Jazz + Blues

Traditional yet avant-garde, archaic but also modern, simple as well as complex—American Primitive Guitar is such a sublime unity of opposites that Heraclitus himself would’ve been a fan. Sprouting from the mercurial soul of bohemian, record collector, and fingerstyle genius John Fahey in the early ’60s, the movement generally revolves around solo guitarists molding scraps of country blues, drone, Indian music, and other exotic styles after their own maverick visions. Sometimes, the music sounds endearingly rustic; other times, wildly celestial. For several decades, American Primitivism behaved more like a secret society than recognized genre. Since the turn of the century, however, its ranks have swelled thanks to a new generation of explorers, including Six Organs of Admittance, Marisa Anderson, and the late Jack Rose.

Traditional yet avant-garde, archaic but also modern, simple as well as complex—American Primitive Guitar is such a sublime unity of opposites that Heraclitus himself would’ve been a fan. Sprouting from the mercurial soul of bohemian, record collector, and fingerstyle genius John Fahey in the early ’60s, the movement generally revolves around solo guitarists molding scraps of country blues, drone, Indian music, and other exotic styles after their own maverick visions. Sometimes, the music sounds endearingly rustic; other times, wildly celestial. For several decades, American Primitivism behaved more like a secret society than recognized genre. Since the turn of the century, however, its ranks have swelled thanks to a new generation of explorers, including Six Organs of Admittance, Marisa Anderson, and the late Jack Rose. -- Justin Farrar

When it comes to excavating history in the traditionally under-reported world of avant-garde music, Andy Beta is one of America’s most probing critics. As part of the Pitchfork Essentials series, he put together “Astral Traveling,” a hybrid sociocultural survey and annotated playlist charting the evolution of spiritual jazz in the ’60s and ’70s. Beta—who also has logged considerable time as a deejay—pulls off what is a tricky balancing act. Through words, he successfully weaves selections from John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Sonny Sharrock, et al., into a cogent historical narrative. At the same time, he ensures that his playlist—as a listening experience in its own right—heaves, swells, and testifies with a sense ecstatic ritual that honors spiritual jazz’s sacred ethos. That’s elegant curation.

This post is part of our program, The Story of Kendrick, an in-depth, 10-part look at the life and music of Kendrick Lamar. Sound cool and want to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out and share on Facebook, Twitter, or with this link. Your friends will thank you.Terrace Martin is best known to most hip-hop fans as one of the architects of Kendrick’s seminal album, To Pimp a Butterfly, but the multi-instrumentalist producer, and son of a jazz pianist, has been carving out a signature sound for the past decade on tracks from Snoop, YG, Raphael Saadiq as well as on his own full length albums. His best work integrates multiple decades of West Coast black music -- from the baroque jazz funk of David Axelrod through the whizzing harmonics of DJ Quik’s G-Funk. It’s woozy, bobbing funk, and his solo tracks, in particular, are breezy summer jams that is perfect white owl BBQ music.

Jason Gubbels provides an excellent overview of the music that served as the building blocks of the blues, which, by extension, made it the foundation for much of American popular music. You should check out the entire piece. He also points out that much of this music was marketed as blues when it originally was released following the turn of the century, but that twelve bar blues didnt exist until the 20s. Quote:

"Blues" itself became a hip marketing term attached to song titles in an attempt to stay current with an evolving musical culture, often taking the place of what before might have been "rag" or "stomp"...Many of these early blues performers were never strictly blues artists -- Mamie Smith came out of vaudeville, Blind Blake picked ragtime guitar, and plenty of Mississippi Delta blues singers incorporated country music and current pop songs into their repertoire. So while we largely lack historical recordings demonstrating the origins of the blues, the reality is that plenty of blues performers continued to cut examples of pre- and proto-blues material during their recording sessions.

Whenever it seems impossible to sum up the state of jazz, that’s usually good news. It means that the genre remains one of America’s (and the world’s) most inventive traditions. Here are 20 tracks, available on streaming services, that have left a strong impression over the first half of 2017.A partial rundown: Trumpeter Christian Scott experimented with trap-music influences (“The Reckoning”). Suave Blue Note singer José James veered into contemporary R&B territory with his album Love In A Time of Madness—but also made room for one vintage-sounding come-hither number (“To Be With You”). Bob Dylan’s pipes aren’t anywhere as flexible as James’, but his triple-disc set of standards, Triplicate, offered surprisingly warm takes on jazz standards like “Stardust.” And a crew of jazz veterans including drummer Jack DeJohnette and guitarist John Scofield turned in a sizzling instrumental interpretation of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”Jazz was mixing (and scrambling) everyone’s preferred musical categories long before “blurring the boundaries” became a cliché. So we’ve included sometime classical-pianist Cory Smythe’s partly improvised “Blockchain.” (Smythe also plays on a vivid new avant-garde set from saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock.) Cellist Tomeka Reid appears in the string trio Hear In Now, as well as in bands led by Jaimie Branch and Nicole Mitchell. Elsewhere, we’ve got swinging fire from the likes of Miguel Zenón (playing his own composition “Academia”), while Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra dig into the music of Modern Jazz Quartet co-founder John Lewis. Improvisers are off to a potent start in 2017—thanks to pop-song inspiration, big-band tradition, fusion energy, and an overall taste for experimentation.

