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Quick note, because it’s tomorrow.

The Listening Room goes live Wednesday, September 2nd at 6:00 PM PT, on Substack Live. Adrian Younge will be there.

Here’s the shape of it: sixty minutes total. The first forty on topics we’ve been covering here. The records, the arguments, the history we usually write about. The last twenty belong entirely to you. Op…

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If you follow Jazz Is Dead on Instagram, you’ve probably seen the track lists of our KJAZZ Is Dead shows we put out every Friday. A couple of weeks ago we inadvertently posted the cover of a compilation to illustrate one of the songs from the show. When Adrian saw it, he hit us up in our work thread asking us not to do that, to always use the cover of the original album where the song was released. I completely agree with him that, for this particular purpose, it’s not only better, but important to post the original artwork. Not only is it more educational for the listener but, most of all, it is respectful to the artist.

Let’s be honest, compilations just don’t feel as cool as actual albums. After all, and we hear about this a lot in these singles-culture days, albums are works of art themselves. They are collective, whole thought. The track order is created with intention to take the listener on a journey imagined by the artist, the artwork should add to the atmosphere, all of it being the materialization of the artist’s vision and expression in that specific moment in time. You don’t get any of that from a ‘greatest hits’ type compilation.

And let’s not forget those dreadful and soulless cash-grab compilations that record companies would put out, without consent from the artists, with flat mastering and horrible, generic artwork. The whole shameful history of the format lies right there: in the repackaging of artists’ catalogs without payment, the royalties paid to whoever held the paperwork from a deal that had screwed the artist in the ‘60s, and every shady arrangement in between.

But compilations, if done the right way, can be so much more than that.

Before we move on, I want to acknowledge that I (and most people of my generation) discovered a lot of great music through compilations. Yes, even the shitty ones I mentioned above. My first contact with The Police, when I was a kid, was through a compilation released in Brasil with songs from the commercials of a popular cigarette brand. Yes, in the ‘80s cigarette companies were allowed to advertise on television, and they released albums with the soundtracks of those commercials and sold them to kids. Yes, I’m old enough to have seen people smoking in airplanes and buses. But I digress. The point is, because of that compilation, I went on to become a fan, and to buy all their albums.

In Viçosa, the small town where I lived, our parties featured the same songs as the hottest club in Rio, thanks to a compilation my friend had that was curated by the club’s DJs. And DJs are essentially live curators, whether they are spinning at a club, on the radio, or... creating a playlist! Because when you look at it, that’s what a compilation is: a playlist curated by someone. So this is the key point: if that someone’s intention is to introduce that music to a new audience, creating their own sonic journey, while respecting the artist’s rights, then the compilation album plays an important role in building an audience and promoting the artist.

It’s undeniable that great compilations do exist. The classic Hitsville USA: The Motown Singles Collection 1959-1971 is a perfect example of a label-anthology form done right. Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychadelic Era (1965-1968) has become one of the most iconic and influential rock anthologies ever released. Or Ultimate Breaks and Beats, compiled by Louis “BreakBeat Lou” Flores and Lenny “BreakBeat Lenny” Roberts, which is arguably the most consequential compilation series in the history of hip-hop. It might be hard for someone who got into music after the internet to understand the educational impact of this kind of release.

That’s the intention behind our compilations at Jazz Is Dead, and why they are particularly sought after. The first album of each series is a compilation drawn from the next seven albums. Not the repackaging of a catalog, but new music, made with the artist in room, and paid as such. It’s our way of announcing all the artists in the series, of giving fans a taste of what’s to come. They are the perfect entry point into the Jazz Is Dead universe, but they are also a great listen for the initiated and unitiated alike, who want to lie back and be taken on an eclectic journey. The curation is done by the same people who recorded the full albums, with input from the artists themselves. Unlike the other albums, they are limited pressings, so whoever has them, has them. The same goes for the instrumental and remix albums of each series, which makes them a collector’s dream. Listening to them is a very deliberate and specific journey unto itself.

Anyway, Adrian can rest assured that if he and Ali decide to spin a song that might be on one of our compilations, we’ll post the artwork of the full album instead. Even knowing that a good compilation is not a short cut around the album, but an invitation to find it, the album is always the fundamental source.

But we want to know what you think about compilations. Love them? Hate them? Is there one that helped you discover an artist you later became a fan of? Tell us in the comments.

Jazz on a Summer’s Day

Join Vidiots and Jazz Is Dead for the perfect summer concert film. Filmed at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island and directed by world-renowned photographer Bert Stern, Jazz on a Summer’s Day features intimate performances by an all-star line-up of musical legends including Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Anita O’Day, Dinah Washington, and closes with a beautiful rendition of The Lord’s Prayer by Mahalia Jackson at midnight to usher in Sunday morning. The film has been beautifully and extensively restored in 4K from the best surviving vault elements by IndieCollect

Tuesday, August 25th - 7:30PM

Featuring a live vinyl set at the screening by @rareform1906

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Since this newsletter stopped being a bulletin and became a place to think out loud with you, the best part hasn’t been the writing. It’s been what comes back. You write in, you challenge us, you tell us how you feel about AI, about your experience carrying the piano, about the record your father played on Sunday mornings, or the small town you grew up in that sounds a lot like ours.

Let me give you one example, because it still makes me smile.

A few weeks ago I wrote about my teenage son asking me for a DVD player.

Then a reader named Vinnie wrote in. It wasn't the first we'd heard from him; he'd commented on earlier articles. He had a DVD player sitting in his garage, doing nothing, and he wanted my son Francisco to have it. No transaction. No angle. A man read a paragraph, thought of a kid he’d never met, and handed over the exact object from the story, out of his garage and into our living room.

That instinct, that quiet, generous reach across the gap, has been the best of what we’ve found these last months. And it’s made us want to close the distance a little more from our side.

So here’s what we’ve built.

The Listening Room is a periodic live conversation where the door is open and you’re in the room with members of the Jazz Is Dead family. I’ll host. The session runs about sixty minutes on a Wednesday evening at 6:00 PM Pacific. The first forty minutes we spend on the ground we’ve been covering here, the kind of thing we usually only get to write toward and never talk through together. The last twenty minutes belong entirely to you. Open floor. Ask what you want, of the people who made the thing

It happens on Substack Live and every session is archived afterward, so the room becomes a small, growing library you can return to. Miss one, and it’s waiting for you. Catch them all, and you’ve got a collection.

The first one is Wednesday, September 2nd, at 6:00 PM PT, and Adrian Younge will be there. The plan is to always have one or more of the original members — Adrian, Ali, Adam, Dru, Jazmin and other friends from this universe, some announced, some not. Musicians, DJs, the people whose names show up in these essays and whose records are in your crate. It’s the same idea Adrian and Ali started with long before any of this had a name: friends in a room talking about what they love. This time you’re in the room.

The Listening Room is the first big thing we’re opening up to paid subscribers, and it won’t be the last, more is on the way. If you’re already with us, we’ll see you on the 2nd. If you’re not, becoming one is the way in.

So: Wednesday, September 2nd, 6:00 PM Pacific. Pour something, pull up a chair, and come hang with us for an hour or so. Bring your questions. Bring your observations. Bring your ideas. We’ll save you a seat.

— Jazz Is Dead

New Merch Line Out Now!

What started as a whisper passed from one person to the next. Not a eulogy, a statement. Everything in this line comes from that same idea: sound as a circle, freedom as discipline, culture as something you carry and hand off, not something you inherit and forget. This collection is for the ones doing the passing.

Full line out now. Link below

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So, this is how I’ll open this story. Earlier this year we went to Brasil for the first edition of Semana Jazz Is Dead, a concert/film festival/exhibit event. Adrian Younge had an interview at a TV station, and I drove him and the band. After the interview, when we got back to the car, I realized I’d lost the key, so I retraced my steps through the building. Nothing. I was about to call the rental company when Adrian said, “Maybe it fell in the portal.”

Guitarist Jack Waterson turned around, somewhere between amused and genuinely annoyed. “How many times do I have to tell you, there is no portal! It has to be somewhere.”

“But the portal—”

“There is no portal! Let’s retrace your steps again.”

We found the key wedged between the cushions of a sofa where we’d waited earlier. It had slipped out of my pocket into the gap. Later, Adrian explained: he and Jack have run this bit for years. When something goes missing, Adrian says it fell into the portal. Jack insists there’s no such thing, and he won’t rest until he’s found the object and proven, once again, that the portal doesn’t exist.

I love that story for what it says about Jack and Adrian’s friendship, but also for what it says about Jack’s personality. Jack is a musician and an artist, but he’s also the man behind LA’s coolest instrument store, and I haven’t met anyone who knows gear better than him.

What a Record Store Is to a Fan, an Instrument Store Is to a Musician

You already know what a great record store means. The feeling of handing your crate to someone behind the counter and having them nod, or reach under the register for something they’d been saving for a customer who just knows. That exchange isn’t retail, it’s initiation.

A used instrument shop does the same for the people who make the music. Except what passes across the counter isn’t a copy of something, it’s the object a scene was built on. A guitar detuned, rewired, and loved back into shape by three owners before you. A synth somebody famous sold on a bad month and somebody unknown bought on a good one. New gear from a big-box chain has no story. Used gear, sold by someone who knows its story, has nothing but.

That’s the difference between a warehouse and a portal.

Future Music

Jack Waterson’s own introduction to that world happened in 1972, broke, in New York, running with a crew of kids who’d shoplift more or less anything that wasn’t nailed down. There was a music store nearby that had always been decent to them. When some other kids lifted a set of drumsticks from the place, Jack and his friends tracked them down and set them on the counter in front of the owner. “These kids stole these drumsticks,” he said. “You’re always cool with us. Here they are.” The owner looked at him and said: you can hang out here every day. So he did. He swept the floor, got handed a mini Moog to mess around with when nobody was looking, and learned the whole language of the place just by being let in.

The gear is the excuse. The real inventory is trust, handed down from whoever’s behind the counter to whoever’s willing to stick around and listen.

Jack opened Future Music, originally on Sunset Boulevard, now on York Boulevard, built around the instruments made before 1983, and around holding the door open the way it had once been held open for him. What grew out of that storefront wasn’t really a business. It was a crossroads. Danger Mouse outfitted himself there before Gnarls Barkley existed. Air, all the way from France, bought a serious chunk of their gear from Jack. Madlib built the sound of Yesterdays New Quintet on equipment he found on York Boulevard. J Dilla passed through before he made Donuts. None of those artists necessarily knew the others were shopping there too. But they were all drawing from the same well, playing gear that had already changed somebody else’s life before it changed theirs. For years, Jack and his crew even hauled gear to gigs in shopping carts, walking them down the street while people on the block cheered because they knew what the carts meant: a show that night. That’s not a marketing story, that’s a neighborhood remembering itself.

The clearest proof of what a shop like this can do is the day an eighteen-year-old named Adrian Younge wandered into Future Music wanting to make music that sounded like the records he’d been sampling, unsure it was even possible. He and Jack were decades and genres apart, a punk-rock lifer and a hip hop obsessive who hadn’t made a record yet. Somehow, over a counter full of pre-’83 gear, they became each other’s professors. Jack schooled Adrian on psych and art rock. Adrian schooled Jack on sampling and where it came from. Neither of them planned that. The shop made it possible simply by existing, by being the kind of place where two strangers with nothing obvious in common had a reason to keep talking.

That relationship went on to produce a catalog of records and a stage partnership that’s carried them around the world. But none of it starts on a stage. It starts at a counter, the way it always has.

