Kendrick Scott’s long-running five-piece ensemble, Oracle, is unrelentingly contemporary in its sound, in part thanks to the inclusion of an electric guitar. But arranging music for a smaller contingent of players requires a different tack. On Corridors, Scott—a drummer whose credits include work with vocalist Kurt Elling and trumpeter Terence Blanchard—scales down to a trio […]
Author Archives: Dave Cantor
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The Greyboy Allstars transform lockdown jam sessions into a new album and tour
The Greyboy Allstars are a bunch of rare-groove re-creationists from San Diego focused on mining soul, funk, and anything else with a deep pocket. Since forming in 1993, the group have consistently toured and put out six records and a couple soundtracks, but they spent the early months of the pandemic cloistered like the rest […]
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Sir Richard Bishop continues to chart his own guitar language in the studio and onstage
Sir Richard Bishop has spent about as much time recording under his own name as he did with the Sun City Girls, a deftly bohemian, genre-bending avant-rock act that dissolved after the 2007 cancer death of founding drummer Charlie Gocher. For almost 30 years, the band (which also included Bishop’s brother Alan) teased at the […]
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Jazz saxophonist Melissa Aldana looks inward on 12 Stars
For her 2019 record Visions, jazz saxophonist Melissa Aldana looked outside herself, crafting songs around meditations on the work of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. But on her new Blue Note debut, 12 Stars, the 33-year-old bandleader taps into the realities of the pandemic era to explore inward, plumbing familial links and self-care as well as […]
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Sarah Shook & the Disarmers find dusty splendor on Nightroamer
Sarah Shook & the Disarmers are known for their roots-driven sound, but on their new third full-length, Nightroamer, Shook’s country aesthetics battle for space alongside some pretty healthy indie inclinations. The production is a bit denser on this recording compared to its predecessor, 2018’s Years—keyboards occasionally factor into the arrangements—and Shook herself gives off less […]
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Earthless return to form on the psychedelic Night Parade of One Hundred Demons
Earthless started releasing anachronistic 40-minute jams steeped in 70s hard-rock riffing at a time in the early 2000s when spindly postpunk seemed to dominate the underground rock landscape. A new wave of psychedelic metal was also beginning to take shape, though, and the Southern California trio’s studio debut, 2005’s Sonic Prayer, opens with a track […]
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On the new W, Boris find serene sounds amid their continuous sonic explorations
As Boris continue to steer in and out of avant-rock territory, the 30-year-old Japanese band increasingly splinter genre ideas and expectations fans might foist upon them. The trio have been prolific during the pandemic, releasing nearly a dozen albums whose variety almost necessitates a disregard for boundaries: they include studio full-lengths, EPs, and live and […]
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Wadada Leo Smith joins forces with guitarists Henry Kaiser and Alex Varty on the aquatic Pacifica Koral Reef
Trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith, who turned 80 earlier this year, is seemingly at the height of his creative life—despite having already catalogued decades of accomplishments across dozens of releases, both in the company of AACM masters and as a bandleader. In May he issued a pair of three-disc sets, one focused on solo […]
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Guitarist Jeff Parker contains multitudes on Forfolks
With credits as diverse as Chicago postrock collective Tortoise and free-jazz band Ernest Dawkins’s New Horizons Ensemble, guitarist and composer Jeff Parker owns a unique vocabulary. He’s been able to muster expressions of self within groups and as a bandleader across 30 years of work, and now he offers a new solo dispatch, Forfolks. “Suffolk” […]
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Makaya McCraven remixes jazz history
It’s been more than a decade since Blue Note Records released an album by a Chicago artist. The last time anyone based here appeared on the roster of this definitive jazz label, it was vocalists Patricia Barber and Kurt Elling, whose most recent Blue Note records as bandleaders arrived in the 2000s. But on November […]
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UK band Squid build up worlds only to destroy them
The five members of London band Squid are architectural engineers who plot points of distinction for listeners to marvel at—or, as vocalist and drummer Ollie Judge sings on “Narrator,” off their 2021 debut, Bright Green Field (Warp), they “mold beauty out of clay.” The 2020 single “Broadcaster” consists mostly of a description of outdoor environs […]
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Orquesta Akokán combine a brassy big-band feel with the dynamics of Cuban music
Orquesta Akokán, a big band with members split between New York and Cuba, are a musical catchall for culture, history, and genre. These players have worked with Chucho Valdés, Irakere, Los Van Van, and other historically hefty groups, and in Akokán they traffic in vivid music that draws on a brassy combination of mambo, jazz, […]
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Wendy Eisenberg is as inventive on banjo as guitar
Multi-instrumentalist Wendy Eisenberg plays in lots of different settings, but no matter what they’re doing, their music always carries a tinge of no-wave. It’s perhaps easier to hear in their rock-centered projects, Birthing Hips and Editrix, but a dash of off-kilter flair seeps into even the low-key ensemble affair of Eisenberg’s 2019 record Auto. With […]
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Trevor Dunn and Sannety mix and match electronics, experimentation, and rhythm as SpermChurch
Bassist Trevor Dunn has forged relationships with polyglot saxophonist and composer John Zorn, avant-garde reedist Ben Goldberg, and scads of other jazz-world luminaries. He plays on Diatom Ribbons, a career-defining 2019 record by jazz keyboardist Kris Davis, but his contributions have largely gone unheralded, subsumed in the overall greatness of the album. Despite these accomplishments, […]
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Buck Gooter honor late band cofounder Terry Turtle with short, sharp blasts
The style and sound of experimental music don’t hew to geographic regions. And Buck Gooter, a noisy duo from Harrisonburg, Virginia, perhaps best exemplify the concept. Convened in the early aughts, after Terry Turtle and Billy Brett met working at local restaurant the Little Grill Collective (known for hosting an early-career Old Crow Medicine Show […]