New Dada Music_September + October 2023

On "punk jazz" (Irreversible Entanglements + jaimie branch Fly or Die) + Sounds & Links from Tomorrow Comes the Harvest, Speaker Music, Jlin, Modern Nature, Santaka, House of Waters, and others

New Dada Music is an occasional (hopefully monthly) summary of releases I am shouting about on Dada Strain’s IG Stories (and now Blue Sky), with rhythm, improvisation and community as the forever-beacons. Through the years, people have asked me for Bandcamp Fridays¹ recommendations, and because many of the releases I highlight are available there directly from the artist/label, New Dada Music felt like a useful piece to add to this newsletter, and time it to that regular date. (It also helps me keep a running annual tally - I’m not good at lists.) All texts here are primarily copy-edits, fact-checks and minor amendments to the character-limited write-ups at the above. (This month I also wrote a longer piece that had been germinating for a while, which I couldn’t place elsewhere for reasons explained therein.) Please support the artists, labels, independent musickers, and broadcasters who struggle against the algorithm and audience apathy. Thank you for reading, listening and community musicking.

The Shape of Humanism To Come!

On Irreversible Entanglements’ Protect Your Light and jaimie branch’s Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War))

Full Disclosure: I couldn’t write about either of these LPs for a publication because the record companies which released them hired me to write editorial materials to help market these works. That and the fact that I am close to many of the musicians who created this music made the conflict of interest very real. But so is my desire to share a real-life perspective and context I feel is being left out in popular discussions of these two great albums, which is what I hope the below provides. It’s important the reader knows this backstory, so as to determine how much critical value to ascribe to my words. The choice is yours.    

A couple of years ago I produced a Dada Strain radio series that explored different stories about rhythm, improvisation and community. One episode focused on “punk jazz,” how the seemingly separate traditions shared anti-authoritarian tendencies, community-building aspirations, and a desire to push sonic boundaries, at times blending the two cultural camps into one another. (Especially in ‘90s New York.) The episode’s guest voice was Luke Stewart, a great community musicker and bassist in the free-jazz quintet Irreversible Entanglements (IE); importantly, he was also a trusted friend, collaborator and part-time Brooklyn housemate of the late trumpeter jaimie branch. (She introduced us.) jaimie and Luke weren’t just creatively simpatico, they shared ideas about how punk values (DIY experimentalism, social structure) worked in the improvised space. And vice-versa, past and future.

In the radio interview, Stewart offered a historical take on the relationship between the two forms: “The context punk usually has about its creation in America is that it was a cultural response to the mega-music becoming prevalent in the ‘70s. Free jazz is sometimes conceptualized in a similar way, as an antithetical response to the form and industry of jazz, to a preexisting, somewhat oppressive — culturally, financially, socially — system of music, of entertainment, of art. A grassroots art movement created from the ground up.” He also told me that part of his own mission was to “re-establish radical jazz music in the context of the legacy of DIY.” 

Stewart and Branch both practiced this sermon. Each not only spent time in punk bands as youngins (Stewart in Mississippi, Branch in suburban Chicago), they brought its noisy outlook to their adult work: Stewart most directly in his post-hardcore duo The Blacks’ Myths alongside drummer Warren “Trae” Cruddup III, but also in solo pieces such as Works For Upright Bass and Amplifier. jaimie’s own duo, Anteloper with drummer/modular synthesist Jason Nazary, included more than a touch of Suicide’s synth hooks and atonal complexities, but branch was also constantly in search of overamplification, jamming with members of Swans and Wolf Eyes. jaimie and Luke’s project together, C’est Trois (with Stewart’s IE rhythm section partner, the inimitable Tcheser Holmes), harnessed this energy into a synth-punk jazz-dance music of immense swinging power and drive, hour-long sets without breaks, just peaks, valleys and emotional thrust. And all that playing does not even touch how much show-organizing Luke and jaimie did, together and separately, around Chicago, New York and DC. Most of the best shit they put on had no Ticketmaster code or guest-list, but cash-only at the door, BYOB, which you were lucky to catch mention of in IG stories. (Lots of it still works that way.)

