First things first: For any New Yorkers reading this, Cindy Blackman Santana is headlining a stellar Celebrate Brooklyn bill this coming Friday, July 24th — also featuring Patricia Brennan and Lucía — exactly one week before she’s set to release her new album, Coherence.

I’ve been waiting for a record like this from the drummer-bandleader-composer ever since I saw her current band at Birdland a couple years back. I was thrilled by what I heard there — a clear throwback to the early days of jazz-rock fusion that, unlike so many subsequent attempts at recapturing this vibe, retained a real sense of risk. And on Coherence, Santana and her outstanding band — with saxophonist Emilio Modeste, guitarist Aurélien Budynek, bassist Felix Pastorius and keyboardist Zaccai Curtis — crank up and rip exactly as they do onstage. (It’s safe to expect the same at Celebrate Brooklyn, a brief stop-off for Cindy in the midst of a summer tour with her husband’s band, Santana, that runs through August. Modeste, Budynek and Curtis will all be on hand at Prospect Park, along with bassist Benny Rietveld and additional saxist J.D. Allen, her longtime collaborator.)

I was lucky enough to grab some time with Santana on Zoom recently, speaking to her for an upcoming project that I’ll elaborate on soon. But for now, ahead of the album and show, I wanted to share an excerpt of the conversation that focuses mainly on Coherence. Hope you enjoy!

I had the pleasure of seeing your current band at Birdland a couple of summers ago, and I was blown away. I’m excited to hear that the group is captured in its raw state on this record. Was that something you were looking to do on Coherence?
Absolutely. Because the way that the band congeals and just reacts to each other, the way we play the music live, that’s what I wanted to capture. So if that’s the feeling that’s coming across, I’m really happy because that’s what I’m feeling. That was my goal: to capture that live energy.

Your prior album, Give the Drummer Some, was more song-oriented. This seems more like, “Get the band in a room and just let it rip.”
Absolutely, and that’s what most of my records have been. Give the Drummer Some was a departure from that, in a way. This is getting to that but even more. So really capturing the live essence and having everybody’s voice shine through like we do when we’re playing onstage. I wanted that to be captured in not only the performance and the playing, but also in the compositions and the overall input from all the musicians. And I think that we did that.

Also, I really love strings. I was really wanting to capture strings, so there’s some strings on the record too. Obviously we haven’t added strings to our band live, but I wanted to add that element in there, too, because that’s a sound that I love and it’s something I’ve been wanting to add for quite a while. I’ve used string pads, and things like that, but I wanted real strings. So there are a lot of elements in this record that we were able to capture that I’ve been really wanting and desiring to capture for quite some time. I’m really happy with that.

Right, I know the cello player Dave Eggar appears on the album.
Yes, Dave Eggar is playing and what he does is really cool because he’s a cellist and he will layer a bunch of tracks. So I think he used some auxiliary string players in a couple of spots, but mainly what it is, is him layering tracks.

He layered so many. On one piece, he layered, I don’t know, 40 tracks. We even had to cut some down because it was like, “Whoa, this is really thick and what we’re doing is already thick.” So he’s really great because he really hears very well what we’re doing and he adds a lot of stuff, and I’d actually rather have more and then take away what I don’t need rather than not have enough. He does that quite well.

I met him on a project that I did. I was producing and I chose a co-producer, Jack Daley, a bass player who I played with for a long time with Lenny [Kravitz]. We were producing Aurea, a singer from Portugal. She’s like a pop star over there, and we needed strings. So Jack knew Dave and he brought Dave in and he layered the strings so well. And I was like, “Dude, at some point we have to do a project with my music.”

Since you’re talking about the layering of tracks, I would have to assume that at least the basic tracking for this record was just the band playing live. Is that most of what we’re hearing on the record, and then some elements are overdubbed?
All of what you hear with the band is done in the room. The only thing that was done later were the strings, one keyboard part on a song and then maybe a couple of fixes here or there. But basically it was just us in the room playing and that’s why we were able to capture the live feel because that’s what we did. We played like we play a show.

And how about some of the other guest spots, like Carlos, who plays on a few tracks including “The Message Is Love,” and John McLaughlin, who appears on “Guitar Love”?
With Carlos, he was there. John was actually not because he was in London. We wanted him to be there, but he was not able to get here, in Las Vegas, where we were recording. But Carlos was.

Yeah, you can definitely feel that. You mentioned the compositions, and I wanted to discuss your approach to the material. Some of the performances here almost reminded me of the Miles quintet’s version of “Nefertiti,” where the band plays the theme and then the drums are kind of going off against that. It’s not necessarily a solo as much as an ongoing commentary. I’m curious about how you chose to structure these pieces, because I really like how that plays out.
Thank you. That was intentional because “Nefertiti,” that concept on that song is one of my most favorite in the world, the way that everybody’s playing and adding, but it’s never too much because that band is a band of such great musicians that they just weaved in and out. That’s what I was looking for.

Yeah, the track “Soon a Queen” that really has that vibe. Overall, it seems like you’re really interested in taking time with this music. Many of these pieces stretch to six, seven minutes, and you’re really letting this stuff breathe and seeing where it ends up. Was that a priority as well?
Absolutely, because that’s what happens when you’re playing live. And I hear so much music that sounds very stoic today and everything is just on a grid with a certain length. It’s a three-minute song only, ever, and nobody’s stretching out, nobody’s painting outside the lines, nobody’s crossing over into any unknown territory or any experiment. I wanted to get away from that.

Because creativity is what we are born with. My perspective and my view of life and creation is that we all come from the master creator, and that means we have the element of creativity in our DNA. It’s inherent; it’s in us. And so if we’re not using that, then we’re not living up to what we are, what we’re made of. I wanted to make sure that we had that represented and done, and done well, on this record.

And my favorite music is that. I love all music. I love dance stuff; I love all kinds of things. But my favorite music is music that pushes boundaries, music that stretches the envelope, music that is intellectual and so there’s form and there’s structure, but you know how to break the rules in a good way. You know how to go outside the line but still stay in, and that’s what I want my band to portray in any of our journeys.

Amen to all that! That feel is a hallmark of so much classic fusion, too, whether that’s Lifetime, Mahavishnu Orchestra or electric Miles. You mentioned going off the grid and painting outside the lines and I feel like that’s especially true of the drums on this record, which sound absolutely explosive. It’s very rare to hear contemporary records, in any genre, where the drums are really allowed to go off and you feel like you’re actually listening to a live take that hasn’t been chopped up and made “perfect.”
Yeah, and thank you. That’s exactly what I was going for and that’s exactly what I go for.

The ’50s I love; the ’60s going into that early ’70s period where Lifetime erupted, that’s my favorite. So between the end of the ’50s and Lifetime, that’s my absolute favorite section of music in creation. There’s other stuff that I love too, but that is my favorite for my personal taste.

I draw on a lot of those elements, and yet my mom was a classical violinist and she used to take me to all kind of classical concerts when I was young. And so what I liked was the counterpoint and all of the elements that were happening at the same time and happening in different spaces, and that is an influence on me as well. All of that plus other styles and other musics that I also love, those elements are all what I want to put into the music and will continue to put into the music because that’s the direction I want to go in.

What about the compositions here? How did the material come together?
Some of the songs are mine and some of the songs are Aurélien. And then there are some songs that are band compositions, and I wanted the band to help compose because again, I wanted everybody’s voice to be involved. I didn’t want just mine or even just Aurélien’s. I wanted everybody’s voice to really shape and mold what we were doing. And then there are some songs that are covers: “Sanctuary” is a Wayne Shorter piece, “Capri” is a Paolo Rustichelli piece, obviously “Guitar Love” is a John McLaughlin song. “Illumination” is my piece, “Peace Please” is my piece, “Blue Whale is Aurélien’s piece; “Soon a Queen,” Aurélien’s Piece.

“Pulp Fiction” was an idea that I brought in but that everybody contributed to, so I just gave everybody credit for that song and that’s what we did throughout. Even “The Message Is Love” is an idea that I brought in, but I gave everybody credit because everybody added something in their own way and it wouldn’t have been the song that it turned out to be if it weren’t for that particular set of musicians. Everything that Carlos added, everything that Aurélian and Felix and Zaccai and Emilio added, it’s all the composition.

I feel like you’ve done something really smart on this record, which is structure the material just enough to get things moving but not so much much that it stifles the playing.
Thank you, because creativity is the main thing — for us to vibe off of each other, to really expound on the changes or the form or the rhythms that we’re playing and do that in a very band-centric way. And that again was one of the goals.

Do you have a favorite piece on the record or one you felt like you were really super proud of?
I’m proud of all of them; I really am so happy with this record. I definitely love “Illumination” and “Peace Please.” “Soon a Queen" I think is beautiful. It’s such a pretty melody and I love the way everybody plays together. “Pulp Fiction” I’m very happy with because that was really sort of experimental and I like what we got to because it’s a very different piece. It sounds to me like movie music, and I love movie themes. Those are probably among my favorites.

Can you speak a little about the makeup of the band? In some ways it seems like this is kind of like really your ideal group. Having seen it live, it feels like your strengths can come through so well in this and that everyone brings something to it. Emilio, for example, I first heard him playing with Stanley Clarke, and he’s just an amazing, fiery presence in the music. What is it about this group of people that makes this the right vehicle for you?
I think this group is the right vehicle because not only are they all very proficient on their instruments, and we all have differences, but we all have this incredible commonality and vision for the music. Which is creativity, which is vibing together and having reference points that we all love like Miles of the ’60s, Weather Report, all the Jaco stuff, all the Wayne Shorter stuff, Lifetime, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Elvin Jones, Coltrane, McCoy Tyner. There’s just a bunch of stuff that we have as common takeoff points in the music, even avant-garde stuff like Grachan Moncur III and Jackie McLean. There’s stuff that we all like. Lifetime, rock stuff, different things.

And so I think the elements of those are great jumping off points for each of us, but especially for me because I like so many different things. I love jazz. I love classical. I love rock & roll. I love Brazilian music. I love Indian music. There’s just so much stuff that I like and I want to draw from. And this group is very diverse in the Rolodex of music that they have in their portfolio. So we’re able to draw from different things, and that to me is really key. It gives us a lot of different energies to draw from, but some commonalities that are really poignant and necessary for us to move forward in the way that we do.

It’s a familiar lament these days: There’s nowhere to cover Record X. I won’t rehash the collapse — or, if you will, the morphing-beyond-recognition — of the culture-journalism ecosystem, which you have surely read about in a dozen different places. It’s real, of course, and clearly demonstrable. But on the other hand, if I, as someone who writes about music both as a profession and a calling, let this stop me from answering that call, then that’s purely on me.

I did make some effort to pitch a story on Rituals of Shame, the first album in 20 years by Warning, the British doom-metal band led by singer-songwriter Patrick Walker, which is out today on the venerable Relapse label. My pitch went unanswered. Hey, it happens — it’s part of the gig.

In some ways, I’m relieved that no one bit, because in pitching the album, I found myself straining to manufacture a sense of “relevancy” around it. As a music lover, relevancy, the sense that a given artist or release matters to the culture at large, is generally irrelevant to me; as a professional writer trying to land pieces in outlets in exchange for money, though, it’s simply a necessity.

Let me dispense with the notion that the new Warning album matters in any broader sense and say simply that it matters to me, that I believe its arrival ought to be celebrated, and that I think if any of what I have to say about it (in the limited time in which I have to put down these words) resonates, then you should spend some time with it.

A quick primer: Before Rituals of Shame, there were two prior Warning albums, but the second of these, Watching From a Distance, released just shy of 20 years ago, in December 2006, is a special case. Albums become cult classics for all sorts of reasons. Watching From a Distance has attained this status for the best reason, which is that it is an extraordinary work of art. Genres are all good and well, but in the end, I’m always looking for the artist or album so potent that they transcend the ultimately petty matter or whether or not a given listener happens to have an investment in Scene X. Like, say, Demilich’s Nespithe or Abdul Wadud’s By Myself, two of my other all-time-favorite cult classics, Watching From a Distance is one of these.

In pitching it around this spring, I described it as the saddest record I’d ever heard. Is that true? There are probably some other viable candidates (honestly, Ween’s Quebec comes to mind, and before you scoff, sit with tracks like “I Don’t Want It” and “If You Could Save Yourself (You’d Save Us All)”), but yes, I’m sticking by it. No album I know embodies pure despondency more fully than this one. You could describe it as a sort of endless keen, a wallowing that never relents, but as weighty as it is, its expression is far from monochromatic. I love Watching because it transmutes misery into something that feels almost holy. Listening to the tectonically heaving riffs, to Walker’s dolorous, and anguished wail, which captures some kind of timeless existential howl, you trudge through the gloom, but you’re always aware of the beauty buried beneath the pain.

I have no idea what actually inspired this record, but everything you need to know is in the music. Beholding a track like “Footprints” — and especially the glorious denouement of its final two minutes, where Walker’s delivery morphs into something ragged and desperate, his expression of presumably romantic grief taking on the dimension of an epic poem — no further explanation is needed.

Here I am wide open,
Surrendering to your side
I have laid down my armor,
I have no sword at my side

I leave behind me the ruins
Of the fortress I swore to defend
I leave behind me foundations,
I'll leave you a man I'll need you to mend

In the immortal words of David Letterman, I’ll take all of that you got.

How does one go about following that up? Well, for 15 years or so, Walker hasn’t even tried. Instead, he started a new band, 40 Watt Sun, that has made four of the best albums of the 21st century, in any genre. As much as I urge you to acquaint yourself with Warning, these — 2011’s The Inside Room; 2016’s Wider Than the Sky, maybe my favorite of the bunch, though it’s a very close call; 2022’s Perfect Light; and 2024’s Little Weight — get my highest possible recommendation. As I put it in a brief 2021 Rolling Stone write-up on Perfect Light:

Since 2009, across two excellent albums by his current band 40 Watt Sun — named for a lyric by his favorite band, neo-prog heroes Marillion — [Walker has] experimented with just how many of the superficial trappings of [doom metal] he can shed while retaining the same emotional gravity. Now, with “The Spaces in Between” (the lead single from the band’s upcoming fourth album, Perfect Light, due in January) we have a definitive answer: pretty much all of them.

I could go on and on about 40 Watt Sun (and I have in the past, as have other writers I admire, including Ron Ben-Tovim, who ran a rare, in-depth interview with Walker back in 2019 on his essential Machine Music site), but for now, just go to the source, and see the band, or its current solo-acoustic incarnation (which has brought me to tears during two separate live encounters in Brooklyn within the past year), anytime you get the chance.

So yes, now, after around a decade of sporadic live appearances focused on the old material, we have a new Warning album. To cut to the chase, this is not the same Patrick Walker of 2006 — crazed with grief, pushing his voice and emotions to feral extremes. As I hear it, this is a less desperate, more assured Walker, infusing Warning with all the wisdom and patient craftsmanship of 40 Watt Sun, and arriving at some new peace within the upheaval.

He’s still concerned with charting the contours of grief and longing (the track below, “Stations,” makes reference to a “vast and aching hunger”), but he seems less racked by it here, more able to sort of stand apart and observe it, appreciating its beauty, its peaks-and-valleys progression, while weathering its harshness. (“Whatever you leave me, you leave me alive,” he wails at the end of “Stations,” with more than a hint of triumph.) His songwriting has grown more sophisticated, so that he can now express in the contours of the riffs, and their lovely and unhurried build, what he formerly had to wrench into being with the raw expulsions of his voice.

I’m still getting to know Rituals of Shame and don’t pretend to have my head or my heart all the way around it yet. I’ve been living with Watching From a Distance for a decade or more (I think I discovered it around the time I first heard 40 Watt), and it’s taken that long for it to really sink in.

But here’s the thing: Patrick Walker is a master songwriter, one of the greatest alive, in my estimation. He doesn’t phone anything in. Each new release tells us something new. There’s nothing on Watching From a Distance that sounds anything like much of what we hear on Rituals of Shame — nor does the new album feel quite like a continuation of 40 Watt. Take a track like “Night Comes Down,” for example, which contains some of Walker’s most otherworldly riffing to date; or “Landing Light,” with its heart-wrenching melodic resolutions at the end of each verse.

What is familiar is the sting of the music, the way Walker’s verses bend almost magnetically toward some axis of hurt, either a throb of melancholy or a twinge of agony (he lets that old Warning snarl loose in select moments on the title track), and the way the songs build methodically toward torrential payoffs in their home stretches, a hallmark of all of Walker’s work.

Overall, though, this is a new chapter, something special and distinct. And like all of Patrick Walker’s records, it’s something to be lived with. These songs are patiently hewn, lovingly brought forth, justifying the 20-year wait. You don’t drink down a record like Rituals of Shame all at once; you let it seep in. In a time when we’re all drenched in absurdity, in danger of going completely numb, it’s a patient infusion, another work to live with and treasure. Take it for the gift and salve that it is.

[Note: all of the photos in this post were taken at Sunday night’s Rush tour opener — most by me, and one by a friendly bystander.]

It was sometime during “Time Stand Still” that I felt myself tearing up.

There’s one line in the song — one of the catchiest and most gripping from Rush’s synth-heavy mid-to-late-’80s era — that always gets me: “Summer’s going fast / Nights growing colder / Children growing up / Old friends growing older,” sung with wrenching poignancy by Geddy Lee over a dramatic uptempo pop-rock groove.

On Sunday, it hit me even harder than usual because I was hearing Lee belt it out live while sitting on the floor of the Forum in Inglewood, CA, next to one of my oldest friends: Adam Galblum, a superb musician and educator who flew in from Kansas City to meet me for Rush’s tour kickoff and first show in 11 years. (Adam was the first one to hip me to Rush around the time we were in 7th grade, roughly 35 years back, so when I learned I would have a plus-one for the show, I knew he would be my first call.)

There was also the fact that accompanying this song — in which Neil Peart, Rush’s late drummer-lyricist, reflected on the desire to freeze time as it speeds relentlessly by — was an animated montage of various Peart likenesses. If I’m recalling correctly, these included one rendered as a constellation and another as a carving in a rock face, glimpsed as a rider-less motorcycle zoomed around a bend in a hilly Southwestern-style landscape, evoking Peart’s love for cruising the open road on two wheels. It was one of a handful of songs in the set that explicitly honored the role of Peart, who died of brain cancer in January 2020, not just as Rush’s sui generis rhythmic dynamo but also its resident philosopher.

As it happened, reckoning with aging and loss, and the mixture of gratitude and regret we feel as the years pass, was a core theme of Peart’s. “Time Stand Still,” which featured a very welcome live cameo from its original backing vocalist, Aimee Mann, showed up during the second set of the night, along with “The Garden,” a lovely ballad that ended up being the closing song on Rush’s final album, 2012’s Clockwork Angels, where Peart wrote:

The measure of a life is a measure of love and respect
So hard to earn, so easily burned
In the fullness of time
A garden to nurture and protect

In the first set, meanwhile, came the arresting “Bravado,” about the tolls our personal quests take on us, with its stoic refrain, “We will pay the price / But we will not count the cost.”

These selections, and the band’s conviction in delivering them, reminded you that Neil Peart took his twin creative disciplines as seriously as anyone in his medium ever has. He awed us on his instrument with his rigorously plotted feats of imagination — last night, as his voice resounded through the arena via an archival recording in which he talked about how he always longed to set off on great adventures but with meticulous preparation, armed with a “well-packed suitcase,” I couldn’t help but think of the gamechanging climber Alex Honnold, who rehearses every beat of his spectacular ascents so that he can inhabit them fully in the moment. Likewise, as a lyricist, he always showed up with something, a scenario, an observation, a reflection, both to entertain and to guide the listener toward the big questions.