The Real Portal

We don't see many places like that anymore. It's easier now to buy gear from a stranger you'll never meet, off a listing with a stock photo and a shipping label, no counter, no conversation, no one to tell you what the guitar actually is, where it’s been, what it’s seen. It’s a mark of these times: convenience over transmission, no-contact security over layered, textured engagement, an expected return versus an unanticipated reward.

So here's my conclusion. I think Adrian and Jack are both right about the portal. There is one. It doesn't swallow lost keys, and it isn't magic, not in the way Adrian means it. It's a counter with somebody behind it who's willing to talk, in a shop full of instruments that already have a history, waiting for someone to add to it. Every scene worth remembering had one of these somewhere near its center. Ours happens to be on York Boulevard, and it has the only name that could possibly fit.

Future Music.

Got a portal of your own? A shop, a counter, a person behind it who transported you through word? Tell us about it in the comments. And if you've got a Future Music story, Jack included, we want to hear that one too.

New Merch Line Out Now!

What started as a whisper passed from one person to the next. Not a eulogy, a statement. Everything in this line comes from that same idea: sound as a circle, freedom as discipline, culture as something you carry and hand off, not something you inherit and forget. This collection is for the ones doing the passing.

Full line out now. Link below.

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Last week my teenage son asked me to buy him a DVD player for his birthday. No, this article was not written in 2004.

When I asked him why, he said it was because there are movies he wants to actually own, not just have access to through some streaming service we don’t even know we’ll still be subscribing to next year. It reminded me of the time our Apple TV credit card expired and nobody caught it in time. We lost access to every pay-per-view movie we thought we’d “bought.” Which, to me, feels like a rip-off. They sell me something that’s supposedly mine, and I can only access it as long as I keep paying for the privilege?

I don’t want this to turn into a boomer whine about technology, or a nostalgic “back in my day” piece. But I do think there’s a middle ground between stubborn resistance to change and blindly swallowing every novelty the technocrats push down our throats. We tend to focus on what we gain from a technological advance and rarely count what we’re giving up to get it. Because it’s always a trade-off.

There’s a documentary, All Things Must Pass, on the rise and fall of Tower Records, and it’s a must-watch for anyone who cares about music. There’s a scene where founder Russ Solomon talks about the company’s first real earthquake: the arrival of the compact disc. That was the period they made the most money, because people who already owned entire collections on vinyl started buying everything all over again on CD. Here’s the thing, though: vinyl had a run of over fifty years before the CD showed up. The CD lasted maybe twenty before mp3 knocked the wind out of it (and out of Tower Records with it). And we blinked, and mp3 was already giving way to streaming. The cycles keep compressing.

But there’s more going on than just new tech replacing old tech.

Let’s talk about built-in obsolescence. The receiver I use to listen to music is a Kenwood my dad bought in 1968. Serviced a few times over the decades, it still sounds incredible. Meanwhile, it feels like just yesterday that loading music onto my iPod was the cutting edge. I still have that iPod, with over 100 gigs of music I can’t get back out of it, and I doubt my kids will be using it in 40+ years the way I still use my dad’s receiver today. For studio gear it feels even worse. Audio interfaces that cost a small fortune become paperweights in under a decade, plugins you don’t buy anymore, you rent, forever.

We’ve reached a point where we’re well beyond the old analog-versus-digital debate being about quality. I’m typing this in an app that isn’t even installed on my computer, and the file saves itself to the cloud without me asking. Our memories, our photos, the fruit of our labor, even the tools we use to make it, all of it lives on servers owned by corporations that have given us plenty of reasons to distrust them. Yes, there’s real convenience in that. But it feels important to stay conscious of how much of our lives we’re quietly handing over for it, and even more important to keep some of what matters rooted in the physical world. Which means keeping the ecosystem around that world alive too: the guy who still fixes analog cameras, the film lab that hasn’t shut its doors, the vinyl pressing plant running machines older than its employees. This is human knowledge, hard-won and quietly disappearing, that needs hands to carry it forward.

Which brings me back to my son and his DVD player.

Honestly? I’m getting him one. He’s a teenager, and he already understands something that took my generation years to learn: owning something means being able to use it after the company that sold it to you stops caring whether you can.

This is, in a roundabout way, exactly what we’re doing here. It’s why Adrian cuts records one at a time on a machine older than his parents, why Linear Labs keeps the whole chain, from musician’s hands to vinyl groove, inside walls we control. It’s why Jazz Is Dead presses wax instead of just uploading files, and why ArtDontSleep keeps bringing people back into rooms together, onto dance floors, into the kind of shared experience no subscription can quietly take away at 2 a.m. because a card on file expired.

None of this is anti-technology. We get to use the cloud and still keep a shelf. We get to stream a record and still buy the pressing. We get to use what’s new without letting it erase our claim to what’s ours.

So yes, I’m buying the DVD player. Some things are worth owning outright. We intend to keep making them.

New Merch Line Out Now!

What started as a whisper passed from one person to the next. Not a eulogy, a statement. Everything in this line comes from that same idea: sound as a circle, freedom as discipline, culture as something you carry and hand off, not something you inherit and forget. This collection is for the ones doing the passing.

Full line out now. Link below.

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When the design team came back with “Culture Keepers” stamped across a few pieces on the new merch line, the first reaction in the room was not a good one. Somebody calling themselves a Culture Keeper? Sounded absurd. Sounded like gatekeeping wearing a nicer outfit. As if culture were a walk-in vault that needed a person, or a company, standing guard at the door deciding what gets in and what gets thrown out. We didn’t want to be the judge of anybody’s culture. No one can be.

Then they told us where the phrase came from. Our own bio. Written a while ago, by yours truly, cobbled together from notes everybody on the team had scribbled at one point or another.

Oops.

So before we quietly retire the phrase or start defending it in a group chat, let’s actually sit with it. Let’s talk about how culture moves, why it survives, and what “keeping” it even means. Because none of us invented the idea. It’s older than the merch line, older than the label, older than most of the records in the crate.

Brasil, 1928. A poet named Oswald de Andrade published something called the Manifesto Antropófago — the Cannibalist Manifesto — and dropped one of the strangest, sharpest lines in modernist literature: “Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question.” He’s eating Shakespeare and telling you he’s doing it. His whole argument was that Brasilian culture didn’t need to apologize for being shaped by outside influence, European painting, poetry, philosophy, all of it. Swallow it. Digest it. Let it come out the other side as something that could only have been made in Brasil. He was borrowing the word from the Tupi people’s own ritual cannibalism and turning it into a method: take what the world hands you, don’t just repeat it, transform it into your own blood. Decades later, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Tom Zé read that manifesto and built Tropicália out of it. Samba eating rock and roll, bossa nova eating psychedelia, all of it still unmistakably Brasilian.

That’s not an isolated case. That’s just what contact does.

A Cuban scholar named Fernando Ortiz was watching the same phenomenon happen in Havana around the same era and gave it a name: transculturation. His point was that when two cultures meet, it’s never a clean handoff, one side just absorbing the other. Something gets lost, sure. But something new also gets made, a third thing that didn’t exist in either culture before the contact happened. Bossa nova is a version of this. American jazz musicians started showing up in Rio in the early ‘50s, and that contact helped produce a sound that fused jazz harmony onto samba rhythm. Then it traveled back across the water. Sinatra, Ella, Nina Simone, all cutting Brasilian songs. Decades after that, hip-hop producers went crate-digging specifically for those old bossa and Brasilian jazz records, because the harmonic complexity left room to chop and flip into something else entirely. Nobody in that chain “owns” the sound. Everybody in that chain kept it moving.

Which gets us closer to what “keeping” actually looks like in practice. It’s not a vault. It’s not a museum piece under glass, untouched, preserved exactly as it was the day someone found it. A culture that never touches another culture doesn’t stay pure, it just stops adapting. It’s the culture in constant contact, the diaspora, the border town, the port city, the neighborhood radio station, that tends to stay alive precisely because it keeps having to renew its own reasons for existing.

Now, none of this happens in a vacuum, and it isn’t always fair. Contact between cultures usually happens on uneven ground, one side with more power, more platforms, more ability to profit off what they didn’t build. That’s real, and it’s worth naming plainly: the difference between exchange and extraction usually comes down to credit and relationship, whether you’re apprenticing yourself to something or just lifting its surface. We’re not going to pretend that history away.

But here’s what struck us, going back through all of this: a culture keeper was never one person. It was never a title you claimed for yourself. It was the friend who brought a record back from a trip abroad and let the whole block dub it to cassette. It was the DJ who played one more deep cut than he needed to and told you, trust me on this one. It was the elder humming a hand-clapping game to a kid who’d hum it to another kid forty years and one border crossing later, a little changed, still recognizable. Every one of them received something and passed it forward slightly altered by their own hands. That’s the whole job. Not guarding the door.

So yeah. “Culture Keepers” grew on us. Not as a title we’re claiming, but as a description of something we’re all already doing, every time we play a record for somebody who’s never heard it, every time we teach a rhythm or borrow one honestly. We put the phrase on the record crate and on the duffle bag, and maybe that’s the whole thing right there. A crate and a bag are built to carry something from one place to the next. Turns out that’s exactly where culture gets kept.

New Merch Line Out Now!

What started as a whisper passed from one person to the next. Not a eulogy, a statement. Everything in this line comes from that same idea: sound as a circle, freedom as discipline, culture as something you carry and hand off, not something you inherit and forget. This collection is for the ones doing the passing.

Full line out now. Link below.

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Every Friday, from 6PM to 8PM PST

www.jazzisdead.com

In over 30 years in this music, I’ve been on the road in nearly every capacity there is. Member of a band, solo artist, supporting musician, tour manager, sound engineer. I have slept on green room floors with my jacket as a pillow, in the back of cars, on the couches of strangers who became friends by morning. I have carried amplifiers and cases of every shape and size. I have driven vans across international borders at four in the morning. I have stuffed a compact Fiat so full of people and gear it would put circus clowns in a VW Beetle to shame.

Let me tell you something that’s true whether you’re a new band packed into a van or a pop icon on a private jet: touring is exhausting. And I’ve met people who have done it longer, and harder, than I ever have. Since joining Jazz Is Dead, I’ve had the privilege of touring with maestros in their 80s, musicians who were already on the road decades before I was born.

Sometimes, in the rougher moments, shuffling through airport security at dawn, checking into a hotel at 2am, I ask myself: why are they still doing this?

You could say it’s the job. That this is how they make their living. That’s true. But I have reasons to believe something deeper is going on.

Renato Massa, a drummer who has played behind some of the biggest names in Brasilian music, once told me that going on tour feels like going to war. You have a mission to accomplish. You leave your normal life behind. Your bed, your routine, the people who know you outside of soundcheck, and step into the unknown, into a string of cities you’ll only ever see through a bus window and a stage door. You don’t fully control the terrain. You adapt, you push through fatigue, you show up for the people beside you because they’re showing up for you. And like anyone who has been through something difficult alongside others, you come out the other side bonded to them in a way peacetime never allows.

That’s part of it. There’s a camaraderie forged on tour that’s hard to replicate anywhere else. A shared objective. A collective exhaustion. Going through all of it together pushes the limits of human relationships, you see people at their most vulnerable. Their quirks, their vices, the things they’d never say to someone who hadn’t earned it. They confide in you, and you in them, in ways only possible for people who spend that much time together, in a row, with nowhere to hide. It’s stressful. It’s also rich. There’s a lot to learn about yourself, and about coexisting with people who see the world differently than you do.

