For the Record: December 13, 2024.
Joel Harrison takes a compelling detour from his adventurous six-string canon—plus more new arrivals and upcoming releases.
For the Record rounds up details about new and pending recordings of interest to the new-music community: contemporary classical music and jazz, electronic and electroacoustic music, and idioms for which no clever genre name has been coined, on CD, vinyl LP, cassette, digital-only formats… you name it.
This list of release dates is culled from press releases, Amazon, Bandcamp, and other internet stores and sources, social-media posts, and online resources such as Discogs. Dates cited typically correspond to initial U.S. release, and are subject to change. (Links to Amazon, used when all else fails, do not imply endorsement.)
These listings are not comprehensive—nor could they be! If you’d like to submit a forthcoming recording for consideration, please email information to nightafternight@icloud.com. (Streams and downloads preferred.)
All opinions expressed herein are solely my own, and do not reflect the views of my employer.
Topspin.
People ask me sometimes how I manage to keep up with the amount of data I juggle for the two weekly newsletters I try to produce every week. One part of the answer is strict organization involving an elaborate system of email folders, so that when I put out a Friday list of new and upcoming recordings, it only contains titles released after the previous Friday.
But sometimes things fall between the cracks, especially as artists are increasingly forced to handle their own P.R outreach. It’s good to stop once in a while and take stock of things that eluded my self-imposed deadlines.
It’s not every day that a prominent jazz guitarist issues a recording of a string quartet. Then again, Joel Harrison is no everyday prominent jazz guitarist.
I’ve admired Harrison’s range and eclecticism ever since I first got to know his work close to 30 years ago, when I heard in swift succession 3+3=7, a punky phalanx of guitarists and drummers including Alex and Nels Cline and Scott Amendola, and a demo tape of Range of Motion, an lush yet kinetic octet session featuring Paul McCandless on winds, Paul Hanson on bassoon, and Dred Scott at the piano. (I’m not formally credited on the Koch Jazz CD release of Range of Motion, but had a large part in manifesting that incarnation into being.)
Since then, Harrison has covered an even broader range of terrain: from Free Country, an elastic interpretation of roots and country tunes with singers Norah Jones and Jen Chapin, to The Music of Paul Motian, a drummerless string choir celebration of the titular drummer’s canon.
The latter release was issued by Sunnyside, which has documented some of Harrison’s most ambitious projects: Search, a septet session on which canonical pieces by the Allman Brothers Band and Olivier Messiaen nestle side-by-side, and two remarkable large-scale suites for jazz orchestra, Infinite Possibility and America at War. On The Wheel, issued by Innova, Harrison augmented a jazz quintet with a string quartet.
He stretched further still on his own label, AGS – as in Alternative Guitar Summit, the gathering of venturesome guitarists he’s convened regularly since 2010 – with The Stardust Reunion Band, a funky, soulful session with four vocalists, interpreting material steeped in classic R&B and gospel sounds.
Taking that vast range of expertise and expression into account, Harrison’s String Quartet No. 1, recorded by Mivos Quartet in 2017 and newly issued by AGS on Nov. 29, should come as no surprise. But it’s still mighty impressive, and worth your attention no matter what musical camp you feel aligned with.
Each of the four movements pays tribute an individual who changed the world in a way meaningful to Harrison. The muscular first movement honors Native American rights activist Russell Means, with whom Harrison spent time at Yellow Thunder Camp. The second movement, fitful and mysterious, is dedicated to Jimmy Santiago Baca, a Chicano author, poet, and essayist “whose work,” Harrison relates, “addresses human rights, incarceration, and the human condition at large.”
Bill Monroe, the iconic bluegrass musician, is the dedicatee of a frisky third movement that alludes respectfully to roots-music sounds without flirting with kitsch. The insistent repetitions that start the fourth movement initially recall White Man Sleeps #1 by Kevin Volans, but only briefly; the music, dedicated to Ken Kesey, evolves from bliss to boogie and back again.
The Mivos lineup at the time of this recording included Olivia De Prato and Lauren Cauley on violins, Victor Lowrie Tafoya on violin, and Mariel Roberts on cello. (Cauley and Roberts have since departed.) They play with enviable precision, cohesion, and style, their work beautifully captured by Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio, and mastered by the redoubtable Henry Kaiser.
The recording is a download-only release, at least for now—and it’s absolutely worth taking the time to investigate.
Bonus tracks.
