Garcia Peoples - Cosmic Cash 2018

On their debut album, Cosmic Cash, New Jersey outfit Garcia Peoples aren't trying to hide their inspirations, but manage to refract them in a way so warm that it feels like a celebration. The influences are obvious: the telepathic boogie rock of Little Feat, the Allman Brothers, or Hot Tuna; the goofy juvenilia of Phish or NRBQ; and signifiers from several different phases of the Grateful Dead's endless oeuvre. Indeed, the raspy vocal harmonies, interlocking guitar leads, and generally blissfully dazzled state of the album all point directly to the Dead's studio work, in particular mellow gallops like "Show Your Troubles Out," which could be an Aoxomoxoa outtake. Rather than jam band mimicry, however, Cosmic Cash reads more like an exciting update to these influences. Garcia Peoples clearly have a healthy appreciation of the '60s and '70s jam band foundations, but take risks with their approach and inject enough of their own spirit into the songs to make them more their own. This comes into full focus on the nearly 14-minute "Suite," a collection of five shorter pieces that charges out of the gates with almost Krautrock-like propulsion. Wild rhythms and burning dual-guitar lead melt into a sunshiny groove for a while before ultimately dissolving completely into a sticky web of harmonies and call-and-response composition that tells a hallucinogenic story as the song shuffles along. It's a long strange trip, to be sure, but feels like a trippy exploration of how far Garcia Peoples can push the known boundaries placed by their influences. When they're not tripping through the stratosphere, they're ripping through boogie rock numbers like "The Sweet Lie," melding barn-burning playing with a lighthearted indie feel (not far from early Real Estate or Bonny Doon) to their '60s-steeped sound. Most of the band members were children when Jerry Garcia died, but this factor somehow adds to the feeling of genuine love and curiosity for what he left behind. While clear in its reference points, Cosmic Cash feels more like a young group of artists carrying the torch passed down from a previous generation of psychedelic searchers than a bar band running through jammy cover songs. The songs are intentional in even their most exploratory moments, tapping into the spirit of mystical wondering and belief in the unexplainable that made the first wave of cosmic rock bands so important to begin with. AMG.

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Big Chief - Face 1992

"Fresh Vines" doesn't merely resemble Black Sabbath, because it is Black Sabbath. Within the first minute, you hear segments of that band's "War Pigs" and "After Forever." Any band with the cajones to directly lift two songs from Birmingham's finest in the opening song of its first LP deserves some credit. Either that or they're asking for trouble. What the hell, you know? Hip-hop has its share of direct samples, so why not rock & roll? Big Chief is actually playing it, and if you're gonna steal, you might as well steal from the best. Is that "Lemon Song" heard on "The Ballad of Dylan Cohl?" Sounds like it. But more importantly, Face cleans up the sound from the early singles. The rhythm section of bassist Matt O'Brien and drummer Mike Danner is given more room to breathe, as everything comes across as more pliable, less cluttered. Just as importantly, Barry Henssler transforms from a vocalist to a singer -- his increased range no longer pins the band into a corner. The record seems to stick to two gears, toggling between charging and deliberate. With some furious soloing, "Drive It Off" introduces overt bluesiness into the band's repertoire, while the stomping "Desert Jam" matches the molasses-paced lurchers of early Soundgarden and Jane's Addiction. The CD adds two different versions of "Fresh Vines," a hip-hop mix with a walking bassline and an instrumental that gets a little too close to Spin Doctors territory for comfort. AMG.

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Ghost-Note - Fortified 2015

A highly inventive, percussion-based ensemble, Ghost-Note showcases the combined talents of Snarky Puppy bandmates drummers Robert "Sput" Searight and Nate Werth. Working with a rotating group of collaborators, Ghost-Note makes a kinetic, stylistically varied blend of groove-based funk, EDM, hip-hop, jazz, and rock. The group emerged in 2015 with its debut album, Fortified, which hit the top of digital jazz charts, and found Ghost-Note drawing upon such influences as James Brown, J Dilla, and Herbie Hancock as well as West African, Afro-Cuban, and Brazilian rhythmic traditions. When not working with Snarky Puppy, Searight and Werth continue to tour and record as Ghost-Note. Prior to joining Snarky Puppy, both Searight and Werth honed their skills studying jazz at the prestigious University of North Texas (UNT). Born in Dallas, Texas, Searight joined Snarky Puppy first, after having built his reputation with Kirk Franklin and other luminaries on the Dallas gospel scene. A native of Indiana, Werth came to the innovative, genre-bending ensemble almost directly after graduating UNT, and immediately struck up a friendship with Searight. Together, they came up with the idea of creating their own group where the percussion would be the main driver behind the music. In 2015, they delivered Ghost-Note's well-received debut album, which featured contributions from a bevy of their friends including Nick Werth, Jason "JT" Thomas, Shaun Martin, N'Dambi, Mark Lettieri, Caleb McCampbell, and others. Two years later, they returned with Swagism, which featured guest appearances by Justin Stanton, Karl Denson, Kamasi Washington, and others. AMG.

