Taking the stage in 2018 for a spontaneous performance in their adopted hometown of New York City, the trio of Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, and Shahzad Ismaily shared an immediate chemistry, a strange alchemy which Aftab has portrayed in aquatic terms as less like a shoal than a school. Seeking to recapture the same sort of energy before it slips away effortlessly downstream, this week the iridescent foragers announced Love in Exile, a suite of songs recorded live with minimal editing featuring Iyer on pianos and electronics and Ismaily on bass and Moog synthesizers while Aftab sings in exquisite Urdu. Expanding thematically on her Grammy Award-winning album Vulture Prince, which drew from Sufi devotionals and odes to unrequited love, Aftab characterises the opening song ‘To Remain/To Return’ as the slow unfolding of a separation anxiety-induced fury, with the jazz innovator Iyer adding ‘I hear Shahzad and myself establishing these haunted cycles, then slowly transforming them, as Arooj glides across like a dark moon’.
Brandon Hocura of Séance Centre continues to sprinkle water on the parched discography of the Palo Alto multi-instrumentalist Jon Iverson, who roomed with Weird Al Yankovic in the seventies and provided the riff to his breakthrough hit ‘My Bologna’ while retaining more discreet aspirations in the vein of Vangelis, Tangerine Dream, and Jean-Michel Jarre. Gradually assembling a home studio out of a converted two-room cottage in Los Osos using one of the first programmable synthesizers, his Teac 4-track reel-to-reel tape recorder, and some of the earliest computer-based equipment including an Alpha Syntauri sound card and the Decillionix DX-1 sampler for the Apple II, three of Iverson’s fledgling electroacoustic compositions featured on his only album of the era, the highly sought after First Collection in collaboration with his friend Tom Walters on mandolin. Following the success of last year’s Many Worlds Interpretation, now Hocura has parsed hours of unreleased material compiled by Iverson from the eighties before handing the vibrant sketches to a group of musicians working in and around Malmö, with the results winsomely described as an amalgamation of American home studio sensibilities with contemporary European kosmische, or a cross between the Montana Badlands of Terrence Malick and Ingmar Bergman’s windswept Fårö isle.
The Ina GRM director Kassel Jaeger returns to the Shelter Press with a seamless blend of micro-editing and asynchronous looping, summoning solar vessels through the limpid tremors of the Cristal Baschet, an instrument once native to musique concrète performers where tuned glass rods are stroked by moist fingertips. Sam Gendel gets sultry and wet on his cover of ‘Anywhere’ by 112 and Lil’ Zane, slinky and soulful on the album closer ‘Water Runs Dry’ by Boyz II Men, troubleshoots early aughts online dating over the best of Aaliyah, and finds the middle ground between crooning All-4-One and Angelo Badalamenti’s cascading Twin Peaks theme as the shapeshifting saxophonist offers a unique take on fin-de-siècle R&B. The Atlanta artist Body Talk grinds hips and twists ankles on his smouldering sophomore effort for 2MR, while the Cairo fixture 3Phaz finds the intersection between bass-heavy club music and the Egyptian street genres of Shaabi and Mahraganat for the Discrepant offshoot Souk.
The composer, clarinetist, and educator Angel Bat Dawid picks up the conversation from Edward O. Bland’s seminal 1959 documentary The Cry of Jazz, adding interludes and other post-production elements to a project that premiered at Hyde Park Jazz Festival in 2019, where Dawid was joined by dancers, visual artists, a four-strong choir, and a 15-piece instrumental ensemble of black musicians from across Chicago’s thriving creative community. CM von Hausswolff and Chandra Shukla issue the second in an ongoing series of international audio diaries, the fruits of nine days in Bali where they recorded at temples, markets, beaches, and even a long-tailed macaque monkey sanctuary with the support of local voices like Dewa Alit and his Gamelan Salukat.
Sharpened from the sprawling double album of vaporous soul and meditative drones which he released last year with recurring collaborator Jah Nada, the Cleveland polymath RA Washington leads Field Tapes In Der Trash alongside the vocalist, lyricist, and fellow Mourning [A] BLKstar member LaToya Kent, whose new record for American Dreams abounds in woozy grooves and a punkish profanity while revelling in the ebullience as well as the ardent longing of youth. Performing as Quintet East, the Finnish bassist Antti Lötjönen heads up a hard-hitting ensemble of Helsinki jazz scenesters including Verneri Pohjola on trumpet, Mikko Innanen on alto and baritone saxophone, Jussi Kannaste on the tenor, and Joonas Riippa on drums. Combining for the second time on We Jazz Records with seven free-flowing compositions boasting a percussive plunk and a sense of sprightly sparseness, the title Circus/Citadel is inspired by the Romanian-born German-language poet Paul Celan. Tha God Fahim tags with Mach-Hommy and Your Old Droog to negotiate rates, as Lido Pimienta, Gerald Cleaver, and the Omar S signees Dastardly Kids pull together the latest roundup of new music.
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Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, and Shahzad Ismaily – ‘To Remain/To Return’
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Tha God Fahim – ‘Let’s Make A Deal’ (feat. Mach-Hommy & Your Old Droog)
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Kassel Jaeger – ‘Barca Solare’
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CM von Hausswolff & Chandra Shukla – ‘Sekala Niskala’
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Jon Iverson meets Prins Emanuel, Golden Ivy, and Inre Kretsen Grupp – ‘Trumpeto’
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Angel Bat Dawid – ‘RECORDARE – Recall the joy’
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