For the Record: Sept. 8, 2023.
A monumental Wadada Leo Smith project at Brooklyn College this weekend, an unorthodox debut album, and dozens of listings for new 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.
Monumental.
I was reasonably pleased with the newsletter I published on Wednesday, brimming as it was with news of the many, many fine options for musical events happening during this especially packed weekend.
That feeling lasted for exactly five minutes—at which point I received an email about arguably the most historic presentation happening in New York City this week… which I’d known about for some time and even pitched unsuccessfully to a couple of media outlets for coverage, but still omitted from my concise batch of listings.
Improvising trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Wadada Leo Smith has been active in large-scale composition for some years now, including his epochal 2012 cycle Ten Freedom Summers (a Pulitzer Prize finalist) and its similarly expansive 2016 sequel, America’s National Parks. Both sets are essential documents of American music, and both are available via Bandcamp.
Alas, the same can’t be said for Smith’s increasingly grand discography on the Finnish label TUM, where much of his most significant work has been documented lately. In 2021 alone, heralding his 80th birthday on December 18, Smith issued Trumpet, a 3CD set of unaccompanied horn music; Sacred Ceremonies, a 3CD set devoted to aural shamanism with Bill Laswell and Milford Graves (captured with breathtaking fidelity); The Chicago Symphonies, a 4CD hometown homage featuring Henry Threadgill (with Jonathon Haffner subbing on the last disc), John Lindberg, and Jack DeJohnette; and A Love Sonnet for Billie Holiday, a single-disc salute with DeJohnette and Vijay Iyer.
That astonishing streak extended into 2022, which brought two more crucial releases: String Quartets Nos. 1-12, an unprecedented 7CD survey by California’s RedKoral Quartet, augmented with guests like Anthony Davis, Thomas Buckner, and Smith himself; and The Emerald Duets, a 5CD compilation of trumpet-and-drums duo sessions featuring DeJohnette, Pheeroan akLaff, Andrew Cyrille, and Han Bennink.
All of which now serves as preface to Smith’s most sweeping artistic statement to date: America Transformed, a four-evening concert cycle comprising 18 pieces composed from 1985 to 2023. The series runs tonight through Monday, Sept. 11, in the new 225-seat Don Buchwald Theater, located in Brooklyn College’s Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts. Each concert starts at 7:30pm, with the house opening at 7pm for general-admission seating.
The concerts feature the RedKoral Quartet – which plays Smith’s String Quartets Nos. 13–16 consecutively across the four evenings – and Purple Kikuyu, Smith’s band with cellist Ashley Walters (also of RedKoral), pianists Sylvie Courvoisier and Erika Dohi, and drummers Pheeroan akLaff and Frank Morrison. Those groups are augmented with additional players – professionals, CUNY faculty members, and students alike – at times swelling to chamber-orchestra proportions.
Presented with an engagement like this, it’s hard to avoid piling on superlatives. I had the same problem two weeks ago, reviewing a Time:Spans festival concert by the International Contemporary Ensemble that included Gondwana, a cello concerto by Smith with Walters as the soloist. Some of my language in that review, published behind a paywall by Musical America, was toned down a bit—an editor’s prerogative.
As before, I’m honoring the publication’s paywall… but here’s the section of the review that specifically concerns Gondwana:
Assertive melodic lines and weighty ensemble passages conveyed a sense of forces in motion, judiciously punctuated with deft, transparent episodes like a splendid trio for cello, viola, and piano.
Cellist Ashley Walters, who works frequently with Smith, was an ideal soloist, matched in technique and temperament by the alert ensemble and conducting. Asked onstage by [International Contemporary Ensemble executive director Jennifer] Kessler what had prompted him to compose Gondwana, Smith cited tectonic plates shifting too slowly to be observed. Africa was once at the South Pole, he noted, and one day will crash into Europe. “It’ll be millions of years from now,” he said. “But because we have thought and dream and imagination, we’ll see it.”
Too often, culture seems to move at a similarly geological rate of change. But when forces like the International Contemporary Ensemble, [artistic director] George E. Lewis, and Wadada Leo Smith converge, the impact is nothing less than seismic.
Similar qualities and sentiments apply here: This is a landmark artistic statement, and a profoundly powerful signal of intent from new Tow Center director Dena Beard, formerly executive director of The Lab in San Francisco.
As the playwright put it, “Attention must be paid.” Tickets are available here.
Album of the week.
There are a lot of extremely fine new recordings out this week, and it’s daunting to single something out… I can’t quite wrap my head around choosing among Samuel Adams, Darcy James Argue, Kinan Azmeh with Brooklyn Rider, James Brandon Lewis, Nico Muhly, Annika Socolofsky, Speaker Music, and Third Coast Percussion—to say nothing of an opera jointly created by John Corigliano and Mark Adamo, a major-label debut from the unstoppable Irreversible Entanglements, and a promising surprise-drop release from Stephen O’Malley and Anthony Pateras.
