Author Archives: Joseph Neff

Originally released in 2022 on cassette, Classic Fevers and Chills is a striking duo session from vocalist Ayami Suzuki and guitarist Rob Noyes. An important facet of the recording is that it was the result of a first-time collaboration, essentially improvised rather than composed. Intense and beautiful as the vocals soar and the strings resonate, the meeting produces a distinct form of duo exchange. It’s available now on vinyl and digital through Feeding Tube Records.

Based in Tokyo, Ayami Suzuki traveled abroad to Ireland and the UK for study before returning home and commencing a series of recordings, some solo, others duo and trio. Suzuki’s musical approach can be assessed as ambient while avoiding the fallback stylistic norms associated with this frankly overused descriptor.

Part of the reason Suzuki’s sound is so consistently interesting relates to her range, both alone and as she bounces ideas off those chosen collaborators. There is a folk influence, explicitly related by Suzuki, that can be heard as far back as her first physical release, the 2020 cassette single “Unknown Beach,” released by the sandfountain label.

This folk root isn’t always discernible, and when it does come through, there’s not a trace of cliché. More prevalent is an experimental air that’s neither tangibly academic nor even avant-garde in nature. Instead, Suzuki’s work connects as more akin to the deep underground of the early 2000s, a scene that was equally aligned with noisy racket on one side and folky strum glisten on the other, as it opened up free and freaky vistas in between, often on cassette.

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Celebrating Andy Mackay on his 80th birthday. —Ed.

Bursting onto the scene 50 years ago, Roxy Music’s blend of glam rock and art rock proved highly influential while being impossible to imitate, as the music of singer Bryan Ferry, synthesist Brian Eno, saxophonist Andy Mackay, guitarist Phil Manzanera, and drummer Paul Thompson was simply drenched in personality. Virgin/UMe’s vinyl reissue program of the band’s eight studio albums began with the debut Roxy Music and its 1973 follow-up For Your Pleasure, both half-speed mastered at Abbey Road Studios by the engineer Miles Showell. Bluntly, these four sides of wax are indispensable to any collection of 20th-century rock music.

Looking back on it, it feels wholly appropriate to describe Roxy Music as coming out of nowhere in 1972. Their debut LP arrived sans any pre-release singles, with “Virginia Plain” b/w “The Numberer,” the band’s first 45, cut just short of a month after Roxy Music’s release, a short enough span that its hit A-side was added to nearly all later pressings of the album (on the subject, please note that Virgin/UMe’s release retains the sequence of the UK first edition).

The nature of the band’s arrival is nicely encapsulated by Roxy Music’s opening track “Re-make/Re-model.” After a passage of what might be intended as dinner party ambiance (shades of Ferry the pure sophisticate to come), Roxy explodes forth, maximally but methodically, and by song’s end it’s clear that in this particular outfit at this point, nobody was taking a back seat (well, except maybe bassist Graham Simpson, who exited after the LP’s release, with Rik Kenton stepping in for “Virginia Plain,” only to be quickly replaced on For Your Pleasure by John Porter).

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Folkways, formed by Moses Asch in 1948, had a distinctive approach to the blues. While the discs of many labels dedicated to this style could once be found in the jukeboxes of beer joints nationwide, Folkways took a more historical, scholarly approach to the blues, with considerable range. The new double album Classic Blues from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings makes a great case for the continued relevancy of the catalog. It’s available now.

Side A gets this undertaking off to a solid start with “Old Jabo,” which finds Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee sounding a little like a more down-home Bo Diddley. Following is “Mule-Ridin’ Blues,” a talking blues groove from Big Bill Broonzy cut in the company of Studs Terkel. Next is the instrumental workout “Joggie Boogie” from pianist Memphis Slim and bassist Willie Dixon, both in peak form, and not far from the thrust of their recording for the Chess label.

“Black Woman,” sung unaccompanied by Vera Hall and recorded in 1951, hits Asch’s folk objective in the bullseye. “Mercury Blues” comes next, an ode to an automobile, with K.C. Douglas smooth of voice and giving his guitar a workout. After that is the boisterous barrelhouse of “Ran the Blues Out of My Window” by the dynamic pianist and singer Roosevelt Sykes, and the side ends with “Leaving Blues” by Lead Belly, a giant of 20th-century folk music whose blues singing and guitar slinging are perhaps a bit underrated.

