For the Record: September 6, 2024.
Bandcamp Friday is here again, with an archival bounty from Tim Berne, a vital debut by Alden Hellmuth, and a slew 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.
Topspin.
If you’re reading this newsletter – thank you!! – then there’s a 99.999% chance your email inbox let you know the moment you woke up today, or even before you fell asleep last night, that today is the first Bandcamp Friday of the fall. (Two more are coming, Oct. 4 and Dec. 6.) There is of course no bad time to buy music, but on days like this, Bandcamp waives its cut of sales, which means artists and indie labels get just a bit more cash per transaction. Everybody wins!
Album(s) of the week.
Tim Berne is featured on two exceptional new sets from the archives: one out today, and another available for pre-order in advance of its arrival next month. Both feature concentrated doses of Berne’s signature compositional language, and each features a partner in whose company the saxophonist has done some of the most striking work of his career.
The first, Live in Someplace Nice, captures Berne’s alto sax in sympathetic flights with guitarist Bill Frisell in 1984, in a set that mixes up a number of Berne originals from around that period, plus a version of Julius Hemphill’s “Dirty Row” (from Blue Boyé, Hemphill’s multi-tracked 1977 solo opus, available now via Berne’s Screwgun label).
Two Berne originals had featured previously on his quartet album Mutant Variations. “Homage” appears elsewhere only on another digital-only archival release, My First Tour – Live in Brussels. Jon Pareles cited “Conversation with Harold” in a New York Times review of Berne’s 1986 quintet date at the late, lamented Sweet Basil – “his first major New York club engagement,” Pareles wrote – but the tune evidently appears nowhere else on record. Likewise, the cutely titled “Eef Laat” is only available here.
The sole overlap with …Theoretically, the 1984 studio release by Berne and Frisell, is “Inside the Brain,” snuggled into the center of a medley with “Flies” (from 7x) and “The Ancestors” (from the album of that name). The playing throughout the set is alert, sympathetic, and inventive, and the sound, newly mastered by David Torn, is brilliant. Really can’t recommend this one highly enough.
The other new Berne release available today, Parlour Games, matches his tart alto and bumptuous baritone with the burly yet nimble bass of Michael Formanek—a partnership formed when Formanek enlisted Berne for his own band prior to his 1992 release, Extended Animation.
That year, the pair recorded Loose Cannon with drummer Jeff Hirshfield, a band I was fortunate to catch at the Cornelia Street Café shortly before I moved here permanently. (Joey Baron performed sleight-of-hand tricks to open the show while technical difficulties were ironed out.) They extended their collaboration with one of the truly great bands of the 1990s, Bloodcount, which matched them with Chris Speed on tenor sax and clarinet, and Jim Black on drums.
By the time Berne and Formanek released Ornery People, a live duo set recorded in August 1998, they’d been working together for close to a decade, and it showed. But when the set comprising Parlour Games was taped in June of 1991, the partnership was new; the sound is less sophisticated, but the energy is explosive.
Here, too, much of the material has been available in other forms, though little of it common. Formanek’s “Beam Me Up” is on his irresistable studio debut, Hey, It was the 80s, Man!!, recorded in 1986 but unissued until 2020. “Ho’ Time” appeared previously on Inference, Berne’s live duo album with Marilyn Crispell.
“Quicksand,” “O My Bitter Hen,” and “Bass Voodoo” all appeared on Extended Animation. (Another “Quicksand,” an elongated Berne opus featuring guitarist Marc Ducret and the ARTE Saxophone Quartet, is included on the New World release The Sevens—which, incidentally, you can snap up at a discount today using the code nwrnew.) But near as I can tell, “Not What You Think” is not the same tune as “Not What You Think They Are” from Mars, by Berne and Gregg Belisle-Chi, which makes the former exclusive to this set.
Dig in.
Bonus tracks.
For the last few months since it was sent my way by a perceptive colleague, Good Intentions by Alden Hellmuth has spent a lot of time between my ears. Hellmuth is a prodigious young alto saxophonist, composer, and bandleader originally from Hartford, CT, where “she grew up surrounded by the legacy of the great saxophonist Jackie McLean,” according to her bio. She studied with Abraham Burton at The Hartt School, and has continued her education at the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance at UCLA. Her writing on Good Intentions, a mix of assertive lyricism and crafty rhythmic puzzles, suggests strongly she’s a kindred spirit to Steve Lehman and Ingrid Laubrock – again, confirmed in her bio – and her snappy band includes pianist Yvonne Rogers, who’s sensational in Laubrock’s band Lilith. An album to savor now, and an artist to look out for from now on.
