Psychedelic Cumbia Icons Chicha Libre Reunite at Barbes

It was late 2006 at a long-gone Curry Hill honkytonk “I’ve got this Peruvian surf band playing on Sundays that you should really check out,” the club’s talent buyer suggested to an e-zine publisher who would eventually become the proprietor of a daily New York music blog. The future blog owner never made it to Rodeo Bar to see an embryonic Chicha Libre, but the group did go on to become the funnest band in New York, toured internationally and also pretty much singlehandedly introduced psychedelic cumbia to the world north of the equator.

They played a brief, maybe 45-minute set at their longtime home base, Barbes last night. It was their first New York show since early 2015, but it was like they’d never left. It was amazing to watch the faces of pretty much everybody in the band. The expressions spoke for themselves: “I can’t believe we’irre doing this, and that it’s still this fun.”

Vincent Douglas is still the most economical yet tersely slashing surf cumbia guitarist on the planet – this time he hit his distortion pedal again and again, for simmer and burn and sunbaked ambience. Frontman/cuatro player Olivier Conan is more serioso in front of the band than ten years ago, notwithstanding the fact that this multinational act is just as much a copycat as the Peruvian cult favorites they imitate were, forty and fifty years ago.

Conguero Neil Ochoa had the songs’ machinegunning turnarounds down cold; timbalera Karina Colis not only added extra layers of devious flurries, but also perfectly replicated Alyssa Lamb’s vocal harmonies from the band’s first two records. Bassist Nick Cudahy held the center while Josh Camp used two small keyboards and a labyrinth of effects pedals for a decent recreation of the tremoloing, oscillating, keening dubwise effects he used to get out of an old Hohner Electrovox synth. Maybe it’s a lot easier to switch between a couple of keyboards than to strap on the heavy accordion body that houses the Electrovox. “Electronics have always been an issue for this band,” Conan confided.

The songs were sublime: jangly, and trebly, and swooshy, just like the classic Peruvian bands the group modeled themselves after. Pretty much everybody in the crowd was dancing or at least bouncing. Surprisingly, the one song that gave the band trouble was the broodingly otherworldly Sonido Amazonico, the national anthem of chicha and title track of their classic 2007 album. But no matter – they jammed it out, a little faster and more dubwise than they used to do it

The uneasily waltzing Depresion Tropical, a snide commentary on IMF bloodsucking in the Caribbean, had special resonance. Camp sang a cumbia version of Love’s Alone Again Or. Conan’s account of the little drunk guy in El Borrachito, who tells a girl in the bar that she should stop picking on him and be his girlfriend – in Spanish, obviously – was as cruelly funny as it was when the band played it ten years ago here. Same with the tightly shuffling Hungry Song, told from the point of view of a couple of guys who are so high they can’t tell weed from chicha. Speaking of which, Barbes now has that sour, beerlike corn mash liquor on draft. As a thirst-quencher on hot days, it’s better than beer.

They closed with their outrageously silly cover of the schlocky cheesy pioneering 1972 proto-symthpop hit, Popcorn, They’re back at Barbes tomorrow night, June 26 at 10, and if stoner music, or dance music, or cumbia is your thing, this may be your only chance to see this band, ever. They’re doing a couple of South American dates next, but after that, who knows.

A Rare Free Show by Iconic Rock Storyteller Wreckless Eric at Union Pool

Whether on his own or playing with his wife Amy Rigby, Wreckless Eric is one of the great storytellers in rock. His album Construction Time & Demolition – streaming at Bandcamp – is arguably his darkest and most saturnine record in a career that started back in the proto-punk era. This one’s a mix of snarling, guitar-fueled post-Velvets rock and noisy, dissociative guitar soundscapes. He plays all the guitars and bass, backed by drums plus a horn section on a handful of cuts. He’s playing one of this summer’s series of free weekend shows at Union Pool on July 3 at around 4 PM.

The first track is Gateway to Europe, a catchy, matter-of-factly swaying, brassy yet sobering look at decaying rustbelt European desperation:

Move the people out to where the buses run
But no one knows where they go….
Old glories fade away, derelicted houses, the ghosts of yesterday
Ruined factories on the east side of town
They’re slated for revival, they’ll soon be coming down

“All there is, is time: hold that thought and it’s gone,” Eric muses in the broodingly cinematic miniature The World Revolved Around Me. He follows that with Flash, a chugging, surreal late-night neo-Velvets tableau, its isolated narrator “Sick on Christmas chocolates and cheery Christmas cheer.”

