A Catchy New Album and an Uptown Show by Cutting-Edge Jazz Harpist Brandee Younger

Brandee Younger has already made a lot of waves as a rarity in the jazz world, a concert harpist. Even with amplification, it’s hard to hear that instrument’s pointillistic (most would probably say celestial) tones over drums, piano or blazing brass. That undoubtedly explains why, beyond Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane, jazz harpists have been such an anomaly. And might also explain why Younger’s catchy, accessible new album, Soul Awakening – streaming at Bandcamp – mirrors Coltrane’s atmospheric, tectonically shifting approach, if more kinetically. Younger’s playing the album release show with an excellent quintet featuring Chelsea Baratz on sax at the Miller Theatre on Nov 16 at 8 PM; you can get in for $20.

Younger opens the album with Soulris, a moody modal number, rippling and shifting from insistent chords to a series of waves as Ravi Coltrane’s tenor sax delivers edgy chromatic variations over the surprisingly bustling rhythm section of bassist Dezron Douglas and drummer Chris Beck. The Alice Coltrane influence is obvious but welcome. Because Younger is up in the mix, all this works out fine…in the studio at least.

Track two, Linda Lee also has a biting, vampy quality, the bandleader playing meticulous, piano-like cascades as Baratz’s sax weaves over a shapeshifting funk shuffle. Ravi Coltrane again carries the melody as the balmy jazz waltz Love’s Prayer gets underway, Younger providing lushness and ripples, up to a spacious, judicious solo. Beck (EJ Strickland plays on most of the other tracks) has his hands full staying chill even as the pace picks up joyously, moving further toward the center as Younger recedes.

Respected Destroyer, a big, vampy anthem, has bracing Asian tinges, Younger circling behind bright, direct horns: edgy blues riffs on the harp get handed off to a similarly bracing, blues-infused minor-key Sean Jones trumpet solo. Games, a darkly slinky Ashby bossa nova, could be the album’s best track: it would take both a piano and a guitar to do everything Younger’s doing here, right down to that wry Doors quote. And it’s awfully cool to hear the strings of a harp bent for blue notes.

Younger’s remake of Marvin Gaye’s Save the Children is energetic and plaintive, with vocals by Niia. The album’s title track slowly coalesces in a Coltrane vein, horns chattering and fluttering as the bass holds the center, Younger winds up the album with its most majestic, epic number, Alice Coltrane’s Blue Nile, done as a staggered blues. Antoine Roney’s Jaggedly delicious, microtonal sax and Younger’s adventurous riffs, from Asian-tinged washes to droll glissandos and balletesque, leaping chords make this a texturally unusual showstopper.

 

Epic Big Band Surrealism and a Jazz Standard Gig From the Michael Leonhart Orchestra

The Michael Leonhart Orchestra‘s previous album traced the epic journey of a swarm of butterflies all the way from Mexico to Egypt. Breathtaking as that trip over the top of the globe was, Leonhart’s new album with the ensemble, Suite Extracts Vol, 1 – streaming at Spotify – goes in a completely different direction, although in places it’s even more swirlingly atmospheric. If the idea of big band versions of songs by Spinal Tap, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Wu-Tang Clan and Howlin Wolf are your idea of a good time, you should hear this record. Leonhart and the group are at the Jazz Standard on Nov 12, with sets at 7:30 and 9:30 PM; cover is $30.

The album opens with an exuberantly brassy Afrobeat arrangement of the Nusrat classic Alu Jon Jonki Jon, punctuated by cheery sax solos. Things get more surrealistically entertaining from there. The first of a grand total of six tunes from the Spinal Tap soundtrack, the wryly titled La Fuga Di Derek turns out to be a moody piece for Sara Schoenbeck’s bassoon and Pauline Kim’s pizzicato violin. Schoenbeck’s desolate solo intro to Big Bottom offers absolutely no idea of where the song is going: as you would expect, Leonhart has fun with the low reeds, and also adds an accordion solo from Nathan Koci. From there, they segue into a one-chord jam that’s ostensibly Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman. Most of this actually makes more sense in context than it would seeem to, Leonhart’s chart following a similar trajectory from spare and enigmatic to an extended, achingly shreddy sax break over mutedly snappy bass chords.