Last night, during a mic break, Lee remarked on how Peart’s lyrics tend to ripen with age, only seeming more profound with time, a fact clearly demonstrated during the show via lines in various classics. Take “The Spirit of Radio,” say:

One likes to believe in the freedom of music
But glittering prizes
And endless compromises
Shatter the illusion
Of integrity

(Spotify and AI-generated music, anyone?)

Or “Natural Science” — probably my personal favorite Rush song, which I was overjoyed to hear pop up during the second set — with its references to “a mechanized world, out of hand” and a “Computerized clinic / For superior cynics / Who dance to a synthetic band.” (Peart would clearly be no great fan of our current dystopian slide.)

Or even “Distant Early Warning,” with its premonition of exactly the kind of perilous geopolitical situation we now find ourselves in.

Opening night laid out the multifaceted mission of Rush’s current Fifty Something Tour, which will take them all over the world and continue through 2027: First, as detailed above, to honor Peart’s unique and irreplaceable greatness, and second, as Lee told me back in March, to demonstrate that “A band can end, but the music lives on.”

Above all, what opening night was, laying out the M.O. for the entire tour, was a celebration of the extraordinary body of work that Lee, Peart and guitarist Alex Lifeson created across their 40 years working together.

What kept striking me last night was the enormous breadth of this catalog. There’s a shorthand that classifies Rush as a “prog” band, but that description only covers a fraction of they’ve explored and what they’re capable of. Last night, we did get a healthy serving of their high-prog era, including the marvelously dynamic and ornate “Xanadu,” an inspired choice for the show opener, in which Lee and Lifeson both hoisted their totemic double-neck axes; the epic, daredevil instrumental “La Villa Strangiato”; the awe-inspiring entirety of “Natural Science” and explosive opening chunk of the sidelong “2112”; and, during the encore, the whimsical yet ferociously knotty “By-Tor and the Snow Dog.”

But there was also plenty of emotive pop-rock — the aforementioned “Time Stand Still,” “Bravado” and “The Garden,” as well as “Red Sector A,” a rumination on the horrors that Lee’s Polish-Jewish family suffered in the Holocaust, the uptempo open-road ode “Dreamline” and “Vital Signs,” the sleek, “Regatta de Blanc”–esque closer to 1981’s career-defining Moving Pictures. And especially during an ass-kicking “Working Man” to close the show, vestiges of Rush’s earliest days as a formidable hard-rock power trio.

Speaking of working men, both of Rush’s surviving core members were definitely putting in the hard labor during this sweeping roughly three-hour show (with intermission). Lifeson and Lee handled this still incredibly intricate music with ease, always balancing their signature compositional filigree with bruising muscle (one major characteristic that sets Rush apart from fussier exemplars of prog) and during the quieter passages, like the moody solo interlude during “La Villa,” deep sensitivity. And new touring keyboardist Loren Gold ably took on select synth duties from Lee, freeing him up to rock out as desired and also to focus on one of the show’s most noteworthy aspects: the astonishingly strong vocals.

When I interviewed Lee, he spoke of how recent work with a vocal coach had “brought back part of my range that I thought had left,” and fans are likely to feel the same. On the later Rush tours with Peart, you could occasionally hear Lee straining to meet the stratospheric bar he had set in Rush’s early years; last night, though, whether on the famously piercing bridge of “Freewill” or the howling verses of “2112,” he sounded like his old self, strikingly unencumbered by age. Rush needs him at full strength to deliver their message with proper urgency and uplift, and it’s such a gift to fans that that’s exactly what we’re getting as they’re setting out on this momentous run.

And speaking of momentous, I mean no slight to Anika Nilles — the woman behind the drum kit for Rush’s current tour and in many ways the star of the show — by not mentioning her thus far into this write-up. In a way, I think there’s something apt about saving my thoughts on her for last. Often during last night’s show, a sentiment she shared with me when I interviewed her in March kept coming back to me. Speaking about her process of acclimating to what is clearly one of the most daunting and challenging gigs a rock drummer has ever undertaken, she said that during rehearsals with Lee and Lifeson:

“I got a really good idea of what Neil was to the guys as a band member, but also as a friend. So you cannot replace that, you know? I’m basically here to help them to get their music back onstage and make it feel right for them and make it feel right for the fans.”

[Emphasis mine]

I will say forthrightly that for this fan, the music did feel right, truly and deeply. There was a moment during “Distant Early Warning,” a favorite especially in its version from the excellent ’89 live album A Show of Hands, when I found myself completely and utterly lost in the song, as I have hundreds of times before, furiously air-drumming along to its relentless onslaught of five- and seven-beat phrases, forgetting for the moment who was or wasn’t onstage, the sadness and significance baked into the occasion, and just feeling entirely present in my fandom for this band that has persisted throughout most of my life. I remember looking up at one point and noticing a fan in the row ahead of me, a bald guy with a big, showy mustache who danced furiously in the aisle during much of the set, gyrating along to that signature herky-jerky odd-time Rush groove and clearly having the time of his life.

I felt that exact sensation, then and throughout the set, and so, so, so much credit for that is due to Nilles, this selfless powerhouse who before her Rush adventure began had barely even heard the band but who has put in the work to give not just Lee and Lifeson but all of us the chance to revisit this canon that has soundtracked our lives.

So to answer the obvious and inevitable question, how does her playing sound? It sounds fucking great. She is not Neil Peart. No one is or ever again will be Neil Peart. There are moments when she opts for a less fussy rendering of some of his famously hyper-detailed parts, born out of his consuming perfectionism. Her groove is different too — I hear her as a more behind-the-beat player, who at times, especially on a song like “Working Man,” digs in and possibly even grooves harder than Peart himself did on material from this early power-trio era that was originally played by the band’s first drummer, John Rutsey.

She hits the quintessential marks of the songs but does not stand over the music with some kind of checklist, accounting for every little Peart-ian flourish. (Interestingly, she seemed to employ Peart’s signature Morse-code-like ride-cymbal pattern more selectively than the man aptly known as the Professor did.) And it’s to Lee and Lifeson’s credit that they clearly granted her the freedom to let go of any idea of facsimile. We can go to YouTube if we want to hear verbatim versions of what, let’s be honest, no one will ever play with more precision and authority than Peart. What Nilles is doing is inhabiting this music, animating it emotionally, letting the songs, as Lee said, surpass the lifespan of one of the men who originally brought it into being.

So there is no replacing of Neil Peart. I’d argue on the contrary that one of the central theses of the tour is that he is irreplaceable. That comes through during the various photo montages during the show, and excerpts from his personal reflections where he demonstrates — even through his mere spoken words — why he was like no other drummer. But that acknowledgement of irreplaceability is the key that unlocks the essential joyousness of the show. We’re all there for a few simple reasons, to celebrate the songs, to honor Peart’s legacy, to toast the still vital genius of Lee and Lifeson, and, for so many of us, to share all these deeply embedded feelings with our Rush family.

When Lee sang about “Old friends growing older,” I put my arm around Adam and we gave each other a brotherly squeeze. We both knew what it meant. There’s something in these sentiments, in these compositions, in the spirit of these three men that is so unlike what is given to us by any other band. We felt that back when we were kids, and we still feel it.

It’s no wonder that Rush and the bromantic spirit that they perennially inspire was chosen as a central plot point in I Love You, Man. (In an endearing and not unsurprising move, the film’s stars, Paul Rudd and Jason Segel, reprised their roles in the show’s opening and closing videos, echoing a hilarious sequel video they once filmed along with the whole band.)

“The measure of a life” — “a garden to nurture and protect.” There’s something in these songs that puts these lofty yet very real sentiments front and center. And the graceful, respectful and most of all fun presentation of this tour leaves so much room for all that feeling to come to the surface. (This spirit was there in conversations that Adam and I had throughout the night, swapping stories both with an ecstatic fan who was too young to have seen them with Peart and an older head who came on board during the early ’80s, and it was also there onstage in the evident warmth, probably tinged with relief that opening night had finally arrived, flowing between lifelong friends Lee and Lifeson.)

I don’t think it’s a stretch to extend the above metaphor to Rush’s legacy itself — the truth is that they have always nurtured and protected their creative ecosystem like attentive gardeners. The loving care they put into the music itself, both in the studio and onstage, inspires the same protective spirit in the fandom.

(I think here of what Lee said to Rick Beato in their recent conversation re: the preciousness of the band/fan relationship, and what it means to really nurture and protect it: “They’re investing in you. They’re investing their time and their love in your band. So if you’re doing it in the name of getting better, you better fucking get better. And so we took that very seriously. “)

To answer another burning question, there was no drum solo in the show, probably a wise move given the inevitable A/B comparisons to Peart’s storied features, but there was a beautiful moment, after Nilles absolutely nailed the legendarily maximalist mid-song fill in “Tom Sawyer,” when the whole audience absolutely erupted in appreciation.

It was easy to understand what was behind that ovation. I felt it. Adam felt it. Everyone there did.

Simply put, Nilles has spent the past year-plus making sure the music feels right for the fans. To make sure Neil’s memory and brilliance are properly honored. And for that audience and all the ones to come on this tour, she — along with Lee, Lifeson and Gold — has given us a most precious gift.

Starting at the timestamp here are nine of the most riveting seconds of musicianship I’ve ever come across:

The sound is flowing out of the horn like magma, right on the edge of control. The breath force is staggering — the notes pelt you with the shock of hailstones. It’s just one of countless bravura moments that follow in this incredible 1980 live performance of “Keep Hold of Yourself,” a Sonny Rollins original from 1972’s Next Album.

For me, these nine seconds sum up how Sonny Rollins was really not apprehensible in anything but such fleeting, incandescent episodes — striving after a kind of Olympian present, pushing and pushing while remaining ever-anchored in song, drawing on the “jukebox of the unconscious” (as his biographer Aidan Levy brilliantly put it) that he kept inside his head. It was a breaking free but it was not “free jazz” nor was it anything else that has a convenient name. It was about riding the wave of the song and, at least in my personal favorite Sonny moments, generating a fearsome momentum that you wished would last forever.

Sonny Rollins made a ton of records, and many great ones. I’m honored to have put together a survey of his classic albums for the Times, which has just posted following the seismic news of his death at age 95.

But the truth is that it’s when I stopped trying to get my head around him only through the traditional medium of the LP and started paying closer attention to the more transitory evidence that I really became a Sonny superfan. I’m talking about the scattered live footage like the above; the Road Shows series; and Robert Mugge’s mindblowing 1986 documentary Saxophone Colossus, which coincidentally is screening next week at Opus 40, in upstate NY, where some of its most unforgettable passages were shot, with live commentary from Mugge and Levy.

It’s these moments that I’ll keep seeking out as I bask in the glow of what he left, the voluminous evidence of his incredible lifelong quest, all that superhuman striving.

I feel beyond fortunate to have spoken with Rollins on two occasions, once for this Times piece on the fabled Great Day in Harlem photo, and the second time for an obituary for the great Al Foster, who can be seen (and heard!) driving the band with style and indefatigable power in the video above.

During the Great Day interview, in 2024, he spoke candidly and poignantly about being the lone survivor of the cohort in the photo:

“When your friends pass away, you have nobody to relate to anymore. You can’t have jokes or things that you both would be talking about, and all this stuff. So when you’re the last guy left, you have a loneliness, because there’s nobody to call up and say, ‘Oh, man, look what Donald Trump is doing today…’”

There are a lot of great Sonny Rollins interviews out there, especially from his final years. This one, conducted in-person by Hilton Als for Pitchfork in 2016, is a good first stop. I love the final bit:

“The world is over in a minute and we’re here just for a second. We need to use this time to find out something. We’re all on our different journeys. And of course it’s difficult. But it’s the way it’s supposed to be. I believe in karma too. Karma is what we’re supposed to be doing—to unravel our karma. See, whatever I did that was bad in this life or another life, I have to get rid of that. And here I am.”

It was at the end of a two-hour lunch interview that Geddy Lee asked me which Rush song I was most excited to have heard the band play. He was referring to a rehearsal I’d attended the day before, while reporting this New York Times feature on the band’s preparations for its upcoming Fifty Something Tour.

Let’s just pan back for a sec and unpack this: The singer and bassist of one of my favorite bands of all time wanted to hear my take on which of their songs had hit me the hardest out of the 11 or so I’d heard during what was, from my own giddy perspective, essentially a private concert.

The evening prior, I could have easily answered the question, but in the moment, sitting across the table from Geddy effing Lee, my mind went blank. Semi-panicked, I started naming off every song I could think of from the rehearsal, all the while knowing that I was forgetting the obvious choice, the one that had left me totally and completely awestruck as I sat there on a stool on the studio floor, listening to a pristine in-ear mix and trying to play it relatively cool as I took in the jaw-dropping spectacle of Anika Nilles bashing away around five feet in front of me, with Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson roughly the same distance to my left and right, respectively, situated in isolation booths.

And then it came to me in a flash and I mentioned the title. (Which, like the titles of all the other songs I heard, I cannot reveal here, since I’m sworn to secrecy re: the set list.)

“I have to say,” I added, “that was fucking mindblowing.” Lee and Lifeson, seated next to him across the table, both smiled.

“Oh, good,” Lee said. “That’s a good word to hear.”

Both at the rehearsal and at the interview, I sat there in a state of disbelief. I was in Toronto, Rush’s birthplace, to do a job, and I did it to the best of my ability. But I made sure to take at least a few moments to inwardly connect with 15-year-old me, trusty Discman spinning, headphones on, reading along with the lyrics to “Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres,” and first having his mind blown by Rush.

I have no grand point to make here, other than to state for the record that all of this was indeed fucking mindblowing, and I can’t wait for the tour, which kicks off in just under a month. In the meantime, I want to extend a sincere thanks to my editor at the Times as well as everyone in the Rush camp who made this trip and article possible. It was a dream come true.

P.S. I often say that I have a favorite “big” band of all time and a favorite “small” one. Rush, huge and world-famous, are the former and craw, the cultest of cult bands, are the latter. It was almost exactly a decade ago that I got to have a similar experience in craw’s hometown of Cleveland, sitting in on a rehearsal of theirs ahead of their two 2016 reunion shows. If you ever get such an opportunity, I highly recommend it!

Like many music obsessives, I enjoy listening with intent. At any given time, along with whatever I’m spinning for research purposes (usually with enjoyment mixed in), there’s always an area of focus, a chunk of pleasurable, self-assigned aural homework.

My ongoing reading and listening re: the great Horace Tapscott (and discussion of same with my dear friend Jeff) led me naturally to the great clarinetist John Carter, his sometime collaborator (The Dark Tree!) and contemporary in the L.A. jazz avant-garde. Carter has always intrigued me, and I’d heard a fair amount of his work in the past, but there were gaps I wanted to fill in. That process is ongoing. There’s a tendency to want to “finish,” to hear absolutely everything, and then publish some grand, subjective summation, as I sometimes used to attempt on the old DFSBP. But these days, my extracurricular writing bandwidth is too unpredictable, and I have to grab the moment when I can. So here are a few thoughts in medias res.

With joy and wonder, I’m making my way through Carter’s magnum opus: “Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music,” a five-album cycle spanning the 1980s. Via those and other releases dating from the late ’60s through the late ’80s, I’m zeroing in on the central creative relationship of Carter’s life, the deep bond he shared with the trumpeter and cornet player Bobby Bradford.

I love hearing these two together on the Roots and Folklore albums like Castles of Ghana (which turns 40 this year!); on earlier Carter releases like Variations and Night Fire, where the marvelous flutist James Newton joins them for both painstaking composed passages and freewheeling collective improv; and on the various sessions where they’re credited as co-leaders, including the Flying Dutchman masterpieces Flight for Four and Self Determination Music, where Carter is also heard on saxophone, the later live release Comin’ On and the intriguing 1975 archival find No U-Turn. But this morning I briefly paused my survey of the discography to check out this short documentary I came across:

Released in 1980, it’s a brief presentation, a fragment, really, but it’s invaluable for the way it preserves the Carter/Bradford alliance, both musical and personal, in a highly distilled form. (Interesting to note: One of the filmmakers is future documentary legend Alex Gibney, working here with his own longtime collaborator Peter Bull.)

Hearing Carter and Bradford two in duet — as in this film or in the two-volume Emanem set Tandem, later compiled later into one CD — is a completely different experience than hearing them as part of a group. In this stark setting, you can really appreciate what a radical statement these two were making. The playing is absolutely fearless, in the way that it utilizes a 360-degree spectrum of aesthetics, approaches and sonics. The improvising, especially Carter’s, can be overwhelming in its speed, its timbral oddity, its rush of ideas. (There’s a part near the end of the film where he launches into some truly mind-bending circular breathing. There’s also a priceless moment around 20:50 in the video, where Bradford breaks out into a chuckle as he takes in an unaccompanied Carter flight. I can totally relate: Listening to this man’s lines swoop and twirl and dance, here and elsewhere, virtuosically and, yes, playfully, is completely exhilarating — a feeling I only get from other truly fearless, boldly idiosyncratic improvisers such as Eric Dolphy, another artist with a strong L.A. connection.) But it can also be extremely patient and sparse. It’s wholly unafraid of silence and punctuation. The composed passages are as exacting as the blowing is free. In short: Everything is on the table. (This general idea runs throughout much of my favorite jazz, from Dave Burrell and Jaki Byard to Booker Little, the Don Pullen / George Adams group, Paul Motian and Billy Mintz, and more.)

The interview segments are as stimulating as the music. The two musicians, Bradford in particular, hold forth candidly on the difficult of making a living playing non-commercial music. (I can definitely relate to Bradford’s mini-rant about fighting for fair pay instead of mere exposure.) They also address the question of whether their music should be considered part of the jazz or classical tradition. Bradford clearly comes down on the former side, but I think there’s something interesting and somewhat maddening at play going on under the surface here (and I absolutely do not intend to fault Bull and Gibney for asking about it, only to suggest that it was a hot topic in general back then): The way that, for decades, Black avant-gardists were made to answer for having drawn influence from the Western classical tradition, as though it were some sort of impropriety or overstep. For much, much more on this highly complex topic, I’d point you toward Graham Lock’s Anthony Braxton portrait Forces in Motion (where Braxton discusses how “controversy began to ensnarl me, even in the AACM; because I was not interested only in Africa, I was interested in Africa and in Europe and in Asia”); George E. Lewis’s AACM history A Power Stronger Than Itself; and the great work of my friend Seth Colter Walls in documenting many of the musicians in this orbit. But I do want to single out a moronic Robert Christgau review of Carter’s Castles of Ghana that’s quoted on the album’s Wikipedia page, and that was pointed out to me by Jeff:

This ain’t jazz, it’s modern chamber music, quite European in view of its ostensible subject, which is how Afro-European mercantilism became the slave trade. In the modern European manner, its real subject is itself — explorations of color and texture that are worth tagging along on occasionally, but best left to the specialists and their grant money most of the time.