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Alain Peters - Rest' La Maloya 2015

Alain Peters is one of the best-kept secrets in the music scene of the Indian Ocean and beyond. His music is unique: a blend of Creole blues, maloya, and international folk, it discretely takes hold of you and never leaves you. Peters travelled through the 70s and the 80s like a shooting star, alone or with a band, with his Sahelian lute, his reel-to-reel tape recorder, firewater and ill-fated genius. He died in 1995, aged 43. Poet, musician, singer and melody-maker, he left behind a handful of sublime songs which are gathered here for the first time on vinyl. Full of dazzling beauty and sparkling darkness, his songs express the yearning homesickness of the Creoles’ highly sensitive wandering soul, at the crossroads of African, Indian and European cultures. Réunion (literally “the gathering”) is aptly named and over the course of his uncertain career, Peters continuously embodied the soul of this culturally hybrid land with a fusion of African instruments, Indian mysticism and European poetry.

Both discreet and sincere, Caloubadia leaves a lasting impression. Peters and his friend Loy Ehrlich’s ethereal choruses give this ode to euphoria a feeling of weightlessness. It’s a slow incantation, mystical, heady and acoustic. With sparse means and spontaneous poetry, Péters speaks of his daily life and environment, where happiness and sunlight shine on an inner storm of volcanic strength and darkness.

Frail improvised percussion, a four-string lute, two plastic bags rubbed together and other titbits are enough for Peters to compose Creole symphonies of dazzling beauty, full of sun, waves and wind. Mangé pour le cœur is the perfect example of this, if not for its preternatural melody.

Released in 1977, La rosée si feuilles songes was the first song he recorded at Studio Royal in Saint-Joseph. Interpreted by singer Hervé Imare, this unique 7” was released by “Les Caméléons”, for whom Peters played the bass guitar. The band, at the crossroads of jazz-rock, reggae and prog rock, lived in a community in Langevin, in the heights of Saint-Joseph. This is undoubtedly one of the most productive periods for Péters, who wrote with a lot of ease, first in French, then in Creole.

Based on a poem by his friend Jean Albany, La pêche Bernica veers towards free jazz, with its incantatory saxophone, arranged by René Lacaille, Peters’ loyal friend since the “Caméléons”. He sings about a spot of fishing at the time of the Mass, in one of the island’s well-known rivers, near Saint-Paul. As in all of his compositions, Peters builds a little melodic gem from his childhood memories, which the poet and the music transcend. It’s remarkably fluid, as if flowing in an azalea-lined gulley which bounces towards the Ocean.

Plime la misère wards off ill fortune, evading a plaintive tone to become a lively creation. Based on another poem by Jean Albany, the song’s melody is built around the wind, while quoting several places in Réunion, once again placing the island at the heart of Peters’ preoccupations. The toponymy of the island names blends perfectly with the lyrics. Proud of his Creole roots, he grew up attending Claude Vinh-San and Jazz Tropical concerts, a band which had a lasting influence on him. His father Edouard actually played the drums for saxophonist Chane-Kane’s band, one of the island’s most influential bands, before the tidal wave of pop music of the late 60s arrived.

Ti pas ti pas n’arriver is another great moment of poetry from the Indian Ocean. The song is also known as Rame canot. This song demonstrates Euclidean perfection: It works like a parable for the hardship that life inflicted on him at the time.

The more celestial Complainte de Satan (1ère figure) is far less dark than its title might suggest. The lyrics evoke the island spleen and the surrounding vastness. Deceptively fatalistic, Peters leaves it to the elements and to an almost resigned Good Lord, while he delivers the lyrics for his own survival himself. The nocturnal Ti cabart is a light and moving instrumental track, with fragments of a sibylline chorus that tales off into the blue, without ever looking back. It floats high above the island’s peaks, carried by breathtaking choruses, while Wayo manman! weaves a hypnotic canvas, thanks in part to the strings of the ngoni. Péters repeats the chorus like a long looped mantra.