Even so, I’m urging everyone to make time for All we’re made of is borrowed, a lovely, urgent, and unorthodox debut album by Paramorph Collective on the consistently edifying Canadian imprint Redshift. The group’s members – singer-guitarist An Laurence and composer-keyboardist Kim Farris-Manning – weave their original songs, poems, and compositions around and among pieces by Rodney Sharman, Linda Catlin Smith, and Margot George.
The last composer mentioned is new to me, a real discovery—and also something of an enigma. A Bandcamp page featuring recordings previously credited to George, “a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and artist based in New York City//Lənape Haki-nk [Lenapehoking],” now cites composer Andrew Hulse, who is based in Oakland.
Whatever has transpired, the music is inspiring: Fruiting bodies, a duo for distorted electric guitar and organ, instantly put me in mind of Stephen O’Malley and Sunn O))). It’s a striking piece, even more so in the context within which Paramorph Collective positions it, among Sharman’s ruminative For Guitar and Smith’s literally poetic Thought and Desire.
It’s a strong, provocative, and accomplished debut, well worth seeking out.
New This Week
Chris Abrahams/Oren Ambarchi/Robbie Avenaim - Placelessness (Ideologic Organ)
Samuel Adams - Current - performances by Karen Gomyo, Conor Hanick, and Spektral Quartet (Other Minds)
Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society - Dynamic Maximum Tension (New Amsterdam/Nonesuch)
Sergio Armaroli & Evan Parker - Dialog (ezz-thetics)
Kinan Azmeh & Brooklyn Rider - Starlighter - compositions by Kinan Azmeh, Colin Jacobsen, and Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin (In a Circle)
Itamar Borochov - Arba (Greenleaf Music)
John Corigliano/Mark Adamo - The Lord of Cries - Anthony Roth Costanzo, Boston Modern Orchestra Project/Gil Rose (Pentatone)
Alan Courtis & David Grubbs - Braintrust of Fiends and Werewolves (Husky Pants)
Sarah Davachi - Selected Works I & II (Disciples)
Catherine Christer Hennix - Solo for Tamburium (Blank Forms)
Irreversible Entanglements - Protect Your Light (Impulse!)
James Brandon Lewis Red Lily Quintet - For Mahalia, With Love (TAO Forms)
Annea Lockwood - Glass World (Room40; originally issued 1970)
Noel Meek & Mattin - Homage to Annea Lockwood (Recital)
Nico Muhly - David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller and further away) (Bedroom Community)
Stephen O’Malley & Anthony Pateras - Sept duos pour guitar acoustique et piano préparé (Shelter Press)
Paramorph Collective - All we're made of is borrowed - compositions by Rodney Sharman, Margot George, Linda Catlin Smith, and Paramorph Collective (Redshift)
Christoph Schiller & Carlo Costa - Spinet and Drums (Neither/Nor)
Matthew Shipp - Circular Temple (ESP-Disk’; originally issued 1992 on Quinton)
Carlos Simon - Together - performances by J'nai Bridges, Will Liverman, Randall Goosby, Seth Parker Woods, and Carlos Simon Collective (Decca Classics)
Annika Socolofsky - I Tell You Me - Annika Socolofsky, ~Nois, Phong Tran, Darian Donovan Thomas, No Plexus (Carrier)
Sydney Spann - Sending Up a Spiral Of (Recital)
Speaker Music (DeForrest Brown Jr.) - Techxodus (Planet Mu)
Third Coast Percussion - Between Breaths - compositions by Missy Mazzoli, Tyondai Braxton, Gemma Peacocke, Ayanna Woods, and Third Coast Percussion (Cedille)
Upcoming Releases
September 22
Madison Greenstone - Resonance Studies in Ecstatic Consciousness (Relative Pitch)
International Contemporary Ensemble - New Moons I: Music from Luna Composition Lab 2023 - compositions by Lucy Chen, Hannah Chen, Lili M. Namazi, Elaina Stuppler, and Isabelle Tseng (Luna Composition Lab)
September 29
Dominique Lawalrée - De Temps en Temps - Nicolas Horvath (Collection 1001 Notes)
October 13
Maria Valencia - Compendio de Alofonías Abisales (Relative Pitch)
October 20
Tristan Allen - Tin Iso and the Dawn (RNVG Intl.)
November 3
Allen Ginsberg - The Lion for Real, Re-Born (Allen Ginsberg LLC; originally issued 1989 on Great Jones)
Matmos - Return to Archive (Smithsonian Folkways)
Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.