The next track is the obliquely political They Don’t Mean No Harm – “But that don’t make them harmless,” Eric explains. “There’s no democracy, just chrome-plated armor….the dark ages of man crawl onto land. His cynical but sage worldview permeates Wow and Flutter, contemplating rockstar envy over ominous mid-90s Blur chord changes: it’s the album’s most memorable track.

The echoey, clanging, trippy Forget Who You Are could be the Brian Jonestown Massacre: “Everything is gonna be groovy, like some happy clappy Iphone movie,” Eric intones, echoing George Orwell’s observarions on how people become so spellbound by technology that they don’t notice how it enslaves them:

No one can see your face anymore
Nobody one can hear you cry,
They control the circumstances
The how the what the when and the why

Moody Fender Rhodes piano mingles with Eric’s guitar multitracks for a Dark Side-era Floyd ambience in 40 Years, a not-so-fond look back at a dissolute early life and its lingering effects. It segues into The Two of Us, an angushed, swirling blend of new wave and the Velvets. The album comes full circle with the glamrock-tinged, apocalyptic Unnatural Acts: “We were descended from dinosaurs, we weren’t meant to survive.”

There are also a couple of brief, loping instrumental interludes titled Mexican Fenders, the second a lot louder. Guitarists agree that Fender guitars manufactored before the company was sold to CBS in the mid-60s are great instruments – and hardly any working musician actually owns one, since they sell for tens of thousands of dollars on the collector market. Whether Mexican-made Fenders from the CBS era are inferior to American-made models from that time is a question of debate. The consensus is that either way, both typically sound better than the Japanese-built ones. At the rate we’re going, someday Japanese Fenders may be prized for being superior to ones made from slave labor a lot closer to home.

Los Hacheros Turn up the Heat with Their Edgy Electric Salsa

It’s too easy to call Los Hacheros a punk salsa band, but that’s part of the picture. They’re a high-voltage, oldschool Afro-Cuban charanga…with a snarling edge sharpened by bandleader Jacob Plasse’s electric tres and guitar. All that extra burn and buzz is like adding a couple of ripe habaneros to the sauce. It’s a sound that on one hand is totally retro, on the other completely new. Some might hear this music and think of Santana, but Los Hacheros’ grooves are infinitely slinkier. They’re playing the Midsummer Night Swing series on June 29 at 7:30 PM at Damrosch Park out back of Lincoln Center. It’s free to get into the park, $18 in advance for the dancefloor and if that’s your thing, you should get there early becuase this is going to be a hot one.

The title track to their latest album Bambaluye begins with a tongue-in-cheek, perfectly sedate, actually very pretty orchestral intro, but it’s there to fake you out. Then they get the party started with an expansively tumbling dancefloor vamp, Eddie Venegas’ violin and Itai Kriss’ flute punctuating the tune over trombone and percussion. Pintate is a mashup of salsa dura and Spanish Romany flavors: again, it’s the electric tres that makes all the difference.

Esta Noche Corazon is a lush, retro 50s bolero with classy violin and completely psychedelic tres solos – but this time around, it’s frontman/conguero Papote Jimenez’s impassioned vocals that bring the energy to redline. Justicia is a pouncing, grim account of police brutality, while Querida Madre has an unexpectedly careening, insistent edge fueled by violin and trombone.

Bomba de Loisa has a rustic Puerto Rican groove and a couple of bracingly Stravinskian breaks.The group open Timbalaye with an ominous Yoruba vocal riff and shuffle along, up to a Santana-esque guitar solo.. Las Nieves de Brooklyn, a playtully baroque-tinged interlude, sets up the sprawling, closing jam, Descarga Para Abe, which has a more oldschool feel than any of the other tracks.

Now where can you hear all this crazy fun? Other than onstage, there’s no online playlist other than a private one at Soundcloud – lots of individual videos at youtube, but nothing linked, no Bandcamp, and no Spotify either. So you’ll have to click on each of the individual song titles above to hear each song.

