LISTENING LISTFULLY 2023
or, What This Fool Poured in the Porches of His Ears This Year
As 2023 ends, I have finally resigned myself to the passing of ye olde original A Fool in the Forest blog,1 and will likely shut it down altogether before 2024 advances much further. I first put up a year-end music list there in 2006, and called it “Listening Listfully,” a feeble play on the blog being no longer listless. It is the only blog feature I have obliged myself to keep going, and the last three editions are the only posts posted at the old stand in the past three years. My enthusiasm for listening to music has not faded over the seventeen years since ‘06, nor have I lost the itch to share with others the music that has grabbed me, nor the itch to publicize fine work that may have escaped those others’ notice. Not incidentally, this is also an annual opportunity to name names and to provide recognition, and reiterate my own gratitude, to the artists who have provided these multifold pleasures and satisfactions.
My list tends to be among the last to publish, commonly in the final week of the year. I have slipped past January 1 at least once, and never posted in the Thanksgiving crush of other year-end lists. There always seem to be two or three December releases that I am happy to catch and add, and this list continues that habit.
[Yippee! There are still more than 48 hours left in 2023 as this uploads to the world! I haven’t missed it! Fetch me the goose from round the corner, boy!]
This is not a ranked list, though the upper third or so includes my most favored favorites at this moment. The GEORGE album that starts it off arrived in early January, and I have almost certainly punched play on that one more frequently than any other, so it might be considered a quasi-Number One. That said, many of its near neighbors, though they often landed much later, are holding their own.
The mix of genres on this 2023 list skews more heavily than ever toward jazz and jazz-adjacent music. “Well, maybe it is just the time of year, or maybe it's the time of man…”2 That is where my responses led me this year, as the zone where dwelt the most music with appeal, heart, intentionality, momentum, and a destination on its mind, even if the particular destination is stamped “Unknown.” Next year, who knows? Could be more field recordings, could be more flute music.
Technical Note: This post contains a tonne of Bandcamp player links. They display rather nicely on a computer screen of any substantial size, but display rather pathetically on an itty-bitty phone screen. Your user experience will be much enhance reading this, if possible, on a device more suitable than an itty-bitty phone screen.
Here beginneth the List:
I started the year with GEORGE, and that is how I will end it. This was almost certainly the album I listened to most across 2023, in part because it arrived almost immediately in January, and in part because once I had begun listening I returned to it regularly. Composer/drummer John Hollenbeck, no stranger to these lists of mine, decided to put together a new band of players he wanted to work with – Anna Webber (tenor saxophone/flute), Aurora Nealand (voice/alto saxophone/soprano saxophone/keyboards), and Chiquita Magic (keyboards/voice/piano) – and work it does, stacking eight Hollenbeck originals and two unexpected covers across an efficient 49 minutes without flagging, even when it slows down. Rhythmic ingenuity, plangent changes, and tight and committed playing merge and surge and there’s a good time to be had by all.
Letters to George gets pride of place this year, as I foretold early on the socials: “I've been living with @john_hollenbeck's new band, #GEORGE, for not quite 24 hours, on repeat & wow: The only way this album will not end up at or near #1 on my year-end list for 2023 will be if the next 11 months prove unanticipatedly extraordinary.”
I pair it here with Another Life, which is technically ineligible for inclusion, having been released in 2022, but it first came to my attention this past year and I am compelled to recommend it at this point because of the John Hollenbeck connection. Twin pianos is the order of the day, with Mr. Hollenbeck again impeccably manning the drum chair. Nearly all of this set was recorded with the players nowhere near one another in time or place, but the final combination is seamless as can be. The first track is a very successful combination of “All the Things You Are” with Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place.”3
Three albums by Nicole Mitchell, or adjacent to her.
Nicole Mitchell ’s Black Earth Sway is Nicole Mitchell (flute), Jovia Armstrong (drums), Coco Elysses (Diddley Bow, percussion), and Alexis Lombre (piano). Everyone sings as well, and three out of four are current Executive officers of AACM. Black Earth Sway is not to be confused with Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble, which features in many of her more deeply serious ventures. That sort of deep seriousness, and an air of solid dignity, which I had come to associate with Mitchell’s flies out the window quickly with this band, which is spicy, sassy, salty, spirited, sometimes spiritual, but most serious about having a darned good humid and effervescent time of it. Songs about the deeply unhip, about cockroaches, about [I think] the origins of Jazz, about good men and dubious men, about these women and all women, about life’s pangs and pageantry, delivered with verve and glee. It slams, it jams, it smacks and whacks. I dig it mightily.
