VIA PRESS RELEASE | Malkmus meets Coltrane?
Twenty years after four jazz heavyweights took Pavement’s slacker-rock songbook for an inspired trip into uncharted territory, James Carter, Cyrus Chestnut, Ali Jackson, and Reginald Veal’s Gold Soundz: A Jazz Tribute to Pavement returns October 2 via Sundazed Music in an expanded 20th anniversary edition. The album is now available for pre-order.
What began with a deceptively simple question—What album would we want to buy that doesn’t exist?—became an audacious experiment in what happens when musicians disregard the boundaries separating record-store sections. Twenty years on, Gold Soundz makes an even stronger case that Pavement’s songs never belonged to just one of them.
Originally conceived as a musical “fantasy league,” assembling a dream lineup to make an album that didn’t yet exist, Gold Soundz brought together saxophonist James Carter, pianist Cyrus Chestnut, drummer Ali Jackson, and bassist Reginald Veal to reimagine the songs of Pavement not as rock covers, but as raw material for adventurous jazz.
Recorded over four days at New York’s Electric Lady Studios in 2004, the sessions transformed Stephen Malkmus and company’s crooked melodies, loose-limbed rhythms and indie-rock irreverence into something altogether new. The result earned an emphatic one-word review from Malkmus himself: “Insane!”
Rather than simply translate Pavement into jazz vocabulary, Carter, Chestnut, Jackson, and Veal use the band’s songs as jumping-off points. Familiar favorites including “Summer Babe,” “Trigger Cut,” “Here,” “Stereo,” “Cut Your Hair,” “Blue Hawaiian,” and “Platform Blues” become vehicles for improvisation, interplay and rhythmic reinvention.
The expanded 2CD edition adds four CD-only bonus tracks: “Bichet,” “Folk Jam (Take 4),” an alternate take of “5-4=Unity,” and a live performance of “My First Mine,” recorded at An Die Musik in Baltimore in 2018. Alongside the bonus material are new liner notes by Jim Allen and newly revised artwork by celebrated artist Steve Keene, whose unmistakable visual language has long been intertwined with the world of independent music.
NPR hailed the project as “a heavyweight jazz album with masterfully crafted and soulful arrangements,” while AllMusic enthused: “If you’re a Pavement fan, you owe it to yourself to check out what these guys do with the songbook. If you’re a jazz fan, these tunes might as well be undiscovered standards.”
Two decades later, Gold Soundz still sounds like a meeting that shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does: indie rock’s patron saints of beautiful imperfection colliding with four musicians capable of taking those songs virtually anywhere. The quartet brings swagger to the slacker, retaining Pavement’s messy spirit while opening the compositions into soulful, exploratory performances that move freely between swing, groove and the outer edges of jazz.
