammad Juman, as a youngster Muhammad Talib inherited a tambooro from his father, before studying under the benju master Ghulamu and learning composition from the prolific television, radio and film composer Niaz Ahmed. On his new album for the independent Pakistani label honiunhoni, he plays two experimental instruments, a fretted tambooro of his own making and an electric bulbul, which is a variant of the benju. By adding frets to the long-necked lute and electrifying his keyboard-fitted zither, Talib furnishes resonant drones with flowing melodies and chords while his music abounds in piquant overtones. The ten tracks of Aap ka number hai? – which loosely translates to ‘Is this your number?’ and serves as Talib’s pet phrase or motto – shift seamlessly between original compositions and those of his uncle Ustad Juman, reinterpretations of Sindhi and Balochi standards, plus two popular Pushto songs, with Muhammad Khan on the dholak and Shahid Ali on the harmonium playing accompaniment while the vibrant and ardent city of Karachi provides a steady background hum.
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, the drummers Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis, plus Kumar Kramer on the harmonium and Tulsi Reynolds on the tamboura. 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 the ‘Year of Alice’ – a yearlong celebration of the artist’s work organised by the Verve Label Group in partnership with The John & Alice Coltrane Home, which commenced back in February with a special night of performances by Ravi Coltrane, Michelle Coltrane, Brandee Younger and more at the legendary Birdland venue in New York City – the full Carnegie Hall concert is released 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.
The second in a series of live double albums finds the percussionist Eli Keszler at the eclectic nonprofit venue ALICE in Copenhagen and at last year’s MODE festival, where he and Park Jiha prefaced the likes of Beatrice Dillon, Lucy Railton, Merzbow, Fuj||||||||||ta and Kali Malone, playing behind the slanted limestone facade of The Jewels of Aoyama in Tokyo. The Copenhagen stretch of the album sounds like hollowed-out kindling and a wafting smoke or shamanistic tinkling on ivory or bone, a zither-like drone halfway through the session making for a more elaborate ritual, Keszler’s scurrying percussion ever more sinuous and devious like a lock forcefully jiggled by a skeleton key. The Tokyo side on the other hand evokes an old bazaar or Shinto temple, buffeted by the hubbub of more urbane, contemporary surrounds, a bell chime serving as a top note which attracts percussive plumes and spirals, before the last few sections find Keszler in wind-down mode, with a languishing warmth as the day begins to yank its own curtain, before night falls and the slender activity is offset by a whinnying sound.
‘Talking to the Whisper’ the penultimate track from Julia Holter’s sixth studio album Something in the Room She Moves maintains a steady drone and top line of static electric, which weaves its way between Beth Goodfellow’s shuffling drum pattern and the bounding strides of Devin Hoff’s bass. Together they provide the song with an almost ominous backbeat, which threatens to stalk off into the distance but just about holds its course or finds its way. Perhaps it is a heartbeat or a hand brusquely unbuttoning a blouse or pair of trousers, because ‘Talking to the Whisper’ abounds to my ears in a covert and sometimes despairing amorousness. The track becomes untethered with a flurry of woodwinds following the carnal ‘knowing’ of Holter’s lyrics, and the song is then characterised by this winnowing, fluttering flute before Chris Speed brandishes a bronze and burnished saxophone, imbuing the closing moments of ‘Talking to the Whisper’ with a coarser friction.
Tyla capitalises on the success of ‘Water’ with a stunning album of sultry and salutatory amapiano. The harpist Rhodri Davies gathers some of his favourite musicians and collaborators for a companion piece to his solo album Telyn Rawn, conceived as a formative work of the medieval period with the likes of Laura Cannell, Jem Finer, Ko Ishikawa, Richard Dawson, Pat Thomas and Brìghde Chaimbeul tasked with rediscovering and reinterpreting this imagined repertoire some centuries after the fact, all under the title Relics of the Horsehair Harp, which is inspired by the name the harpist and collector Edward Jones gave to his eighteenth-century manuscript Musical, Poetical, and Historical Relicks of the Welsh Bards and Druids.
Finally it is Cannell who unveils the third instalment of her Lore series, with a song which seems to embody its own take on everything from Indian classical ragas to vaulted hymns and Celtic druidry, taking for its theme the complaisant or ineluctable nature of change, as her overbowed violin plays a wayfaring drone which summons life’s daily slog and the subtle turning of the tides.
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Alice Coltrane – ‘Journey in Satchidananda’ (Live at Carnegie Hall)
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Lori Goldston & Stefan Christoff – ‘Solar in duet’
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Ko Ishikawa – ‘Ama no Hatofune’
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Tyla – ‘ART’
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Julia Holter – ‘Talking to the Whisper’
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