It’s possible that Vulfmon, aka Jack Stratton, deus ex machina of Vulfpeck, is about to release new music in the short period. In the last couple of months, Stratton has released 4 songs under his moniker, two being remixes (we talked about the Vulfmix of Too Hot in L.A. by Woody and Jeremy last month, together with a minimal yet beautiful rendition of Surfer Girl by The Beach Boys) and the last one being this Nice to You, out on October 4. Nice to you features again a contribution by Jacob Jeffries, now in fact a long-time collaborator of Stratton. The news is that this time Jeffries also presents himself with his own dramatis persona, Little Yacov: should we expect a duo album? Nice to You it’s some weird, high-paced funk, where Stratton plays bass (and piano), Ryan James Carr plays drums, Weber Marley works on the string arrangement and Jeffries sings in an unusual high pitch, obtained by putting Jacob’s voice through an AI model of young Micheal Jackson (as Stratton explained on Instagram while introducing the song):
who is little yacov?
his voice sounds oddly familiar, but who is it?
it’s soulful… it’s emo …
ill tell u …
little yacov is the sound of jacob jeffries processed through a vocal model of young michael jackson
this way you get jacob’s emo-diction plus young mj’s range
it’s explosive
please do not debate the ethics of ai and if life has meaning in the comments
Well, Nice to You works beautifully, sounding as a sort of “Vulfpeck low volume funk meets 70s black music and the Jackson Five”: the bass part is exquisite and full of groove, and the song has a slight nostalgic- retro atmosphere that makes it very enjoyable. So don’t debate ethics or whatever, just listen!
The Wooten Brothers (undoubtedly one of the most musical families in history) are currently on tour in the USA, bringing around some new music that (who knows?) might end up in an album over the next few months. To accompany these dates, on October 5th Victor Wooten, Joseph “Hands of Soul” Wooten, Roy “Futureman” Wooten, and Regi “Teacha” Wooten released the new single SWEAT, coming with a videoclip directed by Leah Ruth. SWEAT is a powerful funk with a sticky bass line, a series of pauses and accelerations, start and stops, that build up a song with a pre-eminent 80s flavor played by a band having a vaguely picaresque aesthetic: a clear example of how it is possible to play at very high levels and remain self-ironic, demystifying the idea of the super band through the image of a group of friends (who in this specific case are also brothers) having fun together doing the thing they do best, which is to play.
And then, after a years-worth of full moon releases, Peter Gabriel has unveiled the release date for his new album i/o: the 12-track work will be officially released on December 1st in a variety of different versions, including a box-set featuring the two stereo (Bright-side and Dark-side) mixes and a 3D immersive Atmos In-Side Mix (amongst the various formats, 2CD + BR disc features all the mixes, otherwise it is possible to buy the double CD or the double LP versions, featuring only the two stereo mixes). Along October, Gabriel released two more songs from the i/o tracklist, that is to say This is Home (Bright Side Mix, by Mark Spike Stent, on October 15) followed on October 28 by And Still (Dark Side Mix, by Tchad Blake). The first, a love song to follow the words by Gabriel himself, draws (as already said) a lot of inspiration from the old Motown records that Gabriel used to listen as a young musician (Otis Redding above all): Stent mix makes the piece softer but no less evocative, giving access to a whole series of small sonic details that shine in the background of the piece, and most importantly This is Home is a hell of a song, whatever the mix. The second song, And Still, is dedicated to Gabriel’s mother: When my mum died, I wanted to do something for her, but it’s taken a while before I felt comfortable and distant enough to be able to write something. The song features a beautiful string arrangement and a cello solo by New Blood Orchestra’s cellist Ian Burdge, which in the live version was played by the gorgeous Ayanna Witter-Johnson. To accompany the song, an artwork by the artist Megan Rooney, a large-scale painting titled ‘And Still (Time)’. Rooney said: first only working from the memory of Peter’s song so that I could find my way into the world he had created. And slowly, as I started to listen to sections of the song, a feeling of longing grasped hold of me and I was transported back to my mother’s garden. I typically paint in rapid, concentrated bursts and Peter’s song has a slow, undulating pace to it. The song really cradles you in its arms as much as it lets you soar, so I had to be patient to find a way to respond. And Still has in fact has the sound of a delicate lullaby, something that makes you think to all you have had and all you have lost, with a bittersweet flavor lying behind the beautiful orchestration.
Speaking of new albums and release dates, on October 26 also Everything Everything announced the publication of their new work, titled Mountainhead and scheduled for March 1, 2024. In making this announcement, the band also released the first single taken from the future seventh studio album, that follows the beautiful Raw Data Feel (2022, we said a lot about it here): the song is called Cold Reactor and it is an actual blast. Jonathan Higgs described the album in a recent interview with NME as a metaphor for “late-stage capitalism”: the idea is that, in a sort of dystopic world, society has built a huge mountain by drilling an enormous pit inside their planet, aspiring to climb on it as a sort of mystical ascension. While trying to figure it out, men are threatened by a gigantic golden snake, called Creddahornis, who lives at the bottom of the pit they drilled. “A ‘Mountainhead’ is one who believes the mountain must grow no matter the cost, and no matter how terrible it is to dwell in the great pit,” Higgs explained. “The taller the mountain, the deeper the hole.”
