Daily Drops · Vol.012每日唱片 · Vol.012
A cellist who records in Welsh cabins, an unreleased Chicago legend, and a tabla player building synths in Rome 每日唱片 Vol.012
Joe Henderson — Consonance: Live at the Jazz Showcase
Here is a document of extraordinary restraint. Henderson's quartet, recorded at Joe Segal's Jazz Showcase in Chicago during 1978, traffics in the kind of close listening that rewards only those willing to sit very still. Joanne Brackeen on piano moves through harmonic space with the deliberation of someone examining a room for the first time; Steve Rodby's bass sits underneath like a second conversation happening in an adjacent room. The repertoire mixes Henderson originals with Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and the standard Invitation—not to assert supremacy over these forms, but to suggest how little has actually changed about the logic of good playing since anyone bothered to write any of it down. The original release on Resonance Records arrives as a 180-gram three-LP set, limited, which is the sort of thing people say now when they mean: this is the way we still show respect.
Meitei (冥丁) — Agate / 瑪瑙
The Japanese ambient artist continues the post-Kofū trajectory with seven tracks—some rearranged from that trilogy, others new—which is to say: the work proceeds as a kind of extended conversation with itself. Kelly Hibbert's mastering (he has worked with Flying Lotus and Madlib, which tells you something about how the ambient world has learned to borrow from hip-hop's attention to clarity) ensures that every filter sweep and granulated texture registers with the specificity of a pen mark on paper. There is no lushness here, which is precisely the point. Agate emerges as almost austere in its construction, which somehow makes it feel like watching someone's hands during a very difficult task.
Parlor Greens — Emeralds
Three musicians who have spent their careers making very good supporting decisions—Tim Carman from GA-20, Jimmy James of True Loves, Adam Scone from Sugarman 3—decided to simply sit down at an organ and see what would happen. What happened was eleven tracks of the kind of jazz-funk that suggests the 1970s not as nostalgia but as a living set of decisions about how sound should move. The organ, that underestimated instrument, gets its due here: less Jerry Lee Lewis, more groove as architecture. Gold vinyl, because apparently that is how we signal that something deserves to be played until the needle wears a groove.
Yaya Bey — Fidelity
The Brooklyn R&B artist's second proper outing arrives as a kind of double album alongside her earlier work, comprising sixteen tracks that document loss with the precision of someone who has spent considerable time with grief. Much of this arrives in the shadow of her father's passing—Grand Daddy I.U., a fixture of New York's hip-hop archaeology—and Bey moves through the register with the calm of someone who understands that the audience does not need to be invited to feel anything. Neo-soul, yes, but the term does a disservice: what matters is the specificity of her voice, how it refuses to make sorrow palatably pretty.
Tenille Townes — The Acrobat
Six years elapsed between Townes's previous statement and this one, which she recorded, produced, mixed, played, and wrote entirely herself in isolation—the kind of album that announces its author with the clarity of a fingerprint. Guest appearances materialize in the form of Lori McKenna and members of I'm With Her, but the work remains singular in its vision: a singer-songwriter's record in the precise sense of the term, meaning one person working out the complete logic of a set of songs without intermediaries. Country music that trusts its audience to sit with complexity rather than reach for the nearest metaphor.
Gracie and Rachel — If We Could, Would We
Benjamin Lazar Davis—the careful hand behind Okkervil River's recent refinements and some of Maya Hawke's better work—presided over this indie pop duo's second statement, which marks the first time Rachel has played guitar on one of their records. Twelve tracks emerge as almost studiously anti-obvious in their construction: pop music that refuses the comfortable gestures, that builds its hooks out of harmonic surprise rather than repetition. There is a wit operating here, a sense that making a listener happy and making a listener think are not opposing forces.
Melanie Baker — Somebody Help Me, I'm Being Spontaneous!
A debut from a Newcastle-based musician who recorded this entire affair inside a Welsh countryside cabin, which fact seems almost embarrassingly on-the-nose until you hear the results. Baker approaches indie rock—the 1990s kind, before the category calcified into a identity marker—with an absurdist's eye for the ridiculous. Queer perspective woven through alt-rock's conventional poses. There is something liberating about watching a musician treat a form with the seriousness it deserves while simultaneously refusing to take any of it seriously.
Matteo Scaioli / Harmograph — Harmograph
Rome-based artist Matteo Scaioli has built his own synthesis instruments and paired them with tabla for the debut release on Donato Dozzy and Neel's new imprint—a detail worth mentioning because it suggests where the ambient world is turning its attention. Three extended tracks, thirty-five minutes total, operating in that strange space where electronic music and acoustic percussion seem to occupy the same harmonic plane. The work moves with the patience of someone entirely uninterested in arrival, which, in ambient music, is very nearly the whole point.