Cool story, bro! He’s saying, essentially, that a Black composer, especially one in the process of grappling with his own heritage, had better not come to the table with anything that sounds too European. (I think again of Braxton, whose work has been constantly assailed by such accusations, and who says in Forces in Motion: “I would constantly run into the wall of definition which said ‘No performances of notated music for you, [n-word]!’”) Ridiculous, first and foremost because Carter can employ whatever devices he wants, but also because the music is ultimately such a beautiful and seamless hybrid of jazz and classical (or, if we’re going there, African and European) sensibilities. This plurality is a feature not a bug.

Ultimately, what I love about the music of John Carter and Bobby Bradford, especially in this pared-down setting, is how infinite it feels. Composition, improvisation, “jazz,” “classical,” density, silence, harshness, beauty, whatever. It’s all fair game. A record like Comin’ On, which I’d feel comfortable classifying as jazz, is a bit of a different story — wildly enjoyable but maybe not quite as challenging in form and content. With the Roots and Folklore titles, and especially these duos, you’re firmly in undefined territory.

You’d never put this music on in the background — there would be no point. It blooms and coheres only with complete focus. To me, if you’re going to worry about provenance or tradition, the great thing about it is that, in the spirit of Braxton’s “I was interested in Africa and in Europe and in Asia,” it seems to take all of this information into account (right down to the timbres of the instruments themselves, which can sound gorgeously traditional one moment and confrontationally “out” the next) while not being bound by any of it.

This idea of everything being fair game is really at the core of the greatness of this group of Black geniuses who came to the fore in the ’60s (and, in some cases, the second half of the ’50s): this small but mighty L.A. contingent spearheaded by Carter, Bradford, Tapscott and a few others; legendary Midwest collectives like the AACM and the Black Artists Group, out of which sprung gamechanging masters such as Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Julius Hemphill, Muhal Richard Abrams, Oliver Lake, Leroy Jenkins and Wadada Leo Smith; and of course the giants of the New York scene including Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Bill Dixon (the former a player who had close personal ties with Carter and Bradford and the latter one who, I’d argue, shares strong aesthetic affinities with them).

The wonderful thing about music is that, ultimately, we don’t have to call it anything other than great. We can worry over the nomenclature all day, but when it’s as sturdily built, as confidently and unapologetically executed, as that of John Carter and Bobby Bradford, the sounds tell you everything you need to know. Who would hear these two play and sit there tabulating percentages rather than just being grateful that they went all in on their thoroughly uncompromising and marvelously expressive soundworld, and, as they discuss in the doc above, kept re-committing to their partnership in an ever-challenging economic climate? (And as you can see from both the film above and the photo below, obviously took great joy in all this as well.)

These were the sounds that John Carter and Bobby Bradford wanted and needed to make, and though I wish the documentation were more extensive, let’s savor and celebrate what we have. (Not to mention the fact that the great Bobby Bradford is still active at 91!) I can’t wait to listen further.

Befitting the greatness of this partnership, it has been well-discussed and -documented among serious heads, including by several writer friends of mine. I’ll shout out in particular:

-’s thorough unpacking of Carter’s Roots and Folklore series, part of the great ’70s and ’80s jazz revival that swept the blogosphere 20 years ago this year (as documented by in the Times). (As Steve laments there, it was then and remains now a tragedy that three of the five entries in the Roots and Folklore series are still, as far as I can tell, out of print and unstreamable.)

-’s extensively researched 2012 look at the early Carter/Bradford collabs, which draws from his own Bradford interview.

-’s comprehensive Bradford interview for All About Jazz from 2009.

-And Mark Weber’s mammoth archive of material related to the L.A. scene, including various Carter and Bradford interviews from over the years.

-And lastly, here’s a true treasure, a 1989 Carter feature by Terry Gross on Fresh Air that deals with Roots and Folklore and centers on an interview with Carter. Reflecting on the historical sweep of the series, he tells Gross, tellingly: “I never try to capture any of the period music, to actually capture that music in terms of writing in that vernacular. I always try to make reference to whatever period it was but use whatever contemporary techniques are mine.” Amen!

-I should also point out that, speaking of a boundless creative outlook, Bradford obviously fruitfully collaborated with European players for years, as documented in his various collaborations with John Stevens, Frode Gjerstad and others. (More from on that here!)

Sometimes you hear exactly the music you need to hear, as if some cosmic force had prescribed it to you. Listening-wise, reading-wise, I’ve felt a bit adrift lately, like I can’t seem to settle on any one thing. But something I’ve just heard for the first time snapped me into focus:

The track is “Autumn Colors,” and it comes from Live at Théâtre Du Chêne Noir, Avignon, France 1989, an archival release by pianist Horace Tapscott and saxophonist Michael Session, first issued in 2020 on an L.A. label called The Village. I’ve been Tapscott-curious for a long time. A long while back, a friend recommended The Dark Tree, another Tapscott live set recorded in ’89, and that set off years of sporadic, unstructured listening. At different points, I’ve enjoyed Aiee! The Phantom, The Giant Is Awakened (and its more recently unearthed companion set, The Quintet, which I wrote up after its release in 2022), Dissent or Descent and others. But I never quite felt like I had a handle on the work, or the story, of this clearly remarkable pillar of the Los Angeles scene.

Last night, browsing the treasure trove that is Unnameable Books with my girlfriend, I happened upon a reissued version of Steven L. Isoardi’s The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles, a 2006 book on Tapscott and the musical and social ecosystem he fostered through his long-running Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and related organization UGMAA (Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension). I’d seen the volume around for years and always been intrigued, but this time, I couldn’t resist picking it up. I’m only a few pages in, but I’m already enthralled. (And note that this is only one of Isoardi’s Tapscott-related titles: He also edited the pianist’s 2001 autobiography, Song of the Unsung, which I imagine I’ll be acquiring soon.)

Wanting to get started on what I hope will finally be a more comprehensive Tapscott listening survey, I pulled up Live at Théâtre Du Chêne Noir more or less at random. Information on Michael Session is somewhat scarce online, though I gather that he played with Tapscott for more than 20 years and took over the Arkestra upon his death. (Leadership was then passed on to Session’s son, Mekala, as detailed in this enlightening Times piece on the Arkestra’s recent activities from a few years back.) Again, I hope to learn more from any/all authoritative sources, but at this precise moment, the music is telling me what I need to know.

“Autumn Colors” is a Tapscott original, apparently recorded only once prior to this, in 1980, for a Tapscott trio album of the same name. This ’89 duo version is nearly 19 minutes long but has kept me rapt through several full listens. There are certain duo partnerships in jazz that have a mind-meld telepathy (I think of Mal Waldron and Steve Lacy), and it’s clear throughout this performance that Tapscott and Session share this kind of bond.

Tapscott starts off the piece with an arresting solo intro, alternating between low-end strikes and rumbles, and dancing upper-register flourishes. He gradually outlines the weighty six-chord vamp that anchors the piece, and then he and Session lock into a triumphant, hard-swinging theme.

From there, Tapscott lays down a strong and driving bed that seems to imply an entire rhythm section. Session’s ecstatic lines recall the fierce urgency of the best post-Coltrane modal jazz (I think of Azar Lawrence on McCoy Tyner’s Enlightenment). The two are simply jamming out, forcefully and fearlessly, staying in the pocket but constantly stress-testing it, settling back into the home base of their earthy see-saw groove but sometimes launching out into a weightless rubato.

(This is really what I have always wanted from jazz: good, sturdy material and then a feeling of total blasting off from that launchpad. You soar but you keep the ground within sight, touching down enough to celebrate the noble integrity of the structure.)

Tapscott and Session dance and strut and shout and sing out, wringing all the passion they can out of this shared excursion. They are so much inside the song, supporting and encouraging one another through the depth of their shared engagement. You don’t for one second miss bass and drums — these two are a complete ensemble unto themselves. As is Tapscott a self-contained dynamo when he ventures out alone around the 11:30 mark. He spirals into cubist abstraction, and later a billowing balladic swirl, but you can hear the thrust and merriment of the song in the background all along. Again, his every extrapolation is a celebration and evocation of the piece’s core ideas.

Not one second of dead air here. Not one dip in conviction. When Tapscott brings the central vamp in around 16:30, and Session joins in soon after, it’s a total rock & roll triumph, a victory lap after a wondrous journey. Listening in, you feel spent and sweaty and grateful.

Note that I haven’t even spun the rest of the album yet — only this track repeatedly. It’s that good. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this captivated by a new-to-me piece of recorded music, completely removed from any kind of timeliness or outside relevancy. Check it out; let me know what you think.

It’s hard to make promises about what shape this newsletter will take going forward, but I hope I can always reserve at least a little time for this sort of thing, more in line with the spirit of the old DFSBP, where I can simply say, “This is blowing my mind FYI. Perhaps it will do the same for you.”

*****

Note that there are many more Tapscott delights, both vintage and newly unearthed, available via both the Dark Tree and Nimbus West labels. I’ve barely scratched the surface, so happy digging to us all!

A couple months ago, I made my first visit to a local institution: the African Record Centre, the historic shop at 1194 Nostrand Avenue in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn. Launched in 1969 by the Francis brothers — Roger, Rudy, Roland and Roy — in order to, as Roger once put it, “introduce African music to the United States and to the world,” the store has endured in its current location for more than 50 years. Among its many devotees is Melvin Gibbs, the eminent bassist, composer, perennial avant-gardist and, now, published author.

Melvin’s new book, How Black Music Took Over the World, out April 14, is partly a result of his initial visit to the Centre, sometime in the mid-to-late-’70s — a fateful occasion, recounted in the text, on which he first heard the music of Fela Kuti. So it seemed natural to drop by with him once again on the morning in February when he and I met to discuss the project for a New York Times feature that is now live. I encourage you to check out the piece and pick up the book, an extremely engaging and enriching read, and also, if you’re local to NYC, to make it out to two related live events taking place next week, part of an ongoing FourOneOne residency themed around the book.

As with my recent Flea post, I wanted to provide a bit of additional context from my reporting that I wasn’t able to include in the piece.

First, a big thanks to Roger Francis for warmly welcoming us into the shop. “You have a good memory,” he said to Melvin when the bassist related how, at the time of his first visit, the Centre was the only place in town (and perhaps in the U.S.?) where you could actually buy Fela’s records. Learning about Melvin’s new book, Roger asked to see the galley copy I was holding. He read its name aloud, then looked up and said with a knowing smile, “Nice title.”

The store is a treasure trove, and any curious music head should make a point of dropping by. (Some more context and history is here.) I asked Roger what he would recommend that I pick up, and I left with a nice reissue of Oro Nigeria Yi, a 1983 Highlife release by Yommy Akins and His New Melody Sounders that I’ve loved spinning around the house.

Melvin’s choice? A copy of Shakara, a 1972 Fela release, on 8-track. (The Centre still stocks that format in addition to vinyl and CD.)

Georgia Anne Muldrow, Stephon Alexander and Arthur Jafa on the Myth Science of Melvin Gibbs

Beyond spotlighting the Centre, I’d like to share a few impressions of Melvin from his various friends and collaborators that I interviewed. I didn’t have space to delve into Melvin’s brilliance as a player, which is a shame, because his colleagues had a lot to say. One thing that struck me is that several of these subjects reached for unusually — but I think aptly — lofty similes and metaphors in order to describe his artistry, comparisons that went beyond sound into the realm of nature, science and even myth.

Consider this impression from Georgia Anne Muldrow, who collaborated with Melvin and the rest of the awe-inspiring Harriet Tubman band (guitarist Brandon Ross and drummer JT Lewis) on the new Electrical Field of Love LP and at a thunderous and poignant live show that was hands-down the best set I saw at Big Ears in March. (Read ’s evocative recap of that set here.)

Playing with Melvin is like surfing. He telling you where the waves is coming up. It’s like he gives you a whole dashboard. He doesn’t just throw out roots. He makes you sound so good.

His bass playing’s like the almanac. You don’t have to taste your finger and put it up to the wind because Melvin gives [it to] us right there — he did all the work. He letting you know what the incoming weather is, what the air pressure is, how much light we got left. I mean, all of it’s happening at the same time. And I feel like that, in a rhythm section, it gives it so much power.

And when Melvin solos, it’s like this weightlessness. It’s like you witness somebody in space, and because he has such a deep relationship with where everything’s at, when he suspends himself within that, you just watch him glow. He just glows, like, this beautiful lime green. He just glows these magentas. It’s like if the bass sounded like an aurora. It’s like the drag of solar wind on the atmosphere of the earth.

That’s what it’s like playing with him: It’s like playing with an aurora.

Interestingly, Stephon Alexander, the physicist and musician who works with Melvin in the band God Particle, and who will discuss the book with him at the FourOneOne event on April 15, independently volunteered an aquatic metaphor when I asked him to describe playing with Melvin.

He holds a space where you can freely swim. Obviously, there’s a lot of improvisation in God Particle. So there’s no other bassist that I’ve played with that can actually meet you where you’re at and then amplify what you’re trying to do, especially in terms of a solo. He just has that capacity to morph into and provide and move and guide in ways that actually make the music sound incredible.

I can be very heady in my approach to playing and improvising. I can get lost in thought and get lost in what key I’m in, and “Am I playing the right changes?” But when I play with Melvin, that just naturally goes away. So I can access, and he enables, what we call that state of flow.

In my conversation with the great artist Arthur Jafa, a longtime friend of Melvin’s, he zoomed way out, considering Melvin’s overall quest and his unique role as a player-scholar. I asked him why he thought Melvin was the right person to relate the larger saga of Black music. His answer was profound, ranging from Tolkien to quantum physics, so I’ll quote it at length.

Why Melvin? ’Cause he’s Frodo. You get it? I mean, the Fellowship of the Ring… The world is at risk. There’s forces in the world and they’re embodied in this ring, and so there’s a fellowship. There’s a congregation of individuals who rise to the occasion of the task at hand, which is destroy the Ring of Power. You got Gandalf, he’s the White Wizard; you got Aragorn, he’s the king; you got the Elves, they have the magic; you got the Dwarves, they forge the iron; and the warriors; and you got Frodo.

What’s his superpower? He was the ringbearer. He wasn’t stronger, he wasn’t braver, he wasn’t none of that; he was just a person with the right constitution to bear the weight of the ring. So that when it came time to do what needed to get done, he was the last person standing, almost.

So that Frodo function, it’s not something that people necessarily choose for themselves. It’s something that people either rise to the occasion of the obligation — they either can manage it or they can’t. And I don’t think Melvin set out to be a narrator of this thing. Specifically, generationally, he’s just the greatest musician who was capable of writing some of this shit down.

He wasn’t a bystander. He’s first-tier as a musician in it and first-tier as a thinker, and he survived. A lot of times when people go through these incredibly volatile and generative and transitional movements, most people don’t survive, so that’s why you see the Aylers and the Tranes. And then occasionally you’ll get a Cecil Taylor or a Sun Ra — they’re like outliers. But in some ways they go so far out that the signal can’t get back to the culture at large.

You say, like, “Why?” Who knows why, in the cosmic sense? I’m just saying, so many other people are either rendered senseless by what they’ve lived through, they’re incapable of writing it down, not inclined to write it down. Maybe they have the ability to write it down, but they’re not necessarily a God-level, genius-level musician, so what they write is not necessarily at the actual core of the things.

I mean, you can talk about the “What?” of it. What is it? What it is, is, like, a communique from the core of a star that collapsed in on itself. And so we know, given what a black hole is — things go into that shit, but things don’t come out of it, just the nature of gravity and stuff. So it’s an accomplishment to be able to create a signal that is sufficient or strong enough — I don’t know if it’s a matter of strength, even — but it’s sufficiently configured that it can even escape the black hole of the thing, the collapse of the star.

“I Feel So Free”: Brandon Ross on How Harriet Tubman (the Band) Got Their Name

The last thing I wanted to share comes from a conversation I had with Brandon Ross, Harriet Tubman’s brilliant guitarist, that I wasn’t able to excerpt in the piece. This concerns how Harriet Tubman got their name, a story I’d never heard before:

It was 1997, and JT Lewis and I were playing in [Henry] Threadgill’s band Make a Move. We were down on the Lower East Side at Context Music Studios, and I had invited Butch Morris to come down because he asked me what I was doing. I said, “Well, we’re just going to go and play.” Butch wanted to hear, and he came down.

We took a break. We were sitting in the lounge and he said, “So, what are you guys going to do with this?” Acknowledging that there was something special going on. I said, “Yeah, we should do something.” And somebody said, “Well, we need a name.” And I think it was JT who said, just kind of blurted out, “Man, we should call the band Harriet Tubman because I feel so free playing with you guys.” He was kind of saying it in, like, an irony.

And Melvin and I were sitting next to each other on the couch, and I turned and looked at him and he looked at me, and it was just like: “That’s the name.”

*****

Hope you enjoyed this latest set of outtakes! For further reading on Electrical Field of Love, see these reviews by in Spin and in The Wall Street Journal. (Larry also hosted an enlightening panel discussion with the band at Big Ears, which I hope will be available for archived listening at some point.) And for more on How Black Music Took Over the World, see this recent Brooklyn Rail review by .

Up front, I want to quickly acknowledge that I had an amazing time at Big Ears. I’d heard many friends’ and fellow writers’ prior accounts of the cornucopia of music and camaraderie that is the annual inter-genre Knoxville fest, but I had no idea how wonderful it would feel to fully immerse in the sounds and the hang for a few blissful spring days.

I shared some photos and acknowledgements over on Instagram, in two parts, but I’d like to reiterate my gratitude to the festival team (particularly Ashley Capps, Bryan Crow and Shelby Sandlin), as well as , for making my visit possible. I’ve dreamed for years of attending and participating, and it was an honor to host a panel in conjunction with the John Zorn residency that took over the Bijou Theatre Friday and Saturday.

Here’s a little memento:

Another huge thanks to the four brilliant artists who joined me for the conversation: John Medeski (who’d been onstage into the wee hours the night before with Billy Martin, Scott Metzger and Nels Cline), Jorge Roeder, Dave Lombardo and Barbara Hannigan. As I did while reporting the 2020 Rolling Stone feature that inspired the panel, I had a great time chatting with all of them about the ways that Zorn has inspired and challenged them, and expanded their creative horizons.

Speaking for myself, the conversation added an extra layer of richness to all the Zorn performances I witnessed throughout the weekend, featuring these four and many others. In particular, the Cobra set, which included Medeski, Roeder and Lombardo, and the first “Hannigan Sings Zorn” set (with Stephen Gosling on piano) really drove home what a vast and diverse creative universe Zorn has fostered during the past 40-plus years.

*****

I also wanted to share a few outtakes from my recent New York Times feature on the making of Honora, the new solo debut by Flea. Up front, here’s a live rendition of what may be my favorite track from the record, an instrumental version of Frank Ocean’s indelible “Thinkin’ ’Bout You.”

1. David Bowie Loved Booker Little

The first is a brief tidbit that Flea mentioned when I brought up Booker Little in our conversation (as I’m wont to do!). We were discussing his various influences and inspirations on trumpet — as he notes in the piece, Clifford Brown is a biggie — and, remembering that I had seen Flea tweet about Little in the past, I floated the name. Here’s what he told me:

I love Booker Little — my son’s middle name is Booker. What he did with Eric Dolphy and his record Out Front… John Frusciante, a while ago, sent me a track that Booker Little played on, this beautiful ballad that I’d never heard before — I can’t remember what it is. But anyways, I guess he was a real acolyte of Clifford Brown’s and really took it in a different way and also died really young. You think of him and Clifford, these guys that did this monumental, history-making, defining music that will just live forever at such a young age. It’s unbelievable. I think about my capabilities at that age — I was trying to figure out where to get an ounce of weed, you know what I mean? [Laughs]

And yeah, I had kind of a light friendship with David Bowie — someone I really admired growing up and always will admire; I love his records and him as a person so much. But the friendship that I developed with him was based around a love of Booker Little. He loved Booker Little. He loved jazz, but Booker Little was his favorite and he’d always write to me about how much Booker Little touched his heart. So Booker Little I think is very beloved musician.

