For the Record: Jan. 19, 2024.
Saxophonist, bandleader, and composer Peter Gordon comes on strong with a new label, plus listings for just arrived 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! To submit a forthcoming recording for consideration, email information to nightafternight@icloud.com.
All opinions expressed herein are solely my own, and do not express the views of any employer.
The lead-in.
There’s a sale going on throughout this weekend at the venerable American indie label New World Records, also incorporating the similarly crucial catalog of Composers Recordings Inc. (CRI). New World is shuttering its Brooklyn offices and moving to Albany, but before it does, it’s trying to blow out some stock in need of relocation—and it’s all too happy to relocate some of it to you. So for the next few days, on the New World website as well as the Bandcamp pages for New World and CRI, use the code SOLONGDUMBO to get 25% off both physical and digital releases. From Muhal Richard Abrams to Peter Zummo, there’s something here for everyone… so if you’ve put off buying TESTAMENT, the label’s monumental Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris box set, or Unjust Malaise, the Julius Eastman collection that changed the world on its arrival in 2005, act now.
I first became aware of Peter Gordon, a protean saxophonist, bandleader, and composer active in NYC’s downtown music scene since the late 1970s, through the two LPs of his music issued by CBS Masterworks during the late ’80s, Innocent and Brooklyn. The classical division at CBS was issuing Philip Glass albums at the time, and Tim Berne was making jazz records for Columbia. That was enough to make me buy Gordon’s albums knowing nothing about him. (Like Berne, Gordon came to CBS via the multifarious guitarist and producer Gary Lucas.)
Some of what I didn’t know: Gordon, a native New Yorker, had soaked up jazz records as a kid, and befriended Captain Beefheart as a high schooler. He studied composition with Kenneth Gaburo and Roger Reynolds in San Diego, and then with Terry Riley and Robert Ashley at Mills College. He was intimately involved in the making of Ashley’s trailblazing TV opera, Perfect Lives, and its Spanish-language remake, Vidas Perfectas.
On returning to New York, he and percussionist David Van Tieghem co-founded the Love of Life Orchestra (or LoLO), whose ranks included Arthur Russell, Rhys Chatham, and the abovementioned Peter Zummo. Beyond his musical peers, Gordon collaborated with a constellation of elite creators, including writer Kathy Acker, director Richard Foreman, artist Keith Haring, and choreographers Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, and composed award-winning music for theater.
Innocent, his first CBS album, features a jaw-dropping lineup of talent: Russell, Zummo, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Lenny Pickett, Cars guitarist Elliot Easton, Tony Levin, future Bob Dylan bassist Tony Garnier, the list goes on and on. Nestled among Gordon’s brainy, funky originals is an inspired cover of Laurie Anderson’s “The Day the Devil Comes to Getcha” featuring the Five Blind Boys of Alabama on vocals—locating his work somewhere in the same zip code as similarly eclectic projects from Hal Willner, Bill Laswell, and Was (Not Was).
Despite its surface sheen and pop-oriented gestures – and perhaps accounting for those attributes, too – Gordon envisioned LoLO as a “populist idea,” as he elaborated in a 2014 interview with WUOG-FM in Athens, GA:
I wanted to create original music that performers coming from a wide range of experience could play. Some band members were classically oriented, others came from jazz and rock; some were self-taught, others highly trained. Some were primarily musicians, others were artist and/or writers. I used vernacular music (jazz, rock, funk) as a means to address more experimental concepts. And all the while, the music needed to have a good beat for dancing.
By the late ’90s, Gordon had slipped off the radar; he left New York for Santa Fe and Los Angeles, and focused on composition. But a nearly two-decade drought on record finally ended in 2005, when Foom issued Gordon’s Symphony No. 5. LCD Soundsystem’s Pat Mahoney and James Murphy lent momentum to Gordon’s return by framing their FabricLive.36 mixtape with Love of Life Orchestra cuts, followed with a CD anthology, Peter Gordon & Love of Life Orchestra, in 2010. Eighteen, a new album of original LoLO charts, came in 2018.
Now, Gordon’s upping the ante with a new label, Adjacent Records, launched quietly just over a week ago with a seductive single by Gordon with Italian pop trio Ferraniacolor, “Eunice.” Now, there’s a new full-length release, Piety Street Adjacent, recorded by Mark Bingham at Piety Street Studio in New Orleans. It’s credited to Love of Life Orchestra, but in reality features a quartet of Gordon on saxophones, synths, and samplers with guitarist Karel Winton, Jon Gross on sousaphone, and the late Kevin O’Day on drums.
