I’ve long admired the music of Phonte because of the honesty it exudes, the kind you can understand in your 20s, though it doesn’t resonate until more dust adorns your birth certificate. It’s not the kind of performative truth that other rappers use mid-career, when it’s time for the “weird” record or the creative reset. It sidesteps trauma for algorithms. The candor is earned and lived-in, arriving after long nights working in retail, after label meetings that leave a sour taste in your mouth, after discovering that talent and acclaim don’t always equate to thousands in your bank account.

Phonte’s voice, whether rapping or singing, has always merged aspiration and realism, confidence and self-doubt, humor and disappointment. He sounds like a man who understands both the miracle and the absurdity of surviving creative life — and, well, life in general. That, perhaps more than anything, is what’s made him singular.

In the canon of Southern hip-hop, across groups like Outkast and UGK, and names like Lil Wayne and Scarface, Phonte never fit neatly into the narratives people preferred. He wasn’t a trap architect or a kingpin mythologist. Coming out of North Carolina at a time when Southern rap was increasingly defined by booming 808s, crunk rhythms and dance-floor immediacy, Phonte — alongside Rapper Big Pooh and 9th Wonder — made music rooted in soul loops, emotional directness and conversational detail.

Their group, Little Brother, felt disinterested in rap spectacle and more aligned with the intimacy of well-placed lyrics catered to everyday people. Their songs unfolded like barbershop debates and late-night dorm-room chats, your cousins talking trash while the latest EPMD spun on the turntable. Like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul before them, Little Brother felt relatable — rap royalty you could dap up.

Little Brother’s debut album, 2003’s The Listening, arrived like a transmission from another era. At a moment when mainstream rap leaned toward maximalism, the trio sounded easygoing and warm, built around 9th Wonder’s lush soul samples and Phonte’s and Big Pooh’s deeply human writing. The album’s breakout song, “Whatever You Say,” spread through internet message boards and the Okayplayer community long before streaming democratized discovery. In many ways, Little Brother represented one of the earliest examples of online grassroots hip-hop fandom translating into real-world momentum.

Raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, and later connected deeply to Durham as an undergrad at North Carolina Central University, Phonte emerged from a region that historically existed outside hip-hop’s primary power centers. Where New York had institutional authority and Los Angeles had mythos as the home of gangsta rap, North Carolina occupied a strange middle ground — Southern, certainly, but not close enough to Atlanta or New Orleans to garner serious attention in commercial rap. North Carolina’s slower pace gave him room to experiment without industry surveillance.

You hear that spaciousness throughout Phonte’s catalog, across songs that never rushed toward a punchline or feel trapped inside a trend cycle, throughout verses that drift between jokes, observations and existential reflections with startling fluidity. He understands cadence as both rhythm and personality. And his bars often sound like someone talking directly to you from across the couch — funny one moment, devastating the next — with startling self-awareness that evades self-loathing. He can critique hip-hop culture without sounding sanctimonious.

Phonte often talks about the internet with gratitude and skepticism, as an artist who understood early how digital spaces can create community around music ignored by traditional gatekeepers. But he also recognized the dangers of believing your own hype — the way online praise can distort one’s sense of scale. Thanks to Okayplayer, Little Brother became beloved in critical circles almost immediately, praised as saviors of “real hip-hop” during an era when purists felt alienated from commercial rap.

But Phonte resisted that framing, because underground rap audiences can be just as limiting as mainstream ones. So-called “conscious rap” becomes its own kind of prison, due to the subtle condescension baked into how audiences discuss Southern lyricists. As he once said, compliments toward Little Brother often carried the energy of someone saying, “For a Black guy, you’re pretty smart,” as if someone with a drawl couldn’t rap with the complexity of someone from New York City.

That tension hovered over 2005’s The Minstrel Show, Little Brother’s masterpiece. Framed as programming on the fictional “UBN” — the U Black Niggaz Network — the album explored how Black performance becomes commodified, dilluted and sold back to mass audiences. Through experienced frustration, the group also examined rap’s relationship to minstrelsy and interrogated the machinery surrounding Black entertainment overall. Few rap albums of the 2000s diagnosed the entertainment industry with such precision. And yet the album remained incredibly funny.

That’s the trick with Phonte: he can make serious social commentary sound effortless. Songs like “Lovin’ It” glide with breezy charisma even as the album cuts deep into questions about fatherhood, marketability and expectation. Phonte never rapped like someone standing above the culture wagging a finger; he’s always rapped like someone trapped inside the contradictions himself.

Critics hailed The Minstrel Show as brilliant, but commercially it struggled, especially after BET reportedly declined to support “Lovin’ It” because it was “too intelligent” for their audience — a claim that became infamous in hip-hop circles. Whether fully accurate or not, the story crystallized what Little Brother represented during that era: artists caught between acclaim and accessibility, celebrated everywhere except the places that most directly shaped mainstream visibility. Yet Phonte never descended fully into bitterness; rather, he worked to understand the machine and not complain about it. Even during periods of obvious frustration with labels, radio and industry politics, he retained humor and never lost sight of the music itself.

Before hip-hop entered his life, Phonte absorbed R&B, gospel and soul through family and church. I can hear these influences in his melodic instincts, the phrasing and warmth of his harmonies. He once joked that he could “sing” but not “sang,” distinguishing himself from cornerstone vocal technicians like Luther Vandross or Whitney Houston. But that modesty obscures something important: Phonte’s emotional delivery is better than many technically superior singers, thanks to a conversational tone rich with emotion.

That sensibility found fuller expression through The Foreign Exchange, the groundbreaking collaboration between Phonte and Dutch producer Nicolay. Their debut album, 2004’s Connected, not only revolutionized song creation through internet file sharing years before remote collaboration became commonplace, it revealed another dimension of Phonte’s artistry entirely. On Connected, he loosened the boundaries between rapper and singer, as the album floated between soul, hip-hop and electronic textures with remarkable elegance. I remember being surprised by the LP, finding it somehow and being taken by how airy it sounded. It didn’t sound like The Listening; it sounded breezy and somewhat industrial, touching on softer themes without coming off syrupy.

Over time, The Foreign Exchange evolved. Albums like 2008’s Leave It All Behind and 2010’s Authenticity expanded Phonte’s vocal confidence while deepening his thematic concerns around adulthood, burnout and emotional survival. Long before “grown-man rap” became a lazy shorthand, Phonte was already articulating what it meant to age inside hip-hop culture without losing complexity.

That maturity has become one of his defining contributions. Where others remain trapped performing youth indefinitely, Phonte embraced aging. He wrote openly about marriage, insecurity and domestic life. He understood that adulthood itself could be dramatic terrain, so his music acknowledged mortgages, emotional labor, therapy and exhaustion — the invisible textures of Black middle-class life often ignored in rap’s commercial narratives.

His first official solo album, 2011’s Charity Starts at Home, crystallized many of those strengths. Released after years of collaborative success, the album felt deeply personal without becoming insular. Phonte sounded liberated creatively, willing to move between sharp rap performances and soulful introspection with fluid ease. Tracks like “The Good Fight” remain among the finest articulations of creative exhaustion in modern hip-hop. The anxieties of paying bills, sustaining relationships, and maintaining artistic integrity are daily negotiations in his work.

By the time he released No News Is Good News in 2018, that perspective had sharpened even further. The album arrived after years of personal upheaval, including divorce and major life transitions, and its emotional clarity feels startling. Still technically precise, the LP also centered narrative and tonal precision, and the storytelling on it found Phonte at his peak. As a 40-something Black man, I listen to the song “Expensive Genes” as a reminder to eat better, take walks and prioritize rest (the latter I’m still trying to learn). He takes a serious look at getting older and the fallout that can come along with it: the heart medicine, the blood thinners, the focus on blood pressure and cholesterol levels, the thinking about mortality. “Our biggest fears were shots and armed robbery,” Phonte rapped. “Now the biggest fears are clots and oncology.” Here and throughout the album, he eschewed middle age as a declining point, leaving emotional space within the songs without overselling pain. It simply feels like the truth, the way a brother or cousin would tell you straight without fluff or reluctance.

I wouldn’t dare call Phonte underrated, but I think listeners and critics have looked away, largely because his flow rarely calls attention to itself, which obscures how sophisticated it actually is. He understands comedic timing as deeply as rhyme structure, and can pivot from punchline to vulnerability within the same bar without losing coherence. More importantly, he writes like someone genuinely paying attention to people and their surroundings.

Too many rappers write from a place of image protection. Conversely, Phonte writes from an observant perch that prioritizes the human experience. These songs don’t care about archetypes; they speak to everyday folks just trying to figure shit out, friends trying to survive adulthood. Even his satire carries empathy. Because beneath all the wit and cultural critique, Phonte’s music ultimately regards the dignity of ordinary people and Southern Black life beyond stereotypes.