A Fresh New Take on Ancient Afro-Cuban Grooves

In Cuban slang, “¿Que Vola?” means “What’s up?” ¿Que Vola? are also a transnational collaboration between three members of legendary Afro-Cuban ensemble the Osain del Monte Orchestra, and several current and former members of French big band the Orchestre National de Jazz. Their debut album is just out and streaming at Spotify. They also have a popular youtube series which follows various band members as they roam around Havana.

In the first video, Ramon Tamayo Martinez performs an ancient, supernatural African drum ritual. In the second, bassist Thibaud Soulas throws a party in memory the beloved mentor who introduced him to Afro-Cuban music. Next up, percussionist Adonis Panter Calderon has to deal with the drama of trying to reschedule a concert cancelled by the Cuban government – all because the president of the country’s ally, Vietnam, has died. After that, Calderon and trombonist Fidel Fourneyron talk music and history in a gritty Havana barrio. The series finale features yet another memorial bash, underscoring how the Afro-Cuban tradition removes barriers between performers and audience. If you’re part of the party, you’re probably playing something.

The album is part rustic, animated streetcorner descarga and part terse, emphatic European jazz. Several of the tracks sound like ancient chants with the vocals switched out for simple horn lines. It opens with a mightily crescendoing salute to the god Chango, minimalist brass over a shapeshifting thicket of percussion: imagine an epic Amir ElSaffar overture percolating with Cuban beats. The second track, Nganga begins with jaunty call and response between Founeyron’s trombone and the rest of the horns: saxophonists Hugues Mayot and Benjamin Dousteyssier and trumpeter Aymeric Avice. Then Bruno Rude’s Rhodes piano takes over beneath a bubbly sax solo as the music gets crazier.

Calle Luz is a sparkling Afrobeat jam, drummer Elie Duris laying down a tricky beat as the horns punch in and out. The next track, titled ¿Que Vola?, builds from a neat implied clave to a starry Rhodes solo, then the horns burst in and accelerate toward warpspeed.

Iyeta comes across as variations on another lively chant with vocals switched out for horns. Fruta Bomba is a carnivalesque number with trickily polyrhythmic allusions to salsa annd Afrobeat. The sprawling Resistir closes the album, a mashup of clave syncopation, Afrobeat and Return to Forever with some deliciously unanticipated noirish swells. They’re playing the atrium space at Lincoln Center on Broadway just north of 62nd St. for free at 7:30 PM on June 27; then they’ll be at Dizzy’s Club on the 29th at 11:30 for $20.

The Yiddish Fiddler on the Roof: More Relevant Than Ever

Believe everything you’ve heard about the Yiddish Fiddler on the Roof. The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene‘s production is fresh, the acting and singing are strong, the casting is smart and the music is both extremely dynamic and classy. Potentially vaudevillian moments are muted in favor of a gravitas that’s sometimes lush and sweeping, at other times austere and plaintive. At a time when people from Syria to Colombia are being forced from their homes to seek refuge thousands of miles asway, and when Jews from Pittsburgh to Poway, California are being murdered, this familiar old story has never been more relevant. And the fact that the narrative concerns daughters breaking free from patriarchal domination shouldn’t be overlooked either.

While the ongoing Manhattan run at Stage 42 marks the Yiddish version’s first American series of performances, Shraga Friedman’s Yiddish translation from the original English is not new: the Polish-Israeli actor and director debuted it in Israel in 1966. However, it is probably safe to say that despite the huge revival of Yiddish as a spoken language, the vernacular probably hasn’t changed much since then.

This is a long production, over three hours including a brief intermission, but it flies by. For non-Yiddish speakers (or those of us who only know terms of endearment and curse words), there are English and Russian supertitles – and some actual Russian sprinkled into the dialogue when the cossacks enter to stir up trouble. The entire cast seem at ease with the language throughout both the narrative and the musical numbers. Friedman’s translation not only rhymes but also pretty much matches the meter of the original songs, although a close listen reveals many instances where both the Yiddish and Russian take some clever poetic license.