But that doesn’t fully answer my question. If anything, it explains why some people eventually get fed up with this life.

I think what I witnessed on the Ebo Taylor farewell tour gets closer to the truth. When the tour was cancelled in 2024 over visa issues, we assumed that was it: that Ebo would likely never tour again. But his sons pushed for us to try again the following year, when he’d turn 89. Their father, his kids told us, was at his best on the road. Even the prospect of touring, the planning, talking about the cities, the shows, was enough to lift his spirits. And once we were out there, the difference was impossible to miss. You could see it in his mood on show days. The excitement in his eyes as he put on his stage clothes. The way he lit up when the crowd sang back to him.

Here’s something I believe: the relationship between artist and fan is a two-way street. The audience gets songs that mark their lives: the soundtrack to a heartbreak, a wedding, a summer they’ll never forget. And the artist gets something back just as vital: proof that they’re not alone. That the intimate, private impulse they turned into sound resonates with people they’ve never met, who don’t speak their language, who live lives nothing like their own. That encounter can only happen through touring. No recording, no stream, no algorithm can deliver it. I believe, no, I know, that deep down, that’s why they keep going through all the hassle. And it’s worth it.

Earlier this week I was in Mexico City for the kickoff of Marcos Valle’s North American tour. Watching him in the green room after the encore, still buzzing from the crowd singing “olé, olé, olé, olé, Marcos, Marcos” back at him, was one of those magic moments you don’t forget. The tour continues through the US and Canada. In a few weeks, it’s Cortex’s turn, with Adrian Younge and J.Rocc on the bill.

Don’t miss the chance to be in the room for these. Go exchange some love. Know that the artist you’ve showed up for has come from far away for one reason: because they know you’ll be there.

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Viçosa is a small university town in the interior of Minas Gerais, Brasil. In the late 1980s, a group of fifteen-year-olds (not particularly cool ones, the kind who read electronics magazines and spent weekends soldering circuit boards) built an FM transmitter from a diagram they found in one of those magazines. We’d take turns hosting it at each other’s houses, whoever had it that night would put on records and broadcast into the air, while the others tuned in from their own bedrooms. We were too young and too broke for clubs or concerts; the music was the thing, and this was how we got to share it. At first it was just friends listening together while apart, a workaround for the particular loneliness of being a teenager in a small town with big tastes. But word got around, and eventually there were strangers tuning in, an invisible audience we never knew exactly the size of. We started embedding encrypted messages in the broadcasts, inside jokes and signals hidden between or in the middle of songs, things only the inner circle would catch. It was music and it was community and it was, in the most modest possible sense, power: the strange, electric understanding that sound could leave one bedroom and arrive in countless others, and that whoever was listening on the other end would feel it.

Others had discovered this power long before us, and wielded it a lot more purposefully than a bunch of nerdy teens ever could.

In 1964, an Irish artist manager and record label owner named Ronan O’Rahilly found himself unable to get airplay for one of his artists. The BBC controlled British radio with an iron schedule, and what it wouldn’t play, which was most of what young people actually wanted to hear, simply didn’t exist on the dial. O’Rahilly didn’t lobby for reform. He bought a boat, anchored it just outside British territorial waters, and started broadcasting rock and roll from the North Sea. He called it Radio Caroline, and by 1966 it had 23 million listeners.

By 1967, ten pirate stations were reaching an estimated 10 to 15 million people daily, and the BBC, facing the reality that the island had tuned them out, restructured its entire operation that year, creating Radio 1, 2, 3, and 4 in direct response to the pressure of ships full of young people playing records that someone had decided weren’t appropriate for the public airwaves. O’Rahilly described the whole thing simply: “It was a little ship and a bunch of young people doing it against the entire forces of the establishment.”

The establishment always builds the walls. The music always finds a way through.

Spin the clock forward twenty years and the ships are gone, replaced by tower blocks, the brutalist high-rises that had gone up across London in the postwar decades, housing the working-class and immigrant communities the city depended on but rarely celebrated. By the 1980s, a new generation of Black Londoners had concluded that commercial radio had no interest in the music they were making or listening to, or the communities they came from, so they climbed, carrying equipment up stairwells, hiding transmitters in biscuit tins, running cable out of windows and mounting antennas on rooftops in Hackney and Brixton and the parts of the city that didn’t show up in any broker or travel agent’s brochures. By the end of the decade there were 600 pirate stations operating across the UK, 60 in London alone, and every genre that would define the next thirty years of English music — jungle, drum and bass, garage, grime — incubated on frequencies that weren’t supposed to exist. Rinse FM started in 1994 with an aerial on a broom handle and went on to become the home of grime, a genre that was itself born from exclusion: younger MCs locked out of the garage scene, building their own platform instead of waiting for an invitation. The authorities raided. The transmitters moved. DJ Slimzee, one of the first to play what would become grime, was eventually served an ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order) prohibiting him from entering the roof of any building over four storeys high without permission, which is one of the most poetic criminal records in the history of music.

The pattern, across every decade and every continent, is always the same: a community that isn’t being served builds its own antenna, broadcasts its own sound, and offers the outsiders, the daring, the inspired spirits of the underground a platform for invitation, discovery, and celebration. The mainstream co-opts what it can and ignores the rest, but the transmission has already done its work: the audience has already found itself, its voice, because those expressing it understood that what they love is worth fighting for.

That spirit is what Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad have been living since long before Jazz Is Dead had a name. Friends in a room with records, sharing what they love, trusting that whoever’s listening will feel why it matters. That is the pirate radio ethos, and it is also, at its most essential, what Jazz Is Dead has always been. A conversation between friends that kept getting louder: from a room to a label, from a label to a concert series, from a concert series to a movement that has brought legends from Rio to Accra to New York through the doors of Linear Labs in Los Angeles to make music that wouldn’t exist without that original act of faith. The infrastructure has changed. The conviction hasn’t.

Now that ethos, that essence, is being broadcast for all kindred spirits and curious souls. Every Friday from 6 to 8pm PT, Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad will host KJAZZ Is Dead on KKJZ 88.1 FM. Two hours of music, context, surprise guests, and the kind of deep listening that has always defined what we do. Think of it as Adrian and Ali doing what they’ve always done: talking to each other and their friends about the music they love, working through its history and its meaning, playing things you need to hear: only now with the whole city tuned in. Those teenagers in Viçosa understood something real about why that matters. So did the kids climbing stairwells in Hackney with transmitters under their arms. The frequency was never the point. The point was always the music, and the community that forms when someone believes in it enough to put it on the air.

Tune in Fridays, 6 to 8pm PT, on KJAZZ 88.1 FM, or online here.

This Sunday in LA!

TICKETS

New! Limited Items From Jazz Is Dead

While we’ve been thinking about the World Cup, we’ve also been in the design studio. And it felt impossible not to connect the two.

João Donato brought Brasil to the world through sound. Decades of harmonic restlessness, a piano touch unlike anyone else’s, a spirit that traveled far beyond Rio and never asked for permission. Ebo Taylor did the same for Ghana, weaving highlife and Afrobeat into something so deeply rooted in his country’s soil that it became, inevitably, the world’s. Both men are giants. Both men are also citizens of two of the most passionate football nations on earth. That’s not a coincidence we were willing to let pass without comment.

We said we were listening when we made JID007 and JID022. These jerseys are our way of saying we still are. The colors they wore as a nation, now carrying their names. Donato 7 in blue and gold. Ebo 22 in black, green, red and yellow. And alongside them, a Jazz Is Dead ball: because the culture travels wherever it goes, and it might as well travel in style.

And because this drop exists in the context of the world we actually live in: the No Human Is Illegal Tee. Music has never asked for papers, and neither have we. Every sale goes directly to CHIRLA — the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights — because we designed it so the message can reach places posters cannot. Wearing it is the least complicated thing you can do right now.

That’s four of eleven new pieces: designed in Los Angeles, made by humans, made to be worn. Check out the rest at the link.

Shop

www.jazzisdead.com

There’s a theory (I’m not sure how much science is behind it) that people who speak more than one language have different personalities in each one. That they don’t just translate thoughts from one tongue to another, but actually think differently, access different parts of themselves, become slightly different people depending on which language they’re operating in.

I couldn’t tell you if that holds up in a lab. But I can tell you what happened when I tried to run a bilingual blog.

Since I started writing for this newsletter, I decided to set up a Portuguese-language version for my Brasilian readers. The plan was simple: write the originals in English, have them translated, post.

It didn’t last.

The translations were accurate. Grammatically clean. Faithful to the source. But the texts didn’t feel like me. I tried tweaking them, adjusting rhythm, swapping idioms, working the voice back in, but the problem wasn’t fixable at the sentence level. The problem was structural.

I eventually understood why: if I were writing about the same subjects in Portuguese, I’d be approaching the text in a different way. Different sentence shapes. Different instincts about when to use a story and when to use a statement. The language doesn’t just carry the thought. In some essential way, it is the thought.

This is where it gets interesting: I don’t think this is just about language.

I believe the creative impulse behind all art is the same impulse. Whatever it is that makes a person need to express something, to get an idea or a feeling out of the body and into the world, that force is singular. We just reach for different instruments to discharge it. Some write poems. Some pick up a guitar. Some spread paint on a canvas. Some dance. Same spark, different output.

But here’s what I’ve come to think: those outputs aren’t always interchangeable. The medium isn’t just a delivery mechanism. It’s a shaping force. It determines not only how the idea arrives, but which idea arrives at all.

A composer sitting at a piano will write a different song than the same composer reaching for a guitar. Not because they decided to write differently, but because the instrument hands them different possibilities and different resistances. The piano says: here is every note at once, laid out in front of you, spatial and rational. The guitar says: here are shapes under your fingers that your hands already know. The creative act that follows isn’t the same act. It’s conducted in a different language.

The same is true across forms. A photographer working in 35mm will see differently than one working medium format, not just technically, but philosophically. Just as black and white removes one variable and restores a hundred others, giving you different possibilities than color. These aren’t just aesthetic preferences. They’re different grammars.

There’s a story that illuminates this better than I can.

In one of his talks, the Brasilian artist Vik Muniz describes how he started as a sculptor. He’d make a piece, and then he’d notice that he wanted people to see it from a very specific angle. So he started photographing his sculptures and, eventually, the photographs became the work. That’s what he’d exhibit. That’s what he’d release into the world.

The question this raises is almost too good: Is Vik Muniz a sculptor or a photographer?

I think he’s both, in a very particular sequence. The sculpture is a draft and the photograph is the final translation. except that he designed the original with the translation already in mind. He sculpted toward the photograph. He knew the medium he was aiming at before he started the one he was working in.

It’s layered art, where each layer is a different language, each one chosen for what it can do that the others can’t.

And here’s what struck me about it: Vik didn’t end up a photographer instead of a sculptor. He became a photographer because of sculpture. One language opened access to the other.

When I started learning trumpet, I became a better guitarist.

Not because the skills transferred in any obvious technical sense. Playing a purely melodic instrument when your background is on a harmony oriented one is enlightening. You start listening differently. And that listening travels with you when you pick up the instrument you already know.

Learning photography has worked the same way. At its core, a photograph and a paragraph are the same gesture: an attempt to show someone else how you see the world. One uses light and frame and the decision of when to press the shutter. The other uses words and rhythm and the decision of where to end the sentence. But both are acts of looking. Of saying, this, here, this is what I noticed, this is how it felt to be standing in this particular spot at this particular moment.

This is what other art forms offer: not distraction from the work you do, but a different angle of approach to the same underlying problem.