Side B opens with “One Dime Blues” by Etta Baker, a sweet and mild guitar instrumental (redolent of Elizabeth Cotten) and a bit of a time jump as it was recorded live in 1992 at the Barns of Wolf Trap in Vienna, VA. “County Farm Blues” by Delta titan Son House dates from a 1942 Alan Lomax field session. “Clog Dance (Stomping Blues)” by piano banger Champion Jack Dupree is the sound of a party captured in a recording studio.

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Bob Bert has sat in the drummer’s seat for a number of highly regarded bands, a few of them vastly important to underground rock’s march forward from the 1980s into the current century. He’s still quite active on the scene, with the newly released Beach Bongo Burnout his first album to hit stores under his own name. A truly solo affair, it finds Bert spurning the guitar, smacking away with his rhythm sticks and plattering up a rapid-fire burst of raw inspiration. It’s out now on vinyl, compact disc, and digital through Bar/None Records.

The band that always gets named first in capsule biographies of Bob Bert is Sonic Youth, the outfit that commences the chronology of his discography. If not his first outlet of artistic expression, the Sonic Youth LPs Confusion Is Sex (1983) and Bad Moon Rising (1985) landed Bert in the history books, and his subsequent clanging and banging in Pussy Galore ensured his relevance.

Replacing John Hammill, Bert is the drummer on the biggest chunk of Pussy Galore’s output right up to the end. After that, as the 1990s dawned, Bert played in Action Swingers, Bewitched, and Chrome Cranks while collaborating with Kid Congo Powers and Lydia Lunch. More recently, Bert rejoined Pussy Galore’s Jon Spencer in the Hitmakers.

So yeah, Bob Bert’s been around the block a few times in the touring van. One might anticipate that his first solo album would be one of those years-in-the-making situations where he rounded up a dozen or so big names from his cohort, and when the schedules coincided, they got down to the business of making a big splash.

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Remembering Vince Guaraldi, born on this date in 1928. —Ed.

Originally released in 1962 by the Fantasy label, Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus was the third LP by the Vince Guaraldi Trio and the first by the lineup responsible for the pianist’s highest profile work, which was just around the corner. But the album, recently reissued as a 3LP/2CD set as part of Craft Recordings’ Small Batch series (and disappearing fast), is a considerable achievement that’s distinguished by a true rarity: a bona fide instrumental jazz hit single in “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.” There’s more on this commercial triumph and other aspects of this multifaceted record directly below.

Vince Guaraldi was a solid West Coast guy, having played in bands of Woody Herman (the Third Herd) and Cal Tjader. As vibraphonist Tjader (early on, primarily a drummer-percussionist) was a good fit with pianist Dave Brubeck, the same was true for Guaraldi as a participant in Tjader’s bands, though don’t go thinking that Guaraldi was a specialist in odd time signatures (in fact, neither was Brubeck pre-Time Out). Instead, Guaraldi’s forte (and an eventual nickname) is reflected in the title of an early composition: “Calling Dr. Funk.”

In short, Vince Guaraldi’s playing was as dynamic as it was attractive, possessing a certain energy that could move a crowd (at a party on a record or in performance on the bandstand) but was laced with enough beauty movement to connect with those in a stay-at-home frame of mind. Again, this is all very (but not exclusively) West Coast, as Guaraldi’s musical temperament is well-suited to the “jazz interpretation” subcategory that flourished in the 1950s-’60s and to which Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus belongs.

Jazzing up My Fair Lady (West Coast drummer Shelley Manne), Exodus (saxophonist Eddie Harris), Golden Boy (Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers), Porgy and Bess (Miles Davis), and The Sound of Music (John Coltrane); an impressive and incomplete list, but there can still be a cloud of crass commercialism hovering above these sorts of endeavors, or perhaps better said, there’s a sense of record labels striving to tap into a lucrative crossover market.