As Cencral patriarch Tevye, Steven Skybell brings a curmudgeonly charisma but also an unselfconscious vulnerability to a role that in other productions all too frequently is done completely over the top. As his long-suffering wife Golde, Jennifer Babiak plays her cynicism as survival skill – and also gets to thrill the crowd with her vast, minutely nuanced, operatic vocal range. In a neat bit of casting, Tevye’s oldest daughter, Tsaytl (Rachel Zatcoff) towers over her shy, nebbishy would-be fiance Motl (Ben Liebert). The rest of the cast – notably Jackie Hoffman, as barely tolerated busybody matchmaker Yente, and Joanne Borts, as Tsayt’s namesake ghost of a grandmother – bring as much resonance as sardonic humor to what are in many cases multiple roles.

The music is rich and often symphonic in scope. Andrew Wheeler conducted the orchestra with remarkable restraint and attention to detail. The group only cut completely loose in the klezmer dance numbers, which were as boisterously chaotic as anyone would want. Clarinet wizard D. Zisl Slepovitch snuck from behind the curtain to the corner of the stage where he bopped and fired off an all-too-brief series of biting chromatic riffs. As the eponymous Fiddler, Lauren Jeanne Thomas sometimes mimes and sometimes plays, but either way her timing and dynamics are perfectly precise.

At last night’s performance, the two best numbers were the tantalizingly brief, rustically ambered Sabbath Prayer – a momentary showstopper for Bobiak – and a sweeping, lingering version of the bittersweet, saturnine ballad Sunrise, Sunset. If I Were a Rich Man gets translated as Ven ikh bin a Rotschild, along with some sly wordplay that’s not in the original. Hannah Temple’s accordion along with the trumpets of Clyde Daley and Jordan Hirsch, and Daniel Linden’s trombone, brought equal parts fire and poignancy to the traditional tunes, especially at the end.

Beowulf Borritt’s stark, minimalist set design creates a striking milieu for the people of Anatevka and the never-ending succession of trouble they have to face. In one of many subtle strokes of staging, a fabric backdrop seems to be repaired, between acts, in a way that would befit one of the central characters. And the simple change of language helps immeasurably in creating a defamiliarizing effect. So you think you’ve seen Fiddler? You should see this one. Shows are Tues-Sun, generally at 8 PM with matinees as well. While the performances have been selling out for months, discount rush tickets are sometimes available.

Epic, Spine-Tingling Spanish Dances and a Queens Show by Fiery Violinist Maureen Choi

Violinst Maureen Choi found her muse when she immersed herself in Spanish music. She likes epics and big, explosive crescendos: her music is not for the timid or people with ADD. Her new kick-ass album Theia is streaming at her music page – and it’s one of the most unselfconsciously adrenalizing records of the year. Her slashing, often Romany and Arabic-tinged compositions rise and fall and leap all over the place, and the fun her band has with them is contagious. She’s playing Terraza 7 on June 29 at 9 PM; cover is $15.

Choi flurries and flares over drummer Michael Olivera’s suspenseful flickers throughout the dramatic intro to the album’s first cut, Dear Paco (Cepa Andaluza); then bassist Mario Carrillo joins the party, pianist Daniel Garcia Diego firing off fiery, Middle Eastern-tinged chromatics.

Phoenix Borealis is a diptych of sorts, hushed luminosity bookending a ferocious flamenco dance with a big explosion of drums and some of the most savagely bowed bass in recent memory. Choi follows the same trajectory in Dance of the Fallen, painting plaintively resonatn lines over Garcia Diego’s elegant chromatic ripples and graceful chordal work.

Canto Salamanchino is a cheery number that shifts in and out of waltz time, between major and minor, with a deliciously pointillistic, chromatic piano solo midway through and an unexpected detour into Chinese pastoralia afterward. Silverio O. Garcia has a hushed, elegaic quality, violin and piano echoing each other’s plaintive riffs. Steady pitchblende menace gives way to acerbic Andalucian flair and a series of crashing crescendos in Sinner’s Prayer

Love Is the Answer is a somewhat muted, almost wrenchingly bittersweet ballad: imagine Chano Dominguez taking a crack at Schubert. Choi kicks off Bok Choi Pajarillo with a big solo that shifts cleverly between Romany intensity and the baroque; from there, it’s a flamenco rollercoaster.

The album closes with its two most towering epics. Septenber the First, the album’s most haunting number, has a persistently uneasy late-summer haziness, part Palestinian-flavored dirge and anguished string-jazz lament. Choi closes the record with Danza Ritual Del Fuego: from an allusive intro that could be Dave Brubeck, through a long Afro-Cuban-inflected interlude, it’s more simmer than fullscale inferno, with a coy false ending. Count this as one of the best albums of 2019 in any style of music.