Released earlier this week – and thus not covered late at all – The Afterlife Is Letting Go is an astonishingly beautiful set by Patrick Shiroishi, an artist whose work has nourished my soul consistently for the past several years. Issued by Touch, the brief album includes two melancholy 11-minute tone poems primarily for string and synth sounds. The music is inspired by writer and poet Brandon Shimoda, and meant to serve as a kind of soundtrack for Shimoda’s new book of the same title, described as exploring “the ‘afterlife’ of the U.S. government’s forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII.” You’ll lose your breath when Yumi Taguchi Schumaier Shimoda recites at the end of the first piece: “…there’s mushrooms growing out of my family tree…”
Issued Nov. 28 on First Visit Archive, the latest venture from Hat Hut founder Werner X. Uehlinger, Live Lugano 1984, First Visit documents a Steve Lacy concert with an offbeat combo: a trio with Barry Wedgle on guitar and Jean-Jacques Avenel on bass. Lacy as ever is sui generis, with Avenel a seasoned partner; Wedgle, previously unknown to me, moves nimbly from inside to outside and back again.
New this week.
December 13
Sophie Agnel, Michael Zerang - Draw Bridge (Relative Pitch)
Luciana Bass - Desatornillándonos (Relative Pitch)
Chris Brown/Ben Davis/Zeena Parkins/William Winant - Scree (Relative Pitch)
Don Brown & Dan Reynolds - Live at the Grange Hall [unauthorized] (Sacred Realism)
Dominic Coles - Alphabets 2 (Superpang)
Paul Dunmall Quartet - Here Today Gone Tomorrow (RogueArt)
ES Trio - The Foreign in Us (Relative Pitch)
Luc Ferrari - Complete Works 10 (Maison ONA)
Malcolm Galloway - Metazoa (self-released)
Michael Gordon - The Showdown - Theatre of Voices/Paul Hillier (Cantaloupe Music)
Kafuka’s Ibuki (Jim O’Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto) - Shiminkai / 嗜眠会 (Newhere Music)
David Lang - poor hymnal - The Crossing/Donald Nally (Cantaloupe Music)
Nicola Miller - Living Things (Cacophonous Revival)
N O Moore + Eddie Prévost - Scratched Earth (scatterArchive)
Klaus Ospald - Escribí - performances by Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Teodoro Anzellotti, Edicson Ruiz, WDR Sinfonieorchester, and Ensemble Modern (bastille musique)
Chuck Roth - Document 1 (Relative Pitch)
Rubbish Music - The 750-kilogram snake of destruction fatberg (Flaming Pines)
Patrick Shiroishi - The Afterlife Is Letting Go (Touch)
Spencer Zahn - Statues Live (Leaving)
David Zucchi - Mandi (people|places|records)
Upcoming releases.
January 10
Thea Farhadian - Tattoos and Other Markings (Other Minds)
January 24
Kate Carr and Matt Atkins - Organelles (Flaming Pines)
Gloria Cheng - Root Progressions - compositions by Anthony Davis, Jon Jang, James Newton, Arturo O’Farrill, Linda May Han Oh, and Gernot Wolfgang (Biophilia)
January 31
Jeong Lim Yang - Synchronicity (Sunnyside)
February 7
Max Andrzejewski - Summen - Ensemble Resonanz (SN Variations)
Gyan Riley - Winter Sun (self-released)
February 14
Peter Brötzmann/John Edwards/Steve Noble/Jason Adasiewicz - The Quartet (Otoroku)
Stephen Davis Unit - The Gleaming World (577 Records)
Lei Liang - Dui - performances by Maya Beiser, Wu Man, Steven Schick, Cho-Liang Lin, Zhe Lin, Mark Dresser, and loadbang (Islandia)
February 20
Julek ploski - Give Up Channel (Mappa)
February 28
Reiko Füting - distant: violin. sound - performances by Miranda Cuckson, Doori Na, Jing Yang, Longleash, Unheard-of//Ensemble, Quartet121, Noise Catalogue, and SchallSpektrum (New Focus)
Mystery Sonata (Mina Gajić & Zachary Carrettin) - Aequora - compositions by Maria Huld Markan Sigfusdottir, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Daníel Bjarnason, and Pall Ragnar Palsson (Sono Luminus)
Anna Thorvaldsdottir - UBIQUE - Claire Chase, Cory Smythe, Katinka Kleijn, Seth Parker Woods (Sono Luminus)
March 4
Dennis Egberth - The Dennis Egberth Dynasty (577 Records)
March 14
Sean Hickey - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Vladimir Rumyantsev (Sono Luminus)
Steve Reich - Collected Works (Nonesuch; 27CD box including first recordings of Jacob’s Ladder and Traveler’s Prayer)
Find many more upcoming releases in For the Record: The Master List, here.
Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.