Likewise, The Dance of the Maidens at Stonehenge has repetitive low brass bursts bookended by lots of African percussion: it’s as sardonic as the original. As is the medley of Jazz Odyssey and Lick My Love Pump, a brooding accordion solo bridging the ominous opening soundscape and the majestic, sweeping arrangement of the film score’s most sarcastically poignant tune. The final Spinal Tap number, The Ballad of St. Hubbins is the album’s vastest vista, Robbie Mangano’s spaghetti western Morricone guitar over postapocalyptic Pink Floyd atmospherics.

The Wu and their members are first represented by the Ghostface classic Liquid Swords, reinvented with forlorn Ray Mason trombone over grey-sky ambience, with darkly Balkan-tinged accordion: RZA would no doubt approve. Da Mystery of Chessboxing vamps along, alternately gusty and blithe, hypnotic and funky, while Liquid Chamber provides a launching pad for a slashing, Romany-flavored violin solo from Kim.

The diptych of ODB’s Shimmy Shimmy Ya and Raekwon’s Glaciers of Ice is the album’s most distinctively noir track, all ominous rises and falls. The concluding tune is a beefy take of Fela’s Quiet Man Is Dead Man and Opposite People, which could be Antibalas at their most symphonic. And Leonhart recasts the Howlin Wolf hit Built for Comfort as a slow, simmering, roadhouse fuzztone groove evocative of Quincy Jones’ 1960s film work.

Leonhart conducts and plays trumpet, mellophonium and bass harmonica; the rest of the group also includes Kevin Raczka and Eric Harland sharing the drum chair, Elizabeth Pupo-Walker and Daniel Freedman on percussion; Joe Martin and Jay Leonhart (Michael’s dad) on bass; Nels Cline on guitar; Philip Dizack, Dave Guy, Jordan McLean, Carter Yasutake and Andy Bush on trumpets; John Ellis, Ian Hendrickson-Smith, Chris Potter, Donny McCaslin and Jason Marshall on saxes; Sam Sadigursky and Daniel Srebnick on flutes and Erik Friedlander on cello.

A Wild, Careening, Eclectic New Album and a Ridgewood Release Show From Funkrust Brass Band

Funkrust Brass Band‘s name raises some questions. There’s no qestion that they’re fun. Are they krusty?

They’re definitely funky. Are they also rusty? Hell no to that.

Bottom line: this massive, potentially eighteen-piece monstrosity are one of New York’s most explosive live bands. They march in various formations, wear illuminated costumes, climb on anything that looks like it could support them…and write catchy songs that draw from styles as diverse as Serbian dances, New Orleans second-line marches and punk funk. Their latest ep, Bones & Burning is streaming at Bandcamp. They’re playing the album release show on Nov 8 at around 10 PM at Footlight Bar in Ridgewood on a killer triplebill. The Plaster Cramp open the night at 8 with their darkly lyrical mashup of post-Velvets jangle and Talking Heads, followed at 9 by Williamsburg psychedelic funk vets the MK Groove Orchestra. Cover is $10.

A moody chromatic trumpet solo kicks off the album’s title track, which sounds like Slavic Soul Party playing clave funk, with incisive, spare solos from trumpet and alto saxes. “The future’s gone, we don’t believe in it,” frontwoman Ellia Bisker (also of latin noir art-rockers Kotorino and existentialist soul band Sweet Soubrette) intones cynically through her bullhorn.

Open House Fire is closer to a New Orleans street theme, with a heftier arrangement that whole crew seems to be in on, pretty much from the beginning. Terminus is the album’s craziest, punkest number but also the most hypnotic one. The group go back to minor keys and chromatics for Uncanny Carnival, with a quote from the busker-rock playbook that’s so obvious but also such a good joke that it’s surprising that other brass bands haven’t used it.

