Music Monday: Old, New, and Revisited

Travel is a weird time to listen to music. No matter what I do, I don’t want to listen to the music that I’ve downloaded on my phone during the flight. I can select albums that I’m sure that I want to hear and then when I go to play them on the plane, I change my mind. For some reason, this results in me having like a dozen Wadada Leo Smith albums on my phone and not wanting all that intensity on my flight.

Anyway.

This weekend, I listened to Joe McPhee’s Underground Railroad (1970) which is his brilliant early free jazz effort recorded at the Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, NY. It’s great:

I was motivated to listen to this album after seeing that Corbett vs. Dempsey is releasing another Joe McPhee album, Nineteen Sixty​-​Six, when McPhee led a group called The Jazzmen. McPhee is on trumpet on this track. I’ve not listened to it carefully yet, but I’m excited to check it out.

It was also Joe McPhee’s birthday yesterday!

The other album that I’ve been enjoying is Andrew Hill’s A Beautiful Day. I was motivated to listen to this live album from 2002 largely because a remastered version of it came out earlier this month (called A Beautiful Day, Revisited). I listened to the original mastering of the live show at New York’s Birdland and then listened to the remastered version and the difference isn’t that subtle. I have always liked this large ensemble performance:

Finally, my favorite album of fall is Hurray for the Riff Raff’s The Past is Still Alive (2024). This band is basically Alynda Segarra (and some session folks) making it easy to use their preferred pronouns!