I originally intended this to be part of an end of the year message I wrote for my soon to be defunct TinyLetter newsletter. Instead, TinyLetter inexplicably flagged my account for abuse and refused to send it. I’ve reworked and expanded it for this format. A few self-promotional notes are at the end.
Not A Top Ten List
Here are a few things, music and otherwise, that I enjoyed this year that you may enjoy too, or that challenged me in ways that I found rewarding, or at least revelatory in some way - which if I’m being frank, is the real theme of this year. Because it was a challenging year that required facing reality in ways I never had to do before. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. We’re seeing the deadly results from clinging to old ways of thinking every day. So these are some of the things that made me think, not tune out or retreat into my own comfort zone (maybe except for the last one), which is not far away from saying prejudice or brainwashing. You may not agree with some (or any) of them, and honestly I don’t agree with all of them either, but they made me think… and that’s the first step.
BlankFor.ms/Jason Moran/Marcus Gilmore - “Refract” (Red Hook)
Tyler Gilmore aka BlankFor.ms studied with me at NEC and Jason Moran is my colleague and friend, and I generally hesitate to write about music by people I know, but this is a special case. If Jason’s exquisite solo release from 2021 The Sound Will Tell You, besides being one of the most poignant expressions of what the mid-pandemic felt like, also pointed towards some really radical new ideas of how an improvising pianist could work with electronics, “Refract” is a kaleidoscopic expansion of those potentialities. And an inversion - Jason and Marcus didn’t _play with_ the electronics. Tyler wrote music for Jason and Marcus and then processed the duo recordings into something so rich and mercurial it challenges the basic idea of what it means to “play” a piece of music. If you think that’s relevant to my own work (see my brief self-promotional note below), you’re right. In the last few years Tyler has been one of my biggest inspirations and a crucial ally. If you want to know the state of the art of music that challenges and revels in ideas like composition, improvisation, jazz, and electronic music - check this out.
Derek Bailey & Paul Motian - “Duo In Concert” (Frozen Reeds)
Speaking of challenging ideas of improvisation - one of the things I struggled with most on a musical level this year was reconciling my students’ drive to play free improvisation with my own frustration with the idea of playing free improvisation. See- I don’t even know how to write the term anymore. Do we “free improvise,” “improvise freely,” or do we “play a free improvisation?” Or something else? Regardless of the problematics of even starting the conversation about it, I have struggled to enjoy the discrete musical practice called “free improvisation” for a long time, both as a player and as a listener. But of course it turned out I was just listening to the wrong stuff. As always, what makes improvised music rewarding isn’t the fact that it’s improvised, it’s that when certain people do it - and it’s a short list, much shorter than we really want to admit - it does something that no other music can do. Whatever that something is, it’s unique to those people in that situation. You can hear that on this incredible archival set from the early 90’s, as these two masters feel each other out and struggle to find common ground in gloriously idiosyncratic ways. In the long main piece from Groningen, they don’t know what to do with each other, which is fine. It’s enough to hear them being themselves together, as if they’re practicing different pieces simultaneously on the same stage, constantly giving up and starting fresh. It takes 23 minutes for them to get it together - for a while. But it’s about the journey not the destination, as they say about something else I forget. So far I’ve found the NYC track to be unlistenable for sonic reasons (sorry Jim) but maybe you’re more accepting. I’m sure I’ll get it eventually.
Claire M. Singer - “Saor” (Touch)
There’s a lot of so-called experimental pipe organ music out there these days (really there is!), and to me this is the best of the best. As a non-Christian, the evocation of the church is lost on me and even alienating in some other examples of the subgenre. But I’m also an Alvin Lucier student who long ago perceived that the interactions of sound waves could potentially reveal something about the inner workings of the universe. Singer uses the church’s resonant space and pipe organ to make Lucier’s research ecstatic. In the guise of a harmonic and formal language that would be legible to Hans Zimmer fans as well as Radigue-lovers, pitch and rhythm collapse into each other and then unfurl on microscopic and monumental scales. Like meditation, you have to carve out space in your day for Singer’s music, but also like meditation, listening to Saor is both a balm and a challenge. It goes even deeper than her previous records, sometimes even into a broken Big Muff-like fuzz zone whose frequency/rhythm/texture/space fuckery I found particularly revelatory in light of the rest of the music’s multidimensional acousticness.