Within the satire is the dignity of an artist refusing simplification, who emerged during a rap era increasingly obsessed with branding, who could rap beside backpack purists and still blast Project Pat in the car. He could parody R&B tropes through his Percy Miracles character while also crafting emotive soul music. And he could critique commercial radio while acknowledging the brilliance of pop songwriting. That openness helped make him influential far beyond sales figures.

You can hear traces of Phonte’s approach in later generations of emotionally transparent rappers and singers — including one I won’t name because the narrative is tired — and others who prioritize integrity over exaggerated persona. His willingness to collapse boundaries between rap and soul anticipated much of hip-hop’s evolution during the 2010s. But unlike many artists who pursued singing as trend adaptation, Phonte approached it organically, as an extension of the rap he prioritized.

In another era, perhaps Phonte becomes a larger commercial figure. Perhaps radio evolves differently and record labels better understand artists operating outside rigid demographic assumptions. But there’s something fitting about the path he actually traveled. His career mirrors the themes embedded throughout his music: perseverance without illusion, hope without naivety, ambition tempered by introspection. He once described Little Brother’s early years as sounding “young” and “naive,” recalling a time when they believed art might genuinely change the world before “getting crushed.” Nowadays, Phonte’s still a landmark rapper, singer and emerging DJ; through it all, the humanity remains. That’s extraordinary enough.

There are albums that announce themselves forcefully, demanding to be understood in real time. Then there are records like Come to My Garden, Minnie Riperton’s breathtaking 1970 debut, which seem to hover just outside of time. It’s an LP that blooms and exhales, drifting into the room like incense curling toward a cathedral ceiling. Even now, more than 50 years after its release, Garden remains one of the most singular vocal recordings in American music, orchestral soul as dream language, psychedelic Black classism rendered tenderly.

While it’s tempting to discuss Garden as though it appeared from nowhere — as if Riperton emerged fully formed, wrapped in gauze and harp strings, singing from some celestial dimension inaccessible to ordinary people — the truth of the album is rooted in Chicago: in the South Side, in Black church choirs, in Chess Records studios, in rigorous classical training, and in the creative fearlessness of artists who understood that soul music could stretch far beyond the boundaries radio imposed upon it.

Riperton’s journey toward Garden began long before the world knew her as the woman capable of climbing into the stratosphere on “Lovin’ You.” Born Minnie Julia Riperton in 1947, she grew up surrounded by music in a working-class Black household that valued artistry. Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s was a city where sacred and secular music collided constantly, where Mahalia Jackson and Muddy Waters existed in the same cultural air. Young Minnie absorbed all of it. Before she devoted herself fully to singing, she studied ballet and dance — disciplines that sharpened her sense of control and physical expression. That physicality would later become central to her vocal style, a singular, classical-centered approach through which she sculpted notes with grace and precision.

Her formal training under Marion Jeffery at Chicago’s Lincoln Center proved foundational. Jeffery recognized immediately that Minnie possessed an extraordinary instrument, but more importantly, she taught her discipline, the breath control, subtlety and resonance that would become her hallmark. While Riperton’s whistle register often overshadows the deeper mechanics of her technique, Garden reveals a vocalist whose mastery rested in rigor. Even at her most sublime, there is structure beneath the elegance.

Still, classical music alone could never contain her imagination. By her teens, Riperton was already moving toward soul and psychedelic music, toward the emotional directness of Black popular songs. She entered the professional music world by joining Chess Records as a member of the girl group The Gems. Chess was sacred ground in Chicago; it was the house that amplified Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, and countless architects of Black American music. For a teenage Minnie, existing inside those halls proved educational.

The stories from that period reveal a young artist absorbing everything around her. She sang background vocals for anybody who needed them. She recorded jingles. She answered phones at Chess after school. She earned ten dollars a session while unknowingly building one of the most versatile voices in soul. There is something almost poetic about the future singer of “Les Fleur” harmonizing anonymously on sessions, learning how voices fit inside arrangements before ever becoming the centerpiece herself.

The crucial turning point in Riperton’s evolution came through Charles Stepney, the visionary arranger, composer and producer whose fingerprints are all over the spiritual expansion of Black music in late-1960s Chicago. If Riperton was the voice of Come to My Garden, Stepney was its architect, the one who heard possibilities where others heard limitations. A classically trained musician with deep roots in jazz and experimental orchestration, he approached soul music as a world-building exercise. He layered vibraphones, strings, woodwinds and choral textures into vast emotional landscapes, lending to a cinematic aura that Black music deserved.

Stepney’s work with Rotary Connection became the laboratory for many of the ideas that would later crystallize on Come to My Garden. Rotary Connection itself was radical: interracial, psychedelic, orchestral and unapologetically weird. In another timeline, they are remembered alongside Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix as one of the defining countercultural acts of the era. Instead, they remained cult figures — too Black for rock radio, too experimental for traditional soul audiences, too expansive for the industry’s increasingly rigid marketing categories. Yet Rotary Connection gave Riperton room to evolve. Listen to their version of “Respect” or the haunting “We’re Going Wrong,” and you can hear Stepney transforming her voice into orchestration itself: She led the songs and floated through them like vapor. Stepney understood that her voice could function as a theremin.

By the time Come to My Garden was recorded in late 1969, Riperton was ready for something more fully realized — an album that could hold together her love of orchestral pop, psychedelic soul, jazz harmony and emotional vulnerability. She wanted intricacy, and in many ways, she wanted the sophistication of Dionne Warwick filtered through Chicago’s cosmic soul underground. The sessions themselves have become almost mythic. Recorded over just a few days with Stepney and a full orchestra, the album possesses the uncanny coherence of a dream. There is no excess on the record. It’s a 10 out of 10 record where every harp glissando, woodwind flourish, and textured harmony feels essential.

And then there is the matter of Richard Rudolph, whose arrival in Riperton’s life changed the emotional center of her music. Their romantic and intellectual relationship became embedded in the DNA of Come to My Garden. Rudolph’s lyrics do not behave like conventional pop writing. Across songs like “Rainy Day in Centerville,” “Close Your Eyes and Remember” and “Oh, By The Way,” his words are impressionistic, searching, and almost devotional. The title track always breaks me down. When I heard the song, in years past, it played like the ultimate form of romanticism. When I played it again after my mom passed, it sounded like God coming to take her home. “I’ll take your hand and lead you from these bad times,” Riperton sings. “I’ll take your breath, and give you mine.” That sense of emotional openness defines the album. Unlike many soul records of the era, which often framed love through heartbreak or romantic drama, Come to My Garden approaches intimacy as transcendence. Even sorrow on the album feels illuminated from within.

“Les Fleur” remains staggering, a song that begins delicately before unfurling into a near-symphonic explosion of delight and revelation. Stepney’s arrangement rises in waves of strings, horns, choir, and percussion, until Riperton seems to ascend above the composition entirely. The refrain feels summoned from another plane. Refusing to settle cleanly, Rudolph’s lyrics frame flowers as metaphors for human potential and spiritual awakening, while Stepney preserves the song’s mysterious vocal syllables, which allows Riperton to drift between the literal and the abstract. In its totality, Come to My Garden is one of the rare recordings where meaning is conveyed best through texture, setting the stage for like-minded artists to follow years later.

Critics have spent decades trying to categorize Come to My Garden. Is it psychedelic soul? Chamber soul? Baroque pop or progressive R&B? None of those labels fully capture the album’s intersection of traditions. Drawing from European classical music, jazz improvisation, Brazilian rhythms and Black church harmony, Come to My Garden checks all these boxes without partaking in aesthetic gimmickry. Stepney’s arrangements feel organic, breathing alongside Riperton’s voice without competing against it. Take “Completeness,” one of the album’s most beautiful moments: As the song moves with near-weightless grace, Riperton’s harmonies are stacked so carefully that they mask the longing, and the ache of wanting emotional wholeness in a fragmented world. Stepney’s orchestration circles her gently, never overwhelming the vulnerability at the center. Or consider “Expecting,” whose elliptical lyricism captures the interiority of womanhood with startling sensitivity. The song feels suspended between anticipation and anxiety, and Riperton sounds meditative. Throughout the album, silence matters almost as much as sound. Stepney leaves room for breath, resonance, and emotional afterglow. In an era increasingly dominated by louder, denser productions, Come to My Garden trusted listeners enough to move slowly.

This is partly why the album initially slipped through the cracks commercially. Released in 1970 amid the corporate upheaval surrounding Chess Records’ sale to GRT and distributed through Janus Records, the album received little meaningful promotion. It also arrived at an awkward cultural crossroads: Psychedelia was fading, funk was ascendant, and Black radio favored grittier, more immediate sounds. Stepney and Riperton had created a deeply contemplative orchestral record at precisely the moment the industry wanted harder edges.

But there’s also a more uncomfortable truth, one that still persists today: the music industry has historically struggled to know what to do with Black artists who refuse easy categorization. Come to My Garden was too lush for straightforward soul marketing, too rooted in Black musical tradition for white rock audiences, too feminine for male critics trained to valorize aggression as artistic seriousness. The irony is that the album’s perceived delicacy is what makes it profound. Riperton’s voice carries enormous technical power, and she approaches virtuosity with immense generosity.