Which brings me back to the translations I wasn’t happy about.

I think the failure was conceptual. I was trying to just translate something that had already been shaped by its language.

So maybe the theory about language and personality is pointing at something real, just not quite naming it right. It’s not that we have different personalities in different languages. It’s that each language — each medium, each instrument, each form — opens a door to a part of us that the others can’t reach. And for anyone who makes things, the more doors you can open, the more of yourself you can bring to the work.

The lesson isn’t to do everything. It’s to go somewhere unfamiliar on purpose, to be a beginner again, to find the resistance, to let a different form hand you a different version of the same question.

You’ll come back changed. The work will show it.

Keep exploring. Keep committing.

New! Limited Items From Jazz Is Dead

While we’ve been thinking about the World Cup, we’ve also been in the design studio. And it felt impossible not to connect the two.

João Donato brought Brasil to the world through sound. Decades of harmonic restlessness, a piano touch unlike anyone else’s, a spirit that traveled far beyond Rio and never asked for permission. Ebo Taylor did the same for Ghana, weaving highlife and Afrobeat into something so deeply rooted in his country’s soil that it became, inevitably, the world’s. Both men are giants. Both men are also citizens of two of the most passionate football nations on earth. That’s not a coincidence we were willing to let pass without comment.

We said we were listening when we made JID007 and JID022. These jerseys are our way of saying we still are. The colors they wore as a nation, now carrying their names. Donato 7 in blue and gold. Ebo 22 in black, green, red and yellow. And alongside them, a Jazz Is Dead ball: because the culture travels wherever it goes, and it might as well travel in style.

And because this drop exists in the context of the world we actually live in: the No Human Is Illegal Tee. Music has never asked for papers, and neither have we. Every sale goes directly to CHIRLA — the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights — because we designed it so the message can reach places posters cannot. Wearing it is the least complicated thing you can do right now.

That’s four of eleven new pieces: designed in Los Angeles, made by humans, made to be worn. Check out the rest at the link.

Shop

www.jazzisdead.com

There is a moment that happens at every World Cup, in every bar, in every living room, on every street corner where someone has propped up a screen. It doesn’t happen during the goals, though those are electric. It happens when the cameras pan across the stands and you see the faces, painted, draped in flags, wild-eyed, and you realize: none of these people were supposed to be in the same room. A Senegalese grandmother in a yellow jersey. A Brasilian kid in a Moroccan scarf he bartered for outside the stadium. A Japanese tourist who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish, arms around two strangers from Ecuador, already learning their chant.

That moment is the World Cup’s deepest secret. The games are the excuse. The gathering is the thing. Which is exactly what makes it so maddening that the whole apparatus is controlled by an organization that has never demonstrated any interest in the gathering, only in what it can extract from it.

The 2026 tournament runs June 11 to July 19, across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. 16 cities, 48 nations, 104 matches. Somewhere around six billion people will tune in before it’s over. Three out of every four humans alive on this planet. There is no other event — not the Olympics, not the Super Bowl, not anything — that comes close. The World Cup is the closest thing humanity has to a shared experience.

Here’s something worth understanding: the World Cup is the only major international spectacle where the so-called superpowers carry no particular weight. The United States and China are just teams. There are no permanent seats on the Security Council of football. South American nations have historically dominated. African nations have been producing genuine contenders for decades, their fan presence turning any stadium into something close to a festival. The World Cup belongs to the world in a way that phrase is usually just marketing.

Which is exactly why it’s worth separating the tournament from the institutions that surround it. An organization that has spent decades awarding tournaments to the highest bidder, regardless of human cost, recently saw fit to create a “Peace Award” to appease a sitting head of state’s ego. A gesture so transparent in its cravenness that it tells you everything you need to know about where their priorities have always been. And the current American political climate, the hostility toward immigrants, the isolationist posture, the casual cruelty toward the very people the World Cup will ask to come here and spend their money, is its own kind of betrayal of what this event represents. You are not required to endorse either one in order to love what happens between the fans. In fact, we’d argue that loving it clearly requires acknowledging both.

Because FIFA doesn’t own this. Neither do the host nations. What fills those stadiums — the music, the drums, the chants, the flags worn as capes, the parades and dances that spill into the streets and across plazas and parks, that belongs to the people who show up. It always has. The tournament has always been larger than the organization that runs it, and larger than the country hosting it too.

Think about what music does when it crosses a border. Not the music industry. The industry is a disaster, we’ve covered that, but the music itself. The way Afrobeat moved from Lagos to Accra to Lisbon to Toronto without asking anyone’s permission. Music doesn’t require a visa. It arrives, transforms whoever it touches, and leaves changed itself.

The World Cup works the same way. And Jazz Is Dead exists because of that kind of transmission, that kind of gracious exchange: the passing of a sound from one set of hands to another, across time and geography. What João Donato built across decades of Brasilian music traveled far beyond Rio, touching listeners who couldn’t tell Portuguese from Spanish. What Ebo Taylor wove into Ghanaian highlife did the same from the other side of the Atlantic: a sound so rooted in place that it became, paradoxically, universal. The more honest, specific and pure the truth, the further it travels.

The World Cup is the world doing that, live, for six weeks straight.

Come July 19, a team will lift a trophy and be called Champion of the World. But what we’re really hoping for is simpler: that the millions of fans streaming into these sixteen cities, and others around the world, do what fans have always done: make a temporary and shared republic of joy that outlasts whatever political and corporate moment it arrives in. That they remind each other, and maybe even their hosts, of what it looks like when the world decides to recognize, respect and celebrate our beautiful differences rather than be intimidated or frightened by them.

Root consciously. Celebrate loudly. Know the difference.

New! Limited Items From Jazz Is Dead

While we’ve been thinking about the World Cup, we’ve also been in the design studio. And it felt impossible not to connect the two.

João Donato brought Brasil to the world through sound. Decades of harmonic restlessness, a piano touch unlike anyone else’s, a spirit that traveled far beyond Rio and never asked for permission. Ebo Taylor did the same for Ghana, weaving highlife and Afrobeat into something so deeply rooted in his country’s soil that it became, inevitably, the world’s. Both men are giants. Both men are also citizens of two of the most passionate football nations on earth. That’s not a coincidence we were willing to let pass without comment.

We said we were listening when we made JID007 and JID022. These jerseys are our way of saying we still are. The colors they wore as a nation, now carrying their names. Donato 7 in blue and gold. Ebo 22 in black, green, red and yellow. And alongside them, a Jazz Is Dead ball: because the culture travels wherever it goes, and it might as well travel in style.

And because this drop exists in the context of the world we actually live in: the No Human Is Illegal Tee. Music has never asked for papers, and neither have we. Every sale goes directly to CHIRLA — the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights — because we designed it so the message can reach places posters cannot. Wearing it is the least complicated thing you can do right now.

That’s four of eleven new pieces: designed in Los Angeles, made by humans, made to be worn. Check out the rest at the link.

Shop

www.jazzisdead.com

There is a version of this story that begins with a beat-up van, a cooler full of warm water, and a stack of CDs in the back.

We were a small underground band touring Brasil in the early 2000s. Nobody knew who we were. The venues were small, the guarantees were modest or nonexistent. But something interesting happened at almost every show: we sold records. Dozens of them, sometimes, to people who had never heard our name before that night. That transaction didn’t just cover the next tank of gas, it was the moment a stranger became a listener. The music left the room with them.

Things changed. Now if you discover a band at a show and want to hear them on the drive home, you just open an app. You don't have to buy anything. The music is everywhere, and monetized almost nowhere. At least not for the people who made it. And even if those new fans become loyal listeners, streaming the record a hundred times over, it likely won't move the needle financially for the artist. The bond is somewhat weaker.

But vinyl is back. Not back the way it was, as the primary delivery mechanism for recorded sound. It’s back as something stranger and arguably deeper: an object people choose. Something you buy not because you have to, but because you want to hold it. A lot of people own vinyl albums and don’t own a turntable. We know this. Because they’re not buying a delivery mechanism. They are investing in a relationship with the artist

Merch has always existed. Bands have sold t-shirts since before most of us were alive. But for most of music history, merch was additive. Something you bought on top of the record, a souvenir from a night that otherwise lived in sound. Now, in a world where the sound is free, the object becomes primary. The jacket, the tote, the poster, the pressed piece of vinyl: these are the things that let fans say I am part of this. Not a passive consumer, not a play-count increment. A participant. Someone who made a choice with their dollars and their closet and their wall space.

This is what merch actually is, when you strip away the commerce. It’s a fan saying: this music matters enough to make visible. When you wear a Jazz Is Dead shirt to the grocery store or the barbershop, you are not advertising a brand. You are broadcasting a value system. You are telling everyone around you that music made with intention and craft is worth caring about, that records made by humans who have lived through something are irreplaceable, that this particular corner of the culture is worth protecting. That is not a small thing. In a world moving faster and faster toward disposability, choosing to carry something is an act of faith, if not solidarity.

And for the artists, the labels, the communities, it’s also simply how things like this stay alive. Not through algorithms. Not through passive consumption. Through people who understand what they’re looking at.

Every piece of merch we put into the world is designed with that weight in mind. Not weight in the sense of seriousness, but weight in the sense of substance. The thing should be worth having. It should last. It should mean as much to you, five years from now, as it did the day it arrived. Because we know you are not buying a product. You are investing in something larger: a label, a catalog, a community of people who believe that music is still worth putting on tape and cutting to vinyl and pressing into a shirt and handing to someone who didn’t know they needed it yet.

We value every person who has ever bought anything from us. The collector who tracked down an out-of-print pressing. The person who bought a sticker because they couldn’t afford anything else. The one who spent a week deciding on the jacket. We understand all of those transactions the same way: someone looked at something we made and decided it was worth being in their life. There is nothing routine about that. We were fans before we were anything else, and we know exactly what it feels like to stand in front of something you love and reach for your wallet not because you have to, but because walking away without it is unthinkable.

Afro-Disco Makossa

Afro Disco Makossa is the first Linear Labs album built for the dance floor, and Adrian Younge is uniquely qualified to make it. Having already recorded modern Afrobeat classics with Tony Allen and Ebo Taylor through Jazz Is Dead, Younge asks a new question: what would a Ghanaian producer in '76 have made if he set out to create an American disco record for his hometown? The result is a relentless, hypnotic patchwork of Afrobeat, funk, and disco recorded to tape, built for the DJ of any era. Preorder available!

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JID 027 - JOYCE & TUTTY MORENO

Joyce & Tutty Moreno, the legendary architects of Brazilian sophisticated samba, have. partnered with Adrian Younge to complete JID027- a deeply emotional album born from tragedy. Set in motion by the endorsement of their late friend João Donato, the project became a tribute to him following his sudden passing. The result is a breathtaking collection of improvisation, poetry and resilience.

Pre Order

YOUNGE

“Younge is enigmatic and expansive, like the soundtrack to an imagined movie” —The Observer magazine (UK)

Dreamhouse Records album of the week for Record Store Day 2026 (UK)

Younge is Adrian Younge’s magnum opus: a record that redefines what orchestral composition can mean for a new generation of jazz and hip hop. It is a bold, instrumental statement that positions Younge not only as a composer, but as an architect of a new musical language, one that looks backward and forward at the same time.