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Born in Barcelona, Spain, and based in New York City since 2012, jazz pianist and composer Eva Novoa has excelled in quartets and trios, sometimes explicitly in the leadership role along with other more collectivist combinations. Her latest album, Solo (1), finds her stepping out on her own for the first time with superb results. Wide-ranging on piano and Fender Rhodes while bringing Chinese gongs and percussion into the scheme, Novoa also sings and whistles on what’s decidedly something other than a standard set of ivories tickling. It’s out now on vinyl, compact disc, and digital through 577 Records of Brooklyn, NYC.

Eva Novoa’s recording debut came in 2012 in a trio she led featuring bassist Masatoshi Kamaguchi and drummer Marc Lohr that recorded a CD for Fresh Sound New Talent. Lengthy at 12 tracks, the disc never runs out of creative steam, solidifying that Novoa has a firm handle on swing and is a dynamic improviser and communicator. Furthermore, it was immediately clear she was uninterested in falling back into the oft-predictable piano trio safety zone.

Novoa’s quartet albums for Fresh Sound are even more swinging, but they can wield an appealing inside-outside edge as the bands, like the trio, can turn up the heat, although there are still moments of considerable melodic beauty. To kick off her quartet run, Novoa’s first band with alto saxophonist Ernesto Aurigna, bassist Kamaguchi, and drummer Andre Sumelius cut a sweet CD in 2014.

Then came her Ditmas Quartet with altoist Michaël Attias, bassist Max Johnsion, and drummer Jeff Davis. They recorded a studio CD, Butterflies And Zebras By Ditmas Quartet, in 2016, and then the Live at IBeam CD in 2018. After that, she unveiled the Satellite Quartet with guitarist Rainer Davies, bassist Kenneth Jimenez, and drummer Arturo García. They released one CD in 2020.

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Remembering Woody Guthrie, born on this day in 1912. —Ed.

Born in 1912 and laid to rest in 1967 after a long bout with Huntington’s Disease, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie is as iconic a figure as American music has produced. Long-considered the granddaddy of folk protest, his 1940s recordings have influenced countless musicians across numerous genres, but ill-health brought his days as a performer to a close prior to the onset of the ’50s folk boom. But against all odds, in every era since, Guthrie’s music has remained relevant; the posthumous 1976 LP Struggle is testament to his staying power, and it’s been reissued on vinyl by Smithsonian Folkways in the label’s classic tip-on jacket, with artwork by David Stone Martin and original liner notes by Moses Asch.

It was as a music hungry youth in the mid-’80s that I first became cognizant of Woody Guthrie. Sure, I’d sung “This Land Is Your Land” in school a good while before that, but the teachers did a bang-up job of not mentioning whose song it was. It was a fascination with Dylan that led me to Guthrie, and even at that point Woody was moving beyond the iconic and into the realms of myth.

Mythic stature almost always brings a backlash, but with Guthrie, it was surprisingly little. He was beloved by the folkies natch, but also valued by the heartland rockers, rated as worthy by blues hounds (due to his association with Leadbelly and Sonny Terry), and even respected by the punks; well, some of them, anyway.

But I’ll confess that after soaking up and appreciating Dust Bowl Ballads (recorded for Victor in 1940) and the Library of Congress Recordings (from another 1940 session, issued by Elektra in ’63 and again by Rounder in ’88, which his how I heard it), for a long while afterward, I listened to Guthrie only intermittently.

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Cento Threeo is the Austin-based trio of guitarist Don Cento, bassist Phil Spencer, and drummer Norm Bergeron. On their debut Halfway to Mellowtown, they nix the vocalizing as unnecessary to a sound that blends post-bop jazz, hearty Americana, and even flashes of rock, all within the unit’s precise dexterity. Compositionally robust and melodically rich, the 12-song set is out now on vinyl, compact disc, and digital through SecondBridge Records.

It’s certainly accurate to consider Halfway to Mellowtown a guitar album. Don Cento, who has been active for a while as a session player-engineer-producer (Jerry David DeCicca, Sarah Jaffe, Will Beeley, Matt Kivel, etc.) and a contributor to bands (Shibboleth, El Cento), is inarguably skilled, blending verve and finesse.