Over time, Come to My Garden has grown from overlooked classic into holy grail for musicians and collectors. Its influence echoes through generations of artists who understand openness and experimentation as companions. You can hear its influence in the airy sensuality of Erykah Badu, the esoteric soul of Björk, the layered vocal intimacy of Meshell Ndegeocello, even the complex folk-jazz of Esperanza Spalding. Most importantly, the album helped redefine the possibilities of Black femininity in recorded music. Riperton was neither the heartbroken torch singer nor the hypersexualized fantasy figure that the industry demanded. On Come to My Garden, she exists as something richer and more expansive: intellectually curious, grounded, emotionally vast and artistically fearless.

Today, Come to My Garden feels impossibly modern in its emotional intelligence and sonic fluidity. Contemporary listeners raised on algorithmic genre collapse may actually be better equipped to understand it than audiences in 1970 were. That the album refuses binaries is perhaps its greatest achievement. Because it doesn’t ask listeners to choose between sophistication and feeling; it insists they’re inseparable.

Listening now, I hear not only the brilliance of Riperton, but the unrealized possibilities of a full musical ecosystem. Chicago in the late ’60s was producing some of the most adventurous Black music in America, yet much of it existed just outside mainstream recognition. Stepney, Rotary Connection, Terry Callier, Ramsey Lewis — these artists were constructing alternate futures for soul music, futures rooted in lush orchestration and emotional nuance. Riperton became the clearest vessel for those ideas because her voice contained multitudes. She could sing with the technical rigor of a conservatory student and the emotional directness of a church soloist. She could evoke big emotions sometimes within the same phrase.

Ultimately, Come to My Garden is a philosophy of listening, asking us to slow down and hear tenderness as strength while understanding Black music’s infinite capacity for experimentation, elegance and transcendence. A masterpiece, the record is also a revelation: a record still opening itself, petal by petal, to anyone willing to engage.

By the time Sunlight arrived in June 1978, Herbie Hancock was already living several musical lives at once. There was the acoustic purist who had returned to the piano with V.S.O.P., a live album that revisited the elegance and elasticity of his earlier jazz-focused work. There was the architect of electric funk who had turned the Head Hunters into a global phenomenon, stretching grooves into long, hypnotic corridors. And then there was the restless futurist, always scanning the horizon for the next tool, the next sound, the next way to convey his imagination. Sunlight was where those lives converged, and where one of them mutated into something stranger, riskier, and misunderstood.

The album didn’t happen quickly. Following the release of V.S.O.P., Hancock went to the studio in August 1977 and stayed there, on and off, until May of the following year. There, the bandleader funneled various aspects of his art — taking the immediate, quick-turning components of yesteryear and flipping that energy inward. On purpose, Sunlight was made to feel deliberate, an album that breathed through circuitry. And at its center was a voice that didn’t sound human.

The vocoder — specifically the Sennheiser VSM201 — wasn’t entirely new in 1978, but Hancock heard something in it that others hadn’t fully explored. Where some treated it as a novelty, Hancock recognized it as an instrument to bridge the intimacy of singing with the flexibility of synthesis. Throughout Sunlight, he inhabited the vocoder, bending his voice through it, harmonizing with himself while sanding down the imperfections of human speech, introducing listeners to what he called “robot scat.” You heard that scat throughout the album’s opening song, “I Thought It Was You,” a sleek disco track constructed for movement. Alongside Byron Miller’s gliding bassline and Leon “Ndugu” Chancler’s snapping drums, Hancock’s voice floated within the arrangement, his tone curious and searching, breezy yet attuned to the future. Equally playful and disorienting, it was romantic contemplation filtered through a machine, and the result was intimate and alien. The tension between warmth and technology was the album’s pulse.

Hancock had long been a master of arrangement, but Sunlight took that sensibility to a microscopic level. Each track felt meticulous, its layers sculpted with intention. The orchestral elements — the strings, brass, and woodwinds — didn’t just decorate the music; they intertwined with the synthesizers, blurring lines between acoustic and electronic. I hear it on “Come Running to Me,” where shimmering chords seem to refract light itself, and the harmony unfolds like a prism. The song has a tenderness that sorta sneaks up on you, a pleading, gentle melody wrapped in makeshift textures like a halo. You start to forget that the voice is processed; you hear the emotion first, understanding that the song likely wouldn’t work without the vocoder. I get caught in the emotions of it, the yearning, the push and pull between night and day. The forgetting is the biggest trick Hancock pulls throughout the album. He asks you to recalibrate your ears and accept that sincerity can come through silicon as much as through skin.

Working alongside his technical collaborator Bryan Bell, Hancock was building systems before the industry had language for them. This was pre-MIDI and pre-standardization, and Hancock — obsessed with gadgets since he was a child — taught his machines how to speak with each other. Hancock developed methods for storing musical ideas and layering parts in stages, essentially becoming a one-man orchestra when needed. Rhythm tracks came first, then the harmonic frameworks, then the melodies. And finally, the collaborative process of shaping those elements into songs. That multi-tiered approach gave Sunlight its distinctive feel. The grooves were lush and airtight while the vocal lines drifted.

My favorite track has always been “Good Question,” the album’s epic closing statement, where the bassist Jaco Pastorius and the drummer Tony Williams, with whom Hancock worked in Miles Davis’s band in the mid ‘60s, step into the frame. Both guests took turns resetting the track — Pastorius darting and weaving; Williams banging danceable rhythms — until the song blended West African groove and Brazilian jazz within the span of eight minutes. It’s one of the few moments on the album where the interplay felt overt, where the human touch overtook the technology. The song proved that, even within this highly controlled environment, spontaneity could still break through.

But innovation doesn’t always translate to immediate understanding. When Sunlight hit the charts, it performed respectably — No. 3 on the jazz chart, modest showings on R&B and pop — but it didn’t dominate the way some of Hancock’s earlier albums had. For listeners who came to him through Head Hunters, the album could feel like a left turn. Where was the raw, face-crunching funk? For jazz purists, Hancock’s heavy use of synthesizers — and now a mechanized voice — pushed the music even further from the traditions they held dear. But it wasn’t that Hancock was drifting away (again, he’d released the jazz-leaning V.S.O.P. the previous year); perhaps he sought a different kind of closeness with wider groups of people. So if Sunlight felt like a departure, it’s because it was. But it was also a continuation of Hancock’s lifelong curiosity. From his early days pushing boundaries on piano to his cosmic explorations in the early ’70s, he was always drawn to the edges of what’s possible. For him, technology was a catalyst and Sunlight became a blueprint.

The methods Hancock developed during its creation would carry into the next phase of his career — the so-called “vocal trilogy” that followed, including Feets Don’t Fail Me Now, Monster, and Magic Windows. Those albums were built upon the foundation laid here, which rebuilt the balance between songwriting and sonic experimentation. After Sunlight, one could hear him getting more fluent in this hybrid language.

The influence of Sunlight goes far beyond Hancock’s own discography. In subsequent decades, the vocoder became a staple across genres, from funk to hip-hop to electronic music. Where artists used it to create personas and distort identity, Hancock’s approach felt, and still feels, distinct. Listen closely, and you can trace lines from this album to the future of Black music. The saxophonist and bandleader Terrace Martin has used the vocoder to great effect across his work. The same with the pianist Brandon Coleman, whose manipulated vocals dot one of my favorite Kamasi Washington songs, “Vi Lua Vi Sol.” The emphasis on texture and atmosphere, and the willingness to redefine what a “song” can be, are ideas echoing through everything from ’80s electro to modern rap and R&B. Sunlight anticipated what was coming.

And yet, it wasn’t an album that demanded recognition or shouted its importance. It hummed and it glowed. It invited you in and asked you to sit with it, hoping that you admired its quiet confidence. There’s something to be said about capturing an artist in transition, how traces of the past emerge in subtle ways that are informed by living. With everything filtered through this new lens, the fascination with technology can unlock new avenues while cultivating old ones. There’s a risk in that, of course. Technology can date music. Sounds that feel cutting-edge one year can feel obsolete in another. Hancock sidestepped that trap by grounding his experimentation in musicality. Though the tools changed, the intent remained clear: to communicate, connect, and explore, and that’s why Sunlight still resonates today. A document of artistic courage, it showed a musician at the height of his powers choosing not to repeat himself, choosing instead to venture into uncertain territory. The willingness to risk confusion, invite criticism, and prioritize novelty over comfort is what keeps Hancock’s work in the foreground. And it’s what makes Sunlight more than just a footnote in his catalog.

It’s a hinge and a turning point, the moment where the analog past and the digital future meet in earnest conversation, inviting others to continue it. Decades later, we’re still answering that invitation, especially now in a world where technology permeates every aspect of music-making. Forty-eight years on, Sunlight feels less like an outlier. Because the questions Hancock asked about identity and authenticity are now central to how we think about art. What does it mean to “play” an instrument when that instrument is software? Where does the artist end and the tool begin?