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Tank and the Bangas

Live at Skirball

July 2, 2026

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More events and music at jazzisdead.com and linearlabsmusic.com

There is a quiet magic in looking back at the history of recorded sound and realizing just how much of it was shaped by hands that history tried to forget. For every icon who stood center stage under the spotlight, there were architects working in the wings (composers, instrumentalists, producers) whose gender made the climb steeper, the room colder, and the credit harder to claim. But here’s the beautiful truth: the music never lied. The grooves contain the evidence. And once you start listening for them, you hear the women everywhere, bending the harmony, driving the rhythm, writing the future.

Before we dive into our centerpiece, the immortal Joyce, let’s rewind the tape to the pre-MTV, pre-80s wilderness. We had trailblazers, not just performers. Think of Mary Lou Williams (1920s-40s), the pianist, composer, and arranger who was the spiritual and musical guide for the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. In the 1950s, Hazel Scott was a classical and jazz prodigy who fought segregation in the halls of Congress while playing two pianos at once. Valaida Snow was called “Little Louis” for her virtuosic trumpet playing long before Wynton became a household name.

Mary Lou Williams

Then there were the architects. Like Carole King, who wrote the soundtrack to the 60s before she sang “Tapestry”. But even when these women earned the respect of their male peers (Miles Davis said that his legendary keyboardist, Joe Zawinul, learned how to perfectly accompany soloists and space his chords by playing with Dinah Washington; Gil Evans deeply admired Carla Bley’s big band compositions) they always hit the same glass ceiling. They could lead the band, but they couldn’t sign the check. The A&R men, the label presidents, the distribution gatekeepers? They were almost exclusively men who looked at a woman with a saxophone or a lyric sheet about existential dread and said, “That’s cute, but can you cover ‘Summer Samba’ in a bikini?”

Joyce

This brings us to Joyce. Her full name is Joyce Moreno, but she is so singular that like Milton or Caetano, she needs only one.

Imagine the scene: Rio de Janeiro, the late 1960s and early 70s. You have a supernova of genius, the likes of Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Donato, Marcos Valle, Edu Lobo, Milton Nascimento. A truly brilliant generation. And in the room? Joyce. Alone. The only woman sitting at the table of composers, smoking the same cigarettes, drinking the same whiskey, bending harmony until it breaks.

Joyce in the studio with Milton Nascimento

Here is what makes Joyce terrifyingly special: She was not a “female composer.” She was a composer. Period. She earned the respect of Jobim (who once called her one of the greatest singers of all time) and Donato not by playing cute, but by playing odd time signatures and writing lyrics that were sharp, poetic, and often brutally introspective. In a scene fueled by machismo and lighthearted bossa, Joyce brought the deep cut.

But the pressure? Immense. And it came from two directions at once. The male executives at Philips and Odeon didn’t care that she could modulate keys like a sorceress. They wanted the mold. They wanted her to write about love and longing in a passive voice. They wanted her to look like a tropical flower, not the intellectual equal of João Gilberto. They wanted to shrink her.

Then there was the dictatorship. Brasil’s military regime, which lasted 21 years, meant that Joyce spent the first two decades of her professional life trying to dodge censorship. The censors didn’t just look for political subversion; they policed morality, and a woman writing from her own body was a threat. At 19, Joyce’s first festival entry, “Me Disseram,” caused scandal for containing the phrase “meu homem” (”my man”). She was called “imoral”. Later, at the height of the censorship machine in the early 1980s, she had a song banned for containing the words “grávida” (pregnant) and “parir” (to give birth) . The female perspective, she recalls, bothered them too much .

Joyce and Adrian Younge (Tutty Moreno in the reflection)

Joyce refused to be silenced. She found her voice not by shouting, but by outsmarting the system. Like her male contemporaries she learned to write in metaphors, cloaking her truth in poetic imagery that the censors were too slow to decode . She wrote about the dust on the floor, the tension of domesticity, the wildness of the ocean. She challenged the executives by simply refusing to disappear. She played guitar with a ferocity that scared session players. She wrote “Feminina” (literally “feminine”) as a manifesto of self-definition, not submission. An intergenerational conversation between mother and daughter about what it means to be a woman .

Then, life happened. In the late 70s, at the peak of her creative powers, Joyce became a mother. And here is the line where the industry fails, but the human being wins. She made the conscious, radical choice to slow down. She put the international tours on hold. She prioritized the child over the microphone.

Most male musicians never make that choice. When they do, it’s a magazine cover story (”Rock Star Dad Takes Baby on Tour!”). When Joyce did it, the industry shrugged and moved on to the next young thing. For nearly a decade, she was a whisper among connoisseurs rather than a roar on the charts.

But Joyce is patient. Joyce is stone.

The longevity of her career, spanning now over five decades, is not an accident. It is a testament to three things:

1) A compositional catalog so deep that modern producers are still mining it for rare samples.

2) A will of iron wrapped in a whisper.

3) The quiet, radical support of her husband, the phenomenal drummer Tutty Moreno.

Tutty Moreno recording JID027 Joyce & Tutty Moreno

We need to name Tutty here. In a story full of men who felt threatened by their wives’ success, Tutty was the foundation. He didn’t just support her; he locked in the rhythm for her. He became the drummer in her band, the father of her child, and the roadie who carried the gear so she could walk on stage with her head high. He is the unsung bassline in the track of her survival. Without that partnership, the story of Brazilian music is incomplete.

Today, Joyce stands as the godmother. She doesn’t fit the mold; the mold broke trying to contain her. She proved that you can be the only woman in the room, earn the respect of the giants, stare down a dictatorship, and then step off the carousel to raise a human being... and still come back to claim your throne.

As she once put it, reflecting on her generation of artists who faced the censorship machine: “Enquanto tiver bambu, tem flecha”—as long as there’s bamboo, there’s an arrow .

So when you spin that JID027 Joyce & Tutty Moreno LP, or the rare Feminina original pressing you hunted for years, don’t just listen for the beauty. Listen for the resistance. Listen for the woman who looked at a room full of geniuses and a regime full of censors and said, “Move over.”

JID 027 - JOYCE & TUTTY MORENO

Joyce & Tutty Moreno, the legendary architects of Brazilian sophisticated samba, have. partnered with Adrian Younge to complete JID027- a deeply emotional album born from tragedy. Set in motion by the endorsement of their late friend João Donato, the project became a tribute to him following his sudden passing. The result is a breathtaking collection of improvisation, poetry and resilience.

Pre Order

YOUNGE

“Younge is enigmatic and expansive, like the soundtrack to an imagined movie” —The Observer magazine (UK)

Dreamhouse Records album of the week for Record Store Day 2026 (UK)

Younge is Adrian Younge’s magnum opus: a record that redefines what orchestral composition can mean for a new generation of jazz and hip hop. It is a bold, instrumental statement that positions Younge not only as a composer, but as an architect of a new musical language, one that looks backward and forward at the same time.

Buy

JID 026 - Antonio Carlos e Jocafi

"A celebration of the culture, resilience, and joy of Bahia — proof that jazz and Brazilian music are never dead." — Playlist Magazine (Mexico)

Buy

UPCOMING EVENTS

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Adrian Younge Presents Jazz Is Dead feat. Ronnie Laws, Carlos Dafé & Ala.ni

July 24 and 25 at the 47th Calgary Folk Music Festival

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Visit us at jazzisdead.com and linearlabsmusic.com

There’s a story that’s stuck with me for years. One that reshapes how I think about almost everything we do here at Linear Labs.

A luthier once told me about a client who wanted a custom classical guitar. They agreed on the price. They agreed on the design. Then the client asked how long it would take. When the luthier gave his answer, the client balked. “I need it sooner,” he said. “I’ll pay extra.”

The luthier didn’t get angry. He didn’t cave. He simply said: “It takes a woman nine months to make a baby. You can’t put two women on the job and get it done in four and a half months.”

You can’t rush a creation without changing its nature.

That wisdom has haunted me (in the best way) ever since. Because we live in an age that worships speed above almost everything else. Produce is gassed to ripen on the truck, not on the vine. We’ve confused faster with better, and we’ve started calling the trade-offs “efficiency.”

But here’s the question no one wants to sit with long enough: What are we actually sacrificing?

The luthier could have cut corners. The client might never have known the difference, but they’d be there. That’s the quiet violence of so-called efficiency: it slowly lowers our standards.

I see this constantly in recording.

I came up in the digital generation. Endless tracks. Infinite takes. The godlike power to move any note anywhere. And you know what that bought me? Hours and hours of editing things that were never broken. I’d stare at a screen, see a kick drum that was two milliseconds off the grid, and nudge it. Not because I heard a problem. Because I saw one.

That’s when I started mixing with the screen off. Audio is meant to be heard, not seen. If it didn’t bother my ears, I’d leave it alone. But that discipline is hard when the tools tempt you to tweak forever.

And here’s the irony: the digital promise was infinite flexibility. What it often delivers is infinite procrastination. More options, more time wasted. Less efficiency, not more.

That’s why I’ve never worked faster from first rehearsal to finished master than I have here at Linear Labs. When you’re recording to tape, you can’t afford to keep your options open forever. You listen. You decide. You commit before you press record. A few takes, pick the best one, move on. No sympathetic tuning. No sample replacement. No grid-snapping your way to a pulse that never existed in the room.

The analog signal path gives you warmth, character, and a finished sound from the start. The mixing process becomes a conversation, not a rescue mission. But yes, there’s a cost. You have to make peace with human imperfection. You have to learn to hear the difference between a mistake and a personality.

Which brings us to the other word we desperately need to reframe: perfectionism.

If your version of perfectionism is rhythmic and pitch uniformity, with every transient locked, every vocal dead-center on the tuner, then you’re on a fast track to putting measurements over feeling. You’ll squeeze the life out of a performance and call it “professional.”

Nearly every classic track you’ve ever loved would fail a Beat-Detective or Auto-Tune inspection. They’d show up as a mess of tiny imperfections. And yet we call them perfect. Because artistic perfection has nothing to do with mathematical precision. It has to do with truth. With swing. With a singer’s voice cracking at exactly the right moment.

In that sense, technical perfection is often just boredom in disguise. It’s the sound of fear. The sound of someone unwilling to let a performance be alive.

So here at Linear Labs, we’re choosing a different kind of efficiency. It’s slower up front. It asks more of you as a musician and an engineer. But it gets you to the finish line faster in the end. Because you’re not spending weeks fixing things that were never wrong.

We’re choosing the luthier’s timeline. Nine months. Not four and a half. One woman. Not two.

And the guitar that comes out the other end? You’ll know the difference.

Keep creating. Keep committing.

— The Linear Labs Team

Played By Humans

Through My Soul, —Now streaming everywhere. Smartlink: lnk.to/JID028DS1.

Learn more and test your music at playedbyhumans.org

YOUNGE

“Younge is enigmatic and expansive, like the soundtrack to an imagined movie” —The Observer magazine (UK)

Dreamhouse Records album of the week for Record Store Day 2026 (UK)

Younge is Adrian Younge’s magnum opus: a record that redefines what orchestral composition can mean for a new generation of jazz and hip hop. It is a bold, instrumental statement that positions Younge not only as a composer, but as an architect of a new musical language, one that looks backward and forward at the same time.

Buy

JID 026 - Antonio Carlos e Jocafi

"A celebration of the culture, resilience, and joy of Bahia — proof that jazz and Brazilian music are never dead." — Playlist Magazine (Mexico)

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This Friday, May 1st is Bandcamp Friday.

Support Jazz Is Dead and Linear Labs by shopping on Bandcamp and 100% of revenue will go to your two favorite indie labels.

