Bandcamp Friday Recommendations_Dec2020

Support Artists, Buy Music: Luke Stewart's Exposure Quintet, Aquiles Navarro & Tcheser Holmes, The Jazz Diaries, Qur'an Shaheed, Mausiki Scales, Pique-nique Records, Ellen O'Meara

Like the monthly shopping splurge it commemorates, the Bandcamp Friday Recommendations content has quickly become a community staple. Easy bits of feel-good consumer lemonade using the sour fruit of Covid-19 quarantine and the general digital music economy. I hate the quarantine, admire Bandcamp, love and support independent musicians, and am happy to tell folks about which records to buy (if they trust me enough to wanna know), and yet…I still feel weird about the exercise, the regularity, the commodification, and, most of all, about doing it all only once a month. (FTR, I now buy sporadically but consciously all month long.)

Yet folks keep asking, and as I’m never short on suggestions, am always happy to promote good people doing good work. Please note though, there are parameters. Much of the music falls into the following categories: a) rhythm and improvisational music (because those are my primary interests and Dada Strain’s purview); b) underrepresented in mainstream media (i.e. no 5-star/BNM types here — not critical bias, but because they don’t need my support); c) mostly but not exclusively “new” (which is also open to interpretation); and d) often made by friends, FOF, and/or people doing intersectional work, aesthetically, socially and/or politically (community is also Dada Strain’s purview).

I’ll try to do this as long as Bandcamp gives up their 5% (or whatever their cut is).

Two albums by members of Irreversible Entanglements (my band of the year), bassist Luke Stewart’s Exposure Quintet (Astral Spirits 2020) and Aquiles Navarro & Tcheser Holmes’s Heritage of the Invisible II (International Anthem 2020) are, by far, two of the best *out* “jazz” albums of the year. (It’s actually embarrassing not to have spotted either in early year-end listicles.) Stewart’s is a quintet date with heavy Chicago-tradition vibes: reeds by Edward Wilkerson, Jr. (AACM original, co-founder of Ethnic Heritage Ensemble and 8 Bold Souls) and contemporary Windy cornerstone Ken Vandermark, drums by Avreeayl Ra (Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, Sun Ra’s Arkestra, Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble), and occasional piano by Jim Baker. They’re a discordant, smart, veteran bunch, capable of finding the groove any time, moving through long patches of softness or noise with purpose, and even have a killer tune up their sleeve (“Awakening the Masters”). This smokes heavy tradition herbs. On the other hand, trumpeter Navarro and drummer Holmes are mostly stripped down to a very fat groove, but that also means using the mixing board to apply all the loudness and brashness of what New York f*cking City has to offer. Electronics and rhythm underpin this Heritage, aided and abetted by Holmes and Navarro’s telepathic connection (they’ve been playing together for almost a decade). It’s got collage qualities, and (mostly) straight duo interaction that jump out the low-end speakers, with a fat shmear of echo and a light Caribbean melodic touch. It’s weirdo party music of the highest order!

Though The Jazz Diaries record label has been putting out good records since 2013, only in 2020 did it feel fully percolating. TJD’s Bandcamp geo-tag says Manipur, India (which is one reason I suspect the mighty Jitwam, TJD’s first release and its mainstay, may be behind it); and their releases have been uniquely inter-continental, fastidious to the quality of its global soul music. This week they’re dropping a cheapie five-track label sampler that partially functions as a 2021 upfront, and which burns in that special jazz-meets-house way that makes me sweaty with dance-floor anticipation. Javonntte and Malik Alston rep Detroit (the former with a keys-heavy soul funk jam, the latter with a scorching dance track full of Pete Cosey-like guitar and tenor horn dazzle); Anthony Nicholson reps Chicago jacking; Zeitgeist Freedom Energy Exchange is Melbourne drummer Ziggy Zeitgeist swinging ensemble, here remixed into a rolling second-line with fluorescent analog synths; and whoever Jerome Dillinja is, he does an excellent, reductivist Theo/KDJ slink that I would love to hear at 3a in the right atmosphere. As label samplers go, this is pretty fire.