With its universal melody, Rest’ la maloya is probably one of the greatest unknown hits, which should be kept close to the heart. The Fender Rhodes and light percussions weave the perfect canvas for Péters, whose blue-tinted voice travels through the track like a shooting star, touching on a world dream. Full of hope, the track sounds like a sunrise, with nothing but the ocean on the horizon.

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Betty Everett & Jerry Butler - Delicious Together 2000

Betty Everett sang gospel growing up in Greenwood, MS, before relocating to Chicago and moving into secular music. She began recording for Cobra in 1958, then joined Vee-Jay in the early '60s and started to land hit records. Her original version of "You're No Good," though sung with fire and verve, didn't make much impact until it was turned into a number one pop hit by Linda Ronstadt in 1975. Her next single, "The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss)," was her first major release, peaking at number six pop in 1964. Her next success was the duet "Let It Be Me" with Jerry Butler, a soul version of the Everly Brothers tune that reached number five R&B that same year. Everett's finest song as a solo act was 1969's "There'll Come a Time," which reached number two on the R&B charts and also cracked the pop Top 30 at number 26. Everett was now on Uni, where she remained until 1970. She continued recording for Fantasy until 1974 and made one other record for United Artists in 1978. A comeback performance for the 2000 PBS special Doo Wop 51 was her last public appearance; she died at her Wisconsin home in August 2001. AMG.

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Barbara Thompson's Paraphernalia - Everlasting Flame 2014

As both bandleader and collaborator, British saxophonist and flutist Barbara Thompson has for decades been a key contributor to cutting-edge jazz and jazz-rock ensembles based in her home country as well as continental Europe. With a classical music education at the Royal College of Music, Thompson was nevertheless attracted to the world of jazz, joining Neil Ardley’s New Jazz Orchestra in the mid-‘60s, where she met Colosseum drummer Jon Hiseman, whom she married in 1967. (Thompson has also performed and recorded with Colosseum on occasion, and she became a permanent member of the group in 2004.) During the 1970s, Thompson joined the United Jazz + Rock Ensemble (a ten-piece band also featuring Wolfgang Dauner, Ian Carr, Kenny Wheeler, Albert Mangelsdorff, Charlie Mariano, and Hiseman) and formed her own jazz-rock outfit, Paraphernalia, as well as a Latin-flavored ensemble, Jubiaba. Thompson’s recordings have run the gamut from jazz-rock fusion and modern creative jazz to world and folk music and even modern classical, and she has also composed music for theater productions (beginning a working relationship with Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1978) and for film and television soundtracks. In 1996 Thompson was awarded the rank of MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for services to music. Thompson was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1997, but continued to record and tour into the new millennium while devoting much of her energies to composing. Her albums during the 2000s have included two releases on Intuition, Barbara Thompson and Friends' In the Eye of a Storm (2003) and Paraphernalia’s Never Say Goodbye (2007). AMG.

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Don Preston - Vile Foamy Ectoplasm 1993

Great title, and an intriguing mass of cuts, clips, and sketches that build up into precisely the kind of portrait you'd expect from such a storied contributor to the Frank Zappa story. Expanding out from its original 1993 Germany-only release (eight bonus tracks have been salted throughout), Vile Foamy Ectoplasm is musically intriguing even when you find it melodically challenging, a smorgasbord of sonics, sounds, and madness that rounds up 20 tracks ranging in length from 15 minutes to nine seconds, and drawn from a bewildering variety of sources. Spoken word clatter from the streets of New York City dates back to 1967-1968 and the Mothers' visits to the Big Apple, but "Loki" is pure Preston magic, a modular synth solo taped in 1968 with Zappa "engineering the gong segments." Weird and wonderful. Other cuts hail from various '70s and '80s excursions, including a quartet of tracks by the post-Mothers Grandmothers jazz convention, but the meat of the moment is the 15-minute "Death Lights," a dramatic collage that again dates back to 1967-1968 and could easily have been sliced even further to bring fresh texture to any period Mothers project. It's not at all easy to listen to all the way through, but you probably wouldn't want it to be, would you? AMG.