With such a huge ensemble, it’s impossible to tell who’s playing what most of the time, but the whole army of instrumentalists deserves credit for this dark beast. In alphabetical order: Phil Andrews (trumpet), Elizabeth Arce (trombone), Eva Arce (trumpet), Josh Bisker (percussion), Matthew Cain (sousaphone), Sherri Cohen (trombone), Anya Combs (alto saxophone), Devin Glenn (trumpet), Ryan Gochee (trombone), Allison Heim (bass drum), Nick Herman (percussion), Perrine Iannacchione (alto saxophone), Alex Jung (snare), John Lynd (sousaphone), Roo O’Donnell (snare), Andrew Schwartz (trumpet), Laurel Stinson (tenbor saxophone).

Yet Another Brilliant, Shadowy Album and a Gowanus Release Show From Noir Instrumental Icons Big Lazy

Big Lazy are the world’s most menacingly cinematic instrumental trio. They’re also the world’s darkest jamband, one of Brooklyn’s most popular dance bands…and they keep putting out brilliant albums. The cover of their long-awaited new one, Dear Trouble, has a 1972 Ford Country Squire station wagon off to the side of a desolate road somewhere in the midwest, facing a tower along the powerline as the clouds linger and the sun sets. That says a lot. They’re playing the album release show this Nov 8-9 at 8 PM at the old American Can Company building at 232 3rd St. in Gowanus. Night one is sold out, but night two isn’t yet; you can get in for $20. They’ll be joined by three of the special guests on the record: Sexmob‘s Steven Bernstein on trumpet, Slavic Soul Party’s Peter Hess on saxes and Miramar’s Farfisa sorceress Marlysse Rose Simmons. Take the F or the R to 4th Ave/9th St.

Interestingly, this turns out to be the band’s quietest, most desolate album. It begins with The Onliest, a loping, skeletal theme slinking along on Andrew Hall’s hypnotically bluesy bassline. They hit an interlude bristling with bandleader/guitarist Steve Ulrich’s signature, macabre chromatics, then eventually a false ending. It’s a good introduction to where the band are at now: there are echoes of horror surf, Angelo Badalementi David Lynch soundtracks, Thelonious Monk and Booker T. & the MGs in the rhythm, although Big Lazy’s sound is inimitably their own.

The album’s title track has Ulrich’s melancholy, resonant lead over a sardonically strutting blend of Nino Rota tinged with early 60s pop: if Tredici Bacci wanted to get really dark, they might sound like this. As is the case with so much of Ulrich’s catalog, the song takes on many different shapes, textures and guitar timbres and winds up far from where it started.

Ramona, with dubby accents from Simmons organ, is one of the spare, overcast bolero-ish tunes that Ulrich writes so well. Cardboard Man features Marc Ribot, a rare guitarist who can go as deep into noir as well as Ulrich, adding eerily flamenco-tinged touches. The exchanges between the two, switching in a split-second between styles, are expertly bittersweet.

Sizzle & Pops – referring to the imaginary roadhouse that Ulrich and his wife would be running in an alternate universe – is a rare moment of straight-up levity for this band, part Booker T, part pseudo Bill Black Combo 50s cheese. Bernstein adds distantly muted New Orleans flavor, both jaundiced and jubilant, on the group’s cover of the Beatles’ Girl: who knew what an ineffably sad song this was!

Drummer Yuval Lion takes the loose-limbed slink of the opening number and raises it several notches with his flurries in Dream Factory as Hall runs another trancey blues bassline, Ulrich’s baritone guitar pulling the song deeper into the shadows. Consider how the title of Cheap Crude could mean many things, and its sardonic rockabilly makes even more sense.

Exit Tucson, another tense, morose quasi-bolero, has all kinds of neat, rippling touches pinging through the sonic picture around Ulrich’s sad broken chords, disconsolately reverberating riffs and long, forlornly shuffling solo. The arguably even more gloomy Fly Paper has a deliciously disorienting blend of tone-bending lapsteel and furtive guitar multitracks: with its trick ending, it’s the most Twin Peaks of any of the songs here.

Ribot returns for Mr. Wrong, a disquietingly syncopted stroll: it’s amazingly how chameleonic yet grimly on task both he and Ulrich are here. The album’s final cut is Sing Sing, Peter Hess’ baritone sax adding extra smoke beneath Ulrich’s lingering, macabre tritones. The album hasn’t officially hit yet but is due up at Big Lazy’s music page.

