For the Record: June 14, 2024.
Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion achieve rare alchemy on a glittering new album… plus listings for dozens of 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! 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.
Album of the week.
For at least the second time this year, a group of musicians chiefly associated with the classical music world has delivered an utterly compelling, absolutely irresistible pop record. An undeniably artful pop record, but one that pushes all the right buttons for instant gratification. (The first, you’ll recall, was Alex Sopp’s The Hem & The Haw, released in April, which I wrote about here.)
And, for the second time, said group of musicians is the collaborative formed by composer, vocalist, violinist, and singer-songwriter Caroline Shaw with the versatile adventurers of Sō Percussion. I’m saying second because the first time Shaw and Sō met on record, 2021’s sublime Narrow Sea, was more clearly perceptible as chamber music, comprising a percussion quartet and a Sacred Harp song cycle featuring soprano Dawn Upshaw and pianist Gil Kalish.
The compositions on Narrow Sea dated from 2012 and 2017, which might help a listener to understand the quantum leap between that album and another that arrived just months later: Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, the debut of the band now known as CaroSō. Listening back to that album now, it’s impossible not to notice a quality of transition… or maybe evolution is a better word.
The sunny Steve Reich-gone-pop opener “To the Sky,” the stark pairing of voice and steel pan for the title track, the Dowlandesque deliberation in the ABBA song “Lay All Your Love on Me,” and the elaborate studio mechanics of “Long Ago We Counted” retain all their original surprise and delight. But they also represent a stride from the sound world of Narrow Sea, via the pop-music ingenuity of Shaw and Sō, toward the completely original, wholly organic fusion that happens on Rectangles and Circumstance, new today on Nonesuch.
(Also, don’t know why this never occurred to me, but wouldn’t you buy an entire album of ABBA covers by CaroSō? Obviously, it has to be titled S.Ō.S.)
“After a few years of touring Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part together, with a pandemic in between, we came to record our second album, Rectangles and Circumstance, as a road-tested band who knew each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies intimately,” Sō percussionist Adam Sliwinski writes in the new album’s detailed, insightful liner notes, generously shared on his new Substack publication, Rhythm Begins. The songs evolved from germs provided by Sō members Eric Cha-Beach and Jason Treuting, Sliwinski explains, while the lyrics were sparked by 19th-century poetry he compiled with Cha-Beach and Shaw.
That definitely sounds like the process of a band, rather than The Composer and The Interpreters, which helps to explain why Rectangles and Circumstance sounds like – pardon the cliché – more than the sum of its estimable parts. Engineer and co-producer Jonathan Low, who’s had a hand in work by Taylor Swift, The National, Kurt Vile, and other more straightforward pop acts, also surely warrants mention for aiding the band’s evolutionary process. (Not coincidentally, Sō’s Treuting was among the artful lodgers on Swift’s fêted folklore.)
I love it that I can’t figure out instantly what I’m hearing at the start of the album-opening title track, and I love it that whatever it was, it’s followed by a Mellotron, that wheezy proto-sampler of historical art-pop and prog-rock glory. The track is jammed full of Moogs and Prophets and a Clavinet, along with beautifully sly, subtle wordplay delivered in Shaw’s casually crystalline tone. (I don’t have a finished CD, but I’ll be delighted if it includes lyrics.)
And that’s only the beginning of the discoveries at hand. Watch the video for “Sing On” (embedded above) for its artful choreography and cinematography—and then watch it again to savor its audacious orchestration. (Who knew you could be a sticky-tape savant?) Listen to “Slow Motion,” the sly, playful song featuring Ringdown, Shaw’s new pop project with partner Danni Lee—and then listen again to savor the near-buried Mellotron murk under its sunny surfaces, and try to pick out Shaw’s tuba playing. (Again, who knew?)