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Circuit Des Yeux - Portrait 2011

Indiana native Haley Fohr began her experimental indie folk project Circuit des Yeux in 2007, writing and self-recording disturbing, nightmare-like atonal pieces caked in distortion and tape hiss. Her debut LP, Symphone, was released in a limited edition by De Stijl in 2008, followed in 2009 by the more widely available Sirenum on the same label, as well as a 7" single on Dull Knife Records. 2010 saw the release of Ode to Fidelity, a three-song 7" EP on De Stijl which signaled Fohr's shift to more song-based material, letting her deep, haunting vocals and unsettling lyrics rise to the forefront. Third album Portrait arrived on De Stijl in 2011, sporting a much clearer recording quality, as well as a dirge-like deconstruction of Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire" recorded live. Fohr graduated college in 2012, and moved from Bloomington, Indiana to Chicago, where she began collaborating and performing with several artists in the city's vast music communities. The first fruits of her collaborations came in early 2013 with the release of CDY3, a 10" EP on Magnetic South showcasing a trio lineup of Circuit des Yeux, with bassist Greg Simpson and drummer Clarke Joyner accompanying Fohr's vocals and guitar playing. Fohr recorded the fourth Circuit des Yeux album, Overdue, with Cooper Crain of Cave and Bitchin Bajas, and self-released the album along with help from Brooklyn-based Ba Da Bing Records. The album continued Fohr's growth as an artist and songwriter, featuring confessional folk songs as well as caterwauling experimental noise pieces, and was her most well-received and acclaimed work to date. Circuit des Yeux toured extensively in 2014, playing over 100 shows with numerous folk and experimental musicians, including Loren Connors, Sir Richard Bishop, and Bill Callahan. Toward the end of the year, Fohr contributed vocals to The Voice Rolling, an album by Mind Over Mirrors, the synthesizer/harmonium-based experimental ambient project of ex-Peeesseye musician Jaime Fennelly. The album was released by Immune Recordings in early 2015, and the duo toured together. Soon after, Circuit des Yeux signed with well-regarded Chicago-based indie/experimental label Thrill Jockey, which released the project's lushly orchestrated fifth album, In Plain Speech, in May of 2015. The label also released the eponymous debut album by Fohr's alter ego Jackie Lynn in 2016. She moved to Drag City for the sixth Circuit des Yeux album, Reaching for Indigo, which appeared in 2017. Meg Remy of U.S. Girls edited the video for "Paper Bag," the album's first single.

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Dwight Trible - Mothership 2019

Whether he's leading his own group or singing with the Pharoah Sanders Quartet or acting as the vocal director for the Horace Tapscott Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra or collaborating with the likes of Bobby Hutcherson, Kamasi Washington, Jr., Charles Lloyd, or Oscar Brown, Jr., Dwight Trible is a jazz singer who prizes a sense of adventure, musicians, and modernity. In addition to singing with experimental jazz musicians, he sang contemporary R&B with L.A. Reid and Patrice Rushen and seized the opportunity to record with electronica and hip-hop outfits, such as his 2005 collaboration with Carlos Nino, a distinction that distinguishes him from many of his jazz peers.

A native of Cincinnati, Trible relocated to Los Angeles in 1978 and swiftly became part of its jazz scene. He caught the ear of pianist/bandleader Horace Tapscott, who became a mentor for the singer. Trible worked his way up to vocal director for the Horace Tapscott Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, which he continued to lead after Tapscott's death in 1999. Two years later, Trible released a tribute to Tapscott called Horace on Elephant Records; it was his first album. Trible was featured on Venus of Harlem, a 2008 album by Paul Zauner's Blue Brass, and he returned to solo recording in 2011, releasing a pair of albums called Cosmic and Duality, the latter being a duet album with John Beasley. Trible's profile increased considerably when he sang lead vocals on Kamasai Washington's 2015 record The Epic, the rare jazz album to find a crossover audience. In its wake, Gondwana Records signed the singer. His first album for the label was Inspirations, a 2017 collaborative album with Matthew Halsall. Trible was featured on Venus of Harlem, a 2008 album by Paul Zauner's Blue Brass, and he returned to solo recording in 2011, releasing a pair of albums called Cosmic and Duality, the latter being a duet album with John Beasley. Trible's profile increased considerably when he sang lead vocals on Kamasai Washington's 2015 record The Epic, the rare jazz album to find a crossover audience. In its wake, Gondwana Records signed the singer. His first album for the label was Inspirations, a 2017 collaborative album with Matthew Halsall. AMG.
 

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