Am not a proper jazz buff, but this recent instrumental harp album from Amanda Whiting that's at least jazz adjacent is great to chill to:



Her previous album After Dark is also good.


And the Brian Jackson installment from the Jazz Is Dead series is a nice slab of wax that came out within the last several months:

Jim O'Rourke's duo record with Mats Gustafsson, "Xylophonen Virtuosen" has been greatly expanded on, remastered and reissued on Trost. It was originally released on a CD on Derek Bailey's Incus label back in 1999.



The digital label Scatter recently released "Domestic Jungle," a collection of the known recordings of Derek Bailey playing along to UK pirate radio stations that were blasting drum n' bass/jungle at the time. These are the same recordings that led to John Zorn hiring DJ Ninj to create a drum n' bass/jungle album for Derek Bailey to play over and was released as "Guitar, Drums 'n' Bass" on Avant. Rather than that lukewarm studio construction posing as facsimile, these are super raw and inspiring. It's also really endearing that it sounds like you're listening to a terrible home-made cassette still, which is how Bailey recorded these cuts in the first place.

Bümp

I'm doing some looking/booking for a festival and curious what I might be overlooking.
Especially non-male and non-Western artists...
What have you been listening to since last we posted?

While it doesn't fit ^that bill these guys came thru town yesterday. To my ear, a lot of Air/Henry Threadgill influence:

Thanks! I love Air/Threadgill deeply, will be sure to give that a listen.

jimmy spako wrote: Sat Dec 17, 2022 9:20 am Bümp

I'm doing some looking/booking for a festival and curious what I might be overlooking.
Especially non-male and non-Western artists...
What have you been listening to since last we posted?

For non-male, here are a couple things I can think of off the top of my head:

Christine Abdelnour


Ingrid Laubrock


Ava Mendoza


Camila Nebbia


And, of course, there are also the bigger names like Tomeka Reid, Mary Halvorson, Nicole Mitchell, or Matana Roberts and the old heads like Joelle Leandre, Ig Henneman, Sylvie Courvoisier, and Irene Schweizer.

Oh, one more thing. After buying the new Derek Bailey album Domestic Jungle, I went through the other releases on the label and found this:


Both she and the instrument she plays are new to me. I'd never heard of a Paetzold recorder before.

Cool! Couple of the contemporary ones have already featured often there (Laubrock, Mendoza, Reid, Halvorson, Mitchell), but a couple of the names are new, will check them out. Cheers!

I saw an interview where she called her backup singers something like fierce lionesses or something. The context was that while there is structure in the songs, they are doing their own thing to some degree.

I got to see Henry Threadgill here at Jazzfest Saturday (also got to see his Artists' Talk the night before). Massively inspiring stuff for me.
They broadcast his set (a commission for a collaboration between Zooid and a European group) on the radio here and it's archived for a month:

https://www1.wdr.de/radio/wdr3/programm ... n-106.html

It's right at the beginning of the first stream, "Konzerthighlights vom Jazzfest Berlin - Teil 1".

More about the project:

The Creative Music Universe of Henry Threadgill: Zooid meets Potsa Lotsa XL

(US, DE)

After the pandemic thwarted an invitation to bring Henry Threadgill’s quintet Zooid to Jazzfest Berlin in 2020, the remarkable Berlin saxophonist and composer Silke Eberhard was enlisted to honour the legendary Chicago musician’s work instead. With the blessing of Threadgill, Eberhard created dynamic new arrangements of pieces spanning his career, performing them with her excellent large ensemble Potsa Lotsa XL – which won the 2023 German Jazz Prize as Large Ensemble of the year. Threadgill was so pleased with her take on this music that he decided to compose a long-form work to be played by Zooid and Potsa Lotsa XL together, a world premiere.

Threadgill is a curious thinker with a vivid, child-like imagination, qualities that have enabled him to create one of the most enduring, influential and original bodies of work over the last five decades. As documented in his book “Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music”, which will be presented on friday during an artists’ talk, Threadgill joined his Chicago colleagues in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and went on to lead a steady string of innovative ensembles beginning with his singular trio Air in the 1970s. His music has always reached well beyond jazz, fuelled by a ceaseless interest in not only other musical traditions, but all art forms and science, which provided a metaphor for the compositional system he uses in Zooid – the term for a cell that can move independently within an organism – his longest-running group.

Eberhard’s dynamic large ensemble, which grew out of a group formed to play the music of Eric Dolphy, will adapt Threadgill’s Zooid system, where musicians are assigned to a number of specific intervals within which they can range freely, producing a buoyant, sometimes dense polyphony. In this history-making concert – commissioned by Jazzfest Berlin – Threadgill's ensemble meets some of the most exciting improvisers of the Berlin jazz scene. An evening that is further proof that at 79, Threadgill remains fully engaged and prolific, finding wonder in our world and working hard to share his humanistic perspective with listeners.


Line-up

Zooid
Henry Threadgill – alto saxophone, flute, bass flute, composition
Liberty Ellman – acoustic guitar
Christopher Hoffman – cello
José Davila – tuba, trombone
Elliot Humberto Kavee – drums, percussion

Potsa Lotsa XL
Silke Eberhard – alto saxophone
Jürgen Kupke – clarinet
Patrick Braun – tenor saxophone, clarinet
Nikolaus Neuser – trumpet
Gerhard Gschlößl – trombone
Johannes Fink – cello
Taiko Saito – vibraphone
Antonis Anissegos – piano
Igor Spallati – double bass
Kay Lübke – drums

Silke Lange – conductor