A few months ago, I found myself at a radio station I had long tuned into yet had never visited in person before, WFMU in Jersey City.

Now I found myself on the other side of the country, standing outside another radio station important so crucial to my aural imagination, waiting at a canary yellow door to enter the studios of KCRW in Santa Monica. The door soon swung open courtesy of one of the station’s new DJ hires, Tana Yonas.

I knew her DJ work and archival fervor from when she began doing things with In Sheeps Clothing. So it’s a thrill to see her continue to rise and have that KCRW platform now. To have her guiding you in the car is a small blessing amidst your LA hell-traffic commute. I’m just psyched to be able to chat with her for an hour about Alice Coltrane for an upcoming radio show focusing on spiritual jazz. Our chat is featured briefly in the show below, but the mix ranges deep and wide.

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Listen back here.

Her first question to me is an astute one, asking me when “enthusiasm shifted to responsibility.” From there, we conducted a far-ranging chat about spiritual jazz and grief and topics. Can’t wait to hear how it fits into her show.

After that conversation, it’s a rare afternoon to not talk about Swamini and her spirit. So we celebrate the afternoon jumping in the warmest waves that the Pacific Ocean proffers for only a few weeks in August.

Sunday afternoon I’m in Leimert Park, the car parked under a mural of Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and John Coltrane. I like how the city lays claim to John with some of these murals.

(Spotted much further west on Washington, a blue mural featuring an oddly bald Eric Dolphy and Coltrane and…???)

A street fair and attendant drum circle are at a full roil outside of Lore, the spacious bookstore in the heart of the neighborhood. Radha Botofasina and I are in conversation tonight. I get to recount the first time we met nearly twelve years ago, when I made the pilgrimage to the ashram and talked to her in the bookshop. I thought I was slick in asking her questions about the ashram, journalistic even in that hushed moment inside the small bookstore on the land. She said aloud: “I feel like I’m being interviewed.” Ten months or so on, I did officially have a long telephone interview with her. In that hour I learned more about Swamini and her vision in one conversation than years of book-reading could ever yield. It would be a decade before I got to translating it all, but it was that day that the seeds for Cosmic Music were first planted.

Radha in turn tells her story about being a “neurotic New Yorker” and escaping from that madness to raise her young son in Sacramento. Trumpeter Roy Campbell Jr. suggested that she check out Alice’s self-published book Monument Eternal, which led the burgeoning journalist to want to write an article about Alice Coltrane’s spirituality. Radha told me that sat in her little bedroom and began to chant Swamini’s name “until the walls began to shake.” She told the story about driving to Woodland Hills for a class at the Vedantic Center, but instead rang the doorbell of Alice’s home, right next door. “Your soul came to the guru,” Swamini reminded her of that many years later.

A few elders from the ashram are present and there’s a tactile spiritual presence in the room. Such an honor to have these people in the community, people who believed in her from the moment they heard her, heard her message, either in the music or in lecture, and leapt with full faith. As I said in one of our conversations, I felt a little bit like the person who first overheard Matthew or Luke talking about Jesus and believed. I never heard Alice play live, never found myself in the same room as her, never studied with her. So I’m in a curious position, at a remove, trying to tell this story of a being I never met in this lifetime.

Radha and a small group perform some of Swamini’s music. Her harp playing brings an incredible presence of beauty and the divine to the space. There’s a perfume to the strings as they quiver the air. My lone lament is that I didn’t record any video footage of one man in the group playing what I think she called a “hand pan” or some such. Somewhere between a tabla and a steel pan, it makes the most heavenly sound with the merest thrum of his thumb. I would have ordered one instantly if I could.

After the talk, some of these elders come talk with me. One woman began to follow Swamini in the late 1970s. She marvels at the book, telling me how Swamini is able to “come forward” in the book. She says the hues of the words are so lovely, adding just enough color. I’m truly honored to hear such a response from them. More than the family, the critics, the jazz wonks who boast about all of their knowledge in their reviews, it’s these words from the ashram members that most hearten me.

During the writing process, I knew I would be able to scale the musical terrain of her life, but there’s a moment about 2/3rds of the way into the book where I realized that Cosmic Music was no longer a jazz biography. I realized I was instead telling a very different story about a profound spiritual awakening, yet I was stuck with the meager tools of music biography to convey this greater message. So to have some of Swamini’s most dedicated students come and say that I conveyed this deeper message was edifying.