2. None of the members of the core Honora cast grew up listening to the Chili Peppers.

The second is a thread that emerged when talking to the various members of Honora’s supporting cast, which, as many jazz-savvy listeners know, draws heavily on the vanguard of the contemporary L.A. scene, including three out of four members of guitarist Jeff Parker’s justly celebrated ETA IVtet — who will put out their own new record next month — and two from the excellent SML, profiled in the Times by Grayson Haver Currin back in November. (I missed SML at Big Ears but caught them at Brooklyn’s Sultan Room back in December and was totally absorbed.)

All three of these musicians — Parker, bassist Anna Butterss and multi-instrumentalist Josh Johnson, the album’s producer, who will be on tour with Flea next month — spoke highly of him and the Honora experience. But interestingly, they each mentioned independently that, prior to working on the record, they had very little history with the band that made him world-famous.

Here’s Butterss:

Honestly, [Flea] wasn’t super on my radar. I did not grow up listening to any kind of popular music. I had heard of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but I don’t think I’d heard any of their music. I knew who Flea was as, like, a public bass player, and I’ve always had a sense of respect for him just from how he shows up in the world and how he talks about music.

But I’d never really listened to anything until — it must have been about 2017. Our friend Nate Walcott [ed. note: a multi-instrumentalist and another member of the Honora cast] was touring with the Chili Peppers. Nate asked if we wanted to come and see them play at Staples Center. And Josh and I went. I think Jeff might have gone too, and that was the first time I’d seen them play, and I was like, “This is crazy. This is really different.” I hadn’t been in that world at all, really. It was actually probably the biggest show I’d ever seen.

Johnson, who, prior to Honora, played on the Chili Peppers’ dual 2022 albums, Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen, gave a similar account:

As a person of my age in the United States, it’s impossible to have not heard the Chili Peppers. [Laughs] I knew their music through hearing it places. It wasn’t a big part of me coming up, or anything like that, but always an awareness of them.

And here’s Parker:

I of course knew of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and knew their music from just the hits that were everywhere you went.

And I was aware of [Flea]. We actually had both played together — not at the same time — but we’re both on a Joshua Redman called Momentum, and that’s actually how I had introduced myself to him. Our kids used to go to the same school. My son was in elementary school and his daughter was in the junior high, and I saw him at a school event, and, you know, he’s Flea, man: He’s iconic; he’s a rock star. So I kind of walked up to him, and I could kind of see him start to be like, “What’s up?” [Laughs] And I was like, “Hey, man, we’re both on a Joshua Redman album.” And then he was like, “Oh, OK, man, how you doing? What’s your name?”

And from then we were pretty friendly, and we actually had some people in common that we knew. Nate Walcott was at the time touring as an auxiliary member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And I knew Nate a little bit from Chicago and then got to know him more, just through the improv, jazz community in L.A. When I had the steady gig at ETA, he would be there a lot of Mondays.

But honestly, I’m of the generation — I didn’t really come up with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I think that was people who were much younger than me. I’m a little bit younger than Flea, so by the time those guys were ascending, I was in jazz school and I wasn’t listening to that stuff, man. I was into Miles and Trane and Sonny Rollins.

3. Jeff Parker & Co.’s idea of “static spaces” may be the Rosetta Stone of 2020s jazz.

And lastly, Parker said something else that struck me, about the aesthetic that he and this cohort of musicians have been cultivating in recent years, an M.O. that Flea clearly appreciated and channeled for his own project:

I also know that he dug the record Suite for Max Brown. That was the first thing that I saw he posted about on Instagram. And he’s talked about it: being musically proficient, but not kind of wearing it on your sleeve. The thing is, you’re trying to just make music and relate to people and not be flashy and show off.

I think maybe he could see how his style could fit into what we were doing. Because there’s a lot of different musical scenes in L.A. There’s a lot of people doing all kinds of amazing things here, and what we do, the space that we exploit, is kind of a part of it. When we were at ETA playing with that group, we definitely were exploring these static spaces. … A lot of our music was more about really exploring a flatter kind of landscape, as opposed to things being very, kind of, peaks and valleys.

This “static spaces” aesthetic Parker describes seems like a driving ethos for a certain wing of jazz during the past decade or so — not just the ETA IVtet and SML but also the larger universe around their shared label, International Anthem, which made major waves earlier on with releases by Makaya McCraven and others. And it’s important to note that all of this music that has brought many new listeners into the fold.

There’s obviously room for overt virtuosity in the contemporary jazz scene too (hello, Steve Lehman, to name just one example!), but having been in these rooms when SML, Parker’s quartet, McCraven and other kindred spirits like Brandee Younger are playing, you can see how much contemporary audiences are responding to a more vibe-based, collectively driven way of making music — less focused on a progression of solos and more on setting and sustaining a groove, and along with it, a mood. (I think a parallel can also be drawn to the Tyshawn Sorey Trio I raved about here.)

*****
OK, that’s what I’ve got for you this time around. Hope you enjoyed these outtakes and impressions — I’m thinking of making a habit out of publishing these sorts of auxiliary posts after a given feature goes live, so if this is something you’d like to see more of, let me know in the comments!

Thanks very much for reading.

My first steady professional music-writing gig was helping to put together the weekly listings at Time Out New York. It’s a time I remember fondly: scanning the club calendars each week for the most intriguing gig options, divvying up blurbs with my extremely knowledgeable colleagues and putting together a section that felt like a comprehensive guide all the live-music options on offer during a given week, from huge pop shows at the Garden to Todd P’s DIY happenings.

It was a joyous process, and the results were, I felt, tangibly useful. Just like the readers, I carried around a copy of TONY myself, circling the gigs that interested me most as I planned my showgoing week. In a now familiar tale — told eloquently by in this Atlantic piece last year, and followed up on by my friend and former colleague , who’s mentioned in the article — the once-robust listings culture in New York, spreading through alt-weeklies and legacy outlets, thinned and all but disintegrated. (Thankfully, in recent years, there’s been a groundswell of smartly curated listings popping up on Substack, from Steve himself at , and other friends and colleagues including at , and Andrew Frisicano at .)

The catch-all diversity of the TONY listings section is something I’ve kept in mind as I’ve been assembling my picks for a new, all-genres-in-play monthly show roundup at Gothamist, at the invitation of another old music-writing pal, . You can check out the March installment here, and stay tuned to WNYC for an audio counterpart.

Along with this endeavor, I’m thrilled to be involved with the Jazz Generations Initiative. You’ll want to keep a close eye on the JGI as it develops, but in short, you’re going to be seeing a lot of journalism, live-event programming, residencies and more coming out of this wide-ranging project, spanning New York and New Orleans, and supported by the wonderful folks at the Mellon Foundation and the Jazz Foundation of America.

Happily, my role with the JGI also centers on listings. We’re still in the early stages of the project, but for now, I’m curating a weekly calendar of jazz shows, with select preview blurbs, posting each Monday on the JGI New York Instagram, mirroring the regular roundups on the JGI New Orleans channel. (I’d also recommend staying tuned to the general JGI account for other exciting news.)

It’s honestly been a blast to reengage with the type of curation that was central to my early career. I’m reminded each week of what a privilege it is to live and work here, and just how much there is to see and hear. Thanks for reading, and watch these various spaces for more.

I’ll leave you this week with a song I can’t get out of my head, by one of the bands featured in my latest Gothamist roundup.

“I never liked the electric guitar,” Ralph Towner told Guitar Player in 1975, in an interview quoted in my New York Times obituary for the late master of the 6- and 12-string acoustic, who died today at age 85.

That was quite a thing for a mid-’70s guitarist to say, especially one adjacent to the jazz vanguard and then recording for ECM, home to luminaries of the post-fusion generation such as Terje Rypdal, John Abercrombie and Pat Metheny, all of whom embraced the possibilities of the electric guitar in different ways.

But Towner made a space for himself and operated there, without compromise, for around 50 years. I’m not an expert in his work, but I love what I know, including Matchbook, his first duo album with Gary Burton; the Solstice recordings; and various works by Oregon. (In addition to the interviews linked in the obit, I recommend that you check out my friend Reed Jackson’s candid and comprehensive 2025 chat with Towner at Aquarium Drunkard.)

There is such a lovely composure and poetry in his sound. I really admire the way he pursued a noble kind of beauty in an unabashed way. There was seemingly no irony or subversion in his work — he just wanted to sound pristine and convey deep, serious feeling, both of which he always did.

On the color wheel of guitar aesthetics, Sunn O))) may just be Towner’s opposite. Simply put, there is no Sunn O))) without electricity. “All the music, the variations and stuff,” Stephen O’Malley, one of the band’s two robed riffsmiths, told me in a New York Times profile that went live earlier this week, “it’s all there in the guitars.”

The guitars, yes, but also the thoroughly maxed-out amps, which are the band’s instruments as much as the six-strings they strum and plug into them. If a Towner piece is delicate origami, a Sunn O))) construction is a room-engulfing Serra, looming over you, eclipsing the light. There’s poetry there too, but it is the poetry of mass and menace, of darkness and decay.

“Maximum volume yields maximum results,” reads the band’s now canonical credo. It’s true: The more you crank their music, the more fully it inhabits you. I doubt Ralph Towner would have had much use for this M.O., but I bet he could have appreciated the uncompromising purity that Sunn O))) have always espoused — not to mention the surprising variety that their work encompasses. Check out that piano in the newly released “Glory Black,” for example:

Both artists have positioned themselves entirely at odds with a world whose attention span is rapidly eroding. And both are essentially saying that exacting sonic standards — and aesthetics that have no place in a fast-food musical culture — matter, and are worth putting one’s entire weight behind. That they are, ultimately, the stuff of a life’s work.

In all the superficial ways, Ralph Towner and Sunn O))) — guitar touchstones from different generations and wildly disparate scenes — diverge. But where it counts, maybe they’re some strange sort of kindred.

Welcome to the fourth and final installment of the annual DFSBP year-end roundup! See here for part 1, which covers my favorite jazz records of the year; here for part 2, in which I list my 10 favorite albums of 2025, all styles in play; and here for part 3, featuring reissues and historical releases.

It was a year of heavy show-going for me. Following a move back to NYC from upstate amid a difficult and transitional time, I needed to re-center and recharge, and live music was invaluable to that process. Here are 25 shows that helped me through.

Kris Davis Trio (Robert Hurst, Johnathan Blake)
Jan 12; Village Vanguard
This trio is very good on record and absolutely mind-melting live.

Dave Burrell
March 1; St. Andrew and St. Luke Church (Beacon, NY)
On a good night, Dave Burrell is, for my money, the greatest pianist alive. I’ve never heard him sound better than he did at this unaccompanied gig, part of a month-long solo-piano fest in Beacon, presented by Elysium Furnace Works.

Saetia + On the Might of Princes + Medicinal + Twowayradio
April 27; Bowery Ballroom
See here.

Peter Evans’s Being and Becoming
May 2; Roulette
See here.

Bob Mould Band + J. Robbins Band
May 3; Le Poisson Rouge
Bob Mould just doesn’t miss. His latest record is ferocious and the live gig was even more so. All of what I just wrote applies to the great J. Robbins as well! (I would put last year’s Basilisk up against the best of Jawbox, which is saying a lot.)

Asphyx + Benediction
May 21; The Meadows
I’d waited more than a decade to catch Dutch death-metal legends Asphyx, and finally hearing the great Martin Van Drunen unleash his caustic roar live was one of the highlights of my year.

Khanate + Mick Barr
June 3; Le Poisson Rouge
The most transcendently punishing gig of 2025, hands down.

Brandee Younger (Rashaan Carter, Elé Howell)
June 9; The Blue Note
Again, I loved the record, but the live show was sublime and transporting.

Life. Love. Rich Hall
June 13; Warsaw.
June 14; The Brooklyn Monarch
It was inspiring to see an entire community unite in support of the family of Rich Hall, the booker and scene pillar who died in January. The result was an absolute feast of pummeling metallic hardcore, with standouts including Orange 9mm and Kiss It Goodbye the first night, and Converge, Cave In, Deadguy and Today Is the Day the second.

George Coleman (Spike Wilner, John Webber, Joe Farnsworth)
June 22; Smalls
Surely one of the purest examples of true, unadorned jazz excellence that I’ve ever witnessed up close, courtesy of the tenor master George Coleman, still sounding phenomenal at 90 years of age, with support from the irrepressible Joe Farnsworth & Co.

Charles Lloyd (Jason Moran, Harish Raghavan, Eric Harland) + Branford Marsalis (Joey Calderazzo, Eric Revis, Justin Faulkner)
June 28; Town Hall
I’m not sure there’s a more commanding and compelling performer alive than Charles Lloyd, whose Sky Quartet — built around the leader’s deep chemistry with Jason Moran and Eric Harland, his collaborators for a little less and a little more than 20 years, respectively — kicked off a ravishing double bill that also featured Marsalis & Co.’s ass-kicking take on Keith Jarrett’s Belonging.

40 Watt Sun
July 12; The Meadows
Patrick Walker may be the greatest singer-songwriter of his generation, and seeing him play unaccompanied simply shattered me.

Sex Mob
July 20; The Owl
One of the signature bands of New York’s downtown scene can still be heard in ripping form.

Moor Mother and Sumac
July 25; Roulette
I’m a fan of both avant-jazz poet Moor Mother and art-doom trio Sumac — together, though, their strengths multiply. This intimate gig was a colossally intense channeling of the energy they captured on record.

Outlaw Music Fest: Willie Nelson + Bob Dylan + Wilco + Lucinda Williams
Aug. 1; Jones Beach
See here.

Portraits of Past
Aug. 22; Le Poisson Rouge
Onstage, the Bay Area screamo godfathers were a cathartic whirlwind.

Unwound
Sept. 8; Elsewhere
One of the best bands of the ’90s is out there converting a whole new generation.

Chicago Underground Duo
Sept. 13; Public Records
Broken record here, but: Hell of an album; even better show.

Dazzling Killmen
Sept. 23; No Fun (Troy, NY)
Sept. 24; The Meadows
These were the most personally significant gigs of the year for me. I’d waited 30 years to see this band, and even in a modified lineup, they exceeded all expectations.

Abdullah Ibrahim’s Ekaya with Kenny Garrett and Terence Blanchard
Oct. 4; Jazz at Lincoln Center, Rose Theater
My first time seeing the master. He let his band and illustrious guest stars Garrett and Blanchard do a lot of the heavy lifting, but his featured moments at the piano were utterly magical.

Pile
Oct. 9; Sony Hall
Pile made my favorite album of the year, and the live show felt like an indoctrination into their adoring, well-deserved cult following.

Tyshawn Sorey Trio (Aaron Diehl, Harish Raghavan)
Nov. 11; Village Vanguard
See here.

Shiner
Nov. 11; Mercury Lounge
Playing in support of a great new record, the KCMO veterans put on a clinic in the art of melodic yet massively weighty post-hardcore.

Death to All + Gorguts
Nov. 14; Irving Plaza
It was a great year to be a Death fan, between the exhaustive, illuminating new Chuck Schuldiner bio and this remarkable tribute tour, in which illustrious alums recreated two beloved ’90s albums, with support from the mighty Gorguts.

The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis: Ask the Ages
Nov. 18; The Hamilton Live (Washington, D.C.)
This full-album cover of Sonny Sharrock’s 1991 masterpiece — augmented by a set of alternately blazing and reflective originals — was a total blast to behold.

Welcome to part 3 of the annual DFSBP year-end roundup! See here for part 1, which covers my favorite jazz records of the year; here for part 2, in which I list my 10 favorite albums of 2025, all styles in play; and here for part 4, where I run down my favorite live shows of the year.

In keeping with my 2024 recap, there are a few reissues and archival titles I wanted to shout out before year’s end. I contributed to the annual round-up of historical releases over at the Times, so I will direct you there for slightly longer takes on these three fine offerings:

-Various artists, The Bottle Tapes (Corbett vs. Dempsey)
I’ve written elsewhere on the pan-genre utopia that was Chicago in the ’90s. A major contributing factor to the vitality of that scene was the Empty Bottle series booked by John Corbett and Ken Vandermark. This massive box takes us back to that time and place, reminding us of the importance of this international, intergenerational jazz-and-beyond nexus.

-Cecil McBee, Mutima (Mack Avenue / Strata-East)
The comprehensive new Strata-East reissue program, backed by Mack Avenue, is cause for celebration, and the 1974 debut by eminent bassist McBee (still going strong at 90!) is one of the gems of the catalog. What I love about a record like this is its anything-goes spirit: No area of jazz was off-limits, and it all makes sense as part of the whole.

-Freddie Hubbard, On Fire: Live From the Blue Morocco (Resonance)
My favorite of Zev Feldman’s annual trove of unearthed jazz treasures is this aptly named Freddie Hubbard set, recorded live in the Bronx in 1967 with a stellar band including Bennie Maupin, Kenny Barron, Herbie Lewis and Freddie Waits.

A few of my other jazz-oriented archival faves were:

-Cecil Taylor and Tony Oxley, Flashing Spirits (Burning Ambulance Music)
The Oxley partnership was one of the most enduring and important of Cecil Taylor’s career, lasting even longer than the pianist’s collaboration with his creative soulmate, Jimmy Lyons (28 years vs. 26, respectively, by my calculation). There are many documents, and all are valuable, including this newly issued recording of what I believe was only their second-ever meeting, recorded in the U.K. in September 1988, less than two months after the classic Leaf Palm Hand. The sound quality is terrific, and the two are already communicating on a telepathic level.

-Rashied Ali Quintet, Sidewalks in Motion (Survival)
Rashied Ali was way more than the “multidirectional” free-jazz drummer he’s often portrayed as in thumbnail accounts. Recorded in 2002 and newly issued by the revived incarnation of the drummer’s own Survival imprint, this is a lovely document of Ali’s more conventionally swinging side, issued here for the first time, as far as I know. The great Frank Lowe is here on tenor — along with Jumaane Smith on trumpet, Andrew Bemkey on piano and Joris Teepe on bass — but Sidewalks in Motion is worlds away from Duo Exchange, which Ali and Lowe recorded 30 years prior. This is one of the stronger examples you’ll hear of the way the leaders of the ’60s jazz avant-garde mellowed in their later years while retaining their openness and idiosyncrasy.

-Horace Silver, Silver in Seattle: Live at the Penthouse (Blue Note)
I wrote this one up for the Times fall preview a few months back. Given the vintage (1965) and personnel (four fifths of the primary Song for My Father lineup: Joe Henderson, Teddy Smith and Roger Humphries, with Woody Shaw in for Carmell Jones), this one pretty much speaks for itself. Beautifully recorded hard-bop excellence.

And on the “rock” front, I highly recommend:

-Dazzling Killmen, Dig Out the Switch (Skin Graft)
Face of Collapse, from 1994, will forever be the Killmen’s defining masterpiece. But their ’92 debut — originally issued on the obscure French label Intellectual Convulsion and out of print for decades before this year’s reissue, timed to the band’s re-formation and return to the stage — already clearly revealed that they were one of the most distinctive and proficient bands of the post-hardcore era.