Bandcamp

UPCOMING EVENTS

Tickets

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Adrian Younge Presents Jazz Is Dead feat. Ronnie Laws, Carlos Dafé & Ala.ni

July 24 and 25 at the 47th Calgary Folk Music Festival

Info

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Visit us at jazzisdead.com and linearlabsmusic.com

Seriously. Sit with that for a second.

Because we’re about to tell you a story where exactly that happened. And the answer turns out to be a lot more complicated than you’d think.

But first, let’s back up.

Since we switched up this newsletter, we’ve talked about community, live music, hanging out as a catalyst for change, the unseen hands that move the piano, and the process of making art.

And we’ve talked about AI in music.

That’s the shadow now, isn’t it? Hovering above seemingly everything we do.

Here’s what we’ve said before, and we stand by it: technological advances in music have always been met with fear: Amplification. Synthesis. Sampling. Each one was called a threat. Each one eventually proved to be just another tool. Another color on the palette. The music survived. In some cases it thrived. Humans adapted, took control, and continued on.

But this AI thing? It feels different.

Not just because the tech is more advanced. But also because of the scale. According to recent data, AI-generated music is being uploaded to digital service providers at a rate of over 20,000 tracks per day on some platforms. That’s not an exaggeration. In 2024 alone, streaming services saw a massive spike in AI-generated content, with some estimates suggesting that hundreds of millions of AI-generated tracks will be on DSPs by the end of this year.

SOURCE: https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/20/deezer-says-44-of-songs-uploaded-to-its-platform-daily-are-ai-generated/

The vast majority of it is background noise, algorithmic wallpaper designed to capture passive streams. But some of it is huge. Millions of streams. Real money. Real playlist placement. Real...music?

See, here’s the thing: you often can’t tell. Or maybe you can, but you don’t know to tell. There’s no label. No disclosure. No warning.

That’s why the Played By Humans project feels particularly important.

When we were first approached with the idea of a Played By Humans label, a certification, something akin to the “organic” sticker on your produce, letting listeners know what they’re actually consuming, we loved it immediately. How could we not? For everything Jazz Is Dead, Linear Labs, and ArtDontSleep stand for, this wasn’t just a campaign. It was a mission. We were honored to be asked to be the face of it.

But then came the twist.

They suggested that Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad record a cover of an existing AI hit. A song with over 25 million streams. The thinking was straightforward: let an AI song be “played by humans,” and the difference would be undeniable. People would hear, in real time, how much better a track sounds when living, breathing, sweating musicians perform it. Case closed.

To say the idea was met with reluctance would be an understatement.

Adrian and Ali are known, among other things, for being the architects of Jazz Is Dead’s proudly, fully analog recordings. For working with legends from Rio to Accra to New York. For building sounds in rooms with wood and wire and tape. Why would they spend their time and lend their image, their artistry, to the recording of a cover of an AI song? Wouldn’t that legitimize AI as a composer? And the very idea of trying to “outdo” a machine felt silly, because to us, the result was never the point.

Think about what we’ve put out lately. JID026 — Antonio Carlos e Jocafi, two legends from Brazil whose voices carry decades of lived experience, warmth, and saudade you cannot prompt your way into. Adrian’s own “Younge”, described as “music that anticipates reinterpretation, deconstruction, and reuse”, acknowledging that it is meant to inspire others. And coming soon: yet another Marcos Valle tour, where the man himself will step on stage night after night and remind everyone watching that this music comes from a body, a history, a soul. None of these things could be faked. None of them would be improved by a machine. They exist because humans showed up, again and again.

It’s not about making a better version.

It’s about the essence of music as a product of human experience and interaction. It’s deeper than sounding better. It doesn’t matter if it sounds better or worse. Better or worse is subjective anyway.

After a lot of back and forth, long deep conversations, late night soul-searching, Adrian and Ali agreed to give it a shot. If nothing else, we hoped our participation would contribute to generating momentum behind the conversation around this issue, one that extends well beyond music, the arts, and IP at large.

The result is “Through My Soul.”

Recorded with a full orchestra and the legendary Midnight Hour band. Strings, horns, rhythm section, all in the same room. No grid-snapping. No pitch correction. Just humans playing. Live. Together.

Two days after the recording was completed, the song was performed at a surprise event at a packed Lodge Room in LA. The room was electric. People didn’t know what they were hearing at first. Then they did. And something strange happened: everyone involved enjoyed it. Artists and audience. Deeply.

Does it prove anything?

We don’t know. Probably not.

Listen to both versions and let us know what you think. To us, the difference is obvious. But here’s the thing: do you like the AI version better? We don’t care.

This was never about results. Or taste.

It’s about knowing that the biggest, loudest mark a generation leaves on the world is the music it produces. And that music is not just an aesthetic thing. It’s a product of the interaction between people and the times. It both feeds and is fed by the community that makes it.

So we come back to the argument we started with: this is about choice. And about having the information we need to make one.

Want to listen to AI music? Listen to your heart’s content. Seriously. No judgment.

But for those of us who don’t, we have the right to know what’s behind the chorus.

— Jazz Is Dead

P.S. “Through My Soul” featuring Loren Oden” (Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge) is out now. The original AI version is out there too. You can find both. Compare. Or don’t. But at least now you know the difference.

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Eyevan For Adrian Younge

Born from a shared reverence for heritage and innovation, EYEVAN for Adrian Younge reimagines vintage eyewear through Younge’s personal style and EYEVAN’s Japanese precision craftsmanship, balancing bold presence, meticulous engineering, and expressive lenses in timeless pieces.

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Upcoming Events

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JID 026 Antonio Carlos e Jocafi

Antonio Carlos & Jocafi, the legendary duo from Bahia whose music has embodied the soul of Brasil for over five decades, return with a bold new collaboration: Jazz Is Dead 026. Introduced to Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad by Beto Barreto of Baiana System, the meeting was instant magic. “The first time we met, it was like family,” they recall. That kinship led Younge and Muhammad to invite the duo to Los Angeles, where they carried a handful of ideas and created new songs on the spot—an intuitive, improvisatory process that defines the Jazz Is Dead ethos.

Now, with Jazz Is Dead 026, Antônio Carlos & Jocafi reaffirm their creative vitality while introducing their timeless Bahian spirit to a new generation. “Adrian’s love for Brasil is greater than that of many Brasilians,” they say, noting how deeply he listens, studies, and channels the rhythms, stories, and feelings of their culture. The result is an album that bridges Salvador’s Mercado Modelo with the global stage, weaving Bahia’s folkloric traditions into Jazz Is Dead’s analog soul.

Buy

Visit us at jazzisdead.com and linearlabsmusic.com

In this edition of the ArtDontSleep newsletter: We talk a lot about community—but this time, we’re getting specific about who actually builds it. Before we dive into the latest releases from Jazz Is Dead and Linear Labs, plus a look at our upcoming events, we want to shine a light on the people who make the music possible long before the first note rings out. The ones who carry the piano so the rest of us can dance. Read on.

We talk a lot about community. Here at ArtDontSleep, it’s practically the chorus of every conversation we have. We speak of the dance floor as sacred ground. We romanticize the way a room full of strangers becomes a single breathing organism when the right song drops at the right moment. And we should, because that magic is real.

But magic, it turns out, requires heavy lifting.

There’s an expression in Portuguese: carregar o piano. Literally, it means “to carry the piano.” In sports, every team has those players who aren’t the stars. They don’t make the highlight reels or get the endorsement deals, but they are absolutely vital to the team’s success. The gritty defender. The selfless passer. The locker room leader. We would say that they are the ones who carry the piano. It’s a humble, loving nod to the unseen work that lets others shine. The image is simple and profound: for someone to sit at the keys and play beautifully, for the audience to lean in and feel every note, others first had to haul that instrument up three flights of stairs, through narrow doorways, across cobblestone streets in the rain. The pianist gets the bow. The piano gets the spotlight. But the carriers? They’re already gone, setting up the next stage.

This is the guiding principle of every live show that has ever moved you. And today, we want to say thank you.

Thank you to the sound engineers who arrive before sunrise, coiling cables, tuning systems to frequencies most ears will never consciously notice—but would immediately feel if something were wrong. You are the guardians of clarity. You hear everything so that we can feel everything.

Thank you to the lighting designers and techs who paint with lumen and shadow, who turn a blank room into a cathedral of mood. You know that a single spotlight at the right moment can break a heart open. You work in darkness so that others can be seen.

Thank you to the stagehands and riggers who muscle the impossible. You lift the subs, lock the truss, tape down the cables. Your work is measured in calluses and sweat.

Thank you to the production managers who carry the piano no one sees: the spreadsheets, the permits, the load-in schedules, the rider negotiations, the last-minute venue changes. You are the calm in the chaos. You make disaster invisible.

Thank you to the runners and local crew who drive four hours for a box of specialty batteries, who find gluten-free snacks at 11 p.m., who pick up the artist’s grandmother from the airport. You are the nervous system of the operation—fast, flexible, and absolutely essential.

Thank you to the talent buyers and concert programmers who believe in a show months before anyone else does. You take the financial risk. You send the cold emails. You stare at empty RSVP lists and say, They’ll come. It matters. And then you pray.

Thank you to the promoters who dedicate their days to building audiences and supporting the arts community. Sending direct messages, shaking hands in person, plastering flyers on telephone poles, hanging posters in coffee shop windows, and creating consciousness for artists to have a support system. You are the megaphone before the music starts.

Thank you to the venue security, box office staff, bartenders, and clean-up crews who make the container safe and warm. You are the first face and the last. You deal with the drunk guy, the lost wallet, the broken glass, so that the rest of us can stay in the dream.

Here’s what we sometimes forget: that hour and a half of emotions and togetherness—the crying during the slow song, the screaming when the bass drops, the arms around strangers—rests on a pyramid of unseen labor. For every minute on stage, there are hours of carrying. For every spotlight, a dozen people in the dark.

So when we say community is important, we want to be specific. Community is not just the crowd singing along. It is the sound engineer protecting their ears so yours don’t have to. It is the stagehand lifting with their legs, not their back. It is the runner who hasn’t slept. It is the promoter beating themselves up in the car after a low turnout, then waking up to do it again—stacking flyers, sending DMs, believing anyway.

The pianist gets the applause. The piano gets the praise. But we see you—the carriers. The ones who make the art possible not with genius, but with grit. With love disguised as logistics.

Tonight, if you’re at a show, take a second before the first note. Look at the stage, then look past it. Think of the load-in at 8 a.m. Think of the soldering iron and the gaffer tape. Think of every person who will stay after the lights come up, breaking down the altar so that another congregation can worship tomorrow.

And if you’re one of the carriers reading this: thank you. We know you didn’t do it for the thanks. You did it because you believe in the music, too. But let us say it anyway, loud and clear:

You are the reason the piano plays. You are the community we keep talking about. And we will never stop dancing on the floor you’ve built and maintain.

With all the gratitude in the world,

ArtDontSleep Crew

Upcoming Events

From Jazz Is Dead

Antonio Carlos & Jocafi, the legendary duo from Bahia whose music has embodied the soul of Brasil for over five decades, return with a bold new collaboration: Jazz Is Dead 026. Introduced to Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad by Beto Barreto of Baiana System, the meeting was instant magic. “The first time we met, it was like family,” they recall. That kinship led Younge and Muhammad to invite the duo to Los Angeles, where they carried a handful of ideas and created new songs on the spot—an intuitive, improvisatory process that defines the Jazz Is Dead ethos.