One student complimented me for the book’s dedication: “To God.” I am grateful for all of these conversations, with strangers new to the music, devotees who studied with Swamini for decades, young people whose hearts are kindled by the example of Alice Coltrane, and all the other folks I met out west. I hope that the book plays a small part in spreading the eternal message of her music.

I’m barely out of the car when I make a beeline through the parking lot of the Philosophical Research Society to reach the statue. On its back is written: “The Truth that is within thee is within me.” Or, as it’s etched on his front, prostrate before God, before the sun setting over the Hollywood Hills: “Thou Art That.” PRS is the place for me.

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While logistically it was possible to have the plane touch down at LAX one August afternoon and drive to the Blue Note on the Sunset Strip in time for a Tuesday night event, the body, the head, the family (not to mention the luggage), weren’t really going to go for that. So about a week before leaving for a week of book events in Los Angeles, I had to r…

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JA in the AM 5/22/2026

As I said on air, it was “a dream to finally be on WFMU.” Tried a bunch of different doors, street directions, and floors before I found the legendary studio. John Allen and I go waaaay back, to the late ‘90s (when I wound up doing concert promo for a John Fahey/ Revenant concert and John’s band opened one of the nights). Countles…

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I first encountered Canadian guitarist/ composer/ producer Michael Brook via his 1985 debut Hybrid, released on Brian Eno’s classic EG Records imprint. Both Eno and Daniel Lanois’s name on the cover was all the seal of approval I needed, as it sounded a bit like the dark ambience of Eno’s On Land, but with a bit more hoarfrost on the edges. It remains o…

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Part Two of my conversation with Steve Tibbetts. You can read Part One here. As some eagle-eyed readers may have noted, the conversation took place last December. Come January, things got rather warzone-esque in Tibbetts’ hometown of Minneapolis. My intention to ask follow-ups took a backseat to the chaos unfurling on the ground as an occupying force attempted to take over the city. I wanted to ask him more about what it was like during those fraught months, but held off. Since Tibbetts works as an LPN, the execution of another nurse in the community was intense, to say the least.

Paying subscribers will be able to read about some of this behind the paywall.

So you’re kind of studying this thing. And then, did your practice sort of deepened as you were traveling through like, you know, Southeast Asia?

No, no, my practice, I wish I could say it deepened at all. You know, I have no problem with music, I have a lot of confidence in the music I do. I seem to have been born with some sort of natural talent. It’s always been there. Meditation, I’m not that good at. Nonetheless, the best place for really taking a crack at meditation is in solitary retreat. For that, it deepens, after a fashion, in southern Colorado at a retreat facility called Dorje Khyung Dzong. Some of the practices I’ve taken on require solitary retreat, practices where you don’t see anybody for weeks at a time. Do I like it? I’m not crazy about it. But the alternative is worse.

What would you say is your morning meditation? How long are you sitting for?

An hour and a half. It’s still mostly distraction, as I’m sure you know.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we have a nine-year-old. So it’s like, I’m lucky if I get 20 minutes...

Hey, man, that is your meditation. You know? That comes first. I had triplets. I didn’t even want kids, but somebody said, “You don’t want kids? I think it’s the secret to life.” And it was! It was the best thing that ever happened to me. If I want to understand my role in whatever the branch of this tree is or whatever…You should have more.

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I can’t afford it!

Yeah, you can’t afford it, but then you have to, so you find a way.

Solitary retreat is good because my phone is off. I stow it with the retreat masters, Shelia and Dan at DKD. They know it’s a closed retreat. Nobody’s going to knock on my door. There’s nothing to do. I might feel terribly isolated and bored and make a list of things I just have to do when I get home. And I do. After many years, my daughter Miriam knew to ask when I came home, “Dad, can we see your crazy list?” I’d be doing an afternoon session, two weeks into a month of retreat, and be sort of tormented about something that I just had to do when I got back. I’d get up, write my little note, get it off my back, then go back to my session. After a month of solitude I might have a page of absurd musical instructions saying “do the thing with the fifth and have Jim come under and play the relative minor then bring the drums in. Probably two solos.” The crazy list. What was I thinking? I don’t know. You know, get home, unpack, look at it, crumple, wastebasket. “Dad, let’s see your crazy list!”

The kids loved it when I was in retreat, because I was as good as gold for the entire month of December, knowing retreat was coming up. Then I’d disappear to retreat for January. Perfect for that month as well, good as gold. And then living in a serene retreat backwash through February I’d still be amenable, pretty nice to be around, so that’s three months out of a year, it’s worth it. At that time my wife wasn’t working because we had enough money coming in from the Chöying Drolma record to make it possible for her to be a stay-at-home mom.