Ulrich and Big Lazy are no strangers to the best albums of the year page here. He took first place back in 2012 for the Ulrich Ziegler record, a quasi-Big Lazy album with guitarist/bassist Itamar Ziegler, which turned out to be a one-off project before he reformed the group.. And Big Lazy’s big comeback album, Don’t Cross Myrtle, was #1 with a bullet for 2014. As far as 2019 is concerned, no spoilers, check back here at the end of December…

The “New Nusrat Record” – Believe the Hype

Today’s Halloween month piece concerns someone who has gone to the great qawwali party in the sky. If you haven’t heard the “new Nusrat record,” as everyone seems to be calling it, you should, if hypnotic sounds or dance music are your thing. Credited to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Party, this live recording– never before released – from the 1985 WOMAD Festival, was the iconic Pakistani qawwali singer’s first-ever performance in front of a western audience. It’s streaming at Spotify.

The show begins with swirling harmonium over a spare tabla beat. Some of the male members of the party onstage trade ecstatic, imploring, melismatic verses as the harmonium resonates gently behind them; finally, the crowd clap along as the rhythm kicks in and the first number, Allah Ho Allah Ho gets underway. It’s twenty full minutes of hypnotic revelry, pretty much everyone raising his or her voice. Khan’s is both honeyed and gritty, maybe feeling the effects of being on the road.

The catchy, singalong second number, Haq Ali Ali is even longer and slower, in a broodingly chromatic, Middle Eastern-tinged mode; the bristling vocal cadenzas tend to be more incisive and brief. The group take it doublespeed at about the eight-minute mark and don’t look back.

Everybody onstage joins in the rapidfire exchanges of call-and-response in the concert’s most hypnotic number, Shahbazz Qalandar, “A very famous tune,” as Khan succinctly explains. They close with the  sprawling Biba Silda Dil Mor De, returning to an uneasy Middle Eastern-flavored mode. Obviously, miking everybody onstage– vocals, percussion and harmonium – was a potential minefield for the sound engineer, but the recording levels are seamless.

It would be a stretch to call any of this Halloween music – but, this blog did promise you dead people earlier this month.

A Smoky, Careening Free Download From Heavy Psychedelic Band Salem’s Bend

Today’s Halloween month installment is Cold Hand Live, a free ep download by LA heavy psychedelic power trio Salem’s Bend. There are just two tracks here. The first is the nine-minute Cold Hand, a slowly swaying doom theme in 6/8 time, guitarist Bobby Parker’s muffled vocals over Kevin Schofield’s bass and Zach Huling’s drums. It doesn’t take long before Parker picks up with a jagged, Hendrix-inspired attack. Then Schofield hits his distortion pedal; Parker takes the song from spare and hypnotic, through a brief salute to classic Sabbath to a screaming, bleeding solo out.

The second track is Winter Sunn, with its suspenseful pulse, sharply executed 70s stoner riffs and comet-trail guitar solos. Grab this while you can.

The Latest Evil, Psychedelic Chapter in the Skull Practitioners’ Brilliantly Noisy Career

Power trio the Skull Practitioners have been one of New York’s most assaultively excellent bands for several years, and have played a lot of seemingly impromptu show in between bandleader and lead guitarist Jason Victor’s gigs with Steve Wynn and the Dream Syndicate. It’s not an overstatement to say that at the top of their unhinged game, the Skull Practitioners are just as dark and intense. Their latest ep, Death Buy is streaming at Spotify.

They open the album with the instrumental title track, a slowly swaying, ominous groove with layers of reverb and evil sheets of sustain that Victor finally turns into chords – for awhile, anyway, until the trails of sparks and fumes return. Kenneth Levine’s gritty bass emerges from the toxic puddles, drummer Alex Baker flurrying like Dennis Thompson would do to pull the MC5 out of the murk.

Grey No More is one of the band’s most straight-ahead punk songs: you can hear echoes of the Cramps, the Damned and the Stooges over late 70s/early 80s SoCal drive. The epic instrumental jam Miami is a real departure for the band, the rhythm section more or less looping a quasi-funk fuzztone bass groove, Victor adding spacious, spacy sheets overhead, finally shrieking his way to the top of the fretboard. It gets a lot tripper from there.