Released in very early December, just in time to evade the notice of other year-end lists, this is a live recording from 2022, released by SESC SP (Serviço Social do Comércio [of the State of] São Paulo). It is, somewhat surprisingly, not on Bandcamp, but can be had via Amazon or the iTunes store.4
Jovia Armstrong also released a list-worthy collection year, in coalition with violinist Leslie DeShazor and a crackling rhythm section. As with 2022’s The Antidote Suite, this is highly skilled Black Music about Black Music, root and branch.
At Earth School is that serious side of Nicole Mitchell to which I alluded, here in the company of pianist Alexander Hawkins, whose growing body of work neatly crosses the streams of avant-jazz and avant-classical.
Appendix: as I went to press/post, a new Moor Mother/Nicole Mitchell track emerged: “One for Archie.” That pair first collaborated in live performance in 2018, and both are sometime members in recent expansive versions of the venerable Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Speaking of Black Music ion some sense about Black Music:
Nate Chinen, for purposes of NPR’s Best Jazz of 2023 list, declares this a jazz album, and he is not wrong. But Meshell Ndegeocello contains multitudes and this latest puts an encompassing swatch of it out there for our perusal and wonder. Immerse yourself in this: these few lines cannot do it justice.
Large band jazz is very much alive, and it doesn’t get much smarter than this. Don’t be a noodle. Listen and dig.
Poets poetizing over music is a niche genre, but a powerful one, and this year brought multiple fine examples.
Moor Mother makes clear distinctions between her solo project, her collaborations, and her membership in bands. Irreversible Entanglements is the latter: a band in which her poetic voice is a component of the larger whole. The band is signed to Verve now, and has responded with a looser, broader, but no less powerful sound. Very little this band can’t do, I suspect, if they have a mind to.
Aja Monet’s “when the poems do what they do” is the most straight-up poetry+music album in this group, and its directness is its power. The band is a compacted version of Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah’s [formerly Christian Scott] pre-pandemic unit, with his trumpet still in evidence, including Elena and Samora Pinderhughes on flute and piano. [See below for Chief Adjuah’s current trumpet-free manifestation.] Words and music coalesce more perfectly than not; it’s a sweet spot, and a potent one.
Fay Victor’s album is, surprisingly, her first as a solo artist. Primarily a singer, and rightly admired as such, she wields speech as well in crafting a personal and artistic manifesto and a report on growth work in progress.5
From a place where the poetry above and the field recordings below meet with jazz and electronics, Caroline Davis takes aim at the uses and misuses of incarceration, at captivity and its opposites. I am less concerned with the politics or social policy than I am with the purely musical virtues of her alto saxophone playing and of her composition and construction of this tightly wound and personal expressive edifice. (Having Tyshawn Sorey on drums in this version of Alula certainly does not hurt.)
Riveting. Chief Adjuah leaves his trumpet behind altogether, builds himself a multiform custom harp that he christens Adjuah’s Bow, gathers himself a company of percussionists, singers, and singing percussionists, journeys back as far as he can go toward the origins of New Orleans music in the drums of Congo Square and the confluence of Black Africans and the indigenous peoples of the bayou and delta, and brings home what he has found.
From the socials: “Congo Square all the way down, and it's a long way down.”
Another one that arrived late, got under my skin, and can be expected to stay in my rotation well into 2024. Eric Mingus is his own creature, but imagine Tom Waits, under the influence of a surfeit of Faulkner, waking up at a crossroad in a dark wood. (Eric Mingus is by far the better singer of the two.)
As I wrote on the socials: “An amalgam of blues and gospel (and weirdo scat) with an old soul, committed and more than occasionally eerie. Special stuff.”
James Brandon Lewis has quickly become a staple of these lists. My introduction to him was his Live in Willisau with drummer Chad Taylor (who remains a regular in most of Lewis’ bands), in which the sense of two players listening closely to one another is almost tangible. Last year brought his plumb astounding George Washington Carver set, Jesup Wagon. For Mahalia, With Love is the obvious successor to Jesup Wagon: another deeply considered interaction with an important Black American, with his Red Lily Quintet. It’s a wonder in similar ways to its predecessor, and deserves full attention.
