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- The Retrographer, Issue 50 (February, 2 0 1 9)
The Retrographer, Issue 50 (February, 2 0 1 9)
Jessica Pratt, Ariana Grande, Jay Prince, RUSSELL!, Benny Sings, Maggie Rogers, Big Wild, Rationale, Cass McCombs, Aldous Harding, Gunna, Sonny Rollins
The Retrographer, Issue 50 (February, 2 0 1 9)
Bulletins
One of my idols, Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis, just died. If you haven’t, please listen to Laughing Stock, Spirit of Eden, and his self-titled album. I wrote about Laughing Stock for the ninth Retrographer, read that here. If you don’t have much time, just listen to this song.
“Here My Love”, Jessica Pratt (Spotify / YouTube) – A headphones album if there ever were one, its lean 25 minutes clarifying like a morning walk. Pratt’s threadbare accompaniment demands the exact assured, brave performance that she delivers.
“Ghostin’”, Ariana Grande (Spotify / YouTube) – A sample of the late Malcolm MacCormick’s “2009”, giving new meaning to fresh tragedy. Elsewhere, Ariana sang, “Malcolm, he was an angel”; Here, he still is: “I know you hear me when I cry.”
“CLOSER”, Jay Prince (Spotify / YouTube) – The East Londoner is only the latest marker of the revolution Drake unleashed on rap. “I’m learning to be honest with people who need the truth” is classic Drizzy; Intimate and self-important, but more the latter than the former.
“Emily OG”, RUSSELL! (Spotify / YouTube) – From JUICE WRLD to Lil Peep, the age of emo rap turns out to be less about emo and more about how many of these lonely rappers can sing, and in fact don’t much care to rap at all. I love the lyrical bent; “Your hair is in a fucked up mess…”
“Not Enough”, Benny Sings (Spotify / YouTube) – ”Have you heard Benny Sings?” my friend asked. “No, is he good?” I replied – and then this thing. Somehow complex and simple at the same time, effortless and too tight to be an accident. Even the beatboxing is imperceptible among the drums.
“Give a Little”, Maggie Rogers (Spotify / YouTube) – Everyone is talking about Maggie Rogers, but don’t hold that against her. Her clear voice carries Haim’s banner for 2019, all palm-muted guitars and handclaps. Wipe away the hype and give her a chance to be herself.
“6s to 9s”, Big Wild and Rationale (Spotify / YouTube) – Like St. Lucia’s “The Night Comes Again”, M83’s “Go!”, or Camp Lo’s “Luchini AKA This Is It”, this song takes place on a dancefloor the size of an arena.
“I Followed the River Down South To What”, Cass McCombs (Spotify / YouTube) – McCombs is a shapeshifter, never the same artist album to album. Today, somehow, he’s a halfling Trey Anastasio, yowling on a yawl through deep space.
“The Barrel”, Aldous Harding (Spotify / YouTube) – Impossible to refer to this song without referring to its video, and impossible to listen to it without thinking of it either. Packed with what I think are some of the strangest metaphors for sex I’ve heard lately, what fun.
“Who You Foolin”, Gunna (Spotify / YouTube) – A Shamisen beat, over which Sergio Kitchens emerges, sounding like he’s making his verses on the spot. Wonderfully odd unless you’ve been listening to Gunna these last few years, in which case it’s right in tune.
One Album for February, 2 0 1 9
Sonny Rollins quit jazz for the first time in 1959. He stayed quit until 1961, when he saw John Coltrane, his old friend and rival, play at the Five Spot Café with Miles Davis. For those two years, Rollins kept playing anyhow. Every day he wandered, starting from his apartment in the Lower East Side, across the Williamsburg Bridge footpath with his horn, playing and searching for hours at a time. The next year he released his comeback album, The Bridge. Later on, Rollins moved to Brooklyn. After so much time on the bridge, he crossed it.
Coltrane’s playing didn’t bring Rollins back to jazz because it had become the right time; Rather, the time had passed. Coltrane was toppling conventions, playing ideas that strayed farther and farther out. The genre was borne from popular melody and interpretation became more inventive over time. Free jazz became a teleology that, once it actually arrived, let loose what the New York Times’ Ben Ratliff called “the deepest internal crisis jazz has ever had.” Rollins made it another four years before retiring again.
And then, in 1972, he was back once more, with Sonny Rollins’ Next Album. The title indicated the anticipation it had engendered. Rollins was one of the movement’s great practitioners, and his absence for the time just before, then years after, Coltrane’s demise left an open question as to how the genre was to move forward.
Next Album didn’t show the way, luckily. Through the following decades, jazz became installed in arts institutions; taught in schools nationwide; imitated endlessly by players with no machinations to take it anywhere it hadn’t been before. That, or it continued to break itself into smaller and smaller pieces, breaking rules at lower and lower levels of abstraction, getting as far from those halls as possible.
Next Album was late again. That year, Miles Davis released On the Corner, an adventure deeper into funk than 1969’s Bitches Brew. The next year, Herbie Hancock would release Head Hunters, his avowal of funk. Amidst this, Rollins returned with Next Album, a warm, eclectic, intermittently funky album that split the difference between the nascent conformists and the non. It touches on so many of the musical movements of the day – from Return to Forever’s airy Latin, to Tchoupitoulas Calypso. Even his more hidebound moments show the mastery that made him Coltrane’s friendly rival in Downbeat rankings and bandstands alike.
Rollins was joined by Jack DeJohnette, longtime bassist Bob Cranshaw, and George Cables, whose electric piano placed Next Album squarely in Jazz’s soulful early 70s sound. It opens with “Playin’ in the Yard”, groovier than anything Rollins had touched before, but just as tasteful. “Poinciana” and “The Everywhere Calypso” stretch out to New Orleans and the Caribbean. “Keep Hold Of Yourself” is a racing, mid-period Coltrane burner, the sort of melody that placed his music so squarely in New York.
The closer, “Skylark”, is a particular piece of brilliance. It opens with a soliloquy, the sort of soli that you might have heard Rollins hum somewhere late at night over the East River a decade before. It’s free, but in such a different way than the free jazz of its contemporaries. Rollins is simply playing his heart, lofted like its namesake. When the band comes in, they color in the lines he’s already drawn, and beautifully so. It was an affirmation – maybe lost on some – of how little jazz had to escape from, and even if it did, there was always this to come back to.
Best-Of Playlists
Though these playlists are all on Spotify, not every song (including many of my favorites) is available to stream. To see which tracks are missing, go to "Preferences", scroll down to "Display Options," and then switch on "Show unavailable tracks in playlists."
MONTHLY
#50 February, 2019 | Sonny Rollins, “Next Album”
#29 May, 2017 | Steely Dan, “Aja”
#27 March, 2017 | Wire, “154”
#16 April, 2016 | RIP PRINCE
#15 March, 2016 | Prince, “Prince”
ANNUAL