Edan Lepucki - “Time’s Mouth” (Counterpoint Press)
Early this year, I felt a rare pang of generational solidarity when I read Zadie Smith’s essay on the odious film Tàr, in which she wrote, “I have this sense that every generation has about two or three great ideas and a dozen or so terrible ones. For example, Gen X nudged forward the good idea that men should be encouraged to be fully involved in the raising of their own children.” I felt that pang even more deeply while reading Time’s Mouth, which agrees with Smith in spectacularly psychedelic, but also clear headed fashion. I’ve enjoyed all of Lepucki’s novels, especially California, her post-apocalyptic tale of a young married couple, and I think her appeal, besides her incredibly deft handling of structure and the deceptively breezy flow of her sentences, is that to me, she’s the novelist who most precisely captures some of the dynamics of Gen X family life as I have experienced it. Time’s Mouth looks at the exploded late 20th century family from a few skewed angles, and as a child of Boomers who made some… let’s just say unconventional life choices in the late 60’s/early 70’s, it resonated with me. Though motherhood is an obvious main theme, this is also the most empathetic depiction of fatherhood I think I have ever read.
Andre 3000 - “New Blue Sun” (Epic)
For a little over a week this fall, thanks to André 3000, or more precisely, Epic records’s PR squad, “experimental music” dislodged Taylor Swift from her near-total domination of High Profile Music Discourse. As a dutiful inhabitant of a distant edge of the music mediasphere, I listened to NBS all the way through twice - and I hated it. But I don’t hate André. In fact, I also listened all the way through to a couple of long interviews with him, and in OutKast’s prime I never imagined I would say this, but I think André and I have a lot in common. We’re around the same age, we both started making music in public when we were very young, and now that we’re middle aged we don’t want to do things the same way we did twenty five years ago. When André talks about that, I find it genuinely moving to hear an artist speak so candidly about his responsibility to his fans and to his own creative drive, and when he plays the flute, like at the end of the incredibly heartfelt interview he did with Touré, it sounds pretty damn good. Unfortunately, the people who enabled Andre to make NBS embedded his flute vibes in the modern “fuck around in the computer and don’t find out” version of experimental music, the post-Afrofuturist aesthetic that doesn’t actually listen to electric Miles or Sun Ra but copies their cover artwork and clothes and wraps a vague sense of their techniques (edited studio improvisations, modal vamps, tape echo, synths, lo-fi sound) in an Instagram-friendly package. It’s tempting to say that they’re Bannons to André’s Trump, manipulators taking advantage of a celebrity to advance a set of marginal ideas in the mainstream discourse. But that would be mean - they’re just musicians trying to keep doing what they do in a harsh new world like everyone else and who know a good thing when they run into him at Erewhon. Meanwhile lots and lots of people heard NBS, hated it (like me) and now think they hate “experimental music.” If only he’d linked up with Roscoe Mitchell or Matana Roberts or even someone with a three dimensional electro-jazz-hip hop aesthetic like BlankFor.ms. If André and Tyler made a 40 minute long record of solo flute interspersed with inspirational talk, I bet it would be magical.
Naomi Klein - “Doppelganger” (Macmillan)
I remember Klein’s books getting passed around in various vans when I was on tour twenty-odd years ago, but it took me until 2023 to actually read one - and when October 7 happened right afterwards, I was extremely glad I did. Though the whole book, an intricate, personal de-interlacing of identity, emotion and politics in the internet/Trump/COVID era, is worth spending time with, the last chapter, on Judaism and Zionism, hit me hardest. I know some people reading this will not agree, and will probably think less of me for saying it, but for a long time the actions of the Israeli state, and its knee-jerk acceptance and support by the congregations I have been in, have made me struggle to take part in Jewish life on any level. Obviously I’m not in favor of the atrocities Hamas committed on Oct 7, and I believe Israel is a real place full of real people who _all_ deserve to live in peace, but I’m also not in favor of the perpetuation of a theocratic ethnostate no matter who is running it, especially not the openly incompetent, delusional, fascistic people running it into the ground right now. Klein’s writing showed me that there are other Jewish people who think the way I do - and that there could be a vision of Judaism and maybe even Israel/Palestine that embraces ideals like peace and justice for all humanity. You can hear her speak about Oct 7 and everything that has happened since on this recent podcast.