“Possibly Jazz Is Dead’s boldest collaboration to date. Antonio Carlos & Jocafi return in vital form on Jazz Is Dead 026, a collaboration that feels more like a continuation of their lifelong creative spirit.” —Wordplay magazine album review (UK)

“Jazz Is Dead 026 brings together arrangements setting the pair’s guitar work and vocals against organ runs, synchronised horn fanfares, and more. With JId026, Carlos and Jocafi deliver an essential addition to the series” —Songlines magazine, 8/10 album review (UK)

“Blending samba, funk, Afro, Brazilian rhythms, and Bahian folk traditions with JID’s signature analog soul, the album unites five decades of history with a sound that feels both timeless and urgent.” —Playlist magazine album review (MEXICO)

Buy

From Linear Labs

Younge is Adrian Younge’s magnum opus: a record that redefines what orchestral composition can mean for a new generation of jazz and hip hop. It is a bold, instrumental statement that positions Younge not only as a composer, but as an architect of a new musical language, one that looks backward and forward at the same time.

“Everything you love about classic big bands with loads of strings combines with modern rhythms and instrumentation on the new self-titled album from the genius that is Adrian Younge.”—Hillary Seabrook album review from Harmonious World podcast, UK.

“Master of the left-swerve key change, able to layer ad build from the slimmest motifs, Younge’s idiosyncratic fusions are invariably freighted with deep-felt emotion” —MOJO magazine album review, 4 stars (UK)

“With Younge, he now poses—by way of example—the question of what a classical orchestra can learn from R’n’B, Soul, Jazz, and Hip-Hop.” —Musikexpress magazine, 5 star album review (GERMANY)

Buy

There is a quiet ritual that happens at Linear Labs when no one is watching. It involves a machine that looks less like a musical instrument and more like a piece of military surplus from a bygone war. It is an old RCA 73B, born in the 1940s, built when the world was still monochrome and analog was the only language. For the last couple of years, this machine has been here, but recently it has been used more and more frequently. And Adrian is its keeper.

For the better part of a decade, Linear Labs has been a studio obsessed with chain of custody. We could record. We could mix. We could master. But there was always a final step where the signal had to leave the building, leave the tape, leave our hands. The RCA 73B changed that. It was the last missing piece.

Now, the music can go from the musician’s fingers to the actual record without ever leaving these walls. From microphone to magnetic tape, from tape to the cutting head, from the cutting head to a vinyl blank. The circle is closed.

The Cost of One Good Cut

Let us be clear: this is not a scalable process. Adrian cuts each 45 one at a time. Not ten. Not a hundred. One. He monitors the depth, the heat, the distance between grooves. A single sneeze, a vibration from the street, a flicker in the power—any of these can ruin a cut. The waste bin is full of almost-perfect records that will never see a sleeve.

But that is precisely the point.

Each 45 that comes out of that RCA 73B is a unique object. It is not a file. It is not a stream. It is a physical artifact of a specific moment in time, cut by a specific human being who was thinking about the specific song. In an age of infinite copies, we have chosen to make things that are finite. Scarce. Even a little fragile.

To us, the symbolism of controlling the process from start to finish speaks to a deeper search. We are not just making music. We are valuing craftsmanship in the very act of making art.

The Boredom of the Bright Screen

We do not say this to be Luddites. We appreciate the digital revolution. Access is a gift. But let us be honest: there is something profoundly boring about the computer becoming everyone’s main tool.

It is not the technology itself. It is the sameness. When the machine we use to make our art is the same one we use to do our taxes, making art just isn’t quite as cool.

Have you ever stood in a darkroom? Red light glowing, the smell of stop bath in the air. You slip a blank sheet of paper into the developer, and for a moment, nothing happens. Then, slowly, like a ghost deciding to stay, the image appears. It rises out of the white. It is chemistry. It is physics. It is magic, but only because magic is just a word we use for things we haven’t reduced to algorithms yet.

Cutting a lathe feels the same. You are not looking at a waveform on a screen. You are listening to the sound coming from the grooves as they are being carved into the vinyl. You hear the future. You hear the past. You hear the needle finding its way through a landscape that did not exist a second ago.

Tactile Faith

This obsession is not only about an aesthetic result. It is also about the feeling while producing the art. The weight of a tape reel in your hands. The careful threading of magnetic tape past the heads. The drop of the needle—that tiny, decisive fall.

These actions are inspiring. They are exciting. And they are true.

The Imaginary Audience

Adrian said recently in an interview: “There’s this imaginary audience in my head, and everything I do is to please them. And I tell you, these are some smart and beautiful people.”

Isn’t that what artists are supposed to do? Not to chase the crowd, but to create what pleases them, and hope that it will somehow resonate with others. Chaplin understood this: “The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting... There must also be a fervent love of and belief in oneself.”

That is not ego. That is conviction.

The Future Is a Lathe

So we will keep doing what makes sense to us. We will believe that process matters. We will cherish the craft. And we will trust that there are others out there who understand and value it as much as we do.

Right now, only a handful of people can own the 45s cut by Adrian himself on the old RCA 73B. They are rare. They are expensive to make. They are not for everyone.

But who knows? If we keep believing in the magic of the physical, perhaps the near future holds a pressing plant of our own. Perhaps we will push this even further.

Until then, the machine is warm. The needle is sharp. And Adrian is listening to that imaginary audience of smart, beautiful people.

We hope you’re among them.

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SEMANA JAZZ IS DEAD

Jazz Is Dead Takes Over Belo Horizonte: A Week of Cinema, Sound, and Connection

Here’s something we’re excited about.

We’re launching a new kind of Jazz Is Dead event. One that goes beyond records, beyond concerts, and into the worlds of cinema, conversation, and community. Think of it as a prototype. A cultural week that we plan to bring to other cities and countries.

It’s called Semana Jazz Is Dead, and it kicks off April 16–22 at the Minas Tênis Clube in Belo Horizonte.

Why are we doing this? Because the Jazz Is Dead universe has always lived in more than just sound. It lives in the films that shaped us, the frames that hit as hard as a breakbeat, the stories told in shadow and light. This week is our first real attempt to bring all of that together—under one roof, over seven days, with free screenings.

So what actually happens in BH?

First, the music. On April 16, Adrian Younge takes the stage with two legendary Brasilian artists: Hyldon and Carlos Dafé. That alone is a moment—orchestral soul meeting the golden era of Brasilian MPB.

Then, from April 17–22, we host a free film series that speaks directly to the Jazz Is Dead aesthetic: Black Dynamite, As Dores do Mundo (the Hyldon biopic), Rockers, Our Vinyl Weights a Ton, Boyz n the Hood, and Killer of Sheep.

Two sessions are particularly special:

• Black Dynamite with a live commentary from Adrian Younge (editor and composer) and actor Loren Oden, moderated by Gabriel Martins.

• As Dores do Mundo featuring Hyldon himself, plus directors Emilio Domingos and Felipe Rodrigues.

These aren’t just screenings. They’re deep dives into the music, the struggle, the joy, and the resistance that define our label’s DNA.

Why this matters—even if you can’t be there

If you don’t live in Belo Horizonte, that’s fine. This note isn’t really an ad. It’s a heads-up.

Semana Jazz Is Dead is a first step. We’re building a new model for how Jazz Is Dead connects with its audience—through film, live performance, and real conversation. And we plan to take this to other markets.

So whether you’re in São Paulo, Los Angeles, London, or Tokyo: pay attention. What we’re testing in Brasil will come your way. The goal isn’t just to sell tickets. It’s to create spaces where our people—heads, musicians, filmmakers, dreamers—can gather and feel something real.

We’ll share moments from the week. But more importantly, know this: Jazz Is Dead has always been about legacy—honoring the past while building the future. Now we’re doing it on a bigger screen.

Stay tuned.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Tickets

Tickets

Eyevan For Adrian Younge

Born from a shared reverence for heritage and innovation, EYEVAN for Adrian Younge reimagines vintage eyewear through Younge’s personal style and EYEVAN’s Japanese precision craftsmanship, balancing bold presence, meticulous engineering, and expressive lenses in timeless pieces.

Shop

Visit us at jazzisdead.com and linearlabsmusic.com

Share Jazz Is Dead

Introducing Played By Humans

This week, in partnership with TBWA/Chiat/Day/LA, we are proud to launch an initiative that puts power back into the hands of artists and listeners: Played By Humans.

We are offering a tool—completely free—that allows musicians to certify their work. By uploading your music, you can secure a blockchain-protected certificate verifying that your output was created by human(s). This certification helps distinguish your work in a sea of algorithmic content, ensuring that fans who value human artistry can find you.

You can find the tool and more information about what qualifies as AI music at www.jazzisdead.com/playedbyhumans.

Think of it as the “Organic” label for music. It is a certification that the music you are listening to was made by human beings—written, performed, and shaped by people, not prompts. This is not an anti-AI movement; it is a pro-human movement. It’s about transparency. It’s about letting the listener decide if they want their money to support human creativity.

And if listening to AI or creating music with AI is your thing, right on, do your thing. Played By Humans is built on the simple notion that just like you deserve to know what you’re eating (Organic vs. GMO), you also deserve to know what you’re listening to.

Who Owns the Music When No One Played It?

There’s a quiet revolution happening in the world of sound, and it’s not happening in the recording studio. It’s happening in a courtroom, on a server farm, and in the fine print of your streaming service bill.

For decades, the question of authorship in music was simple: if you composed the music, wrote the melody or lyric, played the instrument, or sang the song, you were the creator. But we’ve entered an era where a machine can generate a convincing jazz solo, a classical concerto, or a pop hit from a simple text prompt. This raises a fundamental question that strikes at the heart of what we consider art: Is prompting enough to claim authorship of a song?

Legally, the answer (at least for now) is a firm no. The Supreme Court recently declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter, leaving intact the DC Circuit’s ruling that “human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.” A work generated entirely by artificial intelligence, with no human hand in the traditional elements of authorship, cannot be copyrighted. You cannot own the output of a machine in the same way you own a piece of your own soul committed to tape.

But legality is only half the story. While the courts debate philosophy, the streaming economy is facing a very real financial crisis that directly impacts the artists we cherish. And AI is acting as a multiplier to an already broken system.

Consider this: in early 2026, Deezer reported that up to 39% of new uploads to the platform were AI-generated—roughly 60,000 tracks per day. The same platform found that up to 85% of fully AI-generated music streams on its service may be fraudulent. That is an astonishing amount of AI slop—music made almost entirely by machines—gaming virtually every aspect of the system, and it’s having a significant and growing financial impact on actual living, breathing artists.

Questions Worth Asking

Which brings us to a few questions worth sitting with.

If a song is generated by a machine and streamed millions of times by bots, who is actually being compensated, and for what?

If AI can replicate the sound of a lifetime of human experience in seconds, what happens to the value of that lifetime?

And perhaps most importantly: in a world where technology can produce art at scale, how do we ensure that the systems built to support creativity don’t end up suffocating it?

We don’t fear the future. But we do believe that both legislation and systems need to adjust to technological advances to make them serve humanity, not just the corporations behind them. In an age where anyone can generate a jazz song with a keystroke, perhaps the most radical thing you can do is prove you actually played it.

If Played By Humans does anything, it’s our hope that it creates awareness, establishes transparency, and encourages more thought and more discussion around how AI and technology are magnificent tools that we need to take and maintain control of. So we don’t wake up one day in a world where humans are no longer in control of our destiny. Creative or otherwise.