Breaking Stretch, the new septet album by improvising percussionist, composer, and bandleader Patricia Brennan, features some of the most fascinating writing, committed playing, and intriguing integration of electronics you might hope to find. Out today on Kris Davis’s indispensible Pryoclastic label.
As reported here not quite a month ago, today’s the day the prestigious Leo Records catalog starts to arrive on Bandcamp, courtesy of a partnership with Burning Ambulance Music. If you’re bewildered by all the options available, Burning Ambulance writer, editor, and label owner Phil Freeman provides a usefully detailed primer here.
I don’t often allow myself to stray too far off course here – a nice paradox for a personal newsletter!! – but lately I’m really enjoying digging into the deep catalog of English neo-prog singer and guitarist John Mitchell. I first heard Mitchell during a meandering but heartfelt live-streamed concert honoring the late singer, songwriter, and bassist John Wetton, but then missed him in a summer tour by a new version of Asia, which sprang forth from that Wetton tribute—and whose regal, anthemic prog-pop I still quite enjoy, thank you. (Here’s what that band sounded like.) I’m hoping to catch Mitchell performing next month with Larks’ Tongues in Aspic-era King Crimson violinist David Cross at ProgStock in New Jersey. Meanwhile, his work as Lonely Robot and in the bands Frost*, Kino, and It Bites are well represented on Bandcamp; now, if only someone could convince Arena to come aboard…
New this week.
Sophie Agnel/John Edwards/Steve Noble - Three on a Match (OTOROKU)
amelia courthouse - broken things (Spinster)
Timothy Archambault - Onimikìg (Ideologic Organ)
Steve Baczkowski - Cheap Fabric (Relative Pitch)
BASIC (Chris Forsyth, Nick Millevoi, Mikel Patrick Avery) - This Is BASIC (No Quarter)
Tim Berne & Bill Frisell - Live in Someplace Nice (Screwgun)
Ran Blake & Dave Knife Fabris - Live Amsterdam 2006, First Visit (First Visit Archive)
Patricia Brennan - Breaking Stretch (Pyroclastic)
Jack Cooper - Jesus Green - Jack Cooper, Heather Roche (Astral Spirits)
Elisabet Curbelo - Resonance Unbound (Neuma)
Lukas De Clerck - The Telescopic Aulos of Atlas (Ideologic Organ)
Eventless Plot/Yorgos Dimitriadis - Entanglements (Innovo Editions)
EZRA - Earth to EZRA (Cantaloupe Music)
Ken Field - The Canopy (Neuma)
Satoko Fujii Quartet - Dog Days of Summer (Libra)
David Garland - Noise in You (new version) (Tall Owl Audio)
David Garland - Vulneraries, Vol. 7 (Tall Owl Audio)
David Garland - Vulneraries, Vol. 8 (Tall Owl Audio)
Andy Graydon & Luke Martin - Transparent Archipelago (/NTERNEGATIVE)
Alden Hellmuth - Good Intentions (Fresh Sound New Talent)
El Jardín de las Matemáticas - El Jardín de las Matemáticas (Penultimate Press)
Kyle Jessen - I Don’t Want to Take You Anywhere (Personal Archives)
Roland Kayn - The Ortho-Project (Frozen Reeds; 15-CD ltd. edition boxed set)
Charmaine Lee - Elevator Music (Kou)
Allen Lowe & the Constant Sorrow Orchestra - Louis Armstrong’s America (ESP-Disk’)
Paul Lytton/Georg Wissel - Loose Connections (Confront)
Jessie Marino//HARLOW - Fat Square (self-released)
David Merrill - Golden Oranges of Mars (Neuma)
Adam Mirza - Partial Knowledge - performances by loadbang, Mivos Quartet, Unheard-of//Ensemble, Bent Frequency Duo Project, and International Contemporary Ensemble members (New Focus DL; CD due Oct. 10)
The Noonan Trio - Inherit a Memory (Neuma)
Max Richter - In a Landscape (Decca)
Brad E. Rose - Trace Amounts (The Jewel Garden)
Maeve Schallert - The Etching (cow: Music)
Elliott Sharp - Mandocello (Zoar)
Silt Remembrance Ensemble - ATTENTION!!! (self-released)
Jeff Snyder - Loom (Carrier)
Laetitia Sonami/Éliane Radigue - a Song for two Mothers/Occam IX (Black Truffle)
Pat Thomas - The Solar Model of Ibn Al-Shatir (OTOROKU)
RLW - C.D. (Penultimate Press)
Dustin Wong & Gregory Uhlmann - Water Map (Otherly Love)
Upcoming releases.