That said, if I am picking favorites of the year, the James Brandon Lewis spot goes to Eye of I. It is, aesthetically and as a work of authorship, of a piece with Mahalia, but being disconnected from a specific subject and legacy, it moves more freely and plumbs more subtly.
Earlier this year, Lewis wrote an appreciation of Ornette Coleman for PORT Magazine, which begins:
If chords were an easel then Ornette Coleman, like Jackson Pollock, freed us from its hold. The canvas of melody navigating us back to ourselves, our folk nature, organic ways of being before taught understandings. His music urges us to head back to grandma’s cast iron skillet. Coleman pointed towards intuitive ways of knowing, an absolute truth that asks us to be inside the melody rather than observe it.
He goes on to talk specifically about “Lonely Woman,” the revolutionary opening track of Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come. That piece is a Gibraltar-scale touchstone to my own reactions to exploratory music, and the ways in which Lewis extends its legacy without ever falling into rote imitation is inspiring to me as a listener.
In any case, Eye of I is a superb, varied, never lazy set of music, that ends on an outright punk/metal note with ‘Fear Not [feat. the Messthetics,’ a cast iron skillet to the head as it were.
In 1974, living in the dorms during my initial year at Berkeley, I first heard and fell for the British electric folk band, Steeleye Span, thanks to another student on my floor. His name goes unrecalled, as with so many details from that era, but for a week or three he adopted the habit of playing “The Mooncoin Jig” on his stereo at top volume over and over and over again. There are no jigs to be had on hare // hunter // moth // ghost, but it does include two traditional songs that I knew first through Steeleye Span: “Two Magicians” and “King Henry.” Both of those get properly “queered up” here - the artist’s characterization - and it is all to the good. The traditional/standard versions of “Two Magicians” are ultimately creepy: it is a tale of being stalked by a shape shifter who will have his way with you like it or not. Here, by a quick shift of pronouns and alternating the points of view of the two protagonists, it becomes a frankly charming tale of mutual flirtation and fulfillment. Cool.
You Are Wolf is primarily Kerry Andrew, and last featured on my list at #4 in 2018 for KELD, which was all about somethings in the water. [Bonkers and brilliant still, that record, so catch up with that is what I recommend.] hare… concerns itself with change, liminal and labile, identity and mystery, and - because we are in the realm of the traditional tunes of Old Weird Britain - with sex and with death. It all filters through minimal, crepuscular arrangements and processes, and seems perhaps familiar but also not quite right. It’s an untidy glory, really, but still a glory.
The Red Hot Organization grew out of the original awful days of HIV/AIDS, funding research and relief through proceeds from a series of album releases featuring cover versions performed by sometimes unexpected artists. (The original was Red Hot + Blue (1990), which was all Cole Porter, including U2’s strange but not-bad rendition of ‘Night & Day.’) In 1996, they issued Red Hot + Rio, centered on Brazilian Bossa Nova and Tropicália classics of the 1960s, and that collection retriggered, for a time, my on again off again interest in Brazilian music. I still find it very enjoyable and revisit it from time to time.
Red Hot’s focus has shifted over time, and the organization now benefits climate change causes rather than HIV, but they continue to revisit the Brazilian well. This year things got inverted: rather than northern hemisphere artists covering older Brazilian music, we get an array of current Brazilian musicians taking on the older but futuristic interstellar legacy of Sun Ra. Two great tastes that go great together.
The Sound of Brazil Now, or a synthesis of some of its endless variety of sounds. Try to sit still through it, just try. Walls are to be bounced off of, joyously.
This is my personal equivalent of a sleeper hit. It is the debut of the trio of Lukas Traxel (Bass & Composition), Otis Sandsjö (Saxophone), and Moritz Baumgärtner (Drums), and I have not spotted it on anyone else’s year-end list. This is an unfussy, unadorned collection, working the paths pointed to by Ornette Coleman’s quartet, among others, and finding some side routes of their own. By turns elegaic and stinging, I find it uniquely satisfying. It is gaining fast on the “number of times played” meter.
From the socials: “I want you to know first that this is a ++fine contemporary jazz album that has gotten under my skin, and second that the notes say ‘musical influences include’ @caroshawmusic & @gabrielkahane, and third that I love that even if I don't quite hear it yet.”
Just because, here is a live performance of the title track. Playing the prerecorded piano part, via bullhorn, through the drum head makes me smile, after which I just lose myself in the playing.