Cento clearly understands that in an instrumental trio, the guitar needs to do more than cover the basic bases. But importantly, he also resists gratuitous flash spillage, in part because he’s a tasteful player more concerned with atmosphere and consistency of tone than he is in dishing flurries of notes.

It never sounds like Canto is doing too much, which leads us to the abilities of his bandmates to bring something more than support. There is improvisation in the mix, and, in particular, a few knockout bass solos from Spencer, but there is also ceaseless interaction and expressiveness from all three as they put their personalities into the whole.

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Remembering Albert Ayler, born on this day in 1936. —Ed.

Although some have managed to expand upon his groundbreaking intensity and flights of abstraction, Albert Ayler is one of the few sui generis figures in the history of jazz. An uncompromising player with only a small following in his lifetime in music, he cut a record in 1968 that initially seemed to satisfy nobody except for (perhaps) Ayler himself. That LP was New Grass, lambasted as a sell-out by those who favored his prior work, while less adventurous listeners weren’t buying. 

I’ve been contributing to this column for over eight years, but until this piece, I haven’t delivered a full review of a record by Albert Ayler, who’s one of my favorite jazzmen, though I have included him in this site’s New In Stores column and in at least one group review. As this omission is remedied, I feel it should be immediately qualified that the term jazzman isn’t necessarily a tidy fit for Ayler’s brilliance.

Albert Ayler was certainly a man whose work falls inside the boundaries of jazz, so calling him a jazzman isn’t in error, but it still might give those unfamiliar with his work the false impression of a figure, sharply decked-out in a classic tailored suit maybe, who excelled at extending, through live gigs and studio sessions, the core tenets of Modern Jazz.

While innovators are surely jazzmen and vice versa, Ayler remains one of the ever-evolving form’s major freedom-seeking iconoclasts. In short, he’s best placed in the avant-jazz category, which means that for long stretches after his death in November 1970 (presumably by suicide, as his body was discovered in the East River of NYC) his music was difficult to obtain. This was especially true at the end of the 1980s, which is when I first learnt of his existence.

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Bassist, singer, songwriter, and sound editor for films, Kira Roessler is best known for filling the bass position in Black Flag in their post-My War stretch and for forming dos, the two-bass duo with Mike Watt. But she also released a sharp eponymous solo debut in 2021, and now she’s following it up with Enigma, which is available July 10 on vinyl, compact disc, and digital through ORG Music. Assisting her in this effort are brother Paul Roessler as co-producer and instrumentalist, and Petra Haden as backing vocalist. The bass is large, the songs are highly accomplished, and the emotional thrust is mature but defiant.

The era of Black Flag that featured Kira Roessler on bass is the storied band’s most contentious (setting aside Greg Ginn’s numerous 21st-century lineups, of course). Much of this is directly due to Henry Rollins’ transformation of the singer’s role in the band, but there are also those who champion or disdain the musical shift toward a bruising, hard rock-sludgy metal approach. I’m not one of the naysayers, having long considered Kira’s playing crucial to the Black Flag’s success in studio and live (as documented on Live ’84 and Who’s Got the 10 1/2?).

Even better was dos, her bass partnership with Mike Watt, a project that went a long way in broadening the musical landscape of the underground far beyond the rock paradigm. Kira’s first solo LP did something similar in boundary-pushing terms, and without losing a handle on the best qualities of rock and pop.

Enigma continues the march of growth. Her vocals throughout the album are pretty but substantial and without strain. There’s a touch of jazz singing in her lines, and it’s miraculously unaffected. Her bass is prominent in the mix, but there’s no grandstanding as the playing is always expressively functional and properly weighted with the drums.

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Remembering Lee Hazlewood in advance of his birthday on Thursday. —Ed.

If Lee Hazlewood lingers in the contemporary cultural memory, it’s easily due to his work with Nancy Sinatra. On The LHI Years: Singles, Nudes & Backsides (1968-71), the Light in the Attic label collects a bunch of his post-Nancy collaborations and a welcome helping of his solo shots, and the results are highly recommended not just for Hazlewood’s fans but for anyone with an inclination for well-crafted oddball pop.