Woody Allen’s films achieve a very particular duality. Effortlessly shifting from the wound-up, neurotic jokes he makes to the deep moral conundrums his characters face, he laces his films with a balance that often resembles the actual drama and comedy of real life, for better or worse. These moments of levity and seriousness are always anchored to the films’ larger moods, which are themselves bound to his deliberate and inspired use of music. Manhattan kicks off with Gershwin’s ecstatic Rhapsody in Blue, the jazzy crescendos and woozy melodies of which set the tempo and timbre for the rest of the film. For Love and Death the director chose Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s music from Alexander Nevsky and Lieutenant Kijé, both of which lent the film a particular sense of folkiness and pomp, perfectly mediating the screenplay’s reliance on slapstick comedy and black humor. This playlist collects a number of the director’s most inspired musical selections.

The history of black experimental music is made up of musicians who were and are unapologetically proud of their African descent. They not only used their skills to create profoundly unique music — they also leveraged their connection to their heritage to uplift black American communities, as well as convey their personal frustrations with the oppressions of the pre- and post-civil right eras. This mixtape is filled with artists like Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Betty Davis, and Funkadelic, who pushed, pulled, and broke the boundaries of what black music in America should be, yanking themselves from the mold of Motown to explore new musical territory. A small army of gifted artists followed in their footsteps, from Afrika Bambaataa to DJ Spooky, Flying Lotus to Azealia Banks.

In this volume of my Black Experimental Music Mixtape series, I didn’t include Jimi Hendrix or Prince, because I wanted to share contemporary and/or lesser known artists like Heroes Are Gang Leaders and Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber. These artists belong to a lineage of soul, free jazz, funk, and experimental Black music that extends back to the ‘50s and 60s—and, in some instances, back to before music was even recorded.Black Experimental Music is a form of expression that can reinvent itself without losing its basis in the African American (and Black International) artistic ethos that permeates early predecessors like Lead Belly and Lightnin Hopkins. But before we go that far back, we begin this mix with D’Angelo, an artist’s whose music will never get old. From there, Sly & the Family Stone’s “Africa Talks to You (“The Asphalt Jungle”)” explores what it means to be from an ancient time, yet living in the mean streets of present-day urban chaos. FKA twigs’ “Water Me” is a haunting, hollowed ballad, while Cassandra Wilson’s interpretation of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” is a song my mother used to play on car rides when I was a little girl. Black Spirituals finishes off this collection with a track that resembles a futuristic, minimalist Sun Ra, bringing elements of sound art and electro-acoustic noise to the forefront of current underground Black music.

The African nation of Ethiopia has a unique history. It was never colonized by a European power, and through much of the 20th century the country was ruled by Haile Selassie, a member of Ethiopia’s Solomonic dynasty and the spiritual hero of the Rastafari movement. After 44 years as emperor, Selassie was overthrown in 1974, and the coming years saw a surge of repression and bloodshed by the communist military junta that took over. But in the waning years of Selassie’s reign, Ethiopia become famous for producing a generation of singers and artists who reinvigorated and reinvented local popular music.As has been documented over the past decades by international labels like Buda Musique—known for its famous Éthiopiques compilation series—great artists like Mahmoud Ahmed, Mulatu Astatke, Tlahoun Gessesse, and Bzunesh Beqele came to prominence in the ‘60s and ‘70s by playing in the capital of Addis Ababa with Emperor Selassie’s Imperial Bodyguard Band and the Police Orchestra, both state-controlled outfits. The music—called adadis zefanotch, or “new songs” in Amharic—was decidedly modern, influenced in part by American funk and jazz, but also drew heavily on local rhythms, modal systems, and the folk repertoire while featuring lyrics sung in Amharic and Oromigna.One fine example is Mulatu Astatke’s 1972 album, Mulatu of Ethiopia. Recorded in New York City in between Astatke’s studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, the album finds the jazz composer forging an Ethio-jazz sound by melding Latin jazz and psychedelic soul while using pentatonic melodies and 3/4 rhythms. The album is being reissued this month in a deluxe LP package via Strut Records, so to celebrate, we’ve put together a playlist that looks at his music and the music of other Ethiopian greats from that period—a body of work that still sounds revolutionary today.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.