Music Monday: Year End Lists
- Jan 8, 2024
- 2 min read
I don’t do New Years resolutions and I don’t really like all of “year’s best” posts that come out each year between Christmas and New Years.
That said, I do appreciate the lists that various music sites develop that celebrate notable releases for the year. I don’t really care how various releases are ranked or whatever, but I do like finding out about albums that I’ve missed. This is particularly to case for jazz and improvised music which often appears on more obscure My go to this year have been The Arts Fuse Francis Davis Jazz Poll, NPR’s Ten Best Jazz list, and the Free Jazz blog various contributor lists.
There are a few albums that I’ve been enjoying from these lists lately that I missed when they came out.
First and foremost is Jason Moran’s From the Dancehall to the Battlefield, which is nearly a year old at this point! You can get a sense for the album from its Bandcamp page. My favorite piece from the album is “Flee as a Bird to your Mountain/Ghosts” which juxtaposes the hymn (based on Psalm 11) with Albert Ayler’s iconic melody in “Ghosts.” Brian Settles sounds great on saxophone on what must have been a challenging assignment!
The theme of this album is the music of James Reese Europe, the pioneering Black bandleader and musician. Throughout the album, Moran shows how Europe’s music continues to inspire the improvised, popular, and Black music of today. It’s worth a careful listen as Moran seamlessly blends ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, early jazz, and religious songs with contemporary jazz.
There always seems to be space for these kinds of albums in jazz which demonstrate the continuing influence of Black music in the present. Perhaps the resurgence of white supremacy, or at least its increasingly public face, has inspired an efforts from musicians to push back against rhetoric that marginalizes their contribution to American society.
Matana Roberts’ Coin Coin project has its origins long before the current situation, but shares a similar interest in using music to tell the story of African-American history. I would have missed the fifth installment of this project: Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden… if not for the various year-end lists. Perhaps my recent time with Zora Neale Hurston gave me some greater appreciation for the snippets of folksy dialogue that trace the lineage of Roberts’ characters or maybe I just like the somewhat more provocative music that accompanied them. Whatever the reason, this is a challenging album that will reward repeated listenings in the year to come:
Finally, I was disappointed to somehow have missed the release of Marion Brown’s Mary Ann (Live in Bremen, 1969). He plays with a quartet of Germans Ed Kroeger on trombone and Sigi Busch on bass and long-time collaborator American Steve McCall on drums. There’s not enough recordings that show off Marion Brown in the late 1960s (at least for me!) and this one really shows how compelling and rich Brown’s live performances could be:
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