Eleni Mandell’s Best Album Offers Grim Insight Into Survival in the Prison-Industrial Complex

Eleni Mandell got the inspiration for her new album, Wake Up Again, behind bars. No, she wasn’t doing time. She was teaching songwriting as part of the Jail Guitar Doors program founded by the MC5’s Wayne Kramer. The record – streaming at Spotify – is surprisingly her most indie rock-flavored release to date, at least until about the halfway point. But it’s also her most relevant, and most lyrically powerful. These clear-eyed, sobering songs elegantly and often allusively chronicle the cycles of despair, and addiction, and hopelessness of being caught in the prison-industrial compex. As Mandell makes crystal clear, orange is anything but the new black. She’s currently on tour, with a New York stop on June 27 at 9:30 PM at the big room at the Rockwood; cover is $15

Milo Jones’ reverbtoned guitar weaves enigmatically, going nowhere in particular, throughout the album’s opening track, Circumstance, Mandell matter-of-factly traces the outline of a woman caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, knowing that her babies will grow up without her.

“Got my foot out the window it’s a long way down, if you know the secret password there’s another way around,” Mandell explains in Be Together. “Am I waiting for a punishment for all the time I wasted?” she asks. In a career packed with some of the most captivating vocals ever recorded, this is one of Mandell’s most shattering.

Just Herself is just as harrowing, a resolutely waltzing account of someone who’s just as much of an outsider on the inside as she was before she got thrown in jail. Evelyn, a throwback to Mandell’s days as queen of late 90s/early zeros noir, underscores the fact that a large percentage of people in the prison-industrial complex – and the majority of the women there – aren’t criminals. They’re addicts, and people who sold them substances, some of which have been legalized in the years since many of these prisoners were locked up.

“Don’t ask when it was better – she would say that was never,” Mandell intones in Box in a Box, a catchy, gritty account of what could be solitary confinement, or addiction, or both. A brisk, subtly torchy backbeat number, Oh Mother could be a sideways tribute from a prisoner to a mom who managedto stay out of trouble – or the child of a prisoner admiring her mother’s resilience.

The gloom lifts in the quirky, upbeat, country-tinged What’s Your Handle (Radio Waves), following a thinly veiled escape theme that resurfaces a bit later in Air, a similarly bubbling, Americana-tinged number. Empty Locket, a duet with Jones, recounts a wistful, one-sided long-distance phone coversation.

Slowly swaying over Kevin Fitzgerald’s brushy drums and Ryan Feves’ bass, the country lament Ghost of a Girl is the closest thing here to Mandell’s signature noir Americana. The album close with another country waltz, the surreal, enigmatic title track. In a way, it’s no surprise that Mandell, an icon of noir since the late 90s, would end up behind bars – songwriting-wise, anyway. The most basic rule in noir is that ultimately there are none – and the consequences can be lethal.

A Darkly Simmering Comeback From This Era’s Most Potent Tenor Saxophonist

Although tenor saxophonist JD Allen’s compositions gravitate toward concise, often slashing melodies, there’s just as much majesty and gravitas in his music. Often that ache and struggle and anger reaches Shostakovian proportions. Over the course of thirteen albums as a bandleader, Allen has concretized an intense, uncompromising style that draws heavily on bristling chromatics and every facet of the blues, from his breakout 2008 album I Am I Am, through his savagely insightful, blues-steeped Americana collection from 2016. His last couple of records have been a more improvisational quintet release with guitarist Liberty Ellman, and a collection of standards. And they have their moments, but his latest one, Barracoon – streaming at Spotify – is a return to form, a protest jazz collection initially inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It’s a more expansive take on the signature, three-minute “jukebox jazz” sonata-style records Allen started putting out a decade ago; the rage is more restrained, more veiled, but it’s still there.

Allen has a brand-new trio this time. Both bassist Ian Kenselaar and drummer Nic Cacioppo stick close to the roles that Gregg August and Rudy Royston held in Allen’s previous trio for the better part of a decade, although Kenselaar doesn’t dive as frequently into the pitchblende depths August would descend to, and Cacioppo’s rhythms here are closer to traditional New Orleans shuffle grooves.

