Adding a fresh chapter to an already stellar discography which includes stints with his brothers and the saxophonist Wayne Francis as part of the Afrocentric quartet United Vibrations, born in Londinium while spreading the cosmic fusions of Fela Kuti and Sun Ra, a tumultuous affair with the keyboardist Kamaal Williams, and collaborations with Tom Misch, Soulection, Alfa Mist and Mansur Brown plus production for R&B royalty in Kali Uchis and Kehlani, this week the dexterous drummer Yussef Dayes announces his solo debut. Serving as an ode to black classical music, from New Orleans and the belly of the Mississippi, gumbo pots, Caribbean culture, and African rituals to the defining works of Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Nina Simone, the title track of the upcoming album features Charlie Stacey on piano, Venna on sax, and Alexander Bourt on congas as through swirling eddies of keys and roiling percussion the bass of Rocco Palladino provides the anchor.
Awarded a commission in 2020 from the Brooklyn performing arts bastion Roulette Intermedium and the Jerome Foundation, the composer Cassie Wieland called to mind the pianist Vicky Chow for a half-hour program on the theme of connection. Between existential angst in the form of unspoken fears, creative doubts, and the wallowing feeling of codependency, the stately third album by Jófríður Ákadóttir also served as a family affair, with contributions from her twin sister Ásthildur and longtime collaborators Gyda Valtýsdóttir, Josh Wilkinson, and Shahzad Ismaily. Following the hesitations, fever dreams, and webbed speculations of the first three tracks, on ‘Air Unfolding’ the Icelandic singer-songwriter perforates the stolid ambiance through an anticipatory breath and hopeful whorls of synthesizer.
With a serpentine swagger, tarraxinha stickiness, and twanging overtures to soul and the blues, DJ Danifox expands his signature batida sound on a bubbling and burgeoning set for the Lisbon label Príncipe. Still buzzing from the psychedelic thrill-ride of their debut album Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế on the Berlin label Subtext Recordings, the experimental collective Rắn Cạp Đuôi hunker down at home for a dizzying array of glitch and plunderphonics for the Saigon-based label and dance collective Nhạc Gãy. Gost Zvuk unveil a double-vinyl of futurist smear and computer-generated elegies by the Moscow producer and visual artist Flaty, while Nora Stanley and Benny Bock go the distance on an album of acoustic and electronic extemporizations, with a supporting cast including Jeff Parker, Mark Guiliana, Doug Stuart, CJ Camerieri, and Daphne Chen.
Describing the worst time of his life, the saxophonist and music historian Allen Lowe circled the dark and brayed against the ravenous morning sun, unable to sleep or breathe then suffering from the lingering effects of peripheral neuropathy as he recovered from surgery to remove a cancerous tumour in his sinus. Somehow in the midst of all that he began to compose and the music poured out of him, culminating in two albums either side of a set of Wadi-Sabi ballads by Alan Sondheim for the experimental New York holdout ESP-Disk. Beyond its title and opening track, which wryly refers to kicking the bucket, on In the Dark the veteran jazzman swaps the quiet air of desperation for eloquent and rhapsodic compositions which sometimes break free of their moorings, featuring Ken Peplowski on clarinet, Aaron Johnson on clarinet and alto saxophone, and Lewis Porter on piano, paying various ode to old Jews, Jelly Roll Morton, The Big Easy, Eric Dolphy, and peasant life through the earthy tones and nubby forms of early Vincent van Gogh.
Meanwhile on America: The Rough Cut the artist diagnoses the failing state of the blues, a form over which he has obsessed for many decades and which he defines for its ‘disinterest in the polite trappings of (primarily but not only white) society’ and ‘implicit rejection of basic tonal, sonic, and harmonic rules’. Getting back to basics, Lowe invokes the Funky Butt Hall of Storyville, the boisterous gyrations of the Holy Rollers, and the attendant whoops and hollers of the Pentecostal church, running through a ragtag blend of jazz, honky-tonk, and gospel, minstrelsy, medicine show irony, and one-chord ruminations which prefigured the blues, culminating on the album closer ‘At a Baptist Meeting’ with saxophone squalls that snatch and chafe towards spiritualism, tethered by rowdy percussion and the brio of live performance recorded from a concert several years ago with the late trumpeter Roswell Rudd.
The latest dispatch from IIKKI, a project based out of Brittany which fosters dialogue between a visual artist and musician, resulting in two physical imprints in the form of a fine art book and LP or CD, finds the Japanese soundscraper Akhira Sano responding to the work of the French photographer David Nissen, described as ‘an atmospheric journey through fog, rain, and fading lights’. Amid the strictures of isolation and a fruitful week at an abandoned monastery, the violinist and composer Elisabeth Klinck and artist Oscar Claus lost track of time and landed in the Spanish Pyrenees where field recordings, sound experiments, and the tender perambulations of friendship led to the eight probing pieces of Picture a Frame. The Arkansas native Kari Faux lets rip on a joyride through the Dirty South, the acclaimed drummer Gerald Cleaver turns beatmaster on an extended homage to the musical culture of the Motor City, and Indigo De Souza wonders when things will get better with a bravura which makes it sound like her day has come.
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Yussef Dayes – ‘Black Classical Music’ (feat. Venna & Charlie Stacey)
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Rắn Cạp Đuôi Collective – ‘What Cherubs’
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Indigo De Souza – ‘You Can Be Mean’
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Cassie Wieland & Vicky Chow – ‘II. Sister’
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Nora Stanley and Benny Bock – ‘Assembling’
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Akhira Sano – ‘I Remember The Place, The Colors’
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Allen Lowe – ‘At a Baptist Meeting’
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