Which is all to say that “punk jazz” is in the DNA of their best-known bands. Stewart plays in IE with Holmes, vocalist Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother (herself a Philly hardcore/noise veteran), as well DIY-versed monsters, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and saxophonist Keir Neuringer. And branch’s Fly or Die is a quartet with old Chicago family-members, drummer Chad Taylor and bassist Jason Ajemian, but also the Brooklyn-based cellist Lester St. Louis. That DNA is clearly prevalent in their newest albums, IE’s Protect Your Light and jaimie’s posthumous Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War)).  It’s a punk jazz that’s neither an update of old Knitting Factory/Naked City fusion tropes, nor a jazzy variant on the algorithmically fueled revolutions of conservatory emo kids. More like a result of communal camaraderie: lifers who are bad-ass players (the absolutely MF’ing BEST! as far as I’m concerned), applying the emotional complexities of a punk-rock “NO!” and a punk-rock “What If…?” to a world in flames, to loved ones dying, while also looking for a way forward.       

Logistically, it’s important to know that it wasn’t only Luke and jaimie who were tight here, that many of these players regularly collaborated with one another, a fact that continues with Lester’s cello adorning two tunes on Protect Your Light. It’s also important to note that ((World War)) was essentially finished when jaimie tragically passed away on August 22nd, 2022, and that Protect Your Light was tracked at the historic Van Gelder Studios in January of 2023, the week before members of both bands participated in a tribute to branch at Winter Jazzfest. Factually, this makes the back-and-forth between the albums one-directional, most plainly with “root ⇔ branch,” IE’s loving nod to jaimie and her band, addressing the freedom of souls, with Stewart’s great driving bassline and Navarro-Neuringer horn harmonies underpinned by noisy electronics. 

Yet the nature of these albums and their shared points-of-view — politically minded, rhythmically propulsive, sonically sprawling, addicted to risk-taking and not standing still (which extends to IE’s signing to the major-label Impulse! Records, home of Coltrane, rather than remaining with the essential indie, International Anthem) — has struck me from the first-listen as this “punk jazz” moment’s great common stand. The result of a lot of folks exchanging visions, contributing to one another’s love of life, and a promise of the future. Even if it did not work out that way.

jaimie’s circumstances were darker — read her sister’s recent essay rather than between my lines — her fight rawer, her wound more personal, the words more realist. She cared so much — almost too much, which I regard an old-school punk quality — which is why some of Fly or Die’s “punk” couldn’t be more literal. “Burning Grey” and “Take Over the World” are about people’s revolutions, with branch and her blazing band storming the establishment, yelping all the way. These are the voices of the worldwide greens who recognize environmental disasters as our destiny and struggle, who simply refuse to go along with the program. When jaimie demands the song-title’s take-over, with Chad pounding the drums of war and Ajemian double-timing the low-end fury, she is clear with what we do once it’s achieved: “we’re gonna give it back to the la-la-la-land.” (Its land-return is mirrored directly on Protect Your Light, except that IE’s “Our Land Back” features Moor Mother extending the metaphor of Palestinian displacement to victims of all post-colonial projects, a thought branch would have likely approved of.) One well-versed friend said ((World War)) evoked what a modern-day Minutemen album might sound like. 

The most straightforwardly “punk” thing on branch’s album is a cover of the Meat Puppets’ forgotten 1994 classic “Comin’ Down,” here called “The Mountain” and voiced by Ajemian. It’s essentially a slacker folk tune, so the band — actually, only Jason on double-bass, and jaimie on muted trumpet — play it as sincerely as it’s written, which, with the song’s evocation of “lighter side of dumbness” as a daily grind, is open-to-question. It’s a response to the absurdity of the straight world laid bare, with Fly or Die as the ironic pranksters caring enough to pierce the veil. (The first time I saw them play it live, they paired it with “Moon River.”) This is one side of punk’s humanism, which if we follow Luke’s assertion that both musics were rooted in a response to oppressive cultural systems, is a requisite to staying sane thru the madness. 

Irreversible Entanglements don’t go the smirking route. On Protect Your Light, their clearest punk evocations are Moor Mother’s hardwired anti-authoritarian stand, and the way that the horns and legendary rhythm section snap listeners to attention, setting the intensity. Ayewa does bring some of those no-fucking-around moments that could be on t-shirts — “Let’s get right into it / Straight out the gate / Kick in the door,” opens the album’s mighty closer, “Degrees of Freedom” — but they don’t quite lead you into the same fight. That’s because one of Moor Mother’s most powerful weapons is empathy, which, as inferred earlier, is the other side of punk’s humanist streak…because if you’re gonna try to get somewhere satirizing society, it feels undercooked without also possessing an ability to nurse the hurt. (As my wife once said lovingly about Camae, her care is right there in her stage name.) 