Cacioppo punches out one of those second-line rhythms and expands a bit from there as Kenselaar slams his strings for darkly woody resonance, Allen blipping and dancing with a bluesy ebullience throughout the album’s title cut. The second track, G sus (that’s an insider musician joke) begins with Allen’s sparse, saturnine phrases and similarly sparse chords from Kenselaar (on electric bass this time) over scrambling drums, the bandleader picking up steam judiciously.

The Goldilocks Zone is a classic, catchy, suspiciously blithe Allen jukebox jazz number, with more than a few echoes of peak-era Sonny Rollins and an understated polyrhythmic interweave between the trio. In The Immortal (H. Lacks), Allen shifts back and forth between balmy resonance and acerbically wary lines as Cacioppo tumbles gracefully and Kenselaar – on electric again – shifts between stark chords and incisively trebly riffage, shadowing the bandleader,

The album’s fifth track, 13, shuffles along, catchy yet enigmatic, although both Allen and Kenselaar brighten as they move closer to a Veracruz-tinged bounce. Allen’s gravelly, darkly bluesy pulses grow more animated as the drums get busy in Beyond the Goldilocks Zone: titles really set the tone here.

Kenselaar’s anthemically dancing bass over shuffling drums opens Communion, Allen weaving his way through the methodical eighth notes of an unexpectedly triumphant song without words. EYE Scream is a longscale take on Allen’s I Am I Am modal brushfires, a plucky bass solo giving way to straightforwardly uneasy one from the bandleader

The album’s coda, and darkest track, is Ursa Major, Kenselaar returning incisively to electric, Allen shifting deftly between major and minor, Cacioppo exercising some welcome restraint. The trio close with the lone cover here, When You Wish Upon a Star, which despite all the fun the band have with it (Cacioppo’s cymbals are hilarious) seems tacked on. Where does this album fall in the Allen pantheon? Definitely in the top five, and that includes the killer Tarbaby record with Oliver Lake and Orrin Evans.

Now where is the album release show for this masterpiece taking place? The Vanguard? Jazz at Lincoln Center? Not yet. The trio will be warming up for much bigger stages when they play on July 26 at 8 PM at Bar Bayeux at1066 Nostrand Ave. in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. The show is free; take the 2 to Sterling St.

Wadada Leo Smith Puts Out Another Riveting Civil Rights Epic

It’s hard to think of a more consistently relevant artist in any style of music than trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith. Over the last seven years, he’s chronicled the Civil Rights Movement, celebrated the endangered ecology of our Great Lakes and National Parks, and suggested that we shouldn’t stop with occupying Wall Street: as the title of his 2013 album instructs, we ought to Occupy the World. His song cycle Rosa Parks: Pure Love. An Oratorio of Seven Songs – streaming at Spotify – is his most ambitious and often harrowing release since his epic 2012 Civil Rights era narrative Ten Freedom Summers. In general, this album is more atmospheric – and in that sense enveloping – maybe because it’s about a pivotal moment and the embryonic days of the movement it springboarded. Smith is playing a weeklong stand with a series of ensembles, including some of the artists on this album, at the Stone at the New School starting on June 25 at 8:30 PM; cover is $20.

As with Ten Freedom Summers, this album’s orchestration is lavish: Smith plays as part of the BlueTrumpet Quartet with Ted Daniel, Hugh Ragin and Graham Haynes, alongside the RedKoral string quartet and drummer Pheeroan akLaff. There are three singers: Karen Parks, Min Xiao-Fen and Carmina Escobar.

The opening instrumental prelude has a shattering, Shostakovian intensity: a horrified blaze of trumpets, sirening strings, disjointed anguish and yet, in the center of it all, a calm horn presenced which is probably Smith’s own portrayal of Parks’ determination to hold onto her seat and stand up for justice in the midst of assaults from all sides.

As the suspense mounts, there are keening highs over tense, expectant lows from the strings and slow exchanges with the brass. Maybe it’s the presence of Min Xiao-Fen and her spiky pipa, but the first vocal number, The Montgomery Bus Boycott has a big-sky Chinese pastoral vastness, a salute to solidarity and what it can accomplish.