The album’s last track is The Beacon, a growling gutter blues tune that sounds a lot like the early Gun Club with a better singer. Look for this on the Best Albums of 2019 page here at the ehd of the year

Magically Haunting Creative Jazz on the Lower East Side

Over the past couple of months, there’s been an intriguing series of concerts, simply called Art in Gardens., featuring some of New York’s best creative jazz artists rotating through three community gardens on the Lower East Side. Saturday afternoon’s concluding concert at the Children’s Magical Garden, a leafy little Stanton Street oasis, was rapturously fun. Although guitarist Ava Mendoza seemed to be the ringleader, this was definitely a democratic performance, bassist Shayna Dulberger, tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and Daniel Carter, who began the set on trumpet but then switched to tenor as well, exchanged ideas and musical banter and frequently sizzling riffage with a remarkably singleminded commitment to keeping a garden full of jazz fans entertained.

Free jazz gets a bad rap for being self-indulgent because it so often is: this was anything but. How did this crew keep it so focused? By sticking close to a central note, maintaining a lot of resonant, sustained lines rather than disembodied, herky-jerky notes, and keeping solos terse and thoughtful.

When she wasn’t punching out catchy, looping basslines, including one deviously extended interlude that finally veered away from 7/8 time, Dulberger used her bow for pitchblende washes that drew the music into deep, dark terrain. And the one time she hit a bubbly phrase and the rest of the crew resisted, she backed away, letting the music find its own natural flow.

Carter alternated between airy, sustained notes, methodical rises and falls and one particularly sage, saturnine, deep blues interlude where the band pulled back to let that majesty stand out. Lewis played what might have been the afternoon’s most gorgeous solo – such that there there were any solos at all – with a biting, Middle Eastern-tinged poignancy. Alternating between trebly distortion and lingering, sunbaked, bluesy minimalism, Mendoza managed to make her menacing chromatics and macabre tritones work seamlessly within this unsettled but less overtly dark context.

Finally, she cut loose with a nonchalantly savage series of tremolo-picked upper-register chords, then looped them with a pedal and added even more ominous low harmonies. That was the signal to the rest of the band to cut loose, but even there, the steady lattice of notes between the saxes along with Dulberger’s snaky, circular phrasing didn’t go completely nuts: this storm was headed in a very specific direction, straight to the endorphin center of the brain.

The Art in Gardens series may be over, but the organizers are still booking shows all over town, including an excellent “un-Columbus Day” three-day festival opening on Oct 11 at El Taller Latinoamericano at 215 E 99th St.

Delirious, Transcendent, Rare Syrian Music with Wajde Ayub at Roulette

Isn’t it bizarre how some chromatics and modes which have come to be associated with the macabre in western music actually connote transcendence and joy at points further east? In his concert Saturday night at Roulette, Syrian singer Wajde Ayub and his lavish orchestra ranged far beyond the famous hijaz mode that so many western musicians have appropriated for everything from Hollywood faux-exoticism to heavy metal menace. Yet it was in that maqam, with its flat-three and flat-five intervals, that he delivered the most thrills of the night. And there were a lot of them.

In his introductory remarks, impresario Robert Browning – whose Associates had booked this show – spoke of how Ayub, a protege of legendary Syrian crooner Sabah Fakhri, was a throwback to the great tarab singers of the 1930s. He wasn’t kidding – it’s impossible to think of a more electrifying way to kick off this year’s series of global music events at Roulette.

Ayub sings on two levels: intense and more intense. The raw power in his meticulously modulated, melismatic baritone was undiminished throughout practically two hours onstage. People line-danced up front by the stage, clapped along and were invited to join in, boisterously, in many call-and-response choruses throughout the night.

The Aleppo-born Ayub is a rare master of Syrian wasla themes and variations, utilizing both settings of classical Arabic poetry and simpler, singalong folk tunes. Much of the repertoire serves as the roots of this era’s dabke music and habibi pop. With the brief flick of a hand, he led the dapperly dressed orchestra – women in black, men in matching black suits with orange ties – through a vast series of dynamic shifts. The music was sometimes majestic and elegant, sometimes stomping and careening, at other times plaintive and delicate.