My favorite from the ‘contemporary classical’ genre for 2023 is this new-fangled quasi-old school piano album, showcasing soloist Awadagin Pratt amid shifting combinations of string orchestra (A Far Cry) and vocal ensemble (Roomful of Teeth). The pieces were commissioned from five different composers (including eminent Latvian Peteris Vasks) and derive from Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets.’ Apropos of Eliot’s observation that “in my end is my beginning,” the first and the last of these five, by Jessie Montgomery and Judd Greenstein respectively, are the standouts.
From the socials: “Piano, strings, voices, T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, five composers.”
Joseph Branciforte and Theo Bleckmann reconvene amid an array of processes and electronics and non-euclidean spaces. I found it particularly welcome an evenings after highly focused days in court, but is even more enjoyable without preparatory tsuris.
From the socials: “At least as savoury as their first, & honestly maybe better.”
Steel guitar like no other, covering the gamut from Ornette Coleman (a creditable version of “Lonely Woman,” no less) to Prefab Sprout.
Rail music/Field recordings.
Waclaw Zimpel builds thrumming electronic tapestries from the transport infrastructure of Warszawa. Meanwhile, Chris Watson’s raw recordings round and about the Oxmardyke rail crossing are transformed as a parting gesture by the late, great Philip Jeck. It takes a train to cry, they say.
From the socials re Zimpel: “Thrumming clicking buzzing processed field recordings, most of the transit infrastructure of Warsaw, drifting along with the tumbling dynamos.”
Two tributes to Don Cherry, and a recovered live performance by the man himself with Gallic electronics.
From the socials re Ethnic Heritage Ensemble: “A plunge in the ever-spreading ripples that were and remain Don Cherry, with a featured role for Dwight Trible.”
From the socials, re Vandermark/Drake: “An eloquent addition to the burgeoning 'Don Cherry Hommage' genre, with nary a trumpet in sight. Nails it, notwithstanding.”
This year brought a new 30th anniversary edition of Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, which is not about music,6 but is as relevant to music as it is to the visual arts that are its principal subject. Ambrose Akinmusire set himself to contemplating the uses of beauty this year, and these two albums are the result. Beauty is Enough is self-released, a set of focused and restrained solo trumpet performances, spare but exploratory, moving where the moment takes them at their own deliberated pace. Owl Song brings Akinmusire to the Nonesuch roster in a trio with guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Herlin Riley, in which like minds and synchronous spirits blend seamlessly, with unfussy, non-saccharine (no ‘smooth jazz’ here), and (yes!) beautiful results. These performances go deeper each time you listen, all lotus-like and subtly bejeweled.
Three Necessary Reissues
Abdul Wadud’s By Myself is possibly the finest solo cello album not involving a composer named "Bach".
Naná Vasconcelos and company site the heart of Brazil as the heart of every feeling human. (Naná’s also involved in that live Don Cherry session, above.)
Pharoah Sanders had mixed feelings about Pharoah, but “Harvest Time” stands as one of his pinnacle pieces. (An arrangement turns up, supra, on Ethnic Heritage Ensemble’s Spirit Gatherer.)
From the socials: “The vibe here is: Thomas Dolby's "Hyperactive!" if Kraftwerk had just happened to drop by the studio. Good right proper fun from Peter Brewis of @fieldmusicmusic”
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From the socials: “@davidhajdu_ and multiple composers including @hearnedogg, @sksnider, @Theo_Bleckmann [who also sings], and @darcyjamesargue chronicle a single New York building.”
and: “I am entirely charmed by "The Parsonage," from beginning to end. I have taken to imagining it as the original cast recording of a marvelous, closed-too-soon, Off Off Broadway revue.”
In an initial chapter of Kerry O’Brien’s and Will Robin’s On Minimalism, there is an unexpected shout-out to the original early ‘70s version of The Pyramids as a contributing influence to the rise of pulse- and phase-based Minimalist music practiced by the likes of Terry Riley and Steve Reich. The Pyramids of that era were focused on bringing the music of Africa into a serious exploratory jazz framework, inspired by the likes of Cecil Taylor. That version of the band didn’t last past 1977. In the last dozen years or so, founding member and saxophonist Idris Ackamoor has revived the band, issuing a series of albums through the Strut label. The contemporary Pyramids deal in spiritual jazz of the sort pioneered by Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, with a hefty dose of Afro-Futurism, as the title of their latest makes plain. The proto-minimalism has not gone away altogether, however: the first two minutes or so of “Nice It Up” could almost be mistaken for Julius Eastman.