Eyevan For Adrian Younge

Born from a shared reverence for heritage and innovation, EYEVAN for Adrian Younge reimagines vintage eyewear through Younge’s personal style and EYEVAN’s Japanese precision craftsmanship, balancing bold presence, meticulous engineering, and expressive lenses in timeless pieces.

Shop Now

JID 026 Antonio Carlos e Jocafi - Pre Order

Pre Order

Antonio Carlos & Jocafi, the legendary duo from Bahia whose music has embodied the soul of Brasil for over five decades, return with a bold new collaboration: Jazz Is Dead 026. Introduced to Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad by Beto Barreto of Baiana System, the meeting was instant magic. “The first time we met, it was like family,” they recall. That kinship led Younge and Muhammad to invite the duo to Los Angeles, where they carried a handful of ideas and created new songs on the spot—an intuitive, improvisatory process that defines the Jazz Is Dead ethos.

Now, with Jazz Is Dead 026, Antônio Carlos & Jocafi reaffirm their creative vitality while introducing their timeless Bahian spirit to a new generation. “Adrian’s love for Brasil is greater than that of many Brasilians,” they say, noting how deeply he listens, studies, and channels the rhythms, stories, and feelings of their culture. The result is an album that bridges Salvador’s Mercado Modelo with the global stage, weaving Bahia’s folkloric traditions into Jazz Is Dead’s analog soul.

Visit us at jazzisdead.com and linearlabsmusic.com

Subscribe now

Why joy endures where happiness cannot

By Leo Moraes and Dru Lojero

Happiness is an emotion. It is fleeting by nature, a biochemical response to something external. You feel happy when you get the promotion, when the meal is delicious, when the sun breaks through the clouds, when your friends surround you. Happiness depends on circumstances. This is not a flaw; it is simply what emotions do. Like weather, they arrive and they leave.

Joy is a state of being. It is deeper, more stable, less dependent on outcomes going your way. Joy is the soil beneath the weather, present every day, regardless of the forecast. It is the sense of meaning, purpose, and connection that anchors us even when the storm rolls in. Joy does not ask that life be easy. It asks that life be meaningful.

You can be in a state of joy and still feel profound sadness. A parent holding a sick child. A community mourning a loss while gathered together. An artist working in poverty, driven by something that will not let them go. The sorrow is real. The joy is also real. They coexist because joy is not the absence of pain: it is the presence of something underneath it.

Here is the trap we often fall into: we chase happiness as if it were the ultimate prize, mistaking it for the thing that will make us whole. We think: if I get that job, that relationship, that record, that ticket to that show, then I will be okay. But happiness, being an emotion, is not built to last. It comes and goes. And when it goes, we are left wondering what we did wrong.

And here is the beautiful thing: while happiness is largely an internal experience—a feeling that arises in response to what happens to us—joy is something we can give each other. It’s contagious.

No one can make you happy. Not really. Happiness is too contingent, too personal, too tied to the ever-shifting landscape of your own circumstance(s). But you can bring someone joy. Joy shines like a light in darkness.

Because joy is what endures. Joy is what we cultivate internally, through gratitude, through meaning, through alignment with what we value. Joy is not handed to us by circumstances. It is built, slowly, in the choices we make about how to live.

This is why, in the most unlikely places on earth—places marked by poverty, by occupation, by the slow erosion of hope—you find bursts of joy, with music always at the front.

From Cuba to Lebanon. From Skid Row to Trenchtown. From Rocinha to the Bronx. From New Orleans to Lagos.

It is not a coincidence that the most universal music styles—jazz, Afrobeat, blues, reggae, hip-hop, samba, to name a few—were not born in palaces. They were born in the margins. In the places where joy is most desperately needed. In communities that learned, out of necessity, to cultivate something that circumstances could not take away.

Because when the world is heavy, you do not wait for happiness to arrive. You gather. You play. You dance. You dream. Ultimately, you find hope. You remind each other that sorrow is not the final word—that beneath the weather, the ground still holds. It’s through this process that joy is found, mined through your chest plate. It’s this act of resistance that gives us the strength to not only survive but break through. Happiness is found and made in your brain while joy exists in your heart.

So let this be our reminder. Let’s remember why we’re here. Not just as fans of music, but as participants in something older and deeper than any genre. We are here to give what we can to our neighbors—to the person next to us in the crowd, to the musician on stage giving everything they have, to the community that holds us.

We all have more power to affect the world than we think. We are not powerless. The very process of resistance builds into the joy that sustains us.

And in times of sorrow—because there will be sorrow—bringing joy might be the most powerful gift we can offer. Not as a distraction from the hard work of finding meaning, but as the very substance of it.

So go to the show, sing your favorite songs, wear your favorite artists shirt, put up the poster that brings life colors to your room, dance in shower. Let the joy flow through your from the well of your spirit. And when it does, pass it on.

If you’ve been following along, you know that Jazz Is Dead and Linear Labs have always moved to the same rhythm—two expressions of the same creative pulse. Starting today, we finally share a home. Our newsletters have unified, and we’ve moved to Substack.

The content you’ve always received remains free. But for those who want to step deeper into the conversation, the paid version opens the comments—a space to talk back, to question, to connect with other listeners who hear what you hear. Those who currently hold a membership get instant access automatically. No steps, no hassle. Just the conversation, waiting.

First up: a piece that started with a box of negatives in an auction, a photographer who never printed her own work, and a question that’s been sitting with us ever since. About control. About what gets lost when we hand off pieces of the vision. About why Adrian keeps all of his photo shoots in house, mixes his own tracks, and scripts his own videos—not because he has to, but because the world only sounds like itself when one voice stays in the room the whole time.

The Whole Score

In the excellent documentary “Finding Vivian Maier,” there’s a moment that was particularly educational for me. John Maloof, the man who accidentally discovered her work by purchasing a box of negatives at an auction, explains his early struggles getting her into galleries. He had thousands of stunning images, brilliant compositions, street photography that rivaled the greats. But he kept hitting the same wall: Maier had left only negatives. No prints. Nothing developed or approved by her own hand.

The galleries weren’t interested.

I didn’t fully grasp why until recently, when I got back into film photography under Adrian Younge’s guidance. Seeing and remembering the process firsthand reminded me something about art making. Every stage matters. Film choice changes the grain, the contrast, the mood. Camera settings determine what light does and doesn’t reach the negative. The shot itself is just the beginning. Then comes the darkroom. The developer, the paper, the exposure time under the enlarger, the dodging and burning. Each decision shapes the final image in ways you can’t reverse.

Self Portrait by Vivian Maier

If you only have the negative, it’s like you have the written score. What you don’t have is the performance.

That distinction hit me hard. How many steps separate an artist’s vision from what the audience actually experiences? And how many of those steps do we leave to chance—or worse, to someone else?

When I started out as a musician I believed that only the music mattered. The notes, the chords, the lyrics. Everything else felt like decoration. Album covers? Someone else’s job. Lighting on stage? Let the venue handle it. Music videos? A necessary evil. I told myself the work should stand on its own, that the rest was noise.

I was wrong.

The truth is, every layer affects how the music lands. The right album cover changes what someone hears before they drop the needle. The way light hits you on stage shifts the emotional weight of a song. A music video isn’t a distraction, it’s another doorway into the world you’re building. When you hand those things off without engagement, you’re handing off pieces of the vision.

This is where Adrian has reshaped how I work. His attention to the full arc of creation is unlike anything I’ve seen. A Linear Labs album doesn’t just have his fingerprints on the music. He writes, performs, arranges, records, mixes. He shoots the photographs for the artwork, on film, developed and printed by his own hands. He guides the design of the layouts, scripts the videos, shoots and edits them. Everything.

He creates a world and invites you in.

Album Cover - Photographed by Adrian Younge

There are others who work this way, though they’re rare. Prince in his prime, building entire albums alone in his home studio, playing every instrument, controlling every detail. Stanley Kubrick, whose films feel like they emerged fully formed from a single mind because he refused to cede control of anything—cinematography, production design, sound.

What these artists understand is that control isn’t always about ego. It’s about coherence. When one person’s vision guides every decision, the result has a density, a weight, that can be hard to achieve otherwise.

Now, let me be clear: collaboration is wonderful. Some of the greatest art in history came from dialogue, push and pull, the friction of different minds meeting. A great collaborator doesn’t just execute. They challenge, they surprise, they bring something you couldn’t have imagined alone. That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the difference between collaboration and delegation. Collaboration is engagement. It’s a conversation where everyone is fully present. Delegation is handing something off and walking away. It’s treating parts of the process as boxes to check rather than opportunities to express. And when you delegate without care, you create gaps. Spaces where someone else’s vision—well-intentioned, maybe even talented—fills the void where yours should be.

Working with Adrian has made me a better artist by forcing me to be mindful. Not paranoid, not controlling for the sake of control, but aware that every choice I make or don’t make shapes what the audience ultimately receives. When I collaborate, I stay in the room. When I delegate without thought, I leave.

These days, I think about Maier’s negatives differently. Those galleries weren’t being precious or difficult. They understood that exhibiting prints not done or overseen by her adds a new layer to the art. Someone else’s vision. And that can be ok. But it’s important to keep in mind that the art isn’t just what you capture. It’s what you choose to reveal, and how carefully you guide it into the light.

Upcoming Events

Tickets

Jazz Is Dead invites you to an exclusive evening in LA for a defiant celebration of imperfect, authentic human musicianship.

📅 Tuesday, March 24

📍 Lodge Room

⏰ 7 PM

Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad will play an intimate set, reminding us all of the communal power of music played by humans ahead of our launch — the “Played By Humans” certification label, a new standard for the music industry. A declaration and validation of the human experience, process, and organic connections behind the music, Played By Humans is a seal of human authenticity; a rallying point for every musician and fan who believes music without humanity is just sound.

This is a FREE invite-only event. Capacity is limited.

RSVP now to secure your place.

Live concert filming by THE YOUTH.

Tickets

Eyevan For Adrian Younge

Born from a shared reverence for heritage and innovation, EYEVAN for Adrian Younge reimagines vintage eyewear through Younge’s personal style and EYEVAN’s Japanese precision craftsmanship, balancing bold presence, meticulous engineering, and expressive lenses in timeless pieces.

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Younge LP - Pre Order

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Younge is Adrian Younge’s magnum opus: a record that redefines what orchestral composition can mean for a new generation of jazz and hip hop. It is a bold, instrumental statement that positions Younge not only as a composer, but as an architect of a new musical language, one that looks backward and forward at the same time.

The album is rooted in the lineage of composers who unknowingly laid the foundation for hip hop decades before it existed. Figures like Lalo Schifrin, David Axelrod, Ennio Morricone, Galt MacDermot, Bo Hansson, and later visionaries such as Portishead’s Geoff Barrow created cinematic, emotionally charged music that was often overlooked in its time. Their records would later be rediscovered by crate diggers and transformed by producers searching for sounds that felt timeless, dangerous, and unexplored.

Hip hop expanded by inheriting this forgotten language. Through sampling, producers didn’t just borrow melodies; they absorbed orchestration, mood, tension, and storytelling from composers who were operating far outside the mainstream. In many ways, hip hop became the vehicle that preserved and amplified these ideas, introducing new generations to music that had always been ahead of its time.

Younge is composed with that full historical awareness. It is orchestral music written from the perspective of today’s producers, music that anticipates reinterpretation, deconstruction, and reuse. Think of it as a 1970s soundtrack album imagined through modern ears: arrangements built around space, restraint, and texture; movements that feel cinematic yet modular; compositions that invite dialogue rather than demand finality.

Visit us at jazzisdead.com and linearlabsmusic.com