-Ink and Dagger reissues (Trust)
Drive This 7 Inch Wooden Stake Through My Philadelphia Heart
The Fine Art of Original Sin
Ink & Dagger
As I wrote about at greater length here, one of my favorite 2025 discoveries of old music that was new to me was the catalog of this brilliantly eccentric Philadelphia hardcore band, handsomely reissued by Trust, which is doing great things in the booming field of punk-rock archiving and preservation. I sadly missed out on the I&D box set, but all three of these reissues got a lot of play.

Welcome to part 2 of the annual DFSBP year-end roundup! See here for part 1, which covers my favorite jazz records of the year; here for part 3, featuring reissues and historical releases; and here for part 4, where I run down my favorite live shows of the year.

Below is my overall top 10 list. I loved (and enthusiastically recommend!) all the jazz records I listed in part 1, but none of them reappear here, mainly because my most avid engagement with jazz in 2025 was in person. Along with my usual heavy diet of back-catalog listening, the titles below are the recorded statements that defined my year.

Quick P.S. This marks the 21st (!) year that I’ve been compiling an annual top 10 — you can view all previously published year-end lists here, at the old DFSBP blog, as well as a list of all jazz-only top 10s here, dating back to 2005 and 2008, respectively.

Rolling Stone has just published its wonderfully diverse list of the 15 best metal albums of 2025, which I was happy to contribute to alongside various friends, former colleagues and fellow travelers. Three of the albums I blurbed there — by Deftones, Deadguy and Ghost, respectively — made it on to my overall top 10, so I wanted to link to that up front. (The Castle Rat and Coroner albums I wrote up there didn’t make the cut below but are nevertheless well worth your time!)

Without further ado, these are the 10 albums that hit me hardest this year, grabbing me again and again across compulsive repeat listens. (As always, where included, album-title links go to Bandcamp.)

1. Pile, Sunshine and Balance Beams (Sooper)
   I had been dimly aware of Pile before 2025, but this album was a trap door to obsession. I wrote here about the band’s stylistic slipperiness, and that impression has only deepened as I’ve spent more time with this utterly remarkable album. They simply don’t fit in anywhere. I could offer some genre-based shorthand (crushing post-hardcore meets crystalline art rock?), but I’m not sure it’s really of any use. The coherence and intrigue of these songs defies any attempt to reduce or contain them. I did not hear more sturdily constructed music this year: Refined and ferocious in turn, Sunshine and Balance Beams is a triumph. This in-studio performance of album highlight “Deep Clay,” which I’ve probably watched 100 times or more, is a good entry point:

2. Deftones, Private Music (Reprise/Warner)

   Like Pile, Deftones are another band I was oblivious to for years but immediately went all in on once I started paying attention (around a decade ago, with 2016’s Gore). The response to Private Music has been rapturous, suggesting some sort of return to form. That’s not exactly how I see it: Some fans were iffy on Gore, but I adored both that and 2020’s Ohms, so from where I was sitting, no course correction was needed. Anyway, Private Music is another outstanding album from one of the few legacy bands around that never seems to miss.

3. Propagandhi, At Peace (Epitaph)

   I keep an informal mental list of the Best Bands on Earth, the ones that, based on their live show, recorded output or ideally both, just keep delivering year after year (and in some cases, decade after decade). Along with the aforementioned Deftones and new additions Pile — and a bunch of others, including but not limited to Melvins, Queens of the Stone Age, Converge, Deerhoof, Obituary, Sheer Mag, Krallice, Crowbar and the Bad Plus— Propagandhi, the veteran Manitoba pop-punk–turned–technical-thrash outfit, have long ago earned tenure among this company. They have never made a bad album, but for me, their 21st-century output, now encompassing six LPs, from 2001’s Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes up through this latest one, ranks among the finest, most durable music that has been released by anyone during this time. Propagandhi do not half-ass anything, and as I described here, At Peace is another killer: technically staggering, emotionally devastating, ideologically fierce.

4. Deadguy, Near-Death Travel Services (Relapse)

   I’ve long since given up trying to figure out why, but I find some deep solace in music that sounds like a nervous breakdown. The sole full-length of Deadguy’s initial run, 1995’s Fixation on a Co-Worker, is an all-timer in that regard — a record that’s justly legendary for encapsulating collapse and seething catharsis. The big question surrounding this comeback album was: Could they still bring themselves and their listeners to the brink again after 30 long years? The answer, thankfully: Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Near-Death Travel Services is a sardonic and bilious blast, and is now neck-and-neck with Carcass’s Surgical Steel for the title of best reunion album I’ve ever heard.

5. Guided by Voices, Thick Rick and Delicious (GBV Inc)

   It’s a great time to be a GBV fan. As chronicled by my friend Morgan Enos on — his essential Substack covering all things Robert Pollard — the band is in the midst of an inspired resurgence, churning out album after album of material that ranks with the best of Pollard’s staggeringly vast back catalog. I’m still catching up on releases from the past decade plus, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this might be my current favorite GBV album. Featuring gorgeously crunchy production from Travis Harrison (a college pal of mine who has gone on to become a brilliant and seasoned engineer), it just gives you everything you want from Robert Pollard — concise, fun, ingeniously hooky songs that cherry-pick the best of the past six decades or so of what the man himself now likes to call “The Six P’s”: power pop, psychedelic, prog and post-punk.

6. Wednesday, Bleeds (Dead Oceans)

   “Elderberry Wine” is one of those rare songs that feels, as soon as you hear it, like an instant standard — just so true and right and effortless and easy to love that it’s as if it’s been around forever. I loved the rest of this record too. The combination of Karly Hartzman’s lilting voice, her casually devastating lyrics, and the artful flow of her songwriting — which tends toward the mellow but occasionally rises to urgent and desperate peaks — adds up to an absolute emotional bullseye, and a perfect blend of contemporary and classic rock (not just ’70s but ’90s too) and country modes.

7. Ghost, Skeletá (Loma Vista)

   This one really snuck up on me. I’ve been an intermittent Ghost fan since the Opus Eponymous days, but some of the intervening albums haven’t grabbed me as much as the debut. But as I spun this one over and over while working on a Ghost-centric Times feature over the summer, I found myself growing hopelessly addicted to these songs. Tobias Forge’s craftsmanship is absolutely undeniable, and it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that he’s risen to such impressive heights this year (e.g., debuting at No. 1 and selling out MSG).

8. Jim White, Inner Day (Drag City)

   I wrote at some length here about the Jim White–aissance — one of the most welcome musical developments of the past few years. Amid collaborations with old friends — including the frankly thrilling resurgence of Dirty Three, who will tour the States in 2026 — he has launched an unexpected but most welcome solo venture. Crafted in close collaboration with producer Guy Picciotto, these records — last year’s All Hits: Memories and this year’s Inner Day — stake out a soundworld that’s unique and absolutely magnetic. I have no idea what to call this music — with its soothing synth textures set against percussion that combines the subtlety and elemental grace of windchimes sounding in the breeze with a free and abstract flow that seems untethered from rock, jazz or any other easily definable tradition. White has always been a shamanic presence within his various projects, but this record elevates and distills that magic into a truly transcendent expression.

   9. Bonnie Prince Billy, The Purple Bird (No Quarter)

   There’s a theme on this list of sustained excellence — the artists who go all in on a life’s work and just keep delivering year after year. As I’ve written about previously in this space, Will Oldham is a shining example of this caliber of creator — someone whose work has captivated me for around three decades. As with the GBV record above, which I’d wholeheartedly recommend to either a seasoned Robert Pollard fan or someone totally unfamiliar with his work, The Purple Bird is quintessential Will Oldham. His sui generis voice, his wise and wry lyrical perspective, his commitment to honoring and furthering a legacy of unflinching, sometimes harsh emotional truth in performance and songwriting — it’s all beautifully documented here, which is also a testament to the strength of his longstanding collaboration with veteran Nashville producer David “Ferg” Ferguson.

   10. Bob Mould, Here We Go Crazy (Granary Music / BMG)

   Bob Mould is not technically a band, but his tight-knit trio with Jason Narducy and Jon Wurster — heard on six excellent albums so far, dating back to 2012’s Silver Age — probably belongs on that aforementioned Best Bands on Earth list. As with Deftones, Propagandhi, et al., this guy just doesn’t seem to be capable of putting out a subpar record. Mould has experimented quite a bit over the years, but what I love about his recent output is its directness: He knows his lane — concise melodic rock songs marked by anthemic hooks and uncanny emotional conviction — and commands it completely. I’m as excited about next year’s Sugar reunion as the next middle-aged rocker, but let’s not forget that he’s been churning out Copper Blue–caliber songs every few years in the interim.

Greetings, good people, and thanks as always for tuning in. Thanks as well to everyone who checked out the Best of 2025 jazz rundown — more installments in the DFSBP year-end series are coming soon.

The customary GOTW pick will follow this intro, but first, a housekeeping announcement: This will be the final edition of Gig of the Week — definitely for now and possibly forever. I’ve had a great time assembling these weekly rundowns, but the time has come to hit pause.

The reason for this is simple. After around four months, I rediscovered something I first learned back in the days of the old DFSBP blog: Blogging (or “Substacking,” or whatever the current accepted term for self-published extracurricular writing might be!) on a rigid schedule is simply not a good fit for me. I write for a living, so I when I write outside that professional context, it needs to be the result of a specific, often impulsive inspiration.

I’m passionate about recommending shows, but it’s not feasible, time-, energy- or, honestly, income-wise for me to churn out a detailed weekly post here in the midst of my other commitments. And most importantly, this framework isn’t yielding my best work. DFSBP has always been a place for me to be my freest, most joyous writing self — not a gig at which I clock in.

My hope is that this decision will free me up to publish more original standalone essays and interviews — i.e., the kind of Substack content that has been most personally rewarding for me, and which has received the most enthusiastic feedback. Past efforts in this vein include but are not limited to:

-my recent interview with the Messthetics about putting their spin on Sonny Sharrock’s Ask the Ages

-my reflection on tracking down the men behind a zine and album review that changed my life 30+ years ago

-my unpacking of the personal significance of one of my favorite albums of all time, Dazzling Killmen’s Face of Collapse

-my interview with John Stanier, a personal drumming hero, about his work on Helmet’s monumental Betty album

For those who have come here specifically in search of recommendations for jazz shows happening in NYC, I have good news for you, coming soon. Stay tuned!

And for all your Substack gig-calendar needs, I urge you to keep a close eye on the diligent and passionate efforts of my friends Steve Smith and Piotr Orlov.

Again, you will still be hearing from me, just not in clockwork fashion. My only pledge is that I’ll post here whenever I’m inspired to do so, and I’ll try to give it my best each time out. For anyone who has signed up for a paid subscription, I sincerely appreciate it. Over time, as the form and content here evolve, and hopefully find some kind of new, more sustainable equilibrium, I of course leave it up to you to decide whether or not to maintain that contribution — and no hard feelings either way.

Beyond these or any other details, above all, thank you for reading!

And now, on to our final installment of Gig of the Week…

II. Gig of the Week

Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones + Omar Ahmad + sinonó; Pioneer Works; Tuesday, Dec. 16; Pioneer Works

Led by vocalist and harmonium player Amirtha Kidambi, Elder Ones are one of the emblematic groups of the contemporary New York avant-garde. Their 2024 album, New Monuments, and a recent companion live album argue that case persuasively. You can hear the intertwining threads of Kidambi’s history (South Indian Carnatic music, free jazz, outré classical music) in these pieces, but in the moment, as the music journeys between composed passages and volatile improvisation, sinuous groove and chaotic, even psychedelic abstraction, you’re not thinking about any kind of additive genre equation, so much as you’re being swept along by the band’s fever-dream flow.

Here, the band — whose current lineup includes Matt Nelson on soprano sax, Alfredo Colon on tenor, Lester St. Louis on bass and Jason Nazary on drums, with various players adding synth and effects — headlines an installment of Pioneer Works’ False Harmonics series, also featuring producer and sound artist Omar Ahmad and sinonó, a compelling trio featuring vocalist-composer Isabel Crespo Pardo, as well as the aforementioned St. Louis on cello and bassist Henry Fraser.

I was sidelined with a cold for most of last week, so I’m going to skip the recap section here and just move straight into the final listings calendar, which I’ve filled out with some of the gigs I’m most excited about for both December and winter/spring 2026.

And before we get into the specifics, note that there are a whole bunch of Tim Berne gigs at both Lowlands and Barbès in January — stay tuned to his Instagram for details.

III. Highly Subjective/Selective DFSBP Show Calendar, a.k.a Running List of Gigs I May Attend

DEC. 12

Jazz From Hell Festival; Le Poisson Rouge

Imperial Triumphant, the esoteric and eclectic masked death-metal trio, headline a cool genre-melding mini fest featuring “lungcore” (as in prog-metal with horns) veterans Jerseyband and Kilter, a nicely complementary band that brings together Imperial Triumphant drummer (and Heavy Metal Bebop veteran) Kenny Grohowski with Jerseyband saxist Ed RosenBerg III.

J. Robbins Band Plays Burning Airlines; Webster Hall

J. Robbins is one of the most reliably inspired rock songwriters of the past 30-plus years. I’ve been a Jawbox fan for decades and have recently adored his solo output, including last year’s Basilisk. Here he’s returning with his trusty live band, featuring Brooks Harlan on bass and Peter Moffett on drums, to dig into the catalog of his outstanding late-’90s / early-2000s era band Burning Airlines — which also featured Moffett in its initial run. (Originally scheduled as a headlining gig at TV Eye, this show is now an opening slot for Texas Is the Reason at Webster Hall.)

Stress Positions; Trans-Pecos

Stress Positions are an absolutely ferocious hardcore-punk band from Chicago, and I’m dying to see them live.

DEC. 12, 13

SML; The Sultan Room

How You Been, the latest from inspired future-jazz collective SML, is just out, and given the momentum and energy currently surrounding the group (check out Grayson Haver Currin’s recent Times profile), these intimate gigs should be a blast.

DEC. 13

Chad Taylor Quintet; The Jazz Gallery

See last week’s post.

DEC. 17

Conical Intersect; Sisters

Sam Weinberg and Kevin Sun, two saxophonists with highly developed languages both as players and bandleader/conceptualists, team up in an excellent new collaborative band featuring bassist Henry Fraser and drummer Jason Nazary. I caught them back in May and came away highly impressed.

JAN. 7–10, 14, 15

Ches Smith Quartet; The Stone

The same great Ches Smith band heard on Clone Row, which I spotlighted a couple months back and which landed on my extended best-of-2025 list, settles in for a roomy residency at the Stone.

JAN. 9, 10

Winter Jazzfest Marathons; various venues

The iconic and essential annual New York jazz blowout continues with its 22nd edition. The lineups for WJF’s central Manhattan and Brooklyn marathons are out now, and they both look typically amazing.

JAN. 12

Freedom Riders+: My Country ’Tis of Thee; Le Poisson Rouge

This one, part of Winter Jazzfest’s extended slate of offerings, sounds super cool: Luke Stewart and Ben Williams preside over an improv round robin featuring illustrious guests including Dee Dee Bridgewater, Arturo O’Farrill, Adegoke Steve Colson and Samora Pinderhughes.

JAN. 22–24

Improv Nights 2026: A Tribute to Derek Bailey; Roulette

Roulette hosts three nights of anything-goes free improv in the spirit of the late Derek Bailey’s storied Company gatherings. Respective curators for the evenings are Wendy Eisenberg, Chris Ryan Williams and Chris Cochrane.

FEB. 19–21

Ahmed; Shapeshifter Lab

The European jazz quartet Ahmed has caused an international stir in recent years with its channeling and reinterpretation of the works of late bassist and oud player Ahmed Abdul-Malik. I’m hoping to finally catch a glimpse of them at this upcoming residency, presented by Four One One.

FEB. 25–28

Jon Irabagon; The Stone

The ever-inspired, consistently surprising saxophonist Jon Irabagon presents four all-star lineups, including respective quartets with Patricia Brennan, Mary Halvorson and Tomas Fujiwara, and Brian Marsella, Luke Stewart and Nasheet Waits; a duo with Peter Evans; and a quintet with Tim Berne, Matt Mitchell, Chris Lightcap and Dan Weiss.

FEB. 26

Gary Bartz; Le Poisson Rouge

The eminent altoist arrives in the wake of The Eternal Tenure of Sound: Damage Control, a fine recent effort where he reinterprets some of his favorite pop songs.

FEB. 27, 28

Sheer Mag; Mercury Lounge, TV Eye

Sheer Mag are, for my money, the best rock & roll band on Earth. I’ve seen them live something like nine times, and you had better believe I’ll be back at TV Eye in February.

MARCH 6

Zakir Hussain Eternal; Carnegie Hall

The great tabla player Zakir Hussain died a year ago this month. Honoring him here are an illustrious array of friends and collaborators including Charles Lloyd, Mickey Hart, Edgar Meyer, Vijay Iyer and Gerald Clayton.

MARCH 13

Artemis; Zankel Hall

I loved the latest record by jazz supergroup Artemis, spotlighted in the best-of-2025 list, and I’m excited that they’re coming back through town in the spring.

MARCH 21

Geordie Greep + Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore + Delroy Edwards + Still House Plants; Knockdown Center

The upcoming edition of Knockdown’s Outline series is an avant-rock extravaganza featuring Geordie Greep, the former Black Midi member who put out a colossally weird and inspired solo debut last year that sounded like Steely Dan mixed with loungey art pop and head-spinning prog-punk. Terrific bill top to bottom: Barwick and Lattimore present lovely chamber ambient, house producer Delroy Edwards performs with a live band, and Still House Plants play their pleasingly warped indie pop.

MARCH 20, 21

Bill Orcutt; Roulette

Avant-guitar luminary Bill Orcutt convenes all of his active projects, plus artists he releases via his Palilalia imprint, for a two-night Roulette blowout. One cool highlight of the March 20 bill: Shane Parish, Ahleuchatistas leader and Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet member, will present his solo-acoustic interpretations of the music of Autechre, out next year on a new Palilalia LP.

MARCH 26

Shabaka + Irreversible Entanglements + Tom Skinner; Knockdown Center

Three standout acts of 2020s jazz share what’s sure to be a potent bill in Queens. Shabaka’s 2024 album marked an intriguing pivot, and I’m curious to see what direction his upcoming live shows take.

MARCH 29, 30; Irving Plaza, Warsaw

Drain + No Pressure + Haywire + Secret World

I’ve been a fan of Drain ever since I (like the rest of the hardcore-attuned internet) was mesmerized by this 2019 video of them rocking a San Jose house party. Like all their prior releases, their latest, …Is Your Friend, is a shreddy, mosh-inciting blast with a refreshingly upbeat lyrical bent.

APRIL 3

Dirty Three; Pioneer Works

I’m not sure there’s a show I’m more excited for next year. I wrote about the glorious Jim White–aissance recently in this newsletter, and now he returns with the band that started it all.

APRIL 18

Autopsy + Impure + Imprecation + Morpheus Descends; The Brooklyn Monarch

Autopsy, one of the greatest death-metal bands of all time, makes a rare local appearance, topping an extremely sick bill featuring upstate-NY legends Morpheus Descends.

