Genres

Like this playlist? Love vinyl and jazz? Buy all the songs mentioned here and much much more on vinyl at Wayout Jazz.A musician’s-musician all the way through his brief but influential career, Eric Dolphy amassed a long list of guest appearances to help supplement his supburb solo albums. While most jazz fans know of his stints with both Charles Mingus and the John Coltrane Quartet, there remains a treasure trove of other collaborations that showed his true intellectual style and willingness to experiment based on nothing more than mutual respect of those artists whose visions he believed in. Don’t be put off if that sounds pretentious. He was not one to choose art over beauty, and time will reward repeated listens by exposing deeply emotional playing and thoughtful arrangements. -- Wayout Jazz

Keyboardist Erik Deutschs sound has been described as "a gumbo of American music that touches in jazz, blues, pop, funk and dub," and with his swirling new album Falling Flowers, that statement is definitely true. Touching on psychedelic and atmospheric, Deutsch traverses the realm of what a keyboard can do. An artist in his own right, Deutsch has also been backing up artists like Citizen Cope, Norah Jones, Alice Smith, Rosanne Cash and Shooter Jennings as well as touring regularly with Charlie Hunter throughout his career. Obviously a master of his craft, its no surprise he made a playlist championing his fellow keyboardists. Check it out here or hit play above.Says Deutsch of his playlist, "Hammers, Strings, Stops, & Knobs is my tribute to some of history’s best ticklers, plunkers, pounders, and tweakers of all things related to the undisputed heavyweight champ of western music: the keyboard. Every one of these essential artists holds a special place in my heart as the uniqueness of each of their musical voices exist on a level reserved for the very best (not to mention that these are seriously dope tracks!) So kick back, relax, and allow a hefty dose of keyboard wizardry to brighten up your day."

Erykah Badu is this generations queen of soul. Her music is the sound of apocalyptic premonitions, bedroom recriminations, African headwraps, Rhodes keyboards, political claptrap, Nag Champa ashes, and dusty, broken breaks. It’s an oeuvre that is hypnotic, sensual and, above all else, iconic. It’s safe to say that Erykah from Dallas is an emancipation artist: She’s liberated the funk from soul, soul from the past, history from herself, and her audience from their seats. It’s a loopy, wrinkle-in-time logic: One of the foundational figures of R&B’s current futurist, post-everything heatwave is a woman who was considered a nostalgist when she first appeared 20 years ago.And if those mathematics are confusing, swiggle this: What artist, of any genre, has remained as consistently unpredictable or this fearlessly unremitting in her will to constantly redefine her sound for as long as Ms. Badu? If R&B is the lingua franca of modern music, then Erykah was the one who tagged the Rosetta Stone.But what are Erykah’s musical foundations? Luckily, that’s an immensely answerable question. She has always been generous in citing her various influences, and we’ve scoured various interviews, DJ sets, mixtapes, live setlists, and sample databases to compile a list of the tracks that made Erykah, Erykah. If you want to hear her best work, check out our Erykah essentials playlist here; if you’re looking to understand how she got here, this is the place to start.There are at least a few basic sensibilities at play in Erykah’s music. Funk is at the forefront, in various permutations, from the genre’s godfather, James Brown, to his various global descendents: Fela in Lagos, Maurice Washington in Chicago, Prince in Minneapolis, Zapp in Cincinnati, and Thundercat in Los Angeles. Brown’s “King Heroin,” which Erykah included on her phenomenal FEEL BETTER, WORLD! mixtape, features the godfather at his most pensive and mournful, calling for a “revolution of the mind”—another liberation of sorts—over a slinking, understated backdrop.There’s a similar sadness running through Fela’s “Army Arrangement,” which Erykah selected as part one of her favorite Fela tracks in an interview with OkayAfrica. The track was recorded in 1985, as Fela was facing concurrent five-year sentences for trumped-up currency-smuggling charges. After he was imprisoned in Nigeria, his record label gave the masters to Bill Laswell, who chopped up the track’s 30-minute length into something more approachable for Western audiences. "Listening to it was worse than being in prison," Fela quipped. Luckily, the full original version has been restored, and you can hear echos of the track’s loping, hypnotic funk throughout Erykah’s own work.But while funk may be the spoken undercurrent, it’s hardly the only note. Her take on interplanetary psychedelia is also present here. For her BEATS BEES LIKE FOR B-BOYS AND B-GIRLS mixtape, which premiered in 2016 on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 show, Badu chose Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War.” Sun Ra, an afrofuturist pioneer, was perhaps most famous for claiming that he was an alien from Saturn on a mission to preach peace. “Nuclear War” is the apocalypse as a shuttling, chanted, obscene zen koan. This 11th-hour spiritualism is refracted through Erykah’s own shambolic, shamanistic 2008 masterpiece, New Amerykah Part One, an album that alchemizes the dread and loathing of George W. Bush’s second term. That album also famously sampled Eddie Kendricks’ moody “My People...Hold On,” a track that skirts the boundaries of funk, jazz, psych, and soul to craft an an ode to perseverance and defiance.And while the almost all of the selections here are culled from artists of the African diaspora, the exceptions are notable. For a Complex interview in 2015, she revealed that Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon taught her the value of “evolving through experimentation.” It echoed what she told Rolling Stone in a 2011 retrospective of the album, where she relayed being turned onto the Floyd in 1995 by Andre 3000. In that aforementioned Complex interview, she also names Joni Mitchell’s Blue as one of her favorite albums, saying that the Laurel Canyon icon has “one of the most soothing voices I’ve ever heard. The music is haunting.”There’s an underlying tenderness and intimacy in Mitchells work that informs both singers’ work, regardless of which genre the songs work within. It’s the same delicacy that informs many of her soul picks, from Stevie Wonder’s phosphorescent “Visions” to J Dilla’s ethereal “Bye.,” which chopped The Isley Brothers’ “Don’t Say Goodnight” to haunting effect. While no one one-ups Dilla, Erykah did her own impressive interpolation of the Isleys’ version of Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me” for her 2016 hit collaboration with Andre 3000, “Hello”—a track that conveys the tenderness and warmth of those old friends and lovers.And, in many ways, that yin-yang dynamic—the balancing of intimacy, poetry, and grace with power, prose, and rhythm—sums up Erykah. She’s not only one of pop music’s most powerful artists, but one whose work channels the brightest and boldest impulses of the best popular music of the past five decades.

