Thermodynamic Miracle

Little alchemizes Clifford Brown's chops with dense angularity, Miles' spatial command, and some of the weirdest horn phrasings ever. Waldron's fractal playing is nevertheless the most recognizably human, but he doesn't dilute – he anchors. Davis thrillingly redefines out for bassists, solos included. Dolphy is everything everywhere all at once. Blackwell's deconstructed bebop patterns magnetize the band inward and outward, crackling like ... read more

Soul-Rupturing Sandstorm: A Collective's Peak

(Sources and footnotes are included at the bottom.)

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The scene: a quiet, still, mellow Daytona evening in November 2018. My boyfriend (now husband :3) had splurged on a shiny new bong. We were lounging on frayed folding chairs in his cluttered garage, one of us packing a bowl with tacky, purple, potent marijuana. The weather was pleasant; dense Floridian humidity ... read more

Farce to Farce

One of those unsatisfying low pressure farts that doesn't even have a nice pungent odor. You know, when it feels like the gas doesn't even give a shit if it escapes your butt. No glory, no triumph, no catharsis. Just a sad piddly poot.

This record foreshadows the slightly more tolerable dumpster fire that was Making a Door Less Open: wack-ass lyrics (the ones that were changed, I mean), fugly electronic ornamentation for which I suspect Andrew Katz is to blame ... read more

Talent and Toil

As far as music goes, my mom skews further towards accessibility than do I. But insofar as singing voices, she's prickly as pine needles. Billie? Straight to the the bin. Elvis? Helluva performer, but no business on any serious list of all-time vocalists. Lennon, Dylan, Byrne, Madonna, unlistenable.

For her, vocal greatness is embodied by Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, Whitney Houston, Marvin Gaye, Christina Aguilera, Stevie Wonder, Al Green. Artists with firepower, ... read more

They Are Like Us

This diss is like a funeral home flooded with six inches of sewage. Stagnant, decrepit, and reeking past disgust into numbness.

Drake has wobbled on a tightrope of plausible deniability regarding his interactions with young women for years. For some he's unambiguously plummeted into predation. He did it to himself. Who gets on stage and mack modes a 17 year old? What 30-something man sends mushy texts to a minor? Why do rumors and whispers of him getting close to ... read more

A High Watermark for Gangsta Rap, for Hip Hop, for Music

About halfway through the first season of the crime drama The Wire, the finest television series ever created, heroin kingpin Avon Barksdale hauls his nephew (and recently demoted employee), greenhorn dealer D'Angelo, to a psychiatric institution for the purpose of visiting his (Avon's) brain-dead brother, shot in the head and rendered permanently comatose long before the beginning of the series' timeline. Avon, who has ... read more

(0.333...)(3)

Bill Evans at a peak is Bill Evans at a peak. Scrub all save piano and a great album remains. But Scott LaFaro refusing to settle for dutiful homophony and Paul Motian managing to sound every bit as melodic as his bandmates catapult this album to all time classic status.

Through all the pain, Evans never forsook his knack for sensitivity, tenderness, and beauty on the keys, even at death's door. But the deceptive simplicity of this band's crystalline, trinitarian grace ... read more

Big Fun

Live jazz albums attract me like gravity. Some claim they're a fundamentally purer form of improvisation, creativity, the moment itself. This makes me uneasy. Jazz can be a lot of different things in a lot of different ways.

I hear albums like this, and that unease quiets.

This compilation captures a huge leap forward from the already venerable Complete Plugged Nickel ‘65. Plugged Nickel is fascinating but its risk-taking can occasionally slide into blank space. It sounds ... read more

Maelstrom of Madness

This is my favorite album of the 2020s. Thus far no one has come close to topping it.

Death metal ensnared me around the time the COVID 19 pandemic hit stateside. I found the dark, crushing soundscapes aptly cathartic for cooping up in a small house wondering how many people you know are going to die. Plus, it just plain fucking sounded good. Having primarily subsisted most of my life on hip-hop and alternative rock, and primed a couple years earlier by stoner metal, it ... read more

Death With Dignity

Getz lived a rough life. He irreparably wounded himself and a lot of people he was supposed to care about.

His playing on this album, recorded through end stage liver cancer, could be a longing, regretful monologue, or an achingly defiant proclamation of love, or a quiet, humble bow of acceptance. It's a novelistic sequence of deeply human meditations on memory, love, and, yes, death.

Barron, shouldered with impossible responsibility, meets Getz where he's ... read more

2010 Josh Hamilton

Unshackled, roided-up hard bop with solos running 2:03:00 marathons and bench pressing 700 pounds. Thrilling, over and over again.

And it's emotional, to boot. Morgan was far from the only jazzer to escape the gnashing, inevitable maw of oblivion promised by the blood pact of heroin. But unlike Trane's existential wails or Miles' haunted murmurs, Morgan's epic runs were so fiery, exuberant, and altogether alive you'd think he lacked any ... read more

The Best Album of the 2010s is an Outpouring of Grief, Heatbreak, Loss, and Love

Listening to Car Seat Headrest is loving and hating, hurting and healing, living and dying - all at once. Their work erupts and implodes with the contradictions of raw human emotion. Anger, angst, anxiety, depression, desperation, grief, guilt, hatred, joy, loneliness, love, pain, regret, self-loathing, shame, vulnerability, yearning; you could circumnavigate the emotional alphabet with the feelings their music ... read more