September 13
Kristina Warren - Three Rivulets (self-released)
September 20
crys cole - Making Conversation (Black Truffle)
Gates/Hirsh/Carter - Phosphene (Mahakala Music)
September 27
Ingebrigt Håker Flaten’s (Exit) Knarr - Breezy (Sonic Transmissions)
Thumbscrew (Mary Halvorson, Michael Formanek, Tomas Fujiwara) - Wingbeats (Cuneiform)
September 30
Mariel Roberts & Jacob Kirkegaard - Traverse (Infrequent Seams)
October 3
James Romig - The Fragility of Time - Matt Sargent (a wave press)
October 4
John Butcher, Florian Stoffner, Chris Corsano - The Glass Changes Shape (Relative Pitch)
Devin Gray - Melt All the Guns II (Rataplan)
Audrey Lauro - Prose Métallique (Relative Pitch)
Jessica Pavone - What Happens Has Become Now (Relative Pitch)
Reid, Kitamura, Bynum, Morris - Geometry of Phenomena (Relative Pitch)
Jamison Williams - The Lesser Key of Solomon-Bael (Relative Pitch)
October 18
Michaël Attias - Quartet Music Vol. II: Kardamon Fall (Out of Your Head)
Tim Berne & Michael Formanek - Parlour Games (Relative Pitch)
Jon Rose/Mark Dresser - Band Width (Relative Pitch)
Sébastien Roux - 50 frequency and amplitude modulated sine waves describing a landscape (Portraits GRM)
Thollem - Infinite-Sum Game (ESP-Disk’)
Flora Yin Wong - Trigram for Earth (Portraits GRM)
October 25
Body Meπa - Prayer in Dub (Hausu Mountain)
Elliot Cole - Left Hand Path (Long Echo)
Rich Halley 4 - Dusk and Dawn (Pine Eagle)
November 1
Florian Hecker - Resynthese FAVN (Blank Forms Editions)
November 8
Leo Okagawa - Lower the Tone Arm (Flaming Pines)
Pancrace - Papotier (Penultimate Press)
November 15
Donnacha Dennehy - Land of Winter - Alarm Will Sound/Alan Pierson (Nonesuch)
Dan Trueman - The Seventeenth Hotel (Many Arrows Music)
Find many more upcoming releases in For the Record: The Master List, here.
Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.
"Jon Pareles cited “Conversation with Harold” in a New York Times review of Berne’s 1986 quintet date at the late, lamented Sweet Basil – “his first major New York club engagement,” Pareles wrote – but the tune evidently appears nowhere else on record."
So that's a fascinating find. The tune *does* appear on record, as "Mac's Groove" (or "Mag's" depending on which was a typo on the original release :) on SANCTIFIED DREAMS. (Also, "Dream Status" on this new release was the title track of that record.) Interesting that the "Harold" title was noted in the live review, which perhaps indicates that's the original title and not "MG".
Similar renaming happened on FULTON ST MAUL ("Minature" appeared first as "Preview" on ...THEORETICALLY, and "Betsy" as "San Antonio" on SONGS AND RITUALS IN REAL TIME) and SD ("Blue Alpha" was "Sirius B" on THE ANCESTORS). When I asked Tim in 1993, he explained that Columbia had required all new compositions, so he retitled as he pleased to satisfy that condition. (Note also FSM's "Icicles Revisited".) So the same plausibly applies to the SANCTIFIED DREAMS tracks above too.
Major recommendation on that Patricia Brennan Septet album. And Wednesday’s record release show at Nublu was superb, except for the “jazz audience” not knowing about dancing 😂😂😂