It’s difficult to overstate how much DFA meant to modern indie music. When the label first appeared in the early aughts, many in the Pitchfork crowd were afraid of dance music, but bands like LCD Soundsystem and Rapture made electronic music hip again for a certain audience. It was post-internet music, meaning that there was a premium put on pastiche and obscurity; and the music referenced everything from Krautrock to disco. But the music wasn’t stale or overly cerebral; it rocked, thumped and sometimes bumped. Elliot Sharp, from RBMA, places the tracks in chronological order, and it’s interesting to hear the collective sound develop and mature over the years. There seems to be an over-reliance on remixes, and some of the labels biggest names are not on here, but every track is great, and it’s a decent enough place to start.

The origins of post-rock are nebulous, but the aesthetic is more exact: airy instrumentals that found that common ground between the industrial fuzz of musique concrete, the ambience of pre-fusion, late-60s jazz (think In a Silent Way), and the straight lines of ‘80s math rock. When it came out, it felt like a rejection of the scenestery, overly emotive indie rock of the ‘90s, and a path forward for rock, which felt like it had been treading water in the shallow end of ‘60s-inspired nostalgia. It got real boring really quickly, but it sounded glorious at the time. Garrett Kamps, in his write-up for Stereogum, doesn’t try to capture the cannon, but rather a personal reflection of what he remembers to be the best tracks from this now-maligned subgenre.

Thrash represents that pivotal point at which heavy metal turns extreme. Of course, extreme music existed before Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, Overkill, Celtic Frost, and thousands of other vile shredders across the globe declared war on our ears in the mid-’80s. There was Motörhead’s mechanically chugging roar, Venom’s cavernous blasphemy, Diamond Head’s white-hot intricacy, and Void’s violently messy hardcore (which basically is proto-thrash). Yet these were mere glimpses when compared to thrash’s radical, across-the-board redefining of heaviness, speed, and volume, one embedded in the genetic sequence of practically every manifestation of extreme metal to follow: death metal, black metal, metalcore, grindcore, sludge, you name it.It’s generally understood that thrash is a collision of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal’s scorching complexity (including that scene’s innovative use of double-bass-drumming) with hardcore punk’s raw force and gang chant toughness. And while this certainly is true—it’s especially obvious on Anthrax’s “Caught in a Mosh” and Exodus’ “And Then There Were None”—it doesn’t fully explain the movement’s revolutionary newness. And that’s because thrash isn’t a mere blending of antecedents. When it comes to fully appreciating these sick jams, what isn’t heard is just as important as what is. Take Sepultura’s absolutely manic “Stronger Than Hate”—it was recorded a mere six years after Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills,” and yet it sounds decades removed. Melodies, ornateness, choruses—indeed, any semblance of traditional songwriting—have been ruthlessly excised. All that remains is a high-velocity explosion of vicious shredding, incensed howls and grunts, whiplash rhythms, and lyrics splattered in seething rage and graphic imagery.This last quality created quite an uproar during the disgustingly conservative and paranoid Reagan era, back when Tipper Gore’s vile PMRC and tons of Bible-banging parents viewed the genre, as well as headbanger culture in general, as the decline of Western civilization. (Too bad it wasn’t.) It resulted in thrash bands frequently being dismissed as a cross between Satan worshippers and knuckle-dragging brutes, when in fact their lyrics often tackled environmental concerns, nuclear war, genocide, and psychological alienation with a mix of holding-a-mirror-up-to-society morality and intensely black humor inspired by horror flicks. Moreover, thrash unleashed some of the most dizzyingly demanding music this side of avant-garde jazz. Far and away the most potent proof of this is the genre’s crowning achievement: Slayer’s 1986 touchstone Reign in Blood, a record that bludgeons like a club embedded with nails (especially the screaming dive bombs of guitarists Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King) while also sounding so stunningly precise, energetic, and intelligent that it’s difficult to fathom mere mortals creating such a jigsaw-like artifact.This feature is part of our Thrash 101 online course that was produced in partnership with the good rocking folks at GimmeRadio, a free 24/7 metal radio station hosted by heavy-music experts like Megadeths Dave Mustaine and Lamb of Gods Randy Blythe. Check them out here and sign up for the Thrash 101 course here.