MAY 2, 3

Sugar; Webster Hall

Bob Mould’s terrific ’90s power trio returns. Mould is worth seeing in literally any setting, and this ought to be a whole lot of fun.

Welcome to part 1 of the annual DFSBP year-end roundup! Stay here for part 2, in which I list my 10 favorite albums of 2025, all styles in play; here for part 3, featuring reissues and historical releases; and here for part 4, where I run down my favorite live shows of the year.

P.S. This marks the 18th (!) year that I’ve been compiling an annual jazz top 10 — you can view all previously published year-end year-end jazz lists here, at the old DFSBP blog, dating back to 2008.

Here, via The New York Times, are my annotated picks for the 10 best jazz albums of 2025. The titles in question — with links to relevant prior coverage at DFSBP or elsewhere (on the artist names) and to hear/purchase Bandcamp (on the album names) — are as follows:

1. Marcus Gilmore, Journey to the New: Live at the Village Vanguard (Drummerslams)

2. Amina Claudine Myers, Solace of the Mind (Red Hook)

3. Jacob Garchik, Ye Olde 2: At the End of Time (Yestereve)

4. Craig Taborn, Nels Cline, Marcus Gilmore, Trio of Bloom (Pyroclastic)

5. Kassa Overall, Cream (Warp)

6. Billy Hart Quartet, Just (ECM)

   Note: This band also recently released a great live album on Smoke Sessions.

7. Brandee Younger, Gadabout Season (Impulse!)

8. Chicago Underground Duo, Hyperglyph (International Anthem)

9. Joe Farnsworth, The Big Room (Smoke Sessions)

10. Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons, Live in Philadelphia (Otherly Love/Ars Nova Workshop)

I filed this same top 10 as my entry in the 2025 Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll, now overseen by Tom Hull, the results of which should be live in January. I also voted for some choice archival titles, which I’ll run down in a later post.

In naming the 10 best jazz albums of the year, am I also in fact naming my 10 favorites? Pretty much, though I will add that I do try to keep in mind that a list like this will reach a broad readership, i.e., listeners who perhaps have not checked out a single new jazz record in 2025, along with those who may have heard dozens (if not played on one or two!). Ideally, I’d want a curious, relatively open-minded reader to be able to dive in and not find themselves too, too daunted by what they’re coming across.

But again, the chief metric for me here is pretty simple: “Did the record in question truly wow me across multiple listens?” In the case of the Gilmore record that topped the list, I found myself in awe every single time I spun it. There was really no serious competition for No. 1 spot. (Interestingly, like the album that topped my 2024 jazz list, Tarbaby’s You Think This America, at press time, Journey to the New is available only on Bandcamp, though the former title is in fact now streaming, a year and a half after release.)

Narrowing down the list to the 10 titles above was, as it always is, both fun and considerably difficult. In the interest of celebrating the year’s bounty of fine new releases, here are 25 more that made a strong impression, many of which I seriously considered for the top 10. For the below, same as the above, I’ll link back and out where applicable; I’ll also quote prior writeups, either here or elsewhere, or add a brief new annotation if I haven’t yet covered them during the course of the year.

11. Peter Evans’s Being & Becoming, Ars Ludicra (More Is More)

    Framed by Evans’s skillful sound processing, the results feel like a truly cutting-edge sort of fusion, reminding me at various moments of electric Miles, John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet and Autechre.

12. Al Foster, Live at Smoke (Smoke Sessions)

    The legendary drummer’s last-ever gigs produced an epic live album that would have been an exemplary late-career document even without the heaviness of the occasion.

13. Chad Taylor Quintet, Smoke Shifter (Otherly Love)

    Smoke Shifter’s sophisticated, composition-forward approach reminds me a bit of classic mid-to-late-’60s Blue Note…

14. Nicole Glover, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Savant)

    Saxophonist Nicole Glover’s trio with bassist Tyrone Allen and drummer Kayvon Gordon is one of the most promising working bands on the scene, and this is a terrific document of their multifaceted sound, which fits into no simplistic jazz subcategory.

15. Branford Marsalis Quartet, Belonging (Blue Note)

    Marsalis has tackled imposing jazz masterworks before, covering the entirety of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme in the studio and onstage in the early 2000s, but at its best, his [take on Keith Jarrett’s] Belonging goes deeper.

16. Onilu, Onilu (Eremite)

    It was a year of major losses in the drum world (along with Al Foster, R.I.P. to Jack DeJohnette and Louis Moholo-Moholo) but also one of inspired statements from living percussion masters, including the artists of various ages cited above (Gilmore, Overall, Hart, Farnsworth, Taylor) and the great Joe Chambers, who teamed up with Taylor and Sonic Liberation Front leader Kevin Diehl on this fascinating revival of Max Roach’s M’Boom concept.

17. Ches Smith, Clone Row (Otherly Love)

    Featuring Mary Halvorson and Liberty Ellman on guitars and Nick Dunston on bass, Clone Row is all and none of these things, simultaneously or sequentially: progressive rock, avant-garde jazz, art punk, chamber music, electronic music, free improvisation.

18. James Brandon Lewis Quartet, Abstraction Is Deliverance (Intakt)

    James Brandon Lewis is so prolific that even a project as substantial as his excellent working quartet (with pianist Aruán Ortiz, bassist Brad Jones and, yet again, Chad Taylor on drums) can sometimes fly under the radar, but their latest is a beautiful showcase for his magisterial tenor sound and multifaceted writing.

19. Dan Weiss Quartet, Unclassified Affections (Pi)

    …a potent mix of urgent and spacious modes, with plenty of room for the eccentric tendencies of each player (Weiss, trumpeter Peter Evans, guitarist Miles Okazaki and vibraphonist Patricia Brennan) to shine.

20. Nels Cline, Consentrik Quartet (Blue Note)

    In addition to the Trio of Bloom triumph listed above, Nels Cline also issued this debut from his current working band — with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Tom Rainey — that’s as satisfying a distillation of his particular brand of avant-jazz as I’ve heard.

21. Mary Halvorson, About Ghosts (Nonesuch)

    Scored for sextet (with occasional guests), this is an ear-bending compositional marvel, with an overall soundworld as distinctive as Halvorson’s signature guitar voice.

22. Linda May Han Oh, Strange Heavens (Biophilia)

    Oh’s band with Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet and Tyshawn Sorey on drums blew me away live at the Vanguard back in June, and the trio’s first appearance on record captures much of the drive and intrigue of their onstage sound.

23. Tim Berne, Yikes Too (Out of Your Head)

    Berne’s main vehicle these days is Capatosta, a trio with Gregg Belisle-Chi on guitar and Tom Rainey on drums — often heard at the saxophonist’s ongoing Lowlands residency — and this half-studio, half-live effort documents their telepathic chemistry, clearly descended from earlier Berne bands like Big Satan (Berne and Rainey plus guitarist Marc Ducret) but with its own diverse palette.

24. Steve Lehman Trio and Mark Turner, The Music of Anthony Braxton (Pi)

    Two new Lehman originals stirred into the program reflect his own signature style, tricky yet powerfully kinetic, and show how Braxton’s painstaking approach has empowered members of a younger generation to hone their own unconventional aesthetics.

    (Note: The Fieldwork record I spotlighted here, the first in 17 years from the trio of Lehman, Vijay Iyer and Tyshawn Sorey, is also very much worth your time.)

25. Chris Williams, Odu: Vibration II (AKP)

    Ever found yourself wishing that the ambient sections of In a Silent Way would extend into infinity, or that you could hear Bill Dixon improvise against lush open-air field recordings? Then do not miss this blissful and evocative marvel.

26. Artemis, Arboresque (Blue Note)

    It’s always exciting to see a supergroup grow into an enduring staple of the scene, and judging by this LP — the third and best yet from the collective anchored by pianist Renee Rosnes, trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, bassist Noriko Ueda and drummer Allison Miller, with saxophonist Nicole Glover making her second recorded appearance — that seems to be the path that Artemis is on.

27. John Scofield and Dave Holland, Memories of Home (ECM)

    An ECM specialty is the relaxed, swinging duet session between two veteran masters (see also, say, Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden’s Jasmine from 2010), and this entry is as satisfying as you’d hope, reflective and slyly funky in turn.

28. Thomas Morgan, Around You Is a Forest (Loveland)

    A terrifically weird head-spinner, this one (technically Morgan’s debut as a leader!) involves a virtual instrument called WOODS and a cast of some of the world’s most adventurous improvisers.

29. Jon Irabagon, Server Farm (Irabbagast)

    Server Farm is the latest inspired example of a trademark Jon Irabagon move: Assemble a cast of edgy virtuosos, write some challenging pieces while leaving plenty of room for exploration, and let it rip.

30. Paul Cornish, You’re Exaggerating! (Blue Note)

    My pick for the year’s best debut album (after some deliberation, I left Marcus Gilmore and Thomas Morgan out of that particular running, since both are essentially veterans at this point), this piano-trio effort showcases the leader’s marvelous technique and impressive writing, and the highly evolved chemistry he shares with bassist Joshua Crumbly and drummer Jonathan Pinson.

31. Dave Douglas, Alloy (Greenleaf)

    An unusual lineup (three trumpets plus vibes, bass and drums), and a typically varied and engaging set of Douglas compositions make this a must-hear.

32. David Murray Quartet, Birdly Serenade (Impulse!)

    This band’s debut, Francesca, was one of my favorites of last year, and the follow-up is every bit as good: funky, free and swinging, inhabiting each zone fully.

33. Charles Lloyd, Figure in Blue (Blue Note)

    Despite his near-constant output, the 87-year-old Lloyd doesn’t seem to be capable of releasing an uninspired record. The unusual trio format of Lloyd on sax and flute, plus Jason Moran on piano and Marvin Sewell on guitar yields spellbinding results, ranging from floating ballads to feisty blues jams.

34. Vernon Reid, Hoodoo Telemetry (The Players Club / Artone)

35. Melvin Gibbs, Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2 (Hausu Mountain)

    These last two aren’t technically related, but the respective latest efforts from Vernon Reid and Melvin Gibbs feel to me like a complementary pair: inspired sonic fusions from two old friends who have each pursued their own boundless paths.

Note: Before I move on to the next section, I want to state that I loved Henry Threadgill’s Listen Ship. Calling it a jazz record, or really any kind of record other than a Henry Threadgill record, seems reductive, though, so I decided it didn’t make sense to seriously consider it as part of the 2025 jazz crop. So consider this my endorsement — as with many recent Threadgill releases, thumbnail description and categorization fall short; you simply need to hear it.

And an honorable mention to the three albums I voted for in the Vocal category of the aforementioned critics poll.

1. Gary Bartz & NTU, The Eternal Tenure of Sound: Damage Control (OYO)

Is this a Gary Bartz smooth-jazz album? Maybe! Regardless of how you classify it, it’s a bold and surprising statement, and I love it.

2. Christian McBride Big Band, Without Further Ado, Vol. 1 (Mack Avenue)

The eminent bassist’s big band and an all-star cast of vocalists — including Sting, Jeffrey Osborne, Samara Joy, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Dianne Reeves — present a set of consummately classy party music.

3. Tyreek McDole, Open Up Your Senses (Artworks)

This 25-year-old singer has a captivating baritone and serious presence. It’s honestly hard to believe this is his debut LP.

Several fellow critics have already gone live with their year-end lists on Substack, so I invite you to peruse fine rundowns from…

Nate Chinen:

The Gig

The Best Jazz Albums of 2025

During this year of mayhem and malfeasance, one saving grace could be found in the music. Maybe that’s always the case — but didn’t it seem especially so in 2025? It did for me. So consider this list however you like, but I tend to see it as a lifeline…

Read more

9 months ago · 122 likes · 4 comments · Nate Chinen

And note that Nate will be hosting an online Best of 2025 roundtable tonight, Tuesday, Dec. 9th, with Ayana Contreras, Martin Johnson and Peter Margasak. More info at the link above.

Will Layman:

Big Butter & Egg Man: Layman on Jazz and Culture

The Best Jazz of 2025

I have been writing about jazz on the PopMatters website for about 20 years, and I’m proud of the work. Popmatters sounds “lite” but features serious writing, and it allowed me to hone my critical chops…

Read more

9 months ago · 20 likes · 3 comments · Will Layman

George Grella:

Kill Yr Idols

Best Recorded Jazz of 2025

What We Say…

Read more

9 months ago · 57 likes · George Grella

Evan Goldfine (plenty of jazz here among a lot else):

A Year of Bach

My top 47 Albums of 2025

Year-end lists are great, and here’s your first. Stack your queue with new music that you missed among the many lifetimes of songs uploaded every week…

Read more

9 months ago · 61 likes · 23 comments · Evan Goldfine

Greetings, good people, and welcome once again. It’s a busy week, so I’m going to streamline the usual GOTW format and just move right into the show recs. Lots of cool gigs coming up as we move into December.

P.S. Stay tuned for the customary DFSBP year-end wrap-up items coming soon!

I. Gig of the Week

Chad Taylor Quintet; Saturday, Dec. 13; The Jazz Gallery

It’s been a big year for Chad Taylor, but then again, it kind of always is. At pretty much any point during the past 25-plus years, he’s been a key presence in the more adventurous corners of the jazz world, from his work with Chicago tenor legend Fred Anderson to his time playing with the late, great jaimie branch. A rundown of his 2025 highlights includes:

-the Chicago Underground Duo record I spotlighted a few months back

-two very different and equally worthwhile albums with longtime collaborator James Brandon Lewis, Apple Cores and Abstraction Is Deliverance

-the fascinating and somewhat overlooked self-titled debut from Onilu, an M’Boom-esque percussion collective that unites him with Joe Chambers and Kevin Diehl

-Illuminescence, a new effort from Hearts & Minds, another collective trio, with bass-clarinetist Jason Stein and keyboardist Paul Giallorenzo, that I’ve only just begun sampling but is sounding great so far

-The Order, from Luke Stewart’s Silt Remembrance Ensemble, an expanded edition of Silt Trio, heard on one of my favorite albums of 2024

-and Pivot, featuring the all-star quartet of Taylor, Ken Vandermark, Mats Gustafsson and Tomeka Reid

There may be more! But meanwhile, the band performing at the Jazz Gallery on the 13th is featured on yet another impressive 2025 Taylor disc, Smoke Shifter, which debuts a new Philadelphia-based quintet featuring tenor saxophonist Bryan Rogers, trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, vibraphonist Victor Vieira-Branco and bassist Matt Engle. (The personnel offers various cool Philly-oriented threads to follow, including one that leads back to Shot x Shot, a superb quartet active in the early 2000s that included Rogers, Engle, drummer Dan Capecchi and my dear friend Dan Scofield on alto sax; and another that points to Bark Culture, a trio led by Vieira-Branco, which released a terrific debut album last year.)

This record has its own sound, distinct from all the other recent Taylor efforts listed above: Its sophisticated, composition-forward approach (with pieces by Taylor, Vieira-Branco and Rogers) reminds me a bit of classic mid-to-late-’60s Blue Note — a record like, say, Bobby Hutcherson’s Total Eclipse or Medina. There are moments of freedom but the whole program is subtle and crisply structured in a vein that I’d almost describe as chamber jazz. The musicians’ sounds blend beautifully, and despite this being their first collective effort, they already sound like a bona fide band. In short, this — their New York debut, if I’m not mistaken — is going to be a great gig.

See here for an in-depth Smoke Shifter review from Martin Johnson in The Wall Street Journal that helpfully situates the album within Taylor’s long and prolific career.

And the best show I caught last week was, unsurprisingly:

The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis; Friday, Nov. 28; The Hamilton Live

I was lucky enough to be in D.C. over Thanksgiving, so I managed to catch this one, and it was everything I’d hoped. The band really honored the sturdiness of the Sharrock tunes while also going for it with abandon when it came time to improvise. All you could hope for from a covers set, in other words. A very welcome bonus: an entire second set of original material, including some new pieces, that reminded me just how strong this quartet’s self-titled 2024 album really was.

II. Highly Subjective/Selective DFSBP Show Calendar, a.k.a Running List of Gigs I May Attend

DEC. 4

Algernon Cadwallader; Racket

Few bands do that yelpy, stealthily proggy early-2000s form of emo (sprinkled with math rock) better than Pennsylvania’s Algernon Cadwallader, who play here behind their new reunion album Trying to Have a Thought.

DEC. 4, 5

Peter Evans’s Being & Becoming; Public Records

See last week’s post.

DEC. 5

EYE and C.O.L.O + aya and Team Rolfes; Powerhouse Arts

Boredoms leader, former Naked City and Z-Rock Hawaii collaborator, and all-around avant-garde musical force EYE hits town for a rare gig, in collaboration with the visual artist C.O.L.O., as part of the eclectic multimedia fest Powerhouse: International. (For more on the fest, see this opening-night report from Steve Smith.) I have no idea what to expect from this one, and I can’t wait.

DEC. 7

Sylvie Courvoisier with Wadada Leo Smith, Mary Halvorson; Roulette

This year saw the release of new Sylvie Courvoisier duo albums with both Smith and Halvorson, and each of those two configurations appears here. It’s all beautiful and subtly outlandish stuff and should make for a compelling bill.

Mortician + Manat + Black Hurst + Infernal Spawn; TV Eye

A Mortician gig always does the overactive brain good. Expect regressive death-metal goodness from the Yonkers legends.

DEC. 9

Tim Berne; Lowlands

Tim Berne’s Lowlands takeover continues with an expanded version of Capatosta, his excellent working trio with guitarist Gregg Belisle-Chi and drummer Tom Rainey, joined here by bassist John Hébert.

DEC. 9, 10

Ron Carter and Gene Bertoncini; Mezzrow

I can think of few gigs that sound cooler than this one, pairing two master players — the legendary Ron Carter and Gene Bertoncini, the unassuming virtuoso guitarist — at the intimate Mezzrow in a setting that can’t help but recall Carter’s longtime rapport with the late, great Jim Hall. I snapped up tix to this one in a flash.

DEC. 12

Jazz From Hell Festival; Le Poisson Rouge

Imperial Triumphant, the esoteric and eclectic masked death-metal trio, headline a cool genre-melding mini fest featuring “lungcore” (as in prog-metal with horns) veterans Jerseyband and Kilter, a nicely complementary band that brings together Imperial Triumphant drummer (and Heavy Metal Bebop veteran) Kenny Grohowski with Jerseyband saxist Ed RosenBerg III.

J. Robbins Band Plays Burning Airlines; Webster Hall

J. Robbins is one of the most reliably inspired rock songwriters of the past 30-plus years. I’ve been a Jawbox fan for decades and have recently adored his solo output, including last year’s Basilisk. Here he’s returning with his trusty live band, featuring Brooks Harlan on bass and Peter Moffett on drums, to dig into the catalog of his outstanding late-’90s / early-2000s era band Burning Airlines — which also featured Moffett in its initial run. (Originally scheduled as a headlining gig at TV Eye, this show is now an opening slot for Texas Is the Reason at Webster Hall.)

Stress Positions; Trans-Pecos

Stress Positions are an absolutely ferocious hardcore-punk band from Chicago, and I’m dying to see them live.

DEC. 12, 13

SML; The Sultan Room

How You Been, the latest from inspired future-jazz collective SML, is just out, and given the momentum and energy currently surrounding the group (check out Grayson Haver Currin’s recent Times profile), these intimate gigs should be a blast.

DEC. 13

Chad Taylor Quintet; The Jazz Gallery

See above.