Hancock didn’t have definitive answers, but on Sunlight, he offered a framework: embrace the tools but don’t lose the feeling. Let the machines expand your voice without replacing it. Stay curious and stay open. Sometimes, the light you’re chasing isn’t something you can capture in a single take or even a single session. It can take months of tinkering, layering, listening and re-listening. It can take stepping away from the stage and into the studio, into the quiet space where ideas can evolve without pressure.

The in-between can be experimental and perplexing. But it’s also deeply human, even when it doesn’t sound like it at first. Beneath the vocoder, beneath the synthesizers, beneath the carefully constructed arrangements, there was Hancock reaching for new ways of being heard. In the glare of Sunlight, a path appeared.

Bassists hold a special kind of gravity, an unseen, if not underappreciated role as the quiet force of the band. They hold the music upright while everything dances above it.

In jazz, especially, one can feel that gravity. You hear it, sure, but it takes a special kind of ear to register the weight as complicated arrangements unfold. Every so often, a bassist emerges who reframes the conversation. Charles Mingus, Jaco Pastorius, Paul Chambers, and so on. Buster Williams is one of those figures. He’s an artist whose tone and touch have helped shape the course of modern jazz, even if his name doesn’t ring as loudly.

Williams’ story begins, as many musician stories do, in the church. Born Charles Anthony Williams in Camden, New Jersey, in 1942, he grew up in a household where music education was given the same rigor as traditional schooling. His father, a bassist and teacher, introduced him to the instrument. “I loved to watch him play the bass, I thought it was just so brilliant,” Williams once said. “And I can’t remember a time where there wasn’t music. It was always there, as far back as I can remember.” Williams started playing the bass at age 13, after “begging” his father to teach him: “I had asked him to teach me piano … and I didn’t stick with it. Then I asked him to teach me drums and I thought I was just going to sit down and start bashing. But I marveled at him playing the bass.”

That early grounding is key to understanding Williams’ approach then and now: he’s never chased flash or prioritized spectacle. Instead, he’s always seen purpose and clarity as their own marketing tools, and his playing — spiritually inclined yet rooted in the realities of Black American life — continues to speak for itself.

By his late teens, Williams was already gigging professionally, absorbing the expressions of hard bop as it evolved in real time. Alongside his technical proficiency sat his ability to observe and adapt. He had this way of inserting himself into the music without disturbing its balance, like a master conversationalist who knew just when to speak or when to be silent. That sensibility would become his calling card.

The 1960s were a proving ground for Williams, whose work with Gene Ammons, Herbie Hancock and Art Blakey further sharpened his intuition. But it was his tenure with Miles Davis, albeit brief, and his later association with Hancock’s Mwandishi band that solidified his reputation as a bassist who could navigate the outer edges of jazz without losing its core pulse. In those electric, exploratory settings, Williams proved that the bass could propel jazz into the cosmos. I’ve always admired what he brought to “Hornets,” the almost 20-minute closing track on 1973’s Sextant, a vastly underrated LP. That it preceded the groundbreaking Head Hunters likely undermines the album, yet on the expansive final tune, Williams maintains the pocket with elastic electric bass, holding everything together as the other band members flare out in all sorts of directions.

His work in James Mtume’s one-off Mtume Umoja Ensemble is also worthy of praise. On 1972’s Alkebu-Lan: Land of the Blacks (Live at the East), Williams held his own despite a cacophony of sound. Even as horns blared, drums crashed and children chanted, the bassist maintained a steady presence, resetting arrangements when they verged on “too much.”

Still, for all his sideman brilliance, Williams’s artistry as a bandleader deserves equal attention. His recordings under his own name reveal a composer deeply attuned to hybrids of jazz and funk, and as someone who understands the importance of silence and harmony. And it’s here that we arrive at Pinnacle, his debut album released in 1975, a statement record in which the bassist funneled vast influences into a robust 44-minute set. It landed at a fascinating moment in Williams’ career, when he had already established himself as a first-call musician trusted by giants. But Pinnacle didn’t introduce itself by being loud or abstract. By leaning on Afrocentric funk and the groove of ‘70s soul, Williams crafted a nice in-between record that was firmly rooted in jazz, but wasn’t just that. It landed like other Black jazz albums of that era, centered on the groove of melodic drums and choral backing vocals.

Equally structured and free, Pinnacle’s compositions felt sturdy and rooted in melody, but they left room for long bass solos and other tracks that prioritized different band members. On “Noble Ego,” in particular, Williams acts as the guide and a participant, steering the music without compressing it. After a foundational solo to open the song, the band locks into a bright display that’s better heard than described. I just know that every time I play it out loud, heads bob and shoulders move.

It’s a song that the uninitiated don’t know they need. In many ways, Pinnacle encapsulated Williams’ philosophy as a person not interested in dominating the music. To this day, the whole thing feels quite elevated, not preoccupied with speed or aggression, but with serenity and intent. I listen to the song “Tayamisha” and its conventional aspects, how it saunters like an old tune yet it feels very much of the era — a spiritual jazz number taking shape on a dancefloor.

After Pinnacle’s release, Williams continued to evolve as a performer and a thinker. His involvement with spiritual practices, particularly Nichiren Buddhism, began to inform his music in more explicit ways. The concept of sound as a pathway to enlightenment became a guiding principle. I can hear his spiritual dimension crystallizing with each album. By the time he formed the ensemble Something More, Williams began exploring compositions meant to blur the lines between jazz and meditation. And yet, even as his music continues its climb toward the transcendent, Williams remains grounded in the heritage of Black Classical Music. He “is one of the key players in modern jazz with a rock-solid grounding in harmony, counterpoint and orchestration,” as The New Yorker once proclaimed. “Williams’s work as a leader is a blueprint for bassists on how to assume a more proactive, forward position in an ensemble without throwing it out of balance.”

A bridge between generations and styles, he’s often cited for his skill and his integrity, and the humility in his playing that resonates deeply within the jazz community. So while his name may resonate with the heads, any “underrated” classifications are deceptive. His consistency — across countless sessions — speaks to a level of excellence that very few musicians enjoy. Discipline, deep concentration and grace have helped move Williams through different eras of music without losing his identity. Whether in acoustic settings or electric ones, in small groups or large ensembles, he remains unmistakably himself. Though Pinnacle — recently reissued via Zev Feldman’s Time Traveler Recordings — is a rightful entry into the bassist’s world, it’s also just one chapter.

In recent years, as jazz continues to evolve, Williams’ influence can be heard in a new generation of bassists who prioritize tone and subtlety over flash; his approach a reminder that virtuosity is not just about what you can play, but about what you choose to play.

There’s a lesson there, not just for musicians, but for anyone engaged in a creative pursuit. Though it’s tough to prioritize patience these days, it’s important to understand your role within a larger context. So when we talk about Williams’s legacy, the one he continues to build, we’re not just talking about a body of work. We’re talking about a way of being and a way of engaging art with care and curiosity. A way of honoring the past while remaining open to the future. Williams may not always be the loudest voice in the room, but he is often the most essential.

Pinnacle captures that power vividly. It’s an album that rewards attentiveness, revealing new layers with each spin. It’s also a testament to an artist who has dedicated his life to the pursuit of creative voice as a means of connection. In a genre defined by constant change, Williams offers something steady and true. And sometimes that’s what the music needs.

Before Busta Rhymes ever released a solo album, he was inevitable — an unlikely presence in a crowded landscape of singular rap personalities, with a gravitational pull that reshifted the rules of space, breath and tempo. He wasn’t just rapping over the beat; he was attacking it, performing in technicolor, stomping, growling and kicking his way out of rooms too small to hold him. By the time The Coming was released in March of 1996, he had become the best closer in rap, having delivered blackout verses on A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario” and Craig Mack’s “Flava in Ya Ear” remix. The question wasn’t whether Busta Rhymes could carry an album, it was whether recorded music could fully contain the force he exhibited.

Busta the solo artist landed in the early ‘90s, an era defined by competing visions of authenticity in rap. From Wu-Tang’s street reporting and Tribe’s Afrocentric consciousness, to Snoop Doggy Dogg’s commercial crossover and Nas’s lyrical virtuosity, the so-called “golden era” was a time in which all styles were accepted: turn on the radio and one could hear Staten Island next to Queens, Los Angeles next to Brooklyn. Busta was an anomaly who occupied all those spaces without pledging allegiance to one. A spirited rapper with breakneck cadences, his golden era wasn’t about fitting a mold; instead, he sought to build a new one focused on excess energy, voice, imagination, and spectacle. Through a trio of well-received albums — The Coming, When Disaster Strikes…, and Extinction Level Event: The Final World Front — Busta showed that theatricality, when executed with discipline, could also be serious. To understand why his run mattered, and why it still echoes, you have to start before his name was ever on a cover jacket.