Escobar’s fond but emphatic vocal matches the still sternness of the string quartet in The First Light, Gold, a shout-out to how Martin Luther King picked up the ball and ran with it after Rosa Parks got everything started. Vision Dance 2: Defiance, Justice and Liberation [Smith likes subtitles] is a slowly shifting tone poem for the whole ensemble plus samples from early works by Smith’s AACM collaborators Anthony Braxton on alto and Steve McCall on drums.

Parks sings Change It!, a soberingly poetic contemplation of democratic ideals clashing with reality, with an operatic intensity over mutedly pulsing and then resonant strings, akLaff flickering behind them. His majestically cynical, dismissive solo is sublime. Escobar takes the mic on The Truth, alternately spacious and insistent, then hands off to Min Xiao-Fen for No Fear, a hauntingly resonant setting of Rosa Parks’ own simple explanation of how she got up the courage to kick off a revolution.

More than a tinge of the macabre permeates the shivery, slowly unfolding Vision Dance 3: Rosa’s Blue Lake. Shalini Vijayan’s woundedly expressive viola solo introduces Min Xiao-Fen’s similarly moody vocal dramatics in The Second Light. Yet victory seems within reach as the trumpets enter in Vision Dance 4: A Blue Casa; slipsliding strings remind that it won’t be an easy task.

Parks sings the last of the songs, Pure Love, a celestially lingering look at the Greek concept of agape via MLK. Smith saves his most dynamic solo for The Known World: Apartheid amid disembodied string horror. The brief postlude seems like a Pyrrhic victory until akLaff deliciously gets the last word. This music is as rich and as troubling as the history it commemorates: like Ten Freedom Summers, you can get lost in it. Count this among the half-dozen best albums of the past several months.

The Black Capsule Bring Their Epic, Surreal, Cynical Psychedelia to Unexpected Places

Psychedelic band the Black Capsule like long songs. Unlike what their name might imply, speed is not their thing. There’s no other New York band who sound like anything like them, although there are a whole lot of old bands who do. This crew draw on oldschool soul, the more pensive side of Hendrix and stoner 70s art-rock. British psych legends the Frank Flight Band are a good comparison, although the Black Capsule are more cynical and quintessentially New York. Their album is up at Bandcamp as a free download.

Now, there are plenty of decent venues in this town where psychedelia can be found: where are these guys taking the stage on June 20 at around 9? At Baby’s All Right? No. Union Pool? No. Trans-Pecos, Gold Sounds, Coney Island Baby? No, no and no. They’re playing the Bitter End. Cover isn’t listed on the club webpage, but it’s usually ten bucks there. Make sure to find some standing room because the moment you sit down, the waitress will try to stick you for a drink minimum.

The album’s catchy opening track is pretty short by comparison to the rest of the material, clocking in at less than six minutes. It’s a swaying latin soul-tinged anthem, like Chicano Batman at their most sprawling, acoustic and electric guitar textures mingling with Rhodes piano and then swirly organ as it hits a peak. “She was high, she was high, she was high when she was coming down,” the frontman (uncredited on the group’s Bandcamp page) intones in his flinty voice.

Joanna is an increasingly creepy chronicle of failed relationships – think a more vengeful, eleven-minute take on what the Nails did with 88 Lines About 44 Women, with a bridge nicked from Pink Floyd:

After all the cigarettes”
I’m just left with cheap regrets
Take me to your dear dark cave
I promise that I won’t behave

After All is a slightly more focused remake of the Velvets’ Heroin: same two-chord vamp, similar junkie milieu. half-baked Allan Brothers guitar jam on the long way out. Random Thoughts (yes, that’s the title) is a twisted mashup of LA Woman-era Doors, Dark Side-era Floyd and acid funk: it’s the closest thing to Frank Flight here, growly bass poking up through the murk and the smoky organ.

Imagine Hendrix if he hadn’t been a shredder and had an organ in the band: that’s Red Morning, a sort of Fourth Stone From the Sun. The band stagger toward stoner boogie territory, and more Hendrix, with SWLABR. Then they offer a nod to the mean side of the Grateful Dead with The Netherlands. The album’s most epic, final track is Desperate Daze: It’s their Midnight Rambler.

On one hand, this album is like a stoner dad’s record collection: if you know what’s in it, you’ll recognize every stolen lick here. On the other, there’s no denying this band’s epic ability to keep you listening. if you’re, um, in the mood