JAN. 9, 10

Winter Jazzfest Marathons; various venues

The iconic and essential annual New York jazz blowout continues with its 22nd edition. The lineups for WJF’s central Manhattan and Brooklyn marathons are out now, and they both look typically amazing.

JAN. 12

Freedom Riders+: My Country ’Tis of Thee; Le Poisson Rouge

This one, part of Winter Jazzfest’s extended slate of offerings, sounds super cool: Luke Stewart and Ben Williams preside over an improv round robin featuring illustrious guests including Dee Dee Bridgewater, Arturo O’Farrill, Adegoke Steve Colson and Samora Pinderhughes.

JAN. 22–24

Improv Nights 2026: A Tribute to Derek Bailey; Roulette

Roulette hosts three nights of anything-goes free improv in the spirit of the late Derek Bailey’s storied Company gatherings. Respective curators for the evenings are Wendy Eisenberg, Chris Ryan Williams and Chris Cochrane.

FEB. 19–21

Ahmed; Shapeshifter Lab

The European jazz quartet Ahmed has caused an international stir in recent years with its channeling and reinterpretation of the works of late bassist and oud player Ahmed Abdul-Malik. I’m hoping to finally catch a glimpse of them at this upcoming residency, presented by Four One One.

FEB. 26

Gary Bartz; Le Poisson Rouge

The eminent altoist arrives in the wake of Damage Control, a fine recent effort where he reinterprets some of his favorite pop songs.

MARCH 20, 21

Bill Orcutt; Roulette

Avant-guitar luminary Bill Orcutt convenes all of his active projects, plus artists he releases via his Palilalia imprint, for a promising two-night fest.

MARCH 26

Shabaka + Irreversible Entanglements + Tom Skinner; Knockdown Center

Three standout acts of 2020s jazz share what’s sure to be a potent bill in Queens.

MARCH 29, 30; Irving Plaza, Warsaw

Drain + No Pressure + Haywire + Secret World

I’ve been a fan of Drain ever since I (like the rest of the hardcore-attuned internet) was mesmerized by this 2019 video of them rocking a San Jose house party. Just like all their prior releases, their new one, …Is Your Friend, is a shreddy, mosh-inciting blast with a refreshingly upbeat lyrical bent.

Greetings, good people, and welcome once again. It’s going to be another short-ish post this week, as I segue into the holiday weekend from a quiet few days upstate, but the shows heat up again as of next week, so let’s see what’s in store.

I. Prologue: Recent Happenings; Current Listening

-ICYMI, I interviewed the Messthetics about Sonny Sharrock. Along with James Brandon Lewis, they’ll perform Ask the Ages in full on Friday, Nov. 28, at the Hamilton Live in Washington, D.C.

-I rarely need much of a prompt to become re-obsessed with Stinking Lizaveta, an instrumental power trio from Philly that’s been going strong for more than 30 years. There’s something about the purity of their music that I find so life-affirming, and I return to it periodically as I would a beloved seasonal dish, tasty and ever-nourishing. Their signature sound has a certain esoteric quality, with rhythms and scales borrowed from prog, as well as Greek and Arabic music, but — as with, say, the mighty Keelhaul — at its core, it’s just good, old bruising rock music.

Anyway, a passing mention of Stinking Liz by Messthetics bassist Joe Lally, who reissued the band’s first two albums on his Tolotta label back in the early 2000s, got me back on board, and I’ve been savoring this interview with guitarist Yanni Papadopoulos and drummer Cheshire Agusta on the Whatever Comes Next podcast, which appeared back in the spring. Also of note is a trove of archival releases from earlier in the year, including newly remastered reissues of those same first two albums, Hopelessness and Shame and Slaughterhouse; a rare 1994 demo recorded by Steve Albini that sounds absolutely fantastic; and a live album drawn from a 2023 show that you can also watch in full below.

I’m a broken record on this point, but a band like Stinking Lizaveta is a precious natural resource. Independent, passionate, aesthetically uncompromised. Like I discussed in this Oneida post a while back, they’re essentially playing folk music: a homegrown style that’s been shielded from any harmful streamlining or modernizing influence. Buy their music and go see them play anytime you can.

P.S. You might notice that I frequently recommend interviews along with bands or records. I’m not sure if it’s this way for everyone — and this probably isn’t a huge revelation, given my profession — but for me, immersing in the music is also about immersing in the personalities behind it, and the circumstances of its making. Two other recent examples: revelatory dives into the catalogs of Shiner and Hum, accompanied by spins through interviews with those bands’ respective drummers, Jason Gerken and Bryan St. Pere, on Joe Wong’s Trap Set podcast. Based on the latter episode, St. Pere seems like a lovely guy — shocking and tragic that he would pass away only a few years after that conversation at age 52.

-Three recent YouTube uploads that are worth your time:

Cecil Taylor mini doc:

Al Foster EPK re: the new Live at Smoke (see here for more on this one from Nate Chinen, who also wrote the liner notes):

Billy Hart EPK re: the new Multidirectional (and see below for info on his Smoke gigs this coming weekend):

II. Gig of the Week

Peter Evans’s Being and Becoming; Thursday and Friday, Dec. 4, 5

There was a time, around 20 years ago, circa More Is More, Peter Evans’s debut solo album, when it seemed as though labeling the trumpeter as “just” a free improviser — albeit a particularly committed, extreme and ferocious one — was a safe bet. But since then, his music has evolved in many different directions, to the point that you really never know what you’re going to get.

The last time I caught him live, earlier this month at Sam Weinberg’s monthly series at Sisters, he played duo with keyboardist Ron Stabinsky, mixing unsettling electroacoustic soundscapes with eerily beautiful renditions of Medieval and Renaissance music. The time before that, at Roulette in May as part of the Long Play festival, he was leading Being & Becoming, which has become perhaps his signature group in recent years. Featuring vibraphonist Joel Ross and bassist Nick Jozwiak, along with a series of different drummers, it really showcases Evans’s progression as a composer-bandleader. The music is kinetic, driving and highly regimented, but as heard on the excellent new Ars Ludicra, also leaves plenty of room for improvisation that’s both explosive and spacious. Framed by Evans’s skillful sound processing, the results feel like a truly cutting-edge sort of fusion, reminding me at various moments of electric Miles, John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet and Autechre.

This band is outstanding on record and an overwhelming force live. I expect them to sound massive in the cozy confines of Public Records. Michael Shekwoaga Ode shines on the new album, though here the equally mighty Tyshawn Sorey will be behind the kit.

No gig recap this week, as I’ve been off the scene in recent days. Stay tuned!

III. Highly Subjective/Selective DFSBP Show Calendar, a.k.a Running List of Gigs I May Attend

Note: Few new gigs added for November and on into 2026!

NOV. 27–30

Jason Moran and the Bandwagon; Village Vanguard

This stellar, ever-fresh piano trio, going strong for around a quarter century, continues its annual Thanksgiving tradition.

NOV. 28

Sanguisugabogg + Despised Icon + Skinless + Defeated Sanity + Corpse Pile; Irving Plaza

See last week’s post.

NOV. 28–30

Billy Hart Quartet; Smoke

Easily one of the top bands in 21st-century jazz, Billy Hart’s quartet with Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson and Ben Street — which released the terrific Just back in February — celebrates Multidirectional, a new live album recorded at this very club in 2023. (More on Hart and this run from Nate Chinen, Vinnie Sperrazza and Iverson.)

NOV. 29

Ember; Bar Bayeux

You can’t pin an easy subgenre descriptor on Ember, the collective trio of Caleb Wheeler Curtis (who plays both stritch and trumpet), bassist Noah Garabedian and drummer Vinnie Sperrazza. I missed their latest release, August in March, when it came out back in 2023, but I’m currently digging it following a tip-off from Sperrazza’s Substack, and I hope to catch the band live either here or at another gig soon.

NOV. 30

Marietta; Warsaw

Marietta are from Philly, but their 2013 LP Summer Death is as exquisite an example of the bittersweet exuberance of so-called Midwest emo as I could name. (Note: This gig was rescheduled from October.)

DEC. 1

Patricia Brennan; Roulette

Vibraphonist Patricia Brennan is a leading light in contemporary progressive jazz, a artist whose work is as rousing, and just plain fun, as it is challenging. Here she unveils and celebrates Of the Near and Far, a follow-up to 2024’s marvelous Breaking Stretch, with the 10-piece band that appears on the record, featuring a full string quartet within its ranks, as well as Arktureye (a.k.a. Noel Brennan, a percussionist and also Patricia’s husband) on electronics.

DEC. 4

Algernon Cadwallader; Racket

Few bands do that yelpy, stealthily proggy early-2000s form of emo (sprinkled with math rock) better than Pennsylvania’s Algernon Cadwallader, who play here behind their new reunion album Trying to Have a Thought.

DEC. 4, 5

Peter Evans’s Being & Becoming; Public Records

See above.

DEC. 5

EYE and C.O.L.O + aya and Team Rolfes; Powerhouse Arts

Boredoms leader, former Naked City and Z-Rock Hawaii collaborator, and all-around avant-garde musical force EYE hits town for a rare gig, in collaboration with the visual artist C.O.L.O., as part of the eclectic multimedia fest Powerhouse: International. (For more on the fest, see this opening-night report from Steve Smith.) I have no idea what to expect from this one, and I can’t wait.

DEC. 7

Sylvie Courvoisier with Wadada Leo Smith, Mary Halvorson; Roulette

This year saw the release of new Sylvie Courvoisier duo albums with both Smith and Halvorson, and each of those two configurations appears here. It’s all beautiful and subtly outlandish stuff and should make for a compelling bill.

Mortician + Manat + Black Hurst + Infernal Spawn; TV Eye

A Mortician gig always does the overactive brain good. Expect regressive death-metal goodness from the Yonkers legends.

DEC. 9, 10

Ron Carter and Gene Bertoncini; Mezzrow

I can think of few gigs that sound cooler than this one, pairing two master players — the legendary Ron Carter and Gene Bertoncini, the unassuming virtuoso guitarist — at the intimate Mezzrow in a setting that can’t help but recall Carter’s longtime rapport with the late, great Jim Hall. I snapped up tix to this one in a flash.

DEC. 12

Jazz From Hell Festival; Le Poisson Rouge

Imperial Triumphant, the esoteric and eclectic masked death-metal trio, headline a cool genre-melding mini fest featuring “lungcore” (as in prog-metal with horns) veterans Jerseyband and Kilter, a nicely complementary band that brings together Imperial Triumphant drummer (and Heavy Metal Bebop veteran) Kenny Grohowski with Jerseyband saxist Ed RosenBerg III.

J. Robbins Band Plays Burning Airlines; Webster Hall

J. Robbins is one of the most reliably inspired rock songwriters of the past 30-plus years. I’ve been a Jawbox fan for decades and have recently adored his solo output, including last year’s Basilisk. Here he’s returning with his trusty live band, featuring Brooks Harlan on bass and Peter Moffett on drums, to dig into the catalog of his outstanding late-’90s / early-2000s era band Burning Airlines — which also featured Moffett in its initial run. (Originally scheduled as a headlining gig at TV Eye, this show is now an opening slot for Texas Is the Reason at Webster Hall.)

Stress Positions; Trans-Pecos

Stress Positions are an absolutely ferocious hardcore-punk band from Chicago, and I’m dying to see them live.

DEC. 12, 13

SML; The Sultan Room

How You Been, the latest from inspired future-jazz collective SML, is just out, and given the momentum and energy currently surrounding the group (check out Grayson Haver Currin’s recent Times profile), these intimate gigs should be a blast.

DEC. 13

Chad Taylor Quintet; The Jazz Gallery

Chad Taylor, one of the most accomplished and admired drummers in the avant-jazz sphere, has an excellent new album out, Smoke Shifter, that reminds me a bit of classic mid-’60s Blue Note thanks to its sophisticated, composition-forward sound. This gig features the same strong band from the record, with saxophonist Bryan Rogers, trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, vibraphonist Victor Vieira-Branco and bassist Matt Engle. (See here for an in-depth Smoke Shifter review from Martin Johnson in The Wall Street Journal that helpfully situates the album within Taylor’s long and prolific career.)

JAN. 22–24

Improv Nights 2026: A Tribute to Derek Bailey; Roulette

Roulette hosts three nights of anything-goes free improv in the spirit of the late Derek Bailey’s storied Company gatherings. Respective curators for the evenings are Wendy Eisenberg, Chris Ryan Williams and Chris Cochrane.

FEB. 19–21

Ahmed; Shapeshifter Lab

The European jazz quartet Ahmed has caused an international stir in recent years with its channeling and reinterpretation of the works of late bassist and oud player Ahmed Abdul-Malik. I’m hoping to finally catch a glimpse of them at this upcoming residency, presented by Four One One.

MARCH 20, 21

Bill Orcutt; Roulette

Avant-guitar luminary Bill Orcutt convenes all of his active projects, plus artists he releases via his Palilalia imprint, for a promising two-night fest.

MARCH 29, 30; Irving Plaza, Warsaw

Drain + No Pressure + Haywire + Secret World

I’ve been a fan of Drain ever since I (like the rest of the hardcore-attuned internet) was mesmerized by this 2019 video of them rocking a San Jose house party. Just like all their prior releases, their new one, …Is Your Friend, is a shreddy, mosh-inciting blast with a refreshingly upbeat lyrical bent.

As a huge fan of both the Messthetics and Sonny Sharrock, January’s news that the band would be performing Ask the Ages, Sharrock’s 1991 masterpiece, along with frequent collaborator James Brandon Lewis as part of Philadelphia’s Ars Nova Workshop series seemed like pure wish fulfillment.

I wasn’t able to make that gig — which went down in April, at the invitation of Ars Nova’s Mark Christman — but thankfully, there are more Ask the Ages shows on the horizon for the band, the punk-jazz trio combining guitarist Anthony Pirog with Fugazi’s rhythm section of bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty. One of those, ahead of upcoming appearances in France, will take place in Washington, D.C., at the Hamilton Live on Friday, Nov. 28. Opening is cellist Janel Leppin, who played a gorgeous version of the Ask the Ages ballad “Who Does She Hope to Be?” the last time I saw her perform, a couple years back in Brooklyn. (NB: Skullcap, a trio featuring Leppin, Pirog and drummer Mike Kuhl, released a record earlier this year that you should absolutely check out.)

I recently jumped on a Zoom with Pirog, Lally and Canty to discuss their affinity for Ask the Ages, and the humbling and inspiring experience of making this music their own. This interview has been very lightly edited for flow and clarity.

(Before we begin, just a quick house-keeping note: Future original interviews and essays on DFSBP will likely be paywalled, so if you enjoy what you read here, please consider a paid subscription!)

*****

You covered “Once Upon a Time,” a piece from Ask the Ages, as far back as your first record. How did the idea of playing Sonny Sharrock material first come about?

Joe Lally: It was early on in the practice space. That was Brendan’s little recording studio where both of our first records were recorded, above a restaurant here in D.C. We were at practice one day, and that’s an album I love — a friend of mine had turned me onto it years ago — and I came to practice doing a half-assed version of “Once Upon a Time,” thinking about it, trying to play the riff. And Anthony was like, “Oh, this is how you play it.” I’m not the best that way. That’s how I discovered that — well, Anthony can take it from here, but basically, Anthony had played that whole record with Janel Leppin.

Anthony Pirog: Yeah, we bonded over the record in the Messthetics, but my first performance as a bandleader in D.C. was covering this record. So I had a quintet, and I’d just started listening to it in my early twenties, and it meant a lot to me, and I wanted to learn what was going on. So I wrote up charts and Janel was kind of doing the guitar-overdub parts from the record, and then there was sax, upright [bass] and drums. So I already knew how to play the songs, and [Sharrock’s] approach to playing and composing has always just kind of been on my mind since my early twenties.

I’m curious how you each first heard Ask the Ages, and also what first struck you about the record, and what has drawn you back to it over the years.

Brendan Canty: I came to it through Joe and Anthony. I didn’t know this record. When we were forming as a band, [Ask the Ages] was clearly a real touchstone for both of those guys. And so we would listen to it on the road, and when we would play it in the car, they knew it backwards and forward and clearly loved it and shared that passion. So I came to it through them. Even though I loved Elvin Jones and I had seen Elvin Jones [live], when this record came out, it just was not on my radar.

JL: Anthony’s probably going to give a longer dissertation on this, so I can give my short version first, but a friend had turned me on to it — actually, someone who is from D.C. but lives in Philly now, Yanni Papadopoulos [of Stinking Lizaveta]. And I had put out Yanni’s records, and it was just part of turning each other onto music at some point. He was just like, “I think you’ll love this record.” And I think he sent me the CD, is how I first got it. And it just really struck me as not the kind of electric guitar and distorted guitar that I had really equated with jazz per se. I don’t know what the point is of stating genres, but it just was a record that I totally enjoyed for what felt like such free expression.

That was all intriguing to me because I was probably just a few years into really getting into — well, it was probably more than a few years — of trying to figure out the free jazz that I loved. And the other part of that was the way that record sounds, the production of that record. But it’s the songs, but it’s not just the songs because it’s being able to feel like you’re in almost a classic jazz situation with an upright bass, drums and saxophone, and you can hear where you are sort of placed in the room, but the guitar is still, like, wild guitar. It’s still really heavy, very distorted, just really interesting-sounding guitar with effects that doesn’t overwhelm that feeling of a classic jazz album of being in a room with people playing. So that was just so particular and really, really just made the sound of that record stay with me.

“Who Does She Hope to Be?” always reminded me of Hendrix a bit, and of course it’s not at all. And yet there was something that I could relate to that, but by the time I’m playing with Anthony, I’d been into the record for a good decade. So it was it just a big record that stuck with me.

AP: I don’t remember why or how I ended up with it, but I had a digital version of it early on, ’cause I don’t even think I could buy it on CD when I wanted to own it; it ws out of print, so there was, like, one copy for $99 on the internet. And I just remember hearing it and just having a very strong reaction to the music. I didn’t really understand why initially; it was just very exciting. And then I played it for Janel, and I was like, “I really love this record.” And she’s like, “Wow, it really sounds like all the players in this band really believe in [Sharrock’s] vision, and they’re really just there supporting it.” And that’s one of the main things that I think about when I think about this recording.

Like Joe’s saying, there’s a lot of stuff going on with distorted guitar, which you might not expect if you’re going to categorize it or put a label on it. There are overdubs, but the intensity and the commitment and the belief that they’re all playing with is just something very special. And again, it’s not always easy to capture this stuff on tape, but as a recording, it’s very powerful.

And then once I started digging into, like, “Why do I like this?” I was learning the songs. I was young, so I was like, “Well, he’s a jazz guitarist,” so I was trying to figure out seventh-chord kind of movements, and then it just clicked really quickly. I was like, “Oh, these are all barre chords,” so it’s all triadic-based harmony. So even Joe brought up “Who Does She Hope to Be?” — when you get that melody, it goes, [sings main theme]. Those are the top notes of barre chords.

So for me, I was reacting very strongly to the music of Satie. And everyone talks about the simplicity, and the emotional content that could be conveyed with the simplicity of the idea. This kind of brought it into the improvised realm, the jazz realm, even just getting the most music out of — I’m not trying to put it down, but just the simple idea. And I don’t like saying that it’s a simple idea because it’s a springboard for very intense playing, and it’s a springboard for everyone to kind of play however they want and to go as deeply as they want with the music. But as Joe said, too, the chord progressions are really beautiful, the harmonic movements are really beautiful, the melodies are incredibly strong, and the form is going. Even though you might think that they’re playing freely, the chord progressions of the forms are continually happening underneath all of that material. And it was really just an amazing display of what’s possible when everything’s there to use.

