Who says a jazz band can’t play rock music? George Clinton didn’t quite ask that question on the 1978 Funkadelic track “Who Says a Funk Band Can’t Play Rock?” but it’s a logical implication of the various permutations of the lyric, which questioned genre divisions at a time when radio and television were still segregated, even if schools weren’t. These days, the boundaries are thankfully more fluid. Musicians are more likely to move between false divisions, or borrow from more than one at the same time.
Case in point, the bassist Mali Obomsawin, whose Sweet Tooth was one of the best jazz debuts of 2022. But she’s worked at least as much as a songwriter with the trio Lula Wiles and in more esoteric efforts with guitarist Magdalena Abrego. Symbiont (CD, LP, download out last month on Smithsonian Folkways) is a set of songs with the exceptional multi-instrumentalist Jake Blount, drawing on indigenous (Obomsawin is Abenaki First Nation at Odanak) and African-American (Blount both plays and writes about the creolized music of Black Americans) sources. Whether they’re playing rock or jazz or global folk and native funk can be determined Oct. 17, when they appear at the BRIC JazzFest in downtown Brooklyn.
While Blount and Obomsawin draw inspiration from Caribbean and African folk songs, gospel and shape singing and the chants that echoed across the land before Europeans arrived, they also make use of processed beats and sampled voices, electric guitars and synthesizers to give the album a strong and insistent currency. Seated within the ancient and the contemporary sounds is the impetus of the album, a moral mirror reflecting a time when people lived more compatibly with the planet. Maybe it’s looking forward to such a time as well. That remains to be seen.
Guitarist Wendy Eisenberg may be no more firmly encamped in the jazz world, but can certainly be found in various houses of improv around town. On the other hand, earlier this year they released a brief little 12” of compositions for solo electric guitar by New York School composers Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff, so calling genre is anyone’s game. On the other other hand, Eisenberg’s new Viewfinder (LP and download out last month from American Dreams) is a set of odd and infectious songs inspired by the world coming into focus after getting Lasik surgery in 2021. In fact, the first track and lead single is titled simply “Lasik,” and came with a video of blurry colors to match. It’s a very direct song, a literal description of coming out of the surgery with the chilling tagline “changing isn’t healing.” But while the lyrics are straightforward, the music is off kilter and dizzying—piano, bass, drums, trombone and Eisenberg’s guitar all stumbling, off balance but moving in the same general direction. It’s fantastically literal. The eight other tracks cohere a bit more, with long, light melody lines and counter-melodies that sometimes veer toward the jazzy but are always catchy and steady. There’s a lot of great playing, but against layered vocals and stacked instrumental lines, it’s drummer Booker Stardrum who keeps them laser focused.
Music for weeping above a nameless grave. Just in time for your Halloween mixtape—hell, it could be your Halloween mixtape—is To One in Paradise (for Hal Willner) (LP, download out Oct. 18 from Shimmy-Disc): 13 (of course) settings of Edgar Allen Poe verses made with a cavalcade of voice artists. The album is produced and for the most part played by the mono-named Kramer, whose past credits include Shockabilly, Bongwater, and stints in Butthole Surfers, Half Japanese and Ween, as well as launching NYC proto indie-label Shimmy-Disc back in 1987. After a long hiatus, he rebooted the label in 2020. This century’s Shimmy has been a bit more ethereal, a bit less manic than the days of yore, and indeed To One in Paradise is more somber, nearly miserable, than it is scary, befitting much of the master of macabre’s finest verses. The titular dedicatee is the master of the tribute album. Willner produced fine albums of the work of Thelonious Monk, Nino Rota, Kurt Weill and others, overseeing all aspects of production. Kramer follows suit, employing the voices of Jennifer Charles, Joan As Police Woman, Lydia Lunch, Eric Mingus, Thurston and Eva Moore, Anne Waldman, Chloe Webb and others into a lonesome and dismal sonic portrait. The album concludes with a voice from beyond the grave in the form of an archival recording of Allen Ginsberg (1926-1977) reading “The Bells,” which was only published after Poe’s death in 1849. Lou Reed (1942-1913) recorded his own take on “The Bells” in 1979, 24 years before working on a full album based on Poe’s work with Willner (1956-2020). The spirits are all around us. You don’t need poetry and song to connect with them, but it doesn’t hurt.
Retro Yé-yé with a Turkish twist. I first heard the British duo Kit Lambert on the 2021 David Bowie tribute album Modern Love. Their take on his 1973 song “Lady Grinning Soul” was a standout on the album, both faithful and radically reinterpreted, reminding me of ‘90s atmospheric electropop from the likes of Portishead and Hooverphonic. They’d already been around for at least a couple of years by that point, but I didn’t pick up the lead until the EP New Internationale (CD, LP, cassette and download out last month from Brainfeeder) crossed my digital desk. It’s a mere 24 minutes, and about a third of that is radio edits of three of the four songs. But it’s wonderful fun. The songs play up Istanbul-born singer Merve Erdem’s heritage but more than that set a Euro-cosmo scene of Swingin’ London. The other half of the band is multi-instrumentalist Kit Martin, who has just the right twang in his guitar and just the right stride in his step to strut and stroll across countries and decades and into your earbuds.