Was the Chöying Drolma record a commercial success?

It was like catching lightning in a bottle, yeah. So naturally we tried to do it again, always a mistake. We were very lucky the first time.

How did you come to collaborate with Chöying?

I was working in Kathmandu in the south part of the valley in a village called Pharping, a very special spot. I would spend the early part of the evening on the roof of the monastery in Parpang with two translators, Andreas Kretschmar and Eric Schmidt. We’d drink a beer, a big one, a Bintang. One night Andreas said: “Are you ready for a little concert? Let’s go record this nun. Let’s go listen to her sing.” We walked down and there was Chöying Drolma in a shrine room singing. I brought the recording back to Minnesota and added some instruments, just for fun. I was mostly trying to get a software program going, Mark of the Unicorn’s Digital Performer, to see if I could sync up tape and samples. I sent the finished tape to John Diliberto, a writer somewhere in Philadelphia, and Rob Simonds at Rykodisc. Rob called back.

Rykodisc was doing very well then. They had just won a Grammy with David Bowie’s Sound and Vision. Rykodisc was the first company to start bringing out compact discs in the U.S. Other record companies thought, “What is this CD thing? This is a fad.” But then, like ECM, companies realized they’d be able to sell their entire catalog a second time. Rykodisc wanted to do the project with Choying. I called up ECM. I sent it to them and said, “Do you want to do this?” They said, “We’ll get back to you.” A few calls like that. What we call “the long no.”

As a musician you have to deal skillfully with subtle forms of humiliation. It’s just the pavement we’re walking on, right? Then, Rykodisc’s Joe Boyd got in touch and said, “We’ll offer whatever you want for this record within reason: control over the cover, marketing input, a reasonable advance, and we’ll get you out on the road. We’re prepared to offer you the highest possible royalty we can.”

What was it about her that made you want to record it in the first place?

The quality of her voice is astonishing. The only person I’ve heard come as close to singing with a full set of overtones with great depth in the body is Meredith Monk. Meredith, she’s not a large person. But what a voice! Listen to a “Gotham Lullaby” and “Traveling” on Dolmen Music. Chöying and I spoke in person and on the phone and developed a friendship. I said, “We can do this. I can bring you some money, and we can work together and create something.” And she did. She said her dream in life was to create a school for nuns who had been sort of cast aside, women who weren’t allowed to study like the monks.

It’s unbelievable, you’ve traveled in India, so you know that South Asian culture can be one of the most patriarchal in the world. It’s deep-rooted and persistent. That didn’t stop Chöying, she didn’t just walk through these doors, she kicked them down. She did eventually make her school, she built it and staffed it. She also funded a dialysis center. She made housing for a cultural phenomenon in Newari society where, if your son dies, his wife might be cast out into the street. Abandoned. Chöying made a home for these women. So she walked the walk.

What was her first reaction to this music you had made?

I used her voice tracks and made a little recording here, in my studio. I overdubbed guitar and drones. I sent it to her and advised her to set up publishing to work out mechanical royalties, so that money gets to her. As far as the music, I think she was puzzled by it. As soon as we got on the road, she was not puzzled by it. The first gig at the Iron Horse in Northampton was a trip. A bit of a shock. She walks out with Marc and I onto the stage, pin spots lighting up where she’s sitting, little bottles of water, monitor wedges; the whole gigging world I’ve been in since I was 14. For her it was something she’d never been through before. The two nuns she brought with her were absolutely terrified. But after a while, we coalesced, and we turned into a gang of good road dogs. They knew how to set up. They’d help us load in, and they were as good as anybody on the road, any metal band.

I was always struck by the presentation of Chö. It’s not really like a Nonesuch Explorer record that tells you everything. There’s no presentation, not like translations of what she’s singing, or how the collaboration came together.

I love the Nonesuch Explorer series. I listened to every single release. Made tapes, mixtapes of the releases. I didn’t want to do that sort of presentation with Chö. It’s been done. I guess it keeps it from being this documentarian sort of field recording. But I had to proceed with caution. I went to the abbot of the monastery, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, who I’ve known since 1985, and I said, “Is this okay? Do you know what we’re doing? We’re going to make a record. We’re going to put this out in the market. Is that okay?”