Qu’ran Shaheed is a Los Angeles pianist/vocalist making a type of contemporary Black music that’s become, for me, the great sound of that city. Full of open jazz chords and textures, instinctive use of spiritual space and new age meditation sounds focused in their (cosmic) practice, a laid-back rhythmic knowingness indebted to hip-hop but also broken beat electronics (the LA/LDN conversation is never-ending), a lyrical and vocal self-expression that invokes how Joni and the neo-soul singers play off beats and melodies, and, most importantly, a deep comfort of mixing these elements at will. Process is a self-released EP she worked on with producer Jesse Justice, and her most unified release, finished songs that are also intricate sonic sketches. (Her solo electric piano pieces, also available on Bandcamp, provide overlap but are a whole other, great trip.) It also sounds like the work of a career on the knowing verge of beginning and blossoming. Bonus points for how the cover mirrors Charles White portraiture. (H/T @ChannelSubtext for the full info and whom you should really follow for great music recommendations.)

Atlanta native Mausiki Scales has been leading the Common Ground collective for over a decade but it seems like the recordings of this big local band are only starting to come out the past few years, and they’re a pleasure. I came upon Scales via Kai Alce, and his remix of “Let the Drum Remind You,” but WestWest Africa (self-released 2020) is much much more than a good base for a great house remix - although it’s that too obv. Hendrix and Sly and Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band vibes, afrobeat and highlife and kwela vibes, fusion and funk vibes, big background vocals and horn lines and layers of percussion (VIBES!), all maximized for snap and crackle by Daz-I-Kue’s mix. (He’s become one of Atlanta music’s great rhythmic counterpoints since moving there from London — has anyone written about this?) WestWest Africa is a secret weapon that, once live music is back, can’t possibly remain a secret much longer — DJs and agents s/b buying and booking this thing on sight.

The New York side of Pique-nique Records, a label with roots in Brooklyn and in Sydney, is run by Jared Proudfoot and Sam Ngahane, a pair of international transplants who pre-pandemic organized a great small concert series in their Bushwick apartment. The monthly “Take Two” shows invited a lead musician and their group to reimagine one of their favorite albums, first song to last. (The one I saw was led by bassist Endea Owens (Jon Batiste, Jazz at Lincoln Center) interpreting Roy Hargrove’s Earfood with a wonderful sextet; it was crowded, delirious fun, down to the seething neighbors who’d had enough by the time Owens and singer Shenel Johns led 25-30 people through a full call-and-response of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It All Home To Me.”) With no shows on the horizon, the Australian Proudfoot and Frenchman Ngahane have revived Pique-nique which was initially launched in 2018. It’s a 7” label with an all-NYC cast, and a post-rock environment seemingly committed to nothing but its own oddballness. There’s three new records: If you like this heady trio of bassist Spencer Zahn, keyboardist Jacob Bergson and drummer Austin Tufts getting vaguely Tortoise-y, you may dig the meditative state that pianist Erik Deutsch and Zahn achieve on “Ripple Pattern”, or the organic noise pastorals of guitarist Dave Harrington and drummer Kenny Wollesen. And if you’re down to mix cerebral fun with a little funk, Proudfoot and Ngahane also have a really nice monthly morning show on The Lot Radio (8a EST last Tuesday of every month, which just happened to be my slot before they took it over).

I was introduced to Ellen O’Meara’s music in extremely sad circumstances: a few friends of hers, including the great trumpeter Jaimie Branch, gathering together to perform her music as a memorial at Nublu, eight months after O’Meara took her own life. A classically trained pianist and vocalist (and an in-demand session player), O’Meara wrote and recorded compositions which are all about a soulful juxtaposition of choral voices and rudimentary electronics, soft and folky, mellifluous but deeply melancholy, alive with the ghosts of technology and the new spirits that arise when multiple voices blend. Ellen O’s Sparrows And Doves (self-released 2014) is one of two full musical documents that remains (the other is You/Sonata on Babygrande 2017); and it’s aesthetic is straight magic. Imagine Arthur Russell’s home recordings or 4AD demos, but as done by somebody practicing contemporary R&B songwriting. Incredible sad gorgeous as songs, but also as sonic miniatures. The album is a Free Download, so that will hopefully make O’Meara’s music live on and spread that much farther.

For more highly subjective musical choices and samples, check other Dada Strain posts (for example, the weekly Saturday Night Traxx is all dance records) and the still-regularly updated Raspberry Fields tumblr. Also, for a much broader and fertile set of (always interesting) recommendations, the folks at Dada-beloved blog Ban Ban Ton Ton publish a monthly post called “Bandcamp Bounty,” which divides their sizable monthly loot into categories (Balearic, Ambient, Soul, Folk, Jazz, etc.) and always has a couple of incredible nuggets.