Though his music never wavered from its thoroughly commercial designs, Lee Hazelwood was still a truly strange duck. And the undeniable datedness of his work can really add to the overall weirdness factor, though that’s in no way a bad thing; if often possessing production values and orchestrations that are accurately assessed as “middle of the road” (not the same as “mainstream”), his songs almost always avoid falling into simple kitsch.

But Hazlewood was more than just a bizarro/sophisto cowboy that blended Vegas-inclined pop with a country-inflected folksiness both on his own and in a collaboration with Sinatra that still comes off like a Swingin’ ‘60’s reaction to Dolly and Porter. Indeed, while loads of folks are familiar with the string of late-‘50s hits that he produced and co-wrote with Duane Eddy, it’s also true that most of those listeners aren’t cognizant of Hazlewood’s actual involvement with those songs, a short flowering of creativity that stands amongst the finest instrumental rock music ever recorded.

He was also the impresario of Lee Hazlewood Industries, a fleeting subsidiary label of ABC Records. Naturally, a fair portion of LHI’s relatively slim discography is dedicated to its namesake; both his solo album Forty and The Cowboy and the Lady, credited to the duo of Hazlewood and actress Ann-Margret were released in 1969, and Cowboy in Sweden came out the following year. Back around 1999 or so, Steve Shelley’s Smells Like Records began admirably reissuing some of Hazlewood’s harder to find stuff on compact disc. This program included both the Ann-Margret collab and Cowboy in Sweden, but plenty of worthy bits and pieces slipped through the cracks.

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The Michael Marcus Quartet’s new recording, Next Stop Down, is an inspired set of originals that are steeped in the tradition but consistently straining against genre constraints. Featuring Marcus on tarogato, soprano sax, and on one selection, tenor sax (he also bangs a gong), plus Rod Williams on piano, Ricky Rodriguez on bass, and Allan Mednard on drums, the music thrives through an inviting familiarity, but the band is unafraid to get loose, and the compositions brandish some welcome edge. It’s available now on compact disc and digital through the indefatigable ESP-Disk of New York City.

He can navigate jazz’s outer regions with aplomb, but Michael Marcus got his start backing blues heavyweights Albert King and Bobby “Blue” Bland. Moving into the jazz realm, Marcus debuted as a leader with Under the Wire in 1991 for the Enja label with trumpeter Ted Daniel, trombonist Joseph Bowie, bassist William Parker, and drummer Reggie Nicholson in the band.

Since then, Marcus has recorded a ton, including nine releases with saxophonist Sonny Simmons, a fellow Bay Area guy, leading the Cosmosamatics, cut five with Ted Daniel as Duology, and has over 15 under his own name with a variety of players on numerous labels. A key early collaborator was the pianist Jaki Byard, with whom Marcus recorded two albums, both for the Justin Time label.

He also cut two records with the Jus Grew Orchestra, assembled by saxophonist Jemel Moondoc, one for the Ayler label and one for Eremite. More recently, Marcus has been part of the Blue Reality Quartet with horn man extraordinaire Joe McPhee, vibraphonist-percussionist Warren Smith, and drummer Jay Rosen.

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Remembering Martin Phillipps, born on this day in 1963. —Ed.

For some, the two early 1990s releases from New Zealand’s The Chills, Submarine Bells and Soft Bomb, served as a gateway to one of the finest tunesmiths in the whole pop-rock shebang. But for folks who were previously clued-in to the band’s work for the Flying Nun label, these albums, both cut for Slash Records, represent leader and sole constant Chill Martin Phillipps’ already considerable pop ambitions in full flower.

Although it was never my preferred format, back in 1990 when Submarine Bells came out, I was still in the habit of occasionally buying music on cassette. I mention this because I did indeed initially purchase Bells on that very format, a decision spurred by impatience, as on my visit, the store didn’t have any copies in stock.