Welcome to Thrash 101. This Dowsers online course on thrash is produced in partnership with GimmeRadio, your free 24/7 radio station, with shows hosted by heavy-music experts. Want more metal? Check them out here.Thrash represents that pivotal point at which heavy metal turns extreme. Of course, extreme music existed before Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, Overkill, Celtic Frost, and thousands of other vile shredders across the globe declared war on our ears in the mid-’80s. There was Motörhead’s mechanically chugging roar, Venom’s cavernous blasphemy, Diamond Head’s white-hot intricacy, and Void’s violently messy hardcore (which basically is proto-thrash). Yet these were mere glimpses when compared to thrash’s radical, across-the-board redefining of heaviness, speed, and volume, one embedded in the genetic sequence of practically every manifestation of extreme metal to follow: death metal, black metal, metalcore, grindcore, sludge, you name it.It’s generally understood that thrash is a collision of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal’s scorching complexity (including that scene’s innovative use of double-bass-drumming) with hardcore punk’s raw force and gang chant toughness. And while this certainly is true—it’s especially obvious on Anthrax’s “Caught in a Mosh” and Exodus’ “And Then There Were None”—it doesn’t fully explain the movement’s revolutionary newness. And that’s because thrash isn’t a mere blending of antecedents. When it comes to fully appreciating these sick jams, what isn’t heard is just as important as what is. Take Sepultura’s absolutely manic “Stronger Than Hate”—it was recorded a mere six years after Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills,” and yet it sounds decades removed. Melodies, ornateness, choruses—indeed, any semblance of traditional songwriting—have been ruthlessly excised. All that remains is a high-velocity explosion of vicious shredding, incensed howls and grunts, whiplash rhythms, and lyrics splattered in seething rage and graphic imagery.This last quality created quite an uproar during the disgustingly conservative and paranoid Reagan era, back when Tipper Gore’s vile PMRC and tons of Bible-banging parents viewed the genre, as well as headbanger culture in general, as the decline of Western civilization. (Too bad it wasn’t.) It resulted in thrash bands frequently being dismissed as a cross between Satan worshippers and knuckle-dragging brutes, when in fact their lyrics often tackled environmental concerns, nuclear war, genocide, and psychological alienation with a mix of holding-a-mirror-up-to-society morality and intensely black humor inspired by horror flicks. Moreover, thrash unleashed some of the most dizzyingly demanding music this side of avant-garde jazz. Far and away the most potent proof of this is the genre’s crowning achievement: Slayer’s 1986 touchstone Reign in Blood, a record that bludgeons like a club embedded with nails (especially the screaming dive bombs of guitarists Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King) while also sounding so stunningly precise, energetic, and intelligent that it’s difficult to fathom mere mortals creating such a jigsaw-like artifact.

Germany’s DJ Koze makes the type of sweeping, kaleidoscopic electronic that sheds easy genre definitions or quick reference points. When he released his 2013 masterpiece Amyglda, some positioned it next to Daft Punk’s album from that year, Random Access Memories, as the go-to electronic release of that year. Coming from a hip-hop background, I detected the influence of Madlib in Koze’s whimsical, slightly stoned collages, and that sense of playfulness and culture spelunking extends to the artists on Koze’s Pampa label. Philip has captured the “pleasure of small surprises” that is essential to label’s charm. It’s an amazing, frequently silly and always surprising collection.