Busta’s ascent began in 1989 with Leaders of the New School, but even within that group context, he moved like someone auditioning for a larger stage. Leaders fit squarely into the Native Tongues ecosystem: playful, lyrical, youth-driven, and rooted in a post-De La Soul ethos that rejected gangsta orthodoxy. But Busta stood apart. His voice — a raspy instrument capable of cartoonish exaggeration and militant command — was already a weapon. He didn’t sound like he was rapping with the group so much as through it. Even my 8-year-old ears knew he was destined for stardom beyond the collective.

The real shift came when Busta began leaking into other artists’ records. His breakout guest verse on Tribe’s “Scenario” remains one of the most cited feature appearances in rap history for a reason: Equally vigorous and technical, the song changed shape when he showed up — dark clouds formed over the track’s good-natured baton tossing; the playfulness gave way to controlled chaos. It felt like a new kind of rap emerging, one rooted in the performance of it, one that treated breath work like an acoustic instrument. From “Scenario,” Busta became the reliable scene-stealer, the guy who could dominate a posse cut, energize R&B songs, and turn seemingly straightforward verses into moments of high drama. By the mid-‘90s, the buzz around him was driven by evidence: We’d seen his capabilities, repeatedly, in other people’s worlds. Now we wanted to see what he could do at the helm.

Debut albums can sometimes struggle under expectation, but The Coming felt like a carefully staged reveal. Featuring Tribe member Q-Tip, Leaders of the New School members Dinco D, Milo and Charlie Brown, Def Squad members Jamal, Redman and Keith Murray, and members of his own Flipmode Squad — Rampage the Last Boy Scout and Lord Have Mercy — The Coming was a kitchen sink record designed to funnel Busta’s overwhelming presence into a neat, digestible package. The beats — compiled by DJ Scratch, Easy Mo Bee, a young Jay Dee (before he was J Dilla), St. Hilaire, Rashad “Tumblin’ Dice” Smith, The Vibe Chemist Backspin and Busta himself — pivoted between sullen, cinematic textures to lighter fare. At every turn, the instrumentals created a sense of scale that matched his delivery, landing somewhere between hardcore, psychological thriller and backpack rap. “Woo-Hah!! Got You All In Check,” the album’s lead single, functioned as a mission statement and a warning shot, the distillation of Busta’s essence into something accessible without sanding down his edges. It was loud, confrontational, and joyous, a Looney Tunes animation come to life through Hype Williams’s fish-eyed lens. The song also reassured skeptics that Busta’s energy could translate to hit records without becoming a novelty. It charted and was catchy, embedding itself in the culture with a quotable chorus and flashy visuals.

Yet The Coming succeeded because it went deeper than its singles. I used to play “Hot Fudge,” a sauntering head nodder with hanging chimes and ghostly backing vocals, on a nonstop loop, the drums rattling the boombox in my dorm room every Friday. In a good way, the eight-minute “Flipmode Squad Meets Def Squad” felt like it would never end, indirectly training my ears for the 15-minute jazz compositions I’d enjoy and write about years later. Other tracks like “Everything Remains Raw” and “Abandon Ship” showed an artist testing how much intensity a beat could hold without crossing the line. Busta’s flows here were aggressive but precise, even if he wasn’t talking about much beyond the apocalypse. “There’s only five years left!” became his go-to mantra. Though the whole “end of the world” thing was gimmicky, The Coming and its follow-up albums properly introduced themes of survival and spirituality without leaning on them too hard. While many of his songs felt like rapping for rapping’s sake, he was building a world meant for one.

Where The Coming centered Busta’s arrival, When Disaster Strikes… broadened the vision. Released just a year later, the album sharpened the rapper’s identity by leaning fully into apocalyptic imagery, both sonically and visually. The beats grew more layered and menacing, drawing from funk, early ‘80s electronic, and cloud-covered soul. Vocally, Busta got quieter — like on the lead single, “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See,” where he whispered the lyrics instead of shouting them. Similarly, the title track skips along without overt concession to radio. There’s no easy hook engineered for passive listening. Instead, it unfolds with understated urgency. “Tra-la-la-la-la, tra-la-la-la-la, tra-la-la-la-laaaaaaa,” Busta sings pitch-perfectly over a murky and skeletal beat, as if lulling you into a state of alertness. As always, he’s just rapping, but he proves once more that he’s flat-out entertaining, no matter the topic. The negative space is more important than overwhelming the track with relentless ferocity. When Disaster Strikes… found Busta teetering between paranoia and bravado, standing at the edge of societal collapse, wrestling with the interlocking tensions of control and explosion, regulation and indulgence, pondering a world that felt increasingly unstable. It wasn’t an overly serious affair: Pop-leaning songs like “The Body Rock” drifted too close to the gloss of the Shiny Suit Era, and didn’t sound natural for Busta. In totality, the album didn’t have the same replay value as The Coming the year prior, but it was a rightful step forward for a lyrically-inclined rapper with decadent tendencies.

With 1998’s Extinction Level Event, Busta aimed bigger than ever, operating like a blockbuster film director without collapsing under the weight of possibility. Where earlier projects felt like warnings — there were only three or four years left, after all — ELE felt like the disaster movie itself: loud, crowded, frenzied, and outsized. The cover itself depicted New York City on fire, and the opening song — the timeless “Everybody Rise,” with its well-paced drum breakdowns and mournful piano loop — is perhaps Busta’s most popular (to the heads, at least). “Gimme Some More” was pure kinetic energy, a Psycho string sample over double-time drums, a masterclass in breathless delivery that felt more athletic than indulgent. “What’s It Gonna Be?!” paired him with Janet Jackson in a futuristic pop experiment that could have easily failed. Instead, it expanded his audience without compromising his identity, becoming Busta’s highest-charting single on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 as a lead artist.

Here, the album’s ominous framing worked because it mirrored late-‘90s anxieties: millennial paranoia about the world ending on December 31, 1999, technological collapse, and pending anarchy as a result. Busta channeled those fears into spectacle, making teenagers think life would cease to exist beginning in 2000. For a while, it worked, but the shtick had run its course by the release of the rapper’s fourth album, Anarchy, which — without the thematic anchor of pending world doom — rang as a collection of decent to good rap songs devoid of calamity. Busta wasn’t done, of course; albums like Genesis, It Ain’t Safe No More, and The Big Bang were successful and pushed him further into mainstream visibility. But you don’t get the confidence of those LPs without the courage or the audacity of his first three albums.

Busta’s 1990s run challenged false binaries in rap: the notions of underground versus commercial, lyrical versus performative, serious versus spectacular. He proved that energy could be intellectual, that humor and menace could coexist, and that showmanship didn’t have to come at the expense of skill. Busta’s influence is visible in artists who balance vocal performance and lyricism, who treat music videos as narrative extensions, and who understand that presence is a craft. More than anything, Busta showed that meeting expectations doesn’t mean playing it safe; it means understanding your strengths deeply enough to push them further each time.

By the end of the ‘90s, Busta wasn’t just a rapper who had lived up to the buzz. He was a case study in how anticipation — when matched with imagination — can produce bodies of work that feel of the moment and ahead of it. In an era that promised many stars, Busta Rhymes arrived like a force of nature, then stayed long enough to reconstruct the landscape.

In the lexicon of jazz drumming, there’s a handful of names that rise from the page right away — Max Roach, Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams — standard-bearers who defined how generations heard time and swing. But buried in the interstices of that canon, just below the surface where the genre’s mercurial currents run deep, lies Roy Brooks, a drummer whose sound unified beauty and abrasion, whose career arcs from sublime ensemble work to vast explorations that blurred the line between rhythm and spirit.

Brooks’s percussion wore the patina of lived experience: dignified yet dirty, as though encrusted in gravel. There was a grit to his playing before jazz-funk was a subgenre to be cataloged; a raw, primal pulse that felt anthemic and sophisticated. To hear Brooks was to feel the scrape of the snare, the snap of the rim — a living, breathing embodiment of human motion.

He was born in Detroit, a city whose own rhythms were industrial, muscular, and forever in movement. Detroit wasn’t just Motown; it was a jazz hub before the assembly line, a crossroads where bebop, blues, and R&B mingled. Brooks came up in that soil, absorbing not just the metronomic hum of factory life but a deeper cadence: the syncopated clatter of life stripped to its essential beats.

In his early years, Brooks was drawn to percussion as the catalyst of action. But he wanted to fashion his own sonic vernacular. His peers in Detroit quickly recognized this; after he played with the likes of Yusef Lateef and Hugh Lawson, his reputation outpaced his hometown. On the road, Brooks began to develop a new sound: precise, daring, assertive yet malleable. It had all the volcanic elements of Roach but with more thud on the bottom. There were these seismic explosions meant to jolt listeners to varied states of alertness.

In a good way, Brooks’s sound wasn’t polished. His drums seemed to carry sediment — the textural weight of dust and stone pressed into the grooves of the record. To me, it seems intentional, a trick lending itself to something tactile and timeless. I hear a steadfast dedication to the backbeat, not quite locked into a straight-ahead swing, his toms in conversation with one another. His hi-hat whispering, the bass drum thumping with force.