On and on and on and on, Rectangles and Circumstance is a boundary-bursting feat of ceaseless illumination, intoxicating creativity, and unbridled joy, chock full of eloquent timbres, intoxicating rhythms, and arresting turns of phrase—all of it generously calculated to accommodate the disparate visions and complementary talents contained within. It’s a dazzling creation, one that wears its sophistication like tastefully glittering jewelry.
Bonus tracks.
Further must-hear releases this week include new arrivals from Alfredo Colón (who celebrates tonight at the Jazz Gallery), Vijay Iyer with Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and Kory Reeder, as well as new Longform Editions pieces by Susan Alcorn, Sarah Hennies, Yvette Janine Jackson, and Wadada Leo Smith… and a hearty welcome back to Gabriel Mindel Saloman and Pete Swanson, once again negotiating the art of noise together as Yellow Swans.
New this week.
Andy Akiho - BeLonging - Andy Akiho, Imani Winds (Aki Rhythm Productions)
Susan Alcorn - In-Yu (Longform Editions)
Celer - Gems II (Room40)
Alfredo Colón - Blood Burden (Out of Your Head)
Forbes Graham - Pieces of a Puzzle (self-released)
Sarah Hennies - Standing Water (Longform Editions)
Vijay Iyer - Trouble; Asunder; Crisis Modes - Jennifer Koh, Boston Modern Orchestra Project/Gil Rose (BMOPsound)
Yvette Janine Jackson - Festina Lente (Longform Editions)
Michael Mizrahi - Dreamspace - compositions by Andrea Mazzariello, David Werfelmann, Mark Dancigers, Joanne Metcalf, Evan Williams, Yiheng Yvonne Wu, Chiayu Hsu, and Alan Shockley (Sono Luminus)
Kory Reeder - Everywhere the Truth Rushes In (Kuyin)
Kory Reeder - Texas: Vol. XI - B Sides and C Sides (self-released)
Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion - Rectangles and Circumstance (Nonesuch)
Wadada Leo Smith - Masnavi: A Sonic Meditation and Reflections on Light (Longform Editions)
WHO Trio - Live at Jazz Festival Willisau 2023, First Visit (First Visit Archive)
Yellow Swans - Out of Practice I (Collective Jyrk)
Spencer Zahn - Live at Unheard (Pique-nique)
Denny Zeitlin - Panoply (Sunnyside)
Upcoming releases.
June 21
Andy Moor, Marta Warelis - Escape (Relative Pitch)
David Rosenboom - Future Travel (Black Truffle; originally issued 1981)
Byron Westbrook - Translucents (Shelter Press)
June 28
Richard Cameron-Wolfe - Passionate Geometries (New Focus)
Chris Corsano - The Key (Became the Important Thing [and Then Just Faded Away]) (Drag City)
Georgia Denham - with love (Sawyer Editions)
Paolo Griffin - Supports & Surfaces (Sawyer Editions)
Rebekah Heller - ONE (Relative Pitch)
Sarah Hennies - Bodies of Water (Sawyer Editions)
Klein/Rosaly/Warelis - tendresse (Relative Pitch)
Jack Langdon & Taylor Ho Bynum - Precision Valley (Empty Stage)
Eden Lonsdale/red panel - ricercari for rainy days (Sawyer Editions)
Ryan Seward - weathering (Sawyer Editions)
July 12
Eyal Maoz and Eugene Chadbourne - The Coincidence Masters (Infrequent Seams)
“Blue” Gene Tyranny - Real Life and The Movies: Volume 1 (Unseen Worlds; originally issued 1981)
July 19
Matt Pavolka - Disciplinary Architecture (Sunnyside)
August 6
Daniel Carter, Leo Genovese, William Parker, Francisco Mela - Shine Hear, Vol. 2 (577 Records)
August 9
Krononaut (Leo Abrahams & Martin France) - Krononaut II (Palomino)
August 16
Gerald Cleaver - The Process (Positive Elevation)
August 30
Loren Connors & David Grubbs - Evening Air (Room40)
Miguel Zenón - Golden City (Miel Music)
Find many more upcoming releases in For the Record: The Master List.
Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.