Minimalism is a tradition by now, so why should not some frisky Irish traditional players have a go? I have accumulated many of the available In Cs over time, and this is a particularly sweet addition to that stash.
From the socials: “Semper fiddles, poips, and paradiddles.”
From the socials: “Like tossing the 19th century orchestral tradition into a cement mixer, then siphoning the resulting slurry through through multiple player pianos. The rendition of "E--- N------" on volume 3 of @WildUp's Julius Eastman survey/rampage is a sensation.”
The quality musics of Iceland, plus a super account of Missy Mazzoli’s gorgeous Sinfonia. Just listen: it’s deep as Silfra, where the planetary plates snuggle up the one to the other in the northern night.
From the socials: “Some [@nightafternight] hear Robert Ashley; I hear the chanted opening of "Tales From Topographic Oceans" turned domestic dramedy. Yarn/Wire is involved, so it can't be dull.”
First new music from a reformed WITCH [“We Intend to Create Havoc”] in nearly forty years.
From the socials: “I for one endorse the coming #Zamrock revival, and wish it godspeed.”
Thrilling, as is to be expected, but sadly so as it is the last we will hear from the late jaimie branch.
Like it says here: Mystic Bliss. What, you don’t believe me?
A taut and effective operatic realization of the source material for Rashomon.
Five thoughtful movements for quartet, with the composer at the piano, cross-referring jazz and classical concert hall vocabularies.
Heavy electronics, keening reeds, and Carnatic vocals.
Scots singer-versifier James Yorkston put out Great White Sea Eagle this year, and it is a fine example of his craft, but it is not the release of his that swept into my ken and declined to let it go in 2023. That distinction goes to Wide, Wide River, from 2021. Yorkston’s a bit of a spinner of yarns, so perhaps I should be skeptical of the claim that he flew to Sweden, met the band, played them each song once, then hit the record button, whereupon every note fell into place on the fly, or flew into place on the fell, or whatever, which I suppose would make Wide River a jazz album of sorts. It’s highly enjoyable in any case, crouched low and headed into the wind. Eagle is also a good ‘un.
The other Brewis brother, crooning wittily and wistfully beside the bar in an imagined boîte somewhere.
From the socials: “If Magical Realism has an equivalent in Magical Minimalism, this is it.”
Mariel Roberts continues to find new variants on “cello + electronics,” and these are two fine examples, one hot and one cold.
Anohni’s Rock & Soul Revue.
From the socials: "Field record me like one of your French birds"
From the socials: “In a … vaporous electronic vein, @piesaac and Jen Wang evoke the late Alvin Lucier, time, memory, eggs, achers, and Oscars.”
Period instruments and electronics plumb some of the darker corners of John Dowland. Tears will flow.
I hear tell that shoegaze is all the rage again among the Tik-Tokkers. This is another tasteful exemplar from the reunited Slowdive. Accept no substitutes.
IRCAM and spectralism meet large band jazz.
And thus endeth the List, until we meet again in 2024.
Until then, listen to music, find music that excites you, and support artists by buying their music: that way lies the earthly paradise, if you squint a bit. Music of any kind makes it all better.
~~~
2003 - 2023: good times were had, especially in the first dozen years or so.
Traditional Canadian ballad.
Between this and Brad Mehldau’s 2004 version, “Everything in Its Right Place” is officially a jazz standard now.
Nearly all of the music on the list is available through Bandcamp, which means I can embed a proper player allowing readers to sample the goods. For the few exceptions, I have had to make do with Spotify links, because that seems to be the only streaming service Substack is equipped to display. But for this instance of dire necessity, I disdain and abjure Spotify and all of its evil ways. As with other devils, sometimes they have the best tunes.
There’s another Nicole Mitchell connection here: first I ever encountered Fay Victor was as the voice of Mitchell’s maroon cloud (2018).
The expanded anniversary edition of Invisible DragNot oon does encompass music, by including Hickey’s 1974 essay on Dolly Parton. Ted Gioia posted an excerpt on his Substack, The Honest Broker, back in October: “Dave Hickey on Dolly Parton and Richard Pryor”. Before establishing himself as an arts and culture critic, Hickey spent time as a songwriter in Nashville. I still have my original paperback copy of Invisible Dragon, and I cannot count the number of times in three decades I have plucked it spontaneously off the shelf and dipped in. I need to get myself a copy of the new version, now attractively produced in hard cover.