Burning Ambulance

Big Ears 2027 announcement! The full lineup for Big Ears, the Knoxville, TN-based festival of adventurous music, was announced this week, and among a million other cool-sounding shows, Ava Mendoza will be performing with drummer Hamid Drake. Which means you should prepare yourself by buying Ava’s latest CD Alive Alone, Alive Together, which features Hamid on four of its eight tracks.

You’re reading the title wrong if you think it’s just a pun on “introducing.” DJ Shadow’s full-length debut, Endtroducing….., which came out 30 years ago this week (September 16, 1996), was actually intended to be the end of a phase, which is why everyone who’s waited and hoped for him to return to the kind of music he made on that astonishing album — ultra-dense, but moody and atmospheric, sample collages that sounded like much more than instrumental hip-hop beats — was always destined to be...

My first book, New York Is Now!: The New Wave of Free Jazz, was published by a small Brooklyn-based record label and publisher, The Telegraph Company. I wanted to accomplish two things with it: I wanted to document the scene I saw happening in New York, based around free/avant-garde jazz musicians like David S. Ware, Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Roy Campbell, Daniel Carter, and Joe Morris, and I wanted to publish a book before I turned 30.

John Coltrane was born 100 years ago this month, on September 23, 1926. There’s going to be a lot of writing about him and his work for the rest of the year (and beyond, of course; Coltrane is a jazz immortal, whose life and work will be discussed somewhere as long as humans have ears). I wrote about late Coltrane for the Brooklyn Rail, a piece which has generated some heat, particularly on Facebook, where people go to share their most conservative takes on art.

There are 20 new titles up on the Leo Records Bandcamp page this week. They include albums by John Wolf Brennan, François Carrier, Frank Gratkowski, Carolyn Hume, and Szilárd Mezei, among others. All of them are worth your time and money, but I recommend two in particular: Tenderness Of Stones is a set of duos between Joachim Gies on saxophones and electronics, and adventurous vocalist Lauren Newton.

It feels like forever since I’ve done one of these posts, but it’s only been a month. This time, we’ve got some crunchy technical death metal; a veteran organ trio; a collection of saxophone quartets; an electronic album from a jazz drummer; and an exciting out-jazz collaboration. Let’s dive in! Assimilated Transdimensionalization is a solo project of Jøzsef Tøth, aka Tisza Kara, of Budapest, Hungary.

My latest Ugly Beauty jazz column is up now on Stereogum. I got to talk to Henry Threadgill(!) about his two new albums Fifteen (came out last week) and Cut You Where You Was (comes out today), and reviewed new records by (among others) Stefon Harris, Sullivan Fortner, Isaiah Collier, Linda May Han Oh and Melissa Aldana, and saxophonist Mārā Sējāne, who I stumbled across on Bandcamp. The column is paywalled, so you’ll have to subscribe to read it, but you should do that.

The relationship between jazz and rock has often been fraught and contentious. Some jazz artists look down on rock music, viewing it as musically simplistic and unworthy of their attention. Others claim that they could totally do that if they wanted to (“I could put together the greatest rock ’n’ roll band you ever heard” — Miles Davis, 1969).

In addition to publishing this newsletter and putting out records, I write for Stereogum, The Wire, and DownBeat basically every month, and for other places (the Shfl, Everything Jazz, Jazz’n’More, We Jazz) less frequently. I also vote in a couple of critics’ polls every year, one of them being the DownBeat poll. As a reward for participating in the DownBeat critics’ poll, I get a free subscription to the magazine. I also usually get a T-shirt.

Pussy Galore (L-R: Cristina Martinez, Bob Bert, Jon Spencer, Neil Hagerty, Julie Cafritz) (Warning: This essay contains language which some may find offensive.) Pussy Galore were one of the best bands of the ’80s.