He was totally on board. The blowback came from Western acolytes: “How dare you?” That sort of thing. Not surprising. People who have converted to a religion or political party tend to be a little more strident in their approval or disapproval. Nonetheless, we made our own converts on the road. The concerts were very good, good enough so that sometimes I’d have to turn away onstage when I felt like I might cry. I thought that if people saw a tear coming down my cheek, they’d think I manufactured it.

So you feel the second record doesn’t quite capture what you captured the first one?

No. You get lightning in a bottle, you get lucky. You think, “Let’s do it again.”

But you guys were kind of together in the same place making it?

For Selwa, Chöying was onboard a little bit more, talking about what she’d like to hear under her singing. She understood the process more, not surprising since she is about the smartest person I’ve ever met. We would talk about the Tibetan, and how to translate it. We would talk about the order that compositions should appear in. You don’t put a Mahakala liturgy, a protector deity, at the front of the album. That would be like eating your dessert first at a Michelin star restaurant. It would be untoward.

So we began to sequence the music in a way that made more sense. Don’t put the Book of Revelations right after Genesis. It’s not so much that Selwa didn’t work, it’s just that the first one was truly magical. For all of us. Lightning in a bottle. For Marc, Chöying, and me, it was a once in a lifetime thing. Musicians come together as they always do and suddenly realize they’re in the midst of something quite special and greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a cliché, but it does happen. When it does, you have to stand back and respect it.

But trying to make it happen, you know, good luck with that. Or like The Köln Concert, which ECM is flogging right now in its 50th year. You know the story behind that. Look this up on the BBC. It’s called For One Night Only. It’s a great rundown of how it all went down with the promoter, Freda, who booked the concert, and others who were involved. How Jarrett rejected the piano and stalked off the stage. They found another one, they tuned it as best they could. He sits down, starts playing and as she said, “We knew right then that this was something very special.”

For paid subscribers, some Tibbetts tidbits from the frontline this past January:

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All photos courtesy of Steve Tibbetts

When you think Midwest guitar hero who recorded prolifically for the ECM label starting in the 1970s and is seen as a guitar god in the world of jazz, you may be thinking of Missourian Pat Metheny. In the “great man” realm of listening, he tends to eclipse his labelmate, Steve Tibbetts.

In a manner, Minnesotan Steve T…

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In the Fried Archives is ongoing archival series of interviews I conducted over the course of many years with some of my favorite artists. These luminaries range from Grace Jones to Terry Riley, Jane Birkin to Larry Heard, Yasuaki Shimizu to Mark Ernestus. A subscription unlocks access to all of the content.

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This interview stems from a piece at Resident …

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Charles Tyler/Ensemble – Voyage From Jericho

Wow! Usually, the extreme digging diligence of Andreas Vingaard and his Frederiksberg Records yield very intriguing albeit extremely niche reissues. Frederiksberg often put out the most loving packages of music that I don’t always get to spend much quality time with. Andreas follows his muse and whimsy whereve…

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In the Fried Archives is ongoing archival series of interviews I conducted over the course of many years with some of my favorite music subjects. These luminaries range from Grace Jones to Terry Riley, Jane Birkin to Larry Heard, Yasuaki Shimizu to Mark Ernestus. A subscription unlocks access to all of the content.

Subscribe now

One hot LA summer evening in 2014, I fo…

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Back to The Lot for June and this month there were no technical difficulties. (Though this month, the AI didn’t populate the setlist instantly.) These two hours are fairly loose. It was a hot day teetering near a real feel of 100º so veered from torpid to sweaty. I knew that I wanted to pay a little tribute to the recent passings of Sleepy Doug, Bengt B…

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I’m not going to pretend that my schedule has been packed with book tour events (there are none that the publisher is springing for) or a full DJ calendar (it isn’t), but nevertheless I have been busy with a few bits of travel here and there. At the end of April, I trained down to D.C. to have a book talk and spin a few records over the course of two days and then had an afternoon set at Eavesdrop in Greenpoint. My Virgo-ness led me to try and document all of those sets, which I did to the best of my documenting skillset.

Neptune Room (Washington, D.C.)

Much thanks to the homie Michael R. Bernstein, who brought me down to do a book talk and also set up a sweet lil DJ night in D.C. I also got to hit up his shop, HR Records, famous for hosting Kamala Harris when she did a lil dig as VP.