Consider his 1964 album Beat. Recorded at the famed Hitsville USA studio in Detroit and released through Berry Gordy’s short-lived Workshop Jazz imprint, Beat is an exercise in temperament and touch. On the surging “Homestretch,” for instance, one can hear Brooks galloping toward a greater assertion — that, as a newly minted bandleader, he can prod his quintet through urgent arrangements, pivoting between tension and luster without losing focus. Here, Brooks navigates the kit with a dancer’s precision while horns declare their exuberance. On Beat, the cymbals hiss like burning embers, the snare with a dry, confident crack. The drums glide and interrogate, making claims for Brooks to sit alongside Roach, Blakey and the like. It’s percussive poetry that refuses the background.

In recent years, Brooks’s catalog has been rediscovered and reissued by audiophiles looking to exhume the drummer’s hard-to-find albums. Records like 1970’s The Free Slave, which eschewed the polite heat of a studio date for a sprawling live set at the Left Bank Jazz Society in Baltimore. The album landed in that early-‘70s corridor when jazz musicians were renegotiating their musical, political, and spiritual contracts with America. And Brooks sounds fully aware of the stakes. The title alone is a paradox that captures the Black American condition with brutal clarity. Freedom exists conditionally. Liberation is claimed and not guaranteed. Brooks orchestrates the pressure with panoramic arrangements, vast and energetic compositions marching to the destination. But the greatness of The Free Slave isn’t only in its force. Per usual with his catalog, it’s in the duality he exhibits: the anger and tenderness, the urgency and reflection, the push and pull of sophistication and protest — like walking down the street, scowling in a tailored three-piece suit.

Then there’s the album Understanding — recorded in 1970, also at the Left Bank Jazz Society — an excellent triple LP fully at peace with uncertainty. Running more than two hours, it’s a slog to get through. Songs run 20 to 30 minutes; many of the ideas feel unresolved and go on forever. Yet the combustion makes this a worthwhile listen; the hinge between chaos and control a rewarding adventure. It’s the dialogue for me, like around the five-minute mark of “Prelude To Understanding,” when the trumpeter Woody Shaw starts playing ascendant notes, almost like he’s yelling through the horn, and Brooks responds with hard-stomping percussion, as if banging on a door. I love little flares like that, and Brooks was a master of such activity.

By the time Ethnic Expressions was recorded with The Artistic Truth three years later, at Small’s Paradise in Harlem, Brooks had become a full-on musical philosopher making space for collective exploration: horns, reeds, and percussion converged in music that investigated Black identity and tradition. On this album, Brooks’s drums sound as if they’re unearthing something ancestral — sounds and sensibilities rooted in Black Liberation jazz with traces of soul in the mix. “The music I perform, I call Creative Heritage Music,” Brooks writes in the liner notes. “All ethnic groups have their own heritage music. As an Afrikan-American I am able to express my heritage through music, which makes me an Ethnic Expressionist … I believe in serving the community in order to please the spirits that surround the positives.” Indeed, Ethnic Expressions feels indebted to cultural resonance, the bass drum wrapped in lineage.

Even as his reputation grew among musicians and dedicated listeners, Brooks never broke into the pantheon of household jazz icons. Part of that was circumstance: jazz as a commercial force was morphing and splintering in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Another part was personal: Brooks’s life would be marked by struggles that intersected with his artistic path. His personal life was complicated. There was intensity in his playing that mirrored intensity off the kit: bouts with mental health issues, and the precarious existence of a jazz musician navigating an industry that didn’t always reward innovation. Some narratives about Brooks emphasize hardship. But hardship alone doesn’t define a life, especially not one as dynamic as his. There were highs — creative breakthroughs, collaborations with peers of immense stature — and there were lows, moments where the world felt less receptive to a drummer whose pulse was so unapologetically visceral. Regardless, his commitment never wavered; he continued to play, create, and search for resonance.

The grit in Brooks’s sound is not an accident. It’s the result of an approach that valued contact and structure, the process of entering the kit sonically and not just sitting on top of it. The application thrives off physicality: the stick bouncing off bearing edges, the snares vibrating long after the note is played. There’s a roughness there, yes, but also an unspoken elegance. That dichotomy of grit and grace is where Brooks’s greatness resides. It’s what makes Beat sound like an excavation of pulse. It’s what gives The Free Slave and Understanding its live, unrestrained power. It’s what elevates Ethnic Expressions from ensemble jazz to discourse of Black divinity.

Brooks’s music endures in the kits of drummers who seek feeling over flash, in the stories of jazz communities that remember players for the sound they left behind. His drums were a voice that spoke of streets and smoke, of heartbeat and breath, of the push and pull that defines jazz itself. His playing reminds me that rhythm — especially for Black Americans and the keepers of jazz — is something we inhabit. And that’s the true measure of his legacy: not how many records he sold, but how deeply he continues to echo in spaces between beats.

Woody Shaw was a special type of force, a jazz trumpeter whose articulated notes opened new territories for the instrument. His influence rippled beneath the surface with understated power, not always appreciated but essential to the shape of sound flowing above it.

Born December 24, 1944, in Laurinburg, North Carolina, and raised in Newark, New Jersey, Shaw’s musical life began early and ambitiously. He picked up the bugle at an early age, then — at Cleveland Junior High School — he met the accomplished teacher Jerome Ziering and began studying classical trumpet while listening to Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Harry James and Clifford Brown. From the moment he picked up a horn, it was clear that the ordinary rules of jazz phrasing, harmony and improvisation were not enough for him. He sought aesthetic and emotional expansion.

Newark in the 1950s was a crucible for young jazz talent. Wayne Shorter, Sarah Vaughan, Larry Young — these were the names that already coursed through the city’s musical bloodstream. Shaw was a prodigy among prodigies: absolute pitch, photographic memory, and an insatiable curiosity that led him to absorb bebop and the broader harmonic architectures of John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. Those influences were touchstones and gateways to a deeper connection with Black Classical Music.

By the early 1960s, Shaw’s reputation was no longer local. His first significant gig came with Willie Bobo’s band at the Club Coronet in Brooklyn, where he played alongside Chick Corea and Joe Farrell — a lineup that signaled Shaw’s comfort at the intersection of tradition and innovation. Around this time, in California, he met Eric Dolphy, whose fearless explorations left a lasting imprint on Shaw’s own approach to improvisation.

Shaw spent time in Europe immersed in hard bop and modern jazz, playing with Bud Powell, Johnny Griffin and Kenny Clarke before returning to the U.S. and performing with Horace Silver and Art Blakey. These were the formative apprenticeships of a musician who would soon redefine what the trumpet could do at a time when jazz wasn’t as popular in the mainstream marketplace.

Still, at this point, Shaw’s playing was already noted for its breadth, and his ability to navigate complex changes with the buoyant agility of bebop, while also embracing the spiritual depth and modal freedom that characterized much of the 1960s avant-garde. Yet Shaw never seemed interested in fitting neatly into one camp. His musical personality was too restless and too singular.

Shaw’s first album as a leader, Blackstone Legacy, was released in 1971 on Contemporary Records. Though long out of print, it has since been rediscovered and reissued, reaffirming its status as a quietly revolutionary work — a blend of politically charged themes, post-bop sophistication, and almost orchestral ensemble textures that seemed to anticipate directions jazz would take throughout the 1970s. The personnel on Blackstone Legacy — featuring giants like Ron Carter, Gary Bartz, Lenny White and Bennie Maupin — reflects the ambition and the reach of Shaw’s vision. A leader and an architect, here was a trumpeter who wasn’t just leading a band; he was organizing a conversation among some of the most compelling voices in jazz.

The early 1970s saw a string of albums that charted Shaw’s creative evolution. Song of Songs, from 1973, expanded his compositional palette, blending spiritual overtones and modal openness. By the time The Moontrane came around in 1974, Shaw’s voice on trumpet was unmistakable — angular yet lyrical, technically breathtaking without sacrificing the emotional immediacy that made his solos so compelling. The Moontrane was a statement. The music on that album hinted at Shaw’s deep engagement with the harmonic vocabulary pioneered by Coltrane but filtered through a sensibility all his own — one that cherished intervals, embraced dissonance and reveled in expansion. In Shaw’s hands, the trumpet was an engine of revelation.

Love Dance — Shaw’s fourth album as a leader, reissued last week via the jazz archivist Zev Feldman’s Time Traveler Recordings label — stands as one of the most spiritually rich and stylistically adventurous sessions in his catalog. Originally recorded in November 1975 and released on the Muse label the following year, it brings together a fierce and empathetic ensemble: Steve Turre on trombone and bass trombone, René McLean on alto and soprano saxophones, Billy Harper on tenor saxophone, Joe Bonner on piano and electric piano, Cecil McBee on bass, Victor Lewis on drums, and percussionists Guilherme Franco and Tony Waters.