Barbra Streisand - “My Name Is Barbra” audiobook (Penguin Random House but actually Sp0tify)
This is awkward since I’ve only listened to 13% of it, but speaking of Judaism- inspired by Rachel Syme’s virtuosic review in the New Yorker, and since the evil streaming corporation’s recent foray into audiobooks made it free and effortless to access on my phone while cooking dinner, I pressed play on this 48 hour long odyssey and I am so glad I did. Think of it less as a celebrity memoir and more as an epic durational sound work - a Jewish elder from Brooklyn spinning a seemingly endless yarn about midcentury American show business while constantly digressing into mega-detailed commentary on her favorite foods (Swanson’s fried chicken tv dinners are discussed at least twice so far), clothes (Babs loves vintage) and decor (you can do a lot with antique picture frames). It’s like being trapped at a table with someone else’s aunt telling their entire family history at a wedding reception that never ends, but in a fun way. I can’t stand the way she sings (or acts), but in a time when so much seems to be falling apart, it turns out I do love to hear her talk. And by way of wishing you all the best for the year to come, I’d like to quote my friend and fellow Babs listener Suzanne Kapa Taub paraphrasing one of Barbra’s best lines: “May your offices be more than a payphone on 53rd Street and a roll of dimes!”
still from Julie Mallozzi’s untitled altered states film
Coming in 2024
I recorded two new albums of approximately electronic music this year. The first, which will be released on digital and cassette by the Puremagnetik label in (fingers crossed) February, is vie en rose for piano, synthesizers and tape, with a guest appearance by my old friend Eric Gorfain playing violin and piano (incidentally Eric was writing and conducting orchestral arrangements for both Dr. Dre and Def Leppard at the time we were collaborating). I sampled and processed cassettes of my own piano playing to create a sort of Phillip Guston-like dream tableau of melody and noise. It’s the most “playing”-oriented thing I’ve done in a while and one of the least - if that makes any sense. It’s electronic music that is played, constructed, and generated in as “live” a way as possible - sometimes all at the same time. I would play piano live into a mono cassette machine, then rework those recordings by playing them again as samples and processing, and then again through dub-style mixing.
The second is the follow-up to Orgelwerke, released earlier this year on the organ-focussed Touch sublabel Spire. No pipe organs this time. This new record (the title is currently in flux) is made out of samples of bad, touristy records from Austria, Hungary and Romania - the kind of records your grandparents might have bought after taking a cruise down the Danube in 1962 - Tyrolean zithers, third rate Roma bands, ultra-schmaltzy pop vocalists. But this is not a kitschy collage. As I chopped micro-samples out of these records and put them through a complex series of transformations both inside and outside the computer, I discovered that when I listened very closely to them, they turned into something strangely luminous and powerful. It was almost like I discovered a process that could turn this garbage vinyl into something with the ecstatic gravity of an Alice Coltrane record. Of course it didn’t work - but I think the result is pretty interesting anyway. Thankfully the good people at Touch agree. Hopefully it will be on CD and streaming by the end of 2024.
I am currently scoring a beautiful feature length documentary by Julie Mallozzi about the therapeutic uses of altered states of consciousness. This is one of the most wide-ranging and lyrical films I’ve ever scored, including indigenous mushroom rituals in deep rural Mexico, hypnosis, Buddhist meditation, and sensory deprivation tanks (shown above in a still from the film) among other practices. Julie assigned me the task of unifying those practices and guiding the viewer into their own trance-like state.
Arthur Musah’s Brief Tender Light, which I scored earlier this year, is wrapping up an award-winning festival run and will premiere on PBS as part of the POV series on January 15. This doc follows four young people from Africa through their undergraduate educations at MIT, facing joys and struggles and ultimately achieving incredible things. Arthur is originally from Ghana and an MIT alum, and his own journey, including his activism against Ghana’s horrifying anti-LGBTQ laws, is part of the story as well. It’s extremely rare for me to work on something so heartwarming - and I hope you’ll seek it out on TV or streaming.