As it always happens with the works licensed by Jonathan Higgs and this band, also Mountainhead promises to be full of juicy political, cultural and social references, ranging range from the Mark Fisher of Capitalist Realism (I read this book Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher which is a sort of diatribe about late-stage capitalism… I wanted something core and large for the centre of it because it controls all of our lives and we forget how we got here and why we’re even in the system. It has always been this and will always be. Increasingly as I get older I think about what life would be like without it. It’s not just capitalism, it’s more the endless attempt to expand that humans do. They have a tendency to spread out and consume everything and then move on, said Higgs in the same interview) to religious themes, from the idolatry of money (The crypto wankers who think that money is all you should ever need – you don’t need to be a human as long as you can get money) to the nightmare of unstoppable growth, from the themes of the culture of success (The whole of our culture holds up success in how much money you’ve made, rather than almost anything else) and fear (which are subtly intertwined), embodied by the fearsome giant snake Creddahornis, to the attempt, desperate and tender at the same time, to remain human in a world that seems to be going more mad every day. Waiting for an apocalypse that will inevitably cleanse our sick model of society (even if the doubt remains that we are actually already in it), Jonathan Higgs, Jeremy Pritchard, Alex Robertshaw and Michael Spearman let us listen to the first minutes of the new album, contained in the single Cold Reactor: it has a delicate, totally analogue sound dominated by Pritchard‘s bass, powerful as always, chased by ghostly synthetic lines and with a voice melody (as always) of another level. To make a joke, Cold Reactor can be considered a slow burner that never explodes, and on the other hand his most representative line is probably I love you like an atom bomb but I’ve become a Cold reactor, featuring a finale that has the flavor of a sudden dawn, flecked by Robertshaw‘s usual unparalleled work on the guitars. If this is the preview, Mountainhead promises to be another masterpiece.
La prima volta che ho incrociato il nome di Carla Bley, compositrice e pianista jazz scomparsa lo scorso 18 Ottobre dopo una lunga malattia, avevo poco più di vent’anni, ero innamorato di Jaco Pastorius e la mia fidanzata, di ritorno da un viaggio a Londra, mi aveva riportato un CD misterioso e bellissimo, che sarebbe rimasto per sempre uno dei miei dischi favoriti: la copertina un acquerello recante le sembianze di un volto simile a quello di Pastorius, realizzato con tutta una serie di delicati colori pastello; il titolo assente (anche se in realtà l’album avrebbe preso in seguito la denominazione non ufficiale di Jaco) e sostituito dall’indicazione dei soli nomi dei musicisti coinvolti in rigoroso ordine alfabetico, Bley Ditmas Metheny Pastorius, tutti pari e nessuno più importante dell’altro (un modo di concepire la vita, non soltanto la musica); la tracklist una successione di nove brani dai titoli a dir poco evocativi, sei dei quali aventi in comune il nome dell’autrice, appunto Carla Bley (gli altri erano firmati da Paul Bley, dal quale ai tempi Carla Bley aveva già divorziato, pur mantenendone il cognome come moniker artistico, e da Annette Peacock). Questo fu il mio primo incontro con l’opera della Bley, una Signora del Jazz d’altri tempi, grandiosa compositrice, inesauribile sperimentatrice e talentuosa pianista: e in particolare un brano, intitolato Vashkar, che fa la sua comparsa proprio in questo stranissimo album del 1974 (credo si tratti della prima incisione ufficiale di Pastorius e Metheny, due anni prima del meraviglioso Bright Size Life) e che ha tutta la misteriosa sospensione di un blues esotico, scritto su un gigantesco e inospitale pianeta gassoso, un brano complesso e imperscrutabile eppure, al tempo stesso, indecifrabilmente affascinante.
Vashkar, che sarebbe stata eseguita negli anni da fior di musicisti (si ricorda soprattutto la versione di Gary Burton e Steve Swallow, quest’ultimo compagno di vita della Bley fino alla morte, contenuta nell’album Hotel Hello del 1975 e che potete ascoltare qui) è stata il mio battesimo con l’opera della Bley, ma sarebbe seguito molto altro. Non sono bravo a scrivere post celebrativi, quindi mi limito a ricordare l’impegno di Carla Bley nel progetto musicale-politico-sociale della Liberation Music Orchestra fondata dal grande Charlie Haden, come musicista, compositrice e arrangiatrice per tutti e quattro gli album della band, con particolare riguardo per Time/Life, pubblicato dopo la morte di Haden e realizzato anche col contributo del compagno Steve Swallow; i grandi dischi degli anni ’70 e ’80, sempre con Swallow al suo fianco, a costruire alcuni tra i più memorabili duetti tra piano e basso elettrico che mi sia capitato di ascoltare; e ancora, in queste ultime settimane, un pezzo meraviglioso che sto studiando nelle mie lezioni di musica, Rut, estratto dal disco del 1985 Night-Glo, che vi lascio in fondo al post e che, me ne rendo conto ora, è similissimo (per quanto completamente diverso) proprio a quella Vashkar dalla quale (per me) tutto ha avuto inizio. E tutto questo non dà che un’immagine parziale del talento folle e sconfinato di questa artista: ma spero che, nel piccolo, sia di stimolo a chi legge per ascoltare, sorprendersi, imparare qualcosa di nuovo; incuriosirsi, in altre parole. Che questo breve, inefficace ricordo possa essere il vostro biglietto per un viaggio nuovo, pieno di sorprese e di scoperte, in compagnia di un po’ della musica jazz più bella che sia stata scritta nell’ultimo secolo.