Yeah, there’s a recording online of the Philly show, and on “Promises Kept,” I like how you can hear the bass and drums holding down the form throughout. Did you think a lot about the arrangements or how you were going to modify these pieces to fit your style?

JL: Well, I would’ve had to ask Anthony, “How am I going to get at this?” Again, it’s not really simple, but it’s like a distilling of just what’s needed, which is the way I like to look at things anyway: distilling it and going, “Just this part is necessary.” And having said that, there’s no way in my lifetime will I ever play like the bass player, Charnett Moffett, on any of these songs. And that guy’s within a couple of years of my age, and I believe he passed away a few years ago, but jeez, what an unbelievable player he is.

And so the combination of something basic going on and then listening to him play, that doesn’t even make sense; I don’t know what to do with any of that. So if you give me an outline of how I can get at holding down a rhythmic idea, melody, whatever you want to call it, for the bass, I feel those songs for sure. And so it’s a matter of getting into just finding the direction that I can sort of lay the notes, and the rest I can feel. I always kind of hear them in my head and understand where they’re placed, and then I try and figure out what they are later. So having Anthony just go like, “Well, you want to move through these ideas,” and then I can sort of play off of that starting point and figure out what to do. But yeah, I’m always trying to groove with what we do, so that’s really what was happening.

AP: After we had done “Once Upon a Time” and adapted that composition into our thing — ’cause, I mean, on the original recording, Elvin Jones is taking a free solo while they’re playing the chords, and our version is a chord progression in seven, and Brendan’s playing in four — the exciting thing was, what can we do with this? What are we going to do with this? And there wasn’t a lot of discussion about it; we just kind of did our thing, ’cause we’re so used to playing with each other. And I will just say that I was excited for parts of the record where I wanted to stick to some of the form from — where, like, Charnett and Elvin are playing duo over the form, over two choruses in “Promises Kept.” It was really important for me to say, “I think that you guys should do that, ‘cause the results are going to be very interesting. If James and I are just not playing, and you continue to play over the form and have your dialogue with that material, it’s going to make for an interesting listen and take on the music.” So, I was excited with the results, for sure.

BC: The more I listen to the record, the more I try to at least pull out some of the vibe and the mood and the dynamics of what they’re doing a little bit. But there’s no escaping who I am, and I like to play the way I play, and those are all choices, especially like on “Once Upon a Time,” and playing fours over sevens.

But to be honest with you, that has even changed as time has gone on and it actually has become more of a quieter piece and I feel like I’m a little bit more responding to what the guys are playing on it. So a big part of this band and a big part of everything we do is trying to be a good listener and trying to not just support Anthony and James along with Joe, but also to somewhat have a dialogue with them along the way, where it doesn’t necessarily have to be one thing over and over again, night after night. It can actually be a dialogue or I can be more responsive than some of the songs that we have even written. But I think the whole band is turning into that: a more free-form live experience, which is really lovely.

Yeah, you can really hear you all stretching out and improvising in the Philly recording. It sounds really nice.

BC: Oh, that’s good. I’m glad it works. You don’t know, but I think even the songs that we’re playing these days are by design stretching out more and more, following more of a jazz template where we play the head and let it go for a little while and launch, as they say. So yeah, I’m glad you’re hearing something that sounded like something. It really felt like we were creating a bonfire and then jumping in it over and over again. It was really fun.

Anthony and Joe, you two were sort of getting at this, but this record seems to be kind of crisscrossing styles, but not in the same way as what we typically think of as fusion.

AP: Yeah, I think absolutely, just because it’s not trying to be anything other than what they want to do.

BC: I mean, to me the record is four really strong personalities, and I don’t think that there’s anything, like, standard jazz about it. I mean, Elvin is always going to play like Elvin. His personality comes through on every record he’s ever made, so ultimately, whoever assembled this team — and I know Bill Laswell produced it, but I don’t know whose idea it was to get Pharaoh Sanders, and I actually don’t know the bass player. But the truth of it is, when you listen to it, everybody seems to be given complete license to be themselves and to react to each other in whatever heartfelt way they felt they want to, and that’s exactly the way that this band works.

So, yeah, we’re all playing the same tunes, but we are, in our band and in that band, and with James, everybody has been given the license. It’s not like anybody has ever told anybody else in this band what to play or how to play it. We show up with our personalities and our sounds and our impulses, and then we throw it together and make it happen. And that record sounds like that to me.

I mean, starting with Sonny Sharrock, who has one of the most distinctive sounds on the planet, but then also allowing for overdubs, allowing for the band to stretch, and also there clearly is a shit-ton of dialogue on it between them and they’re amping each other up. And then also to make a record that’s jazz, but also so full-throated rock in a way, sound-wise — his guitar sound has definitely got a rock vibe to it. There’s nothing careful or easy-listening about it, as far as I’m concerned. There’s some beautiful playing and some soft playing, and I adore it, but it has a spirit all the way through it that is really individual.

JL: Yeah, it doesn’t get classified very easily at all, I don’t think. It’s one of those records that stays with you as being different because it’s outside of genres and it’s just absolutely unique. And other people have records like that, and Sonny Sharrock has other records that are very unique and not like this one and stand out on their own. It’s just one of those things: It’s so totally different. And then, yeah, we’re just going to be who we are and interpret.

One of the wild things about the record, I think, is that Charnett is like 20 years younger than everybody else. So what is going on? [Laughs] Whose dad did he know? He’s like the son of someone they knew, or something?

AP: Yeah, he’s [drummer] Charles Moffett’s son. His name is a combination of “Ornette” and “Charles.”

JL: Oh, wow, OK. Cool — I didn’t know that.

Yeah, I’m not sure exactly how he got drafted into the whole thing*, but it is really interesting because I guess that’s Sonny’s last record, and his first record was also with Pharaoh.

AP: Was it Tauhid?

Yeah, I could be wrong, but I think that’s the first Sonny Sharrock appearance on record.

There’s something else I wanted to run by you all. There’s a quote that Sonny gave that I always come back to, and he said this around the time of Ask the Ages: “I’ve been trying to find a way for the terror and the beauty to live together in one song.” And then he says, “I want the sweetness and the brutality, and I want to go to the very end of each of those feelings.” So there’s this kind of duality that he’s thinking about, that’s obviously embodied in this record. I think in some ways it’s embodied in your band, even when you’re not covering Sonny Sharrock. I’m wondering if that resonates with you in terms of how you think about the unique appeal of this record.

JL: Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely the way the record sounds, and it’s definitely the way I want to be a musician. I mean, we all want to express musically more than anything. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

BC: I’m listening to that quote and I’m thinking about all the dynamics of a situation and how you can get there by yourself and it’s one thing, but you get there as a group, and it’s a totally different thing, right? And you only go to some of these places when you can do it together. That’s the way I feel it. Especially as a drummer, I’m not able to journey to all the potential places that you can travel to musically without these guys. And so to me, that’s a huge part of the reason for being in a band, for being a band, is to find out those sides of the music, the sweetness and the darkness, and where your potential stops and starts, and all that. Anthony, do you have anything to say about that?

AP: Yeah, I wasn’t aware of that quote until after I was very familiar with the record and his playing. But it makes a lot of sense to me, and it makes a lot of sense to what I’m drawn to. And there are other bands and people that I know that means a lot to as well. Like Harriet Tubman has a record named after that quote. It’s a pursuit. It’s important and worth doing.

Just to wrap up, is there any kind of new appreciation for or perspective on Ask the Ages that you have after going through this process of playing it?

JL: Well, definitely being able to play these songs at all is very encouraging and inspiring. [Laughs] I mean, I still listen to the record and go, “That’s not really what we’re playing.” It’s just a whole other universe. To be able to occupy it in any way feels good. But it is a completely different thing to listen to. It’s like trying to get to Saturn.

BC: The more I listen to the record, and the more we play the parts, the more it becomes something that’s separate from us as a band, but also separate from the actual original record because our interpretation of it seems to be changing every time we play it, every time we get together. As you would want it to be.

/////

*According to this 2020 interview with Bill Laswell by Tzvi Gluckin, we actually have Ronald Shannon Jackson to thank for Charnett Moffett’s involvement in Ask the Ages.

Greetings, good people, and welcome once again. If you’re new here, see this post for a rundown of our format here at GOTW; if not, we’ll move right along into our regularly scheduled programming. Time is tight, so this will be a more streamlined edition than usual — still, plenty of worthy items to recommend.

I. Prologue: Recent Happenings; Current Listening

-First, over at Shfl, here’s a new digest post on the vast Wayne Shorter discography, spanning almost exactly six decades in the life of the late legend. Putting this together, I was struck anew by Shorter’s continued relevance across this span of time. Has any other major figure in jazz ever started as strong as he did (Blakey, Blue Note, Miles and on into Weather Report), and then finished with a project as vital as his 21st-century quartet? Honestly, forget jazz: Few figures anywhere in music have done so. Jack DeJohnette, whose epic career as a bandleader Vinnie Sperrazza recently recapped with typical care and insight, comes to mind — as does, say, David Bowie — but comparable career arcs are few and far between.

-Second, last week’s Death to All gig was as great as I’d hoped. And it coincided with the arrival of Born Human — David E. Gehlke’s new Chuck Schuldiner biography, released by Decibel Books — at my doorstep. I mentioned this title in a previous edition of the newsletter, but now that I’m well into the book, I can offer my enthusiastic recommendation. At around 500 pages, it’s an incredibly detailed but never ponderous read, based on tons of new interviews (with seemingly every living Schuldiner relative or associate), offering a 360-degree perspective on this brilliant and complicated figure. I appreciate the way that it doesn’t shy away from the less flattering aspects of Schuldiner’s personality, while never seeming salacious. It really just lays all the facts out there, while making a strong case for why his art made such a strong impact and continues to resonate 20-plus years after his death. I’ve enjoyed all the Decibel Books titles I’ve checked out, but this one seems like a new high water mark.

II. Gig of the Week

Sanguisugabogg + Despised Icon + Defeated Sanity + Corpse Pile; Friday, Nov. 28; Irving Plaza

No disrespect to the other bands on the bill here — including the headliner, a band I very much dig on record and would love to catch — but from where I’m sitting, the real draw here is the German death-metal band Defeated Sanity.

It’s my contention that there are certain artists operating in niche genres that anyone who cares about forward-thinking music should know about. The same way that I’d recommend, say, Craig Taborn, Tyshawn Sorey or Kris Davis to any open-minded listener, regardless of their particular interest in jazz, I’d do the same re: this band. They exist firmly within the realm of extreme metal, but like, for example, Meshuggah, their importance and influence extends far beyond it. (Don’t take my word for it: Check out past Heavy Metal Bebop interviews with both Ben Monder and Kate Gentile, where they each spoke enthusiastically about Defeated.)

The band’s mastermind, Lille Gruber, is a fascinating figure. He’s the drummer in the band, but also its chief composer, and the architect of its outrageously dense and relentlessly intense sound. Death metal often self-divides into “technical” and “brutal” camps — think of them as the genre’s mad-scientist and bloodthirsty-caveman wings — but Defeated Sanity are all in on both fronts, and the effect is both overwhelming and thrilling. You can’t really go wrong with any of the records, though 2010’s Chapters of Repugnance is a personal favorite. Last year’s Chronicles of Lunacy is as strong as anything they’ve ever put out, and they’re a reliably withering live band.

For more background — including a look into Gruber’s strong grounding in jazz fusion, which came thanks to his father, the late Wolfgang Teske, an accomplished drummer and, later, a guitarist who actually co-founded Defeated Sanity with his son — check out this 2019 Heavy Metal Bebop interview with Gruber, which also includes a conversation with bassist Jacob Schmidt.

Gruber’s blend of fusion and extreme-metal chops is really a marvel to behold — this video is a good intro.

And one of the most inspired sets of music I witnessed last week was:

Gorguts; Friday, Nov. 14; Irving Plaza

Much of what I wrote about Defeated Sanity above could also be applied to Gorguts: They’re a death-metal band that enjoys wide esteem outside that niche and one that anyone with an ear for the bizarre and/or extreme should check out. Early on in my Heavy Metal Bebop interview series, they were a constant touchstone: Check out the chats with Dan Weiss and the aforementioned Craig Taborn, who befriended and actually jammed with the band’s late former guitarist Steeve Hurdle, for more on the appeal they hold for some of the leading minds in contemporary jazz.

Much like Defeated do and Death (whose latter-day incarnation, Death to All, headlined this Irving Plaza gig) once did, Gorguts orbit around the inventions of a single creative giant, in this case Luc Lemay, who co-founded the band in Quebec back in 1989 and has been its sole constant member. And also like those bands, especially Death, they’ve taken a strongly evolutionary approach to their sound: Aside from the first pair of albums, 1991’s Considered Dead and 1993’s The Erosion of Sanity, no two Gorguts LPs feature the same lineup, or sound all that much alike. Every chapter is worth exploring, and as last week’s show demonstrated, the current era — which began in earnest with 2013’s Colored Sands, the first to feature avant-metal luminaries Colin Marston and Kevin Hufnagel, of Dysrhythmia and many others, as part of the lineup — feels like a new golden age for the band.

What I love about this Gorguts incarnation, now featuring drummer Michel Bélanger, is that they can convincingly execute material from all the band’s phases — the thrashier and more orthodox sound of the early period; the lurching, discordant madness of 1998’s landmark Obscura; the raging majesty of Colored Sands — and make it all jell within one riveting set. At Irving Plaza, it was inspiring to see such a risk-taking band go over so well with a crowd of die-hard headbangers. And maybe the best part of the set? A sneak peek at two new songs, slated for the band’s long-awaited follow-up to 2016’s Pleiades’ Dust (a fascinating single-track EP clocking in at more than 30 minutes). As heavy and head-spinning as anything else they played, these previews have me seriously excited for the Gorguts new LP, apparently due out next year.

III. Highly Subjective/Selective DFSBP Show Calendar, a.k.a Running List of Gigs I May Attend

Note: Few new gigs added for the coming weeks!

NOV. 20

Dying Wish + Static Dress + Gouge Away + Orthodox + Boltcutter; Warsaw

Solid bill here featuring Portland melodic-metalcore crushers Dying Wish and Fort Lauderdale’s Gouge Away, who are simply one of the best bands anywhere in the heavy-music underground at the moment. Their 2024 album, Deep Sage, which split the difference between punishing hardcore and nuanced indie rock, was an absolute triumph, and they’re equally great live.

Stephen Brodsky + Scout Paré-Phillips + Chris Brokaw; TV Eye

Stephen Brodsky, the ever-inspired art-metal auteur behind Cave In, Mutoid Man and others, recently released a solo acoustic covers album, on which he pays tribute to various ’90s underground acts that inspired him — a very cool project that should be worth catching live. Chris Brokaw — a similarly prolific indie lifer known for his work in Codeine, Come and many others, and an accomplished singer-songwriter to boot — rounds out an enticing bill.

NOV. 25–30

Jason Moran and the Bandwagon; Village Vanguard

This stellar, ever-fresh piano trio, going strong for around a quarter century, continues its annual Thanksgiving tradition.

NOV. 28

Sanguisugabogg + Despised Icon + Skinless + Defeated Sanity + Corpse Pile; Irving Plaza

See above.

NOV. 28–30

Billy Hart Quartet; Smoke

Easily one of the top bands in 21st-century jazz, Billy Hart’s quartet with Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson and Ben Street — which released the terrific Just back in February — celebrates Multidirectional, a new live album recorded at this very club in 2023.

NOV. 30

Marietta; Warsaw

Marietta are from Philly, but their 2013 LP Summer Death is as exquisite an example of the bittersweet exuberance of so-called Midwest emo as I could name. (Note: This gig was rescheduled from October.)

DEC. 1

Patricia Brennan; Roulette

Vibraphonist Patricia Brennan is a leading light in contemporary progressive jazz, a artist whose work is as rousing, and just plain fun, as it is challenging. Here she unveils and celebrates Of the Near and Far, a follow-up to 2024’s marvelous Breaking Stretch, with the 10-piece band that appears on the record, featuring a full string quartet within its ranks, as well as Arktureye (a.k.a. Noel Brennan, a percussionist and also Patricia’s husband) on electronics.

DEC. 4

Algernon Cadwallader; Racket

Few bands do that yelpy, stealthily proggy early-2000s form of emo (sprinkled with math rock) better than Pennsylvania’s Algernon Cadwallader, who play here behind their new reunion album Trying to Have a Thought.

DEC. 4, 5

Peter Evans’s Being & Becoming; Public Records

Having seen this group, with Joel Ross on vibes, Nick Jozwiak on bass and Tyshawn Sorey on drums, at the Long Play fest earlier this year, I can attest that they’re an absolute juggernaut live, and that energy comes through quite clearly on new album Ars Ludicra, on which Michael Shekwoaga Ode plays drums. Sorey will be behind the kit for this Public Records two-nighter.

DEC. 7

Sylvie Courvoisier with Wadada Leo Smith, Mary Halvorson; Roulette

This year saw the release of new Sylvie Courvoisier duo albums with both Smith and Halvorson, and each of those two configurations appears here. It’s all beautiful and subtly outlandish stuff and should make for a compelling gig.

DEC. 12

Jazz From Hell Festival; Le Poisson Rouge

Imperial Triumphant, the esoteric and eclectic masked death-metal trio, headline a cool genre-melding mini fest featuring “lungcore” (as in prog-metal with horns) veterans Jerseyband and Kilter, a nicely complementary band that brings together Imperial Triumphant drummer (and Heavy Metal Bebop veteran) Kenny Grohowski with Jerseyband saxist Ed RosenBerg III.

J. Robbins Band Plays Burning Airlines; Webster Hall

J. Robbins is one of the most reliably inspired rock songwriters of the past 30-plus years. I’ve been a Jawbox fan for decades and have recently adored his solo output, including last year’s Basilisk. Here he’s returning with his trusty live band, featuring Brooks Harlan on bass and Peter Moffett on drums, to dig into the catalog of his outstanding late-’90s / early-2000s era band Burning Airlines — which also featured Moffett in its initial run. (Originally scheduled as a headlining gig at TV Eye, this show is now an opening slot for Texas Is the Reason at Webster Hall.)

Stress Positions; Trans-Pecos

Stress Positions are simply an absolutely ferocious hardcore-punk band from Chicago, and I’m dying to see them live.

DEC. 12, 13

SML; The Sultan Room

How You Been, the latest from inspired future-jazz collective SML, is just out, and given the momentum and energy currently surrounding the group (check out Grayson Haver Currin’s Times profile), these intimate gigs should be a blast.

DEC. 13

Chad Taylor Quintet; The Jazz Gallery

Chad Taylor, one of the most accomplished and admired drummers in the avant-jazz sphere, has an excellent new album out, Smoke Shifter, that reminds me a bit of classic mid-’60s Blue Note titles by Bobby Hutcherson, Jackie McLean and Grachan Moncur III thanks to its sophisticated, composition-forward sound. This gig features the same strong band from the record, with saxophonist Bryan Rogers, trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, vibraphonist Victor Vieira-Branco and bassist Matt Engle.