International Anthem: S/D

i could use some achingly beautiful today; queuing up now.

Oh, the dePlume is really nice!

Yes enjoyed it on a short flight yesterday

Another vote for the deplume here finished it and immediately restarted it for a second listen thru critical and kind music at this moment

yeah, it's great.

Good god damn this DePlume record is absolutely beautiful.

Thanks for the reminder -- I checked out the DePlume today, and it is wonderful. It has a slight Getatchew Mekurya vibe.

yah, that is right. really a great album, thanks for hipping me to it.

That Alabaster DePlume record is exactly what I needed right now, thank you

"Not My Ask" brings me to tears

Praise for Recent Non-Album Track "Homeless/Global"https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/homeless-global

this is so good rn

Alabaster DePlume = ILM record of the year 2020, calling it now

icymi, rob made a thread for it:

thread of rapturous appreciation for Alabaster DePlume

Interview w Angel https://thequietus.com/articles/28498-angel-bat-dawid-emma-warren-interview-total-refreshment-centre-transition-east

I am two tracks into the new Makaya McCraven (Universal Beings E&F Sides) and it is FYAH

Loving this one

posted unwatched but excited to see this short makaya bio doc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9t86fAuz5s

okay, watched; really great and helpful in understanding his process.

Interested in seeing that. New album is decent but I don't think it's as good as Universal Beings. Some good grooves, though; I can see why it would appeal to Jordan.

Universal Beings continues to be my most reliably enjoyable album of quarantine. Works for anything. I know it gets a lot of love but if anything I think it's underrated. Like, why isn't this guy on tv?

I wonder if the Jaimie Branch agnostics itt have heard the Anteloper stuff with Jason Nazary. It definitely converted me. Great stuff

i do feel like the crossover with makaya and say, the herbie hancock/robert glasper/kamasi washington crowd seems natural and it's either a matter of time for him to break bigger or it's just a sign that he's not interested in pursuing a broader audience.

Again, that doc is great; anyone even a little into makaya should watch it.
Turns out his mother is a lead member of Kolinda (pictured, i think, on this youtube thumbnail on the right)!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46C4F7XmYLg

Will check doc, thanks. He was featured on Jazz Night In America not too long ago, should be in their archive. Also in that good recent UK comp Kaleidoscope, which is on YouTube, also w some Brits on https://totalrefreshmentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/makaya-mccraven-where-we-come-from-chicagoxlondon-mixtape A bunch of other stuff on bandcamp I haven't listened to yet, but digging this: https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/universal-beings-e-f-sides. And def. Gil Scott-Heron's We're New Here: A Reimagining by Makaya McCraven, as I carried on about over on What Are You Listening To? 2020:
Still haven't heard the original album, or Jamie xx's reworking, but the unmistakable sound and sensibility of classic Gil come through: sharp, reflective glints in the dark, rough-edged a fluid, lyrical and realist, searching and on point, thematic and grooving---jazzwise, yet "blues is a feeling" the overall. Only thing is, some of the originals are really short, like down to 37 seconds: golden kernels of potential and realization---McCraven is def. not showboating, but I wish he extended these--maybe he was required to stick to the original track times? I'd like a bit more---Laswell redoing Marley and Miles? Anyway, it's all good, though faves are mostly because they have longer to make an impression: "New York is Killing Me," "I'll Take Care of You," "Me and the Devil"--yes, Scott-Heron and Robert Johnson and Mr. D. on the Greyhound, seems natural. Speaking voice is worn but clear, singing voice not that different from 1970s.

―

That Where We Come From set is maybe my favorite McCraven thing; you can get it on IA's Bandcamp page (I have the CD):

https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/where-we-come-from-chicagoxlondon-mixtape

Can’t wait to hear the new Angel & the Brothahood live album, the backstory is grim but I loved the part about how she sat down at the hotel piano and went off on the guy who told her not to play.

https://pitchfork.com/news/angel-bat-dawid-and-tha-brothahood-release-new-live-album-listen/

^I still haven't gotten to that, but I just listened to Rob Mazurek/Exploding Star Orchestra's "Dimensional Stardust" and really loved it: https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/dimensional-stardust

Her live album is REALLY good, would recommend with the caveat that it's pretty heavy!

It's emotionally a lot to take - not something you're gonna want to listen to every day. But yeah, it's great stuff.

I'm on track 5 of the Mazurek now and am really liking it so far.

It took a few listens to absorb, but I'm now quite taken with the shimmery Chicago Waves by Carlos Niño and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. It's much much more new age/ambient than jazz, probably closest to the De Plume record than anything else on the label that I've heard, though it doesn't pierce your heart with melodies like AdP. Maybe some day I can listen to it while strolling through an aquarium (perhaps Shedd...sigh).

As that recommendation maybe implies, I still haven't gotten into the mental space to try the new Dawid

I worked yesterday afternoon in front of a fire with the Exploding Star Orchestra album on and it was very nice.

There's a new Damon Locks/Black Monument Ensemble album coming in April: https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/now

the first track is really beautiful (recorded live & outside last summer -- you can hear the cicadas)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQLGNOCb6ZM

I love that. The video is very cool as well.

The whole album is amazing. I said on Twitter that it's like a combination of SAULT, an Adam Curtis documentary, and Archie Shepp's Attica Blues.

Will be pre-ordering this for sure. A little surprised the physical edition isn't out until July though, shit must really be getting backed up.