Though the solos transcend Love Dance, I’m most taken by how the session feels like a collective spiritual journey. The title track, composed by Joe Bonner, unfolds over expansive time, with Shaw’s horn drifting between meditation and exultation. “Obsequious” and “Sunbath” explore modal landscapes with a kind of effortless depth, while Billy Harper’s composition “Soulfully I Love You (Black Spiritual of Love)” brings a raw, devotional intensity to the set. Shaw and the band were charting territory equally grounded in post-bop tradition and the open horizons of spiritual jazz. The result is an album that feels like reckoning and liberation, and one that stands as a testament to Shaw’s vision in the mid-1970s.

By the late ’70s, Shaw’s work garnered further critical acclaim. Albums like Little Red’s Fantasy and Rosewood showcased his dexterity, compositional imagination and willingness to move across moods — from fiery hard bop to introspective post-bop. Rosewood in particular, released on Columbia, earned Shaw widespread recognition, including DownBeat accolades and Grammy nominations, reinforcing his status as a player’s player but as an artist whose work resonated across jazz’s broader cultural landscape. And yet, despite the praise, Shaw’s trajectory was not without its struggles.

The arc of Shaw’s life, tragically, includes chapters of physical and personal hardship that intersected with — and sometimes threatened — his musical voice. Health issues stemming from diabetes and complications related to drug addiction eventually led to significant vision loss. In 1989, Shaw suffered a subway accident that left him severely injured; he died on May 10 of that year at the age of 44 — far too young for a musician who still had so much to say and so many horizons left to explore. Shaw’s story resonates because he left more than just music behind. He embodied the resilience of artistic pursuit in the face of adversity, when the industry tried to push him one way and he opted for the other. Every note, every phrase, feels like a declaration of technical mastery and engagement with the emotional complexities of life.

In the years since his passing, Shaw’s influence has only grown. Trumpeters and improvisers across generations cite him as a touchstone for harmonic innovations, along with his fearless approach to form and feeling. From Wynton Marsalis and Terence Blanchard to a host of modern jazz voices, Shaw’s fingerprints are everywhere: in the way players think about intervallic structures, in the way they consider the trumpet’s expressive range, and in the very ethos of improvisation itself.

Albums like Love Dance and Blackstone Legacy have brought Shaw’s music back to the foreground of jazz discourse, reintroducing historical documents while inviting reevaluation, conversation and rediscovery of his best work. They remind us that Shaw was not simply a trumpeter but a thinker, a philosopher and an architect whose music clicks with new listeners finding him for the first time. Shaw’s life and career have been marked by contradictions of discipline and improv, of technical virtuosity and soulful openness, of recognition and relative obscurity. Yet it is precisely these tensions that give his music its enduring power.

Shaw stretched the trumpet into moments of pure expression, and when we listen to him today — to the lines he carved, to the arcs of his phrases, to the emotional breadth of his compositions — we aren’t just hearing notes. We are hearing an entire life in motion: a life shaped by ambition and struggle, by brilliance and heartbreak, but always directed toward that most audacious pursuit of all: the truth. And that is why, decades on, Shaw’s music still feels alive: Because it was never just music. It was a life lived in full view of the eternal questions — and answered, again and again, in radiant melody.

Austin Peralta always sounded like he was listening beyond the present tense. Even when he was a teenager — still a prodigy operating with childlike awe — his playing carried the weight of someone who knew how short the runway could be. He didn’t rush the notes or flatten them into something soulless and technical. Peralta let them hover, drift, and circle back. There was patience in his touch and curiosity in the silence, as if hearing him consider wonder or arrival in real time.

That instinct reached its clearest expression on Endless Planets, the lone album he released during his lifetime. To this day, it’s an LP that feels less like a debut than a dispatch — sent from somewhere just beyond the edge of genre and expectation. Listening now, more than a decade later, the album reads as both a culmination and a question mark: what happens when a jazz musician grows up inside hip-hop, absorbs electronic music without fear, and refuses to choose a single lineage as home?

“I don’t think art can or should be classified into earthly conventions,” Peralta once said. “True art defies categorization and transcends boundaries and shouldn’t be looked at through a lens of ‘earthly’ or ‘not earthly.’ If you let it wash over you and carry you away, that experience may not feel like anything you’ve ever experienced here on Earth. It can be the doorway into an infinitude of worlds.”

Before jazz music’s mainstream reawakening in 2015 — before Kamasi Washington stretched the form into operatic sprawl on The Epic, before Kendrick Lamar reframed it as Black American redemption on To Pimp a Butterfly — Peralta had the tools, the collaborators, and the imagination to be the connective figure. Not the savior or spokesperson, but the quiet gravitational center: a musician fluent in tradition who never treated it like a cage.

Born in 1990 in Los Angeles, he was a piano prodigy almost immediately, mentored by teachers who recognized his gifts early and pushed him into rooms where most kids his age would’ve been invisible. He studied jazz formally, absorbed classical technique, and learned the canon the way you’re supposed to — by listening closely and showing respect.

But the more interesting education happened outside the classroom. Growing up in L.A., Peralta steeped himself in hip-hop culture, in beat tapes and late-night sessions, in the idea that jazz didn’t have to announce itself as jazz to be valid. This was a generation of musicians who came up trading files instead of charts, who learned improvisation from looped breaks as much as from standards.

That path led him naturally to Brainfeeder, the L.A. collective helmed by the experimental producer Flying Lotus that functioned less like a label and more like an ecosystem. As it seemed, Brainfeeder wasn’t interested in preserving genre purity; it was interested in feeling, futurism, and the shared language between jazz improvisation and beat science. In that space, Peralta didn’t have to translate himself. He could just play.

Endless Planets sounds like the result of that freedom. It’s an album that doesn’t rush to explain itself while quietly opening doors, trusting listeners to follow. There’s piano at the center, yes, but it’s rarely alone. Synths flicker like distant stars. Drums — handled by Zach Harmon — hit with the elasticity of hip-hop but the intuition of jazz. Hamilton Price’s bass doesn’t anchor so much as orbit, melodic and conversational, as if it’s responding to Peralta’s thoughts mid-sentence. It all feels unburdened. This isn’t a young musician trying to prove that he belongs, no stacking complexity for its own sake or leaning on virtuosity as a shield. It feels moody and expansive, with the themes of space and spiritual alignment emerging and reappearing in different shapes. Endless Planets toes a fine line: It’s cosmic without feeling dark or distant, cerebral without taking itself too seriously.

There’s a divine undercurrent to Endless Planets, but it’s subtle as Peralta looks inward. Titles like “Algiers” and “The Underwater Mountain Odyssey” hint at travel, but the emotional register stays intimate. It’s the sound of Peralta at the piano late at night, searching alone, letting the music tell him where it wants to go next. That sense of voyage makes the album all the more compelling in hindsight. It feels like a waypoint to a larger narrative about the atmosphere as a whole, a mapped constellation of ideas pointing upward and outward.

Released in 2011, Endless Planets arrived before the broader culture was ready to fully receive it. Jazz, at that moment, was still largely siloed — either locked in academic reverence or relegated to niche appreciation in small, subterranean nightclubs. The idea that it could sit comfortably next to hip-hop, electronic music and experimental soul at open-air festivals hadn’t yet reached the masses. Peralta wasn’t alone in his prescience; also in L.A., in the mid-2000s, the producer and vocalist Georgia Anne Muldrow was blending funk and spiritual jazz, the results landing somewhere between Herbie Hancock’s early-‘70s fusion era and Alice Coltrane’s meditative orchestral arrangements. But because Peralta was so young, he had the potential to reach young 20-somethings who only knew Herbie and Alice from their families’ old record collection. Neither Peralta nor Muldrow waited for permission. As it were, they performed jazz simply because it was cool.

Peralta’s death in 2012, at just 22 years old, froze Endless Planets in a particular kind of light: It was both a fantastic opening statement and a sad ending. While that can make listening difficult, and tempt the listener to frame the notes as premonitions, the album somehow resists that reading and doesn’t feel rushed against time. It sounds like someone confident there would be more. And that might be the quiet tragedy at the center of Peralta’s legacy — not just that he died young, but that he was just beginning to settle into himself.

His death had a profound impact on FlyLo and the bassist Thundercat the most; the work they released in his passing referenced grief in one way or another. It was slower in places, heavier and more reflective, as if suddenly aware that time — even in creative communities built on futurism and freedom — is not an infinite resource. In 2013, on Thundercat’s sophomore album Apocalypse, he used songs like “Lotus and the Jondy” to reminisce playfully about the time he, Peralta and FlyLo were in the woods tripping on mushrooms. Elsewhere, on the emotive “A Message for Austin / Praise the Lord / Enter the Void,” Thundercat ushered his friend to the afterlife with a tone of see you later. “Though we say goodbye,” he sang. “We will say hello again.”