Arnie Lawrence- “Blessed is the Match”
Pharoah Sanders - “Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord”
Phil Cohran - “White Nile”
Brother Ah - “Sekou”
Michael White - “Journey of the Black Star” “The Blessing Song”
Joe Henderson - “Air”
Sun Ra - ??
Phil Musra+Michael Cosmic - “We Love You Malcolm X”
Pharoah Sanders - “Memories of JW Coltrane”
Don Cherry - “Malkauns”
Derf Reklaw - “Olé”
(some selections via Mike B.)
Kirk Lightsey & Rudolph Johnson - “Fresh Air”
Alice Coltrane - “Los Caballos”
Cecil McBee - “Mutima”
Dewey Redman - “Qom”
(a drunken tag team with Mike B. for the last hour of the night)
The Pyramids - “Mogho Naba (King Of Kings)”
Miles Davis - “Prelude”
Phil Ranelin - “Sounds from the Village”
Karma - “Funk de Mambo”
Eddie Harris - “Instant Death”
Weldon Irvine - “Love Your Brother”
Archie Shepp and Horace Parlan - “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”

Eavesdrop 5-2
Saturday afternoon breeziness in Brooklyn…

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La belle mystérieuse Mademoiselle Mabry

Las Sunday, I wrote Pitchfork’s Sunday Review about Miles Davis’ oft-overlooked Filles de Kilimanjaro. I’ll admit I’m a little late to the splendors of Miles’ Second Great Quintet, a group whom Greg Tate likened to quantum mechanics and Amiri Barak called “the all-time classical hydrogen bomb and switchblade band.…

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As an American teenager who hung out with potheads, I had heard plenty of Bob Marley in high school, but I was exhausted by hearing Legend for the umpteenth time at a kegger. But it was a friend at Hogwild Records (still going strong after 40 fuckin’ years!) who got me hooked on dub reggae proper. Hunting for records from Jamaica in South Texas was all but impossible, but my friend helped me navigate that smoky new headspace. Experiencing dub at full volume felt like plunging into a bizarro world…

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Back in 2020, in the cloistered early days of the global pandemic, I received a commission to write liner notes for a reissue of Sonny Rollins’s curiously overlooked 1958 album, Freedom Suite. In honor of the legend’s passing yesterday, I’m posting the text here, with some additional quotes from Gary Bartz, which were cut from the final document.

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Last Friday, after a fair amount of travel this past month, I was back in town and back at the Lot Radio. But, perhaps due in part to The Lot also being on the fairgrounds at Horst Festival in Vilvoorde, Belgium this past weekend, The Lot Radio wasn’t quite back. And so despite being back, there was no outgoing signal emanating from that shipping contai…

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“Thurston Moore just gave us a blurb for your book.”

So announced my UK editor just as Cosmic Music was entering its final stages of prep. Thurston doesn’t need an introduction, so let’s just say that when this news came through, I immediately time-traveled back to the forlorn teenaged ‘90s me stuck in South Texas listening to Evol on repeat and told hi…

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Ten years ago this week. Tears while dancing at Questlove’s impromptu wake/ dance party that night. Memories of seeing him at MSG, kicking Kim K off his stage for not dancing. Thinking to myself that we would have decades to enjoy this man and his music. But things looked very different back in 2015.

It took thumbing through hundreds of pages of a certai…

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In light of today’s announcement, I’m thinking back to a Boards of Canada review I wrote back in 2013. I have quite fond memories of that time. Music writing still existed. And there were print magazines that would splurge on airfare for writers to go and profile artists. I found myself in London not interviewing Boards of Canada, but instead interviewi…

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(This piece originally appeared on Pitchfork in 2016.)

On a spring day in 1964, police in Harlem’s 32nd precinct tried to beat a confession out of two black teenagers for a crime they did not commit. The young men, Wallace Baker and Daniel Hamm, were repeatedly bludgeoned with billy clubs while in custody, beaten with such force that they were taken to a nearby hospital for X-rays.

In an interview at the nearby Friendship Baptist Church a few days after the incident, the 18-year-old Hamm recounted being brutalized in shifts by six to 12 officers over the course of the night, along with the fact that “they got so tired beating us they just came in and started spitting on us.” But even after hours of abuse, the cops weren’t about to allow Hamm out of their grasp to be admitted for treatment, since he was not visibly bleeding. Thinking fast, Hamm reached down to one of the swollen knots on his legs where the blood had clotted beneath his skin.

Those 20 words, spoken by a young man who would unjustly remain in prison for nine years, still land like a cop’s night stick to the skull. And utilizing just that one sentence, composer Steve Reich made one of the most visceral pieces of music of the 20th century. Today marks the 60th anniversary of Come Out, which made its live debut on April 17, 1966.

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