I've only seen like 10 mins of a Curtis doc but I am intrigued by that description

Well this totally rules—deserves its own thread really, but I'm annoyingly busy today

fyi Sons of Kemet fans should get on this immediately

This = Damon Locks and Black Monument Ensemble? It's great. Wish there was a little less spoken parts, but I get that's an essential part of what their doing.

was a little less = were fewer, jesus

yes that's the one!

Since we have some deathly allergic-to-spoken-word jazz fans around here, I think it's fair to note that, aiui, most of the "spoken parts" are samples not slam poetry, giving the whole thing something of Madlib/sound collage quality (I assume this is what unperson meant by referencing Adam Curtis). Still might not be your cup of tea, but it's a different vibe from some of the declamatory contemporary jazz that I know rubs some the wrong way

Yeah I like the Damon Locks album a lot. The first and last tracks in particular.

Been enjoying it

Went to see Jaimie Branch & her fantastic band blow the roof off last night -- it was my first show post-pandemic and I may have been primed to enjoy it regardless but I LOVED IT. I loved everything about the performance -- the band's chemistry, the energy, the music itself, interaction with audience, guest players!, her performance style. If you have a chance to see her, don't miss it. I think the band is on tour?

Yeah, I've been getting that experience, as much as possible online, from listening to their live album:
https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/fly-or-die-live

I am not super familiar with Angel Bat Dawid's work, does she always use autotuned vocals so extensively, like on this?

https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/hush-harbor-mixtape-vol-1-doxology

She uses a lot of different vocal techniques/ways of singing and/or vocalizing -- that's just one thing she does ime. Not broadly representative of her vocal style.

thanks!

PERFORMING AT BASILICA SOUNDSCAPE 2021

“Like a blossom emerging from between the floorboards of a slaughterhouse, Moor Mother’s music is an act of transcending a violent, intolerable present.” - The Fader

Today Moor Mother – aka Camae Ayewa – is announcing her new album ‘Black Encylcopedia Of The Air’, thirteen mesmerizing tracks about memory and imprinting and the future, all of them wafting through untouched space like the ghostly cinders of a world on fire, unbound and uncharted, vast and stretching across the universe.

On the new single “Obsidian”, Moor Mother says the song is about present danger - “thinking about one's proximity to violence. Thinking about violence in the home. Violence in communities." Featuring rapper Pink Siifu, listen and watch the song’s new video here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fovnxpu10EA.

from Rolling Jazz:

More Energy Fields, Current
by Carlos Niño & Friends
Tagged in label notes as 10 pristine gems of collaborative communication helmed by the Southern Californian sage, elegantly presented in his unique “Spiritual, Improvisational, Space Collage” style. And sounds like the improvisational part might feed and respond to the Space Collage: it's more jazz than set piece, like the tracks, never too long, might be scooping up something along the way, lighting in the bottle and vice-versa. Wonder if they play live, with loops, maybe? (I imme

Listening on headphones, I keep getting aerial glimpses of the Pacific Coast Highway, interspersed w more time in little caves and coves: an intimate, though airy, small group sound, always incl. Niño (percussion, sound design, editing, mixing) and I think always Jamael Dean on keys, with others sometims on drums, tenor and/or flute, synths, and voices (on one track: wordless ones, don't worry, of Laraaji and Sharada). Shabaka Hutchings, Dntel, Adam Rudolph, Aaron Shaw, a bunch of others, coming in and moving on, at least for a while, never too many at once.

First one to command my attention was "Nightswimming," then so many of the others that I gave up on linking a favorite in addition to the whole thing:
https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/more-energy-fields-current

― dow, Monday, May 31, 2021 4:57 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Niño’s previous album on IA, Chicago Waves, is live if you’re curious! I think I described it as more like ambient/new age than jazz on the IA thread but I liked it a lot

― rob, Monday, May 31, 2021 5:08 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Will check, thanks! Ambient/New Age usually puts me right to sleep, but this got me more awake.
Also, this one has *kind* of a DePlume vibe, or related appeal,anyway, but maybe earlier in the day or evening, and a little more spare?
https://alabasterdeplume.bandcamp.com/
- dow

also from RJ:
omg Dedicated to Saint Escrava Anastacia.
credits
released June 19, 2021

All instruments, vocalz, and synths performed, produced, recorded, arranged & mixed By Angel Bat Dawid.
https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/hush-harbor-mixtape-vol-1-doxology
First encounter w this, and don't know of course if it will seem as amazing now that I know what to expect (nothing like what I did expect from several titles, which is prob the point), but so far it's immediately compelling, often beguiling, with an eerie, tranquil intensity, and some shifting surfaces and perimeters (for inst, what's happening to the vocals going around the room---"I know I should be grateful"---in " 'Goree,' or Slave - Stick"---we also get the improbably redemption of overt Auto Tune sometimes, or maybe keys, emphasizing the inflection (of male group vocals? Or herself treated?) that suggests a African-Hebraic-Isalmic chain, rattling a little (the clarinet encourages this). One of the most affecting tracks is her untreated, a capella , "Bet"--followed, in a plausible way, by a calmly killer finale trilogy. None of this is an onslaught of sounds though; each room is only as full as need be. Seems like a rec to fans of adventurously historical clarinetists John Carter and Matana Roberts (her Coin Coin series, and maybe all of his Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music, although the album from that I'm thinking of, and most familiar with, is Fields).

― dow,

This is really fun, thanks LL! Her voice reminds me of someone. I want to say Liz Fraser?

Always I am mixing up this label with the very different but equally good Imaginational Anthem label.