What was most striking was how much of a singing quality the instrumentalists brought to the performance. There weren’t a lot of instrumental taqsims (improvisations), but the group made them count. Violinist Michael Abdullah got the most of them; oudist Zafer Tawil also kicked in some frenetic flurries along with kanun player Jamal Sinno’s incisive, lingering ripples and pings. Bassist John Murchson and cellist Khalid Khalifa provided a rich, low undercurrent, often doubling each others’ lines over the mighty percussion section of Johnny Farraj on riq (tambourine), Mahmoud Kamil on tabla and Mohammad Almassri on boomy katim frame drum. Violinist Insia Malik and ney flutist Naeif Rafeh added contrasting airy melody overhead.

Classical Arabic and modern spoken Arabic are quite different, so the subtitles projected during the first three songs were useful for everyone, not just those for whom English was a first language. The lyrics spoke to the age-old, shattering power of female beauty, which Ayub saluted both with imploring and gloriously impassioned resonance. There was also a point where the two women singing in the chorus – Zahra Alzubaidi and Nesma Mohamed – exchanged fond “aw, wasn’t that sweet” looks during one of Ayub’s more forceful variations on a hijaz phrase. Clearly, he’d hit a mark with his colleagues.

Robert Browning Associates’ next concert of Middle Eastern music at Roulette is on Oct 19 at 8 PM with legendary percussionist Pejman Hadadi leading a spellbinding Iranian trio with Saeed Kamjoo on kamancheh fiddle and Kourosh Taghavi on setar lute; cover is $30.

Mystical, Dynamic Rainy-Day Korean Sonic Exploration with Kim So Ra at Lincoln Center

Last night Lincoln Center partnered with the Korean Cultural Center to bring janggu drummer and innovator Kim So Ra and her band to make their debut here. She’s one of the great innovators in Korean sounds, having founded the country’s first all-female traditional percussion ensemble, Norikkot, as well as cinematic art-rock instrumentalists nuMori. She was clearly psyched to be at “One of the finest musical theatres in the world,” as she put it. “Cool! I brought some rain from Korea for this perfect day,” she grinned, alluding to the stormy, watery themes on her latest album A Sign of Rain. The result was as psychedelic a storm as you can possibly imagine.

There’s a tradition in janggu drumming that’s feral and shamanic, but the duo of Kim and fellow percussionist Hyun Seung Hun,opened the night with otherworldly, mysical ambience, blending delicate gongs and a singing bowl punctuated by spare, resonant beats and rainlike washes. Then the bandleader kicked into a brisk, syncopated 10/8 beat that was no less hypnotic for being a lot louder.

The two made disorientingly clipped variations out of a distantly majestic processional before really picking up with a staggered gallop. Piri player Lee Hye Joong blew white noise and then increasingly animated, quavering calls through her little wooden oboe over a steady janggu riff; gayageum player Lim Ji Hye joining quietly underneath.

The irresistibly warptoned gayageum (a fretless zither that sounds like a low-register hybrid of the Egyptian oud and the Indian surbahar, minus the reverberating strings) took centerstage, ripping and leaping over percussive flurries, long, surprisingly low, sax-like sutained lines from the piri and an eventual return to a stately, swaying rhythm. Meanwhile, deep-space photography drifted across the screen behind the stage. Somebody give this band a residency at the Hayden Planetarium: they’d pack the place!

A janggu solo meant to depict a heartbeat came across as a pretty strenuous expedition, drama giving way to a hypnotic groove and back, with some serious sprinting involved as well. Then the two percussionists brought the thunder and eventually some dancefloor thud, entreating the crowd for some boisterous call-and-response. The full quartet closed with a mighty, swaying theme punctuated by wailing piri and spiky, rippling volleys of upper-register gayageum, and encored with an even more turbulent piece.

The next concert at the Lincoln Center atrium space on Broadway just north of 62nd St is tomorrow night at 7:30 PM with latin jazz drummer and bandleader Bobby Sanabria leading a mighty 21-piece unit paying tribute to the great Palladium-era salsa bands. Get there early if you’re going: it’s going to be a dance party.