Andy Beta strikes again. This time around fans of Pitchfork’s Essentials series are treated to the music journalist’s historical romp through pop’s love affair with the vocoder and talk box, repurposed chunks of communications technology that transform the human voice into cyborg speech and frog croaks. His track list is a veritable house party packed with bouncing dance jams, from electro, hip-hop, electronica, and funk. A cunning curator, Beta has the chutzpah to actually leave off Kraftwerk, one of the vocoder’s most high-profile pioneers. He adds crate-digging obscurities from Can’s Holger Czukay and French disco freaks The Rockets instead. Neither is essential in terms of historical importance, yet they’re so deliciously novel that it hardly matters. Just turn them up and have a blast.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!A café opened in my neighborhood a few years ago that I just couldn’t figure out. The trouble wasn’t the menu, but the decor: The interior was a gaily colored hodgepodge of Buddha busts, paper lanterns, pretty vases, and posters of mighty waves and long-tongued dragons; the place was a kitschy riot of Chinese and East Asian motifs. Yet I didn’t see a single Asian employee. It took me several visits to realize that the design aesthetic wasn’t just some egregious example of cultural appropriation—though it probably was that, too—but a new manifestation of a phenomenon with much deeper roots.Derived from the French word for Chinese, “Chinoiserie” is the name for a style of European decorative arts that brandish an Asian influence, the result of new trade relationships between the East and West in the 17th century. King Louis XV was a fan, as were the architects who decided that no English manor garden was complete without a pagoda. In any case, my neighborhood’s belated example of orientalism-in-action must’ve confused people because the establishment didn’t thrive. The space was eventually reborn as a sushi restaurant, and needless to say, the new proprietors didn’t do much redecorating.I’m also relieved to no longer have to deal with complex questions of white privilege, cross-cultural exchange, and colonial power dynamics every time I want a decent latte. Yet these matters seem inescapable today, what with the Trump administration’s unabashed Islamophobia, the growth of nationalist and nativist movements throughout Europe, and the hardening of attitudes toward immigrants and refugees. Citizens of the so-called First World have never been freer to cast a fearful eye on whichever group they consider the “other.”Meanwhile, in the cultural realm, there’s a renewed urgency to carve out new spaces for previously marginalized or unacknowledged voices and perspectives within a dominant industrial-entertainment-media apparatus that seems forever prone to missteps. In other words, it’s not an overreaction to question the wisdom of casting Scarlett Johansson as a Japanese anime heroine. Every day yields a new Twitter eruption on the topic of who can and can’t represent positions and experiences, especially when the work involves transgressing boundaries of race, gender, culture, and class.All of this makes me feel even more confused and conflicted about a huge body of music that’s always fascinated me. This is music by (mostly) white people who eagerly adopted other modes that were ostensibly foreign, which automatically was a complicated move given the stew of African, Caribbean, and Latin influences in American popular music in the first place. Nevertheless, they drew and continue to draw from African, Asian, Arabic, East Indian, indigenous, and other traditions to create forgeries and mutations that positively revel in their inauthenticity.I’m not about to defend all of it—I can’t. So much of it reeks of an old colonial mindset, one I continue to grapple with as a suburban kid who grew up in a placid corner of Canada, devoid of the cultural markers I perceived and envied in other lives (an illusion that’s proof of my white privilege, of course). Yet much of it is also the product of an age in which much of the West had a different attitude toward the rest of the globe. Looking back at the world music vogue sparked by Paul Simon, David Byrne, and Peter Gabriel in the ‘80s, it can seem like a wave of cultural appropriation run rampant, a self-congratulatory embrace of cultural otherness that’s as suspect as the exotica craze of the 1950s. But at its best, this music can be seen and heard as an open-hearted effort to dissolve the borders and boundaries that are so important to people right now.Those good intentions and spirit of curiosity connect music as diverse as cheeseball tiki-lounge tunes, the cheeky ethnological forgery series of Holger Czukay and CAN, early American minimalism music—which was steeped in Indian raga, African percussion, and gamelan—and even The Rolling Stones’ dalliance with The Master Musicians of Jajouka. In recent years, newer acts such as Goat, Beirut, Dengue Fever, Vampire Weekend, and Dirty Projectors have incurred charges of appropriation for stepping outside of their own original cultural domains to investigate and play around in others. Such engagement is bound to be problematic on several levels, yet it deserves a reaction other than knee-jerk dismissal. So does the music we get when—to borrow a favorite title for post-grad courses on postcolonial legacies—the empire looks back: when Western pop modes become absorbed and transformed (though that’s another playlist). As confusing as it may be, this music elicits emotions and sensations other than the hate and fear that are otherwise so rife in our moment.