The music is whip-smart and funky at once – you’re sure to chuckle at what Gordon does with the finale from Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony – and the band somehow manages to sound loose and tight at the same time. It’s the kind of group you’d want to hear on a bill with Steven Bernstein’s Sex Mob.
Piety Street Adjacent is available now on Bandcamp, and hits streaming platforms next week. Further releases from Adjacent will include Live at Tonic, with a LoLO lineup featuring the aforementioned Pickett, Zummo, and Bernstein; Finding Hope in the Beauty of Our Differences, a solo piano set; and Live at the Mudd Club 1979 by Blue Horn File, a trio of Gordon and Van Tieghem with Laurie Anderson.
All told, it’s a great time to get to know Gordon a whole lot better.
New this week.
Tim Berne’s Sunny Five - Candid (Intakt)
Yu-Hui Chang - Mind Like Water - performances by Rhonda Rider, Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, Composers Conference Ensemble, and Lydian String Quartet (New Focus)
Nikolaus Gerszewski - 3 Works for Strings - Giusto Chamber Orchestra (Now-ezz-thetics)
Philip Glass - Philip Glass Solo (Orange Mountain Music; streaming now on Apple Music, available via Bandcamp Jan. 26)
Peter Gordon & Love of Life Orchestra - Piety Street Adjacent (Adjacent)
Keiji Haino/Jim O’Rourke/Oren Ambarchi - With pats on the head, just one too few is evil one too many is good that's all it is (Black Truffle)
Mary Halvorson - Cloudward (Nonesuch)
Ethan Iverson - Technically Acceptable (Blue Note)
Rob Mazurek Exploding Star Orchestra/Small Unit - Spectral Fiction (Corbett vs. Dempsey)
Jordan Munson - Heartless Fools (Church of Noise)
Reverso (Vincent Courtois, Ryan Keberle, Frank Woeste) - Shooting Star – Étoile Filante (Alternate Side)
Elliott Sharp - Arbor (Zoar)
Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Odean Pope - The Lighthouse (Jam All Productions)
Tilth and Wind Tide - Anemoia (Editions Glomar)
Alan Tomlinson, Steve Beresford, Steve Noble - Baggage and Boating (scatterArchive)
Yarn/Wire - Yarn/Wire Currents 8 - compositions by Sarah Davachi, Kelley Sheehan, and Victoria Cheah (self-released)
Yea Big + Jon Mueller - Now Is Always (FPE Recordings)
John Zorn - The Hermetic Organ, Vol. 11 – For Terry Riley (Tzadik)
Upcoming releases.
January 26
Dante Boon - Dreamings - Nicolas Horvath (Collection 1001 Notes)
February 9
Tessa Brinckman - Take Wing, Roll Back - compositions by and collaborations among Tessa Brinckman, Norio Fukushi, Andile Khumalo, Todd Barton, Cara Stacey, and Shirish Korde (New Focus)
February 16
Ekmeles - We Live the Opposite Daring - compositions by Jeffrey Gavett, Zosha Di Castri, James Weeks, Hannah Kendall, Shawn Jaeger, and Erin Gee (New Focus)
Ted Reichman - vie en rose (Puremagnetik)
Nate Wooley - Moths - Laura Cocks, Madison Greenstone, Eric Wubbels (Editions Verde)
Cody Yantis - Opticks (Flaming Pines)
February 23
Melaine Dalibert - Horizons - Nicolas Horvath (Collection 1001 Notes)
March 1
Michael A. Muller - Mirror Music (Deutsche Grammophon)
March 8
Moor Mother - The Great Bailout (Anti-)
Jonah Parzen-Johnson - You’re Never Really Alone (We Jazz)
March 15
Remy Le Boeuf’s Assembly of Shadows - Heartland Radio (SoundSpore)
March 22
Claire Dickson - The Beholder (New Amsterdam)
Jlin - Akoma (Planet Mu)
March 29
Samuel Vriezen - Within Fourths/Within Fifths - Nicolas Horvath (Collection 1001 Notes)
Find many more upcoming releases in For the Record: The Master List.
Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.