This pained me a little at the time, but I also knew I could remove the shrink wrap and pop that tape right into the car’s deck for immediate listening out on the highway, which was enticing as The Chills’ sound, which flows from a jangle pop/ indie pop fount with tangible if savvy nods to the 1960s, is well-suited for vehicular absorption. Upon reflection, Submarine Bells hits something of an apex in the windows down volume up mode, beginning with one of the band’s signature tunes, “Heavenly Pop Hit.”

That song’s stature relates largely to pure skill in the construction, but as said up above, Submarine Bells was many folks’ intro to The Chills, and sequenced on that album first, “Heavenly Pop Hit” no doubt deepened this first impression. Along with reaching No. 2 on the New Zealand singles chart (the album hit No. 1, as The Chills weren’t an u-ground thing at home), it snuck into the UK singles sales list at No. 97 and even made the Alternative Airplay chart in the US at No. 17.

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Chris Corsano is a living, breathing titan of drumkit explosiveness. It is said that he hangs his hat (if a hat he chooses to wear) in Chicago, IL, but in a spiritual sense, Corsano is everywhere. Tashi Dorji is a contemporary cyclone of abstract versatility and fervor playing guitars electric and acoustic. Born in Bhutan, he has long called Asheville, NC, home, but like Corsano, the essence of the man cannot be harnessed; it spills out all over hill and dale.

Putting these rich cats together in a room with their instruments is a recipe for interactive fireworks, a display that reinforces the pair as collaborators of the highest rank. Live at Ritual Botanica provides recorded evidence of the duo’s high-energy brilliance. It’s out now on vinyl and digital via Feeding Tube Records.

The drum prowess of Chris Corsano has perhaps been most widely disseminated through his duo sets, studio and live, with guitarist Bill Orcutt (expanded to a trio for one mind-flaying LP with ecstatic saxophonist Zoh Amba, The Flower School). Corsano is, in fact, a dogged collaborator, with a massive discography built upon the vast range of his improvisational abilities.

A few solo records stand out in his body of work, but Corsano really thrives through dialogue. There are numerous conversational constellations inside or on the borders of free jazz, in particular a stunning string of duos with saxophonist Paul Flaherty that form one sweet peak in a mountainous expanse of exploratory magnificence.

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Celebrating Debbie Harry on her 81st birthday. —Ed.

Any discussion of ‘70s-era pop-rock is incomplete without due time spent on Blondie, and vinyl mavens unversed in their essence can play catch-up in one fell swoop with Universal’s box set of the six LPs from the group’s original run. As no-frills as its title, Blondie offers exact reproductions and absolutely nothing extra; the totality captures the heights and depths of a highly successful and influential band.

If the most commercially solvent entity to emerge from the ‘70s New York City punk/new wave scene, Blondie’s style, at least for a significant portion of their ’75-’82 existence, is most aptly compared to the Ramones. Purists may balk, but honestly I’d be perplexed if by this date on the calendar there are more than a handful of bitter goats clinging to the notion that Blondie were hangers-on or sellouts.

Spearheaded by vocalist Debbie Harry and guitarist Chris Stein and after early personnel changes solidified through keyboardist James Destri, bassist Gary Valentine, and drummer Clem Burke, in December of 1975 Blondie’s self-titled debut appeared via fly-by-night independent Private Stock Records. It didn’t shift many units, but their popularity surged once Chrysalis scooped them up, releasing Plastic Letters in the fall of ’77 and reissuing Blondie in the bargain.

There were lineup adjustments, with Valentine out and replaced by Frank Infante, who promptly switched to guitar upon addition of bassist Nigel Harrison. The membership remained stable until ’82, when disappointments revolving around The Hunter inspired a breakup. This collection doesn’t include everything; missing are the five illuminating ‘75 demos cut with Alan Betrock and the ’80 Giorgio Moroder collaboration “Call Me” from the soundtrack to Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo; instead it simply boxes-up the half-dozen long-players devoid of editorializing.

All of these platters were once extremely cheap and relatively easy to pick up used (though I’ve never glimpsed a Private Stock edition of Blondie), and I can’t imagine the situation has changed. But I realize there’s a breed of vinyl connoisseur equivalent to those licensed drivers who wouldn’t stoop to buy a second-hand car; bluntly, this set is for them.

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