About halfway through “Degrees of Freedom,” the rambunctious mood changes, and what emerges is a stretch of one of my favorite pieces of music in recent memory. A dirge simultaneously funereal and anthemic. As Keir and Aquiles once more gracefully fit around one another, Lester’s visiting cello plays long braiding lines, while Luke and Tcheser forcefully drive the “reprise,” Camae’s oratory blazes thru the sky. I am not gonna quote the whole thing here cause I’ve already gone on for way too long (just click the above), but there’s one couplet that I’ve been going back to since I first heard it in June — and which seems even more apropos at the moment I write this: 

“They say there ain't no justice only sorrow / I say the acknowledgement of sorrow is the first step towards justice.” 

I recognize that, at first, there seems nothing particularly “punk” about that thought. Except maybe its courage of expression in the face of a cold hard world the words clearly understand as such. And then, I can’t unhear it as the most punk thing ever.

More New Dada Music:

Tomorrow Comes the Harvest, Evolution (Axis) - Jeff Mills' continued journey into live electronic improvisation informs this trio album with tabla player Prabhu Edouard and keyboardist JP Dary. Long gorgeous slabs of techno as global spiritual trance, proof of how Detroit still informs the world.

Speaker Music, Techxodus (Planet Mu) - Rhythmanalyst DeForrest Brown, Jr.'s Speaker Music is a sonic manifestation of his written critiques. The words and rhythms resonate brilliant FFWD>>> intentions. And his third full-length album inverts Dada's motto: "Techno is electronic improvisation."

House of Waters, On Becoming (GroundUP) - Strangely ethereal fusion LP—centered on the trio of Max ZT (hammered dulcimer), Moto Fukushima (electric bass) Antonio Sanches (drums)—that should have Metheny-loving jambanders, J-Jazz nerds and Laraaji stans in a cloudy tizzy. New Age got something to say.

Jlin, Perspective (Planet Mu) - It's a wonder watching and listening to Jerrilynn Patton inch towards music institutions—be they organizations, famous composers or social contexts—adapting when called for, but generally giving no quarter. Her drums on Perspective remain huge, crisp, volcanic. Yet collaborating with Third Coast Percussion gives these pieces a new sonic breadth, as well as a quiet dignity and power. Just Wow!

Gunn-Truscinski-Nace, Glass Band (Three Lobed Recordings) - Bill Nace (Body/Head) joins the ongoing duo of Steve Gunn and John Truscinski for a two guitars + drums session at the intersection of American Primitive and lo-fi noisy. Shaping tradition, minimalism, and shitty technology into an apocalyptic emo soundtrack. Too timely! [h/t Lee Gardner]

Santaka, Xram (Radio Vilnius) - Santaka is a Lithuanian duo (percussionist/producer/Dada Strain fave Marijus Aleksa and DJ/producer Manfredas Bajelis) plus occasional friends, making laidback rhythm music. This EP, Santaka’s fourth release and its third of 2023, moves fluidly between ambient techno-troniks and post-modern drum circles, with zero complacency. Great shit!

Modern Nature, No Fixed Point in Space (Bella Union) - Once a solo project of Cambridge musician Jack Cooper, Modern Nature is now a jazz-folk-pop "group" with Julie Driscoll Tippetts out front, and a mighty international cast. The songs on its fourth studio LP are lightly textured, naturalistic, eternally beguiling. [h/t Peter Margasak]

Eli Escobar, The Beach Album (Off Track) - reviewed for Pitchfork

Related Materials:

New Dada Music, August 2023 // New Dada Music, June & July 2023 // New Dada Music, May 2023 // New Dada Music, April 2023 // New Dada Music, March 2023

1. As of this moment, I’m not yet sure how to react to the changes taking place at Bandcamp, greatly skeptical of the company’s new-overlords future (going round this block since 1995) but also recognizing of the platform’s immense value to the independent music ecosystem. For now, Bandcamp Friday remains a date I am happy to recommend new music on.