A year later, FlyLo released his own breakthrough jazz album, You’re Dead!, which conveyed what the soul endures when the body passes away. On the surface, the album — with all its jazz fusion, prog and hip-hop — felt kinetic, even playful, but was fundamentally obsessed with mortality. Death wasn’t just an abstract concept there, it was a presence and a conversation partner. The only song that dealt directly with his death, “The Boys Who Died In Their Sleep,” felt nervous and haunting, like FlyLo was trying to reckon with his sudden death without letting it consume him. “I still think about him a lot, like he’s so crazy, but he’s going to live forever,” FlyLo once told The Fader. “I never thought he’d die, never thought he’d be dead.”

If he had lived long enough, it’s tough not to imagine Peralta inside the moment of jazz music’s commercial resurgence a decade ago. Not as a competitor to Kamasi and Kendrick, but as a counterweight to their maximalist approaches. Peralta modeled a kind of musical citizenship that feels obvious now but was radical then. Ultimately, Endless Planets remains his clearest artifact, an album asking us to consider jazz as a method of approaching imagination, despite the superficial genre tags that keep art separated. The record suggests that virtuosity is most powerful when it serves feeling, when curiosity is free to roam without borders. In the short life Peralta was afforded, he didn’t need a renaissance to validate his vision, because he was already living inside the future the culture would catch up to. Endless Planets doesn’t sound dated or unfinished. And maybe that’s the most honest tribute to Peralta. He never treated music as an endpoint, only as a way through.

Live recordings are often treated as supplemental archives — dusty snapshots tossed into discographies, a bonus for heads who’ve already traced every studio session. But From In To Out, recorded in late October 1970 at the Festival de Créteil and released decades later on the French label Futura Marge, demands reconsideration as something far more essential.

Alphonso Son “Dizzy” Reece, a Jamaican-born trumpeter who made his name in Europe working with American jazz luminaries Frank Foster and Kenny Clarke, could have easily been cast as a journeyman by any cursory history of the genre. But on From In To Out, he’s a tectonic presence, a soloist and composer who understands that lyricism and abandon shouldn’t antagonize each other. In this quintet — flanked by the mercurial tenor of John Gilmore’s saxophone, the glowing harmonic fires of Siegfried Kessler’s piano, Patrice Caratini’s obsessive bass pulse, and Art Taylor’s crisp, propulsive drumming — Reece orchestrates something that sounds both collected and uncontainable.

This album was recorded when jazz music’s boundaries were being applied with fresh urgency across Europe: American and Caribbean-born players were molding free jazz, modal explorations, and spiritual flux into something more elemental. And yet From In To Out doesn’t wear its ambition like obvious aggression. The listening experience feels more like entering a room that’s already combusting — you’re not sure when or where the flame started, only that it’s illuminated all the hidden corners.

To understand why From In To Out sounds the way it does — unsettled, alert, perpetually in motion — you have to fathom Reece as a musician shaped by displacement long before exile became a creative trope. Reese’s earliest musical language was already about the hybrid: Steeped in Caribbean rhythm, Reece absorbed jazz as an open system, a perspective that sharpened when he moved to London in the late 1940s.

By the mid-1950s, Reece was a revelation. Tony Hall’s jazz club became his laboratory, and his tone, burnished and insistent, carried the authority of hard bop and the pliability of someone unafraid to bend it. That fearlessness followed him to New York at the end of the decade, where Blue Note co-founder Alfred Lion recognized in Reece a rare blend of discipline without rigidity, virtuosity without ego. Albums like 1959’s Star Bright and 1962’s Asia Minor placed him in conversation with the era’s heavyweights, yet Reece never quite fit the tidy narrative of the label’s canonical stars.

That tension would come to define his career. As jazz music’s commercial center of gravity shifted in the 1960s, and opportunities in the U.S. grew more constricted, Reece joined a growing cohort of Black American musicians who found Europe less prescriptive than the States. Paris, in particular, offered work and creative space. It was here that Reece began leaning harder into extended forms, collective improvisation, and the spiritual charge of open-ended composition as a natural extension of a life lived between geographies and expectations.

From In To Out emerges from this period as a stylistic detour. By 1970, Reece had lived multiple jazz lives: prodigy, expatriate, Blue Note stalwart, and now, something closer to a godfather of hard bop. In that way, the album’s title reads more like an autobiography — movement as necessity, inward reflection translated outward. Reece sounds like someone who has accepted that the center was never fixed to begin with. By the time Reece steps onto the stage at Créteil, he’s not chasing relevance. From In To Out is the sound of a musician still moving, still listening, still refusing to settle into anyone else’s definition of where jazz was supposed to go.

The program unfolds as four movements — “Communion,” “Contact,” “Krisis,” and “Summit” — but only the most discipline-focused jazz scholars will find that useful. The music moves like a living organism, oscillating between meditative exposition and volcanic eruption.

“Communion” begins with a sense of ritual — not the languid, cliche’d ritual of spiritual jazz, but the eerily calm before kinetic conversation. Reece and Gilmore trade phrases that feel familiar, even triumphant, but with an undercurrent that suggests there’s a tidal wave coming. There’s a tone here, a tautness in Reece’s trumpet that sidesteps his hard bop roots to embrace something broader and wilder. It’s trumpet playing walking a tightrope between instinct and structure.

“Contact” accelerates this idea: As the rhythmic tension climbs, Taylor’s drums ripple beneath Caratini’s grounded, almost obsessive bass chords. Kessler’s piano is scorched-earth harmony, shoving the ensemble toward terrain that’s both modal and volatile. Within this kinetic space, Reece’s lines turn less melodic and more declarative, stretched into intervals that imply doom and deliverance from said catastrophe.

When “Krisis” arrives, the group’s interplay is so tightly wound that it seems near impossible to distinguish composer from improviser, leader from collaborator. It’s collective thinking that resembles argument and dialogue simultaneously. The tension here is palpable — not indulgent, not didactic, but questioning. Every phrase feels like a necessary response to what just happened, not a preconceived thought, as if headed toward a common goal without knowing where the destination is located.

And then there’s “Summit,” the apex in form and spirit, where Reece’s trumpet transcends without jumping the rails. Here, he doesn’t sacrifice precision for passion; instead, he seems to hold them in equilibrium, tracing the lineage of Black Classical Music while pushing the music forward. I hear urgency and nuance, every pitch a decision made under the glare of unrelenting scrutiny.

The personnel assembled makes this album all the more riveting. Gilmore’s saxophone is incisive and independent, offering a complement that’s equally polite and singular. The two aren’t trading solos per sé; they’re sparring, converging, and fracturing ideas in ways that feel tense. Reece’s own approach feels especially confident in how he leverages harmonic frameworks without being beholden to them, letting his tone and articulation guide the emotional contour of each movement. And it’s in that interplay — between form and freedom, expectation and surprise — that the album’s singular energy lies.

But this isn’t an ego project. Though Reece’s name is the biggest on the vinyl jacket, the bass and drums are compelling narrative forces, too. Caratini’s bass grounds this elastic music with insistence, providing anchor points that make each leap feel all the more daring. Taylor’s drums puncture the air with a firm but graceful resonance, reminding me that even in the wildest sonic terrain, rhythm remains the gravitational force.

It’s tempting to place this album in a historical backwater — after all, it sits between Reece’s Asia Minor and later sessions like 1978’s Manhattan Project. But From In To Out shines because it denies static categorization. There’s no shrine to tradition and no dismissal of it. Instead, there’s the sense that jazz is alive, despite the public discourse at the time of it taking a backseat to soul and funk. This is jazz — in all its unease, joy and ecstasy — that acknowledges the past and hears the future without surrendering to novelty. It’s a reminder that jazz doesn’t need to adhere to tradition to be validated.

To my ear, listening to From In To Out is a negotiation with the music and our own expectations of sound and history. As the ensemble dissolves and rebuilds motifs across these 38 minutes, we’re left with the felt sense of possibility — the thrilling uncertainty that comes when musicians and the audience risk being changed.

To call Masayuki Takayanagi a guitarist is almost a disservice to what he did for, and to, the instrument. Across a 40-year career, he deconstructed it, remade it, and blasted it into the ether where melody, tradition and expectation went to die. In the context of 20th-century jazz and improvised music, Takayanagi occupied a zone less charted than most: an arcane frontier between free jazz, noise, and pure sonic exploration, where confusion and clarity are one. On albums like April is the crullest month and Eclipse, his work is neither easily digestible nor comfortably explained; it is music that grabs your ears and insists you listen differently.

Born on December 22, 1932, in Tokyo, Takayanagi’s earliest engagements with music were rooted in the norms of jazz performance. By the early 1950s he was already a professional, holding court in Tokyo clubs and functioning within the cool jazz lexicon — fluid, technically assured, stylistically familiar. But while many of his peers would function within traditional jazz, Takayanagi’s path was always bent toward the edge.

The key to understanding Takayanagi’s music is to appreciate the stark transition in his professional life. Picture the late 1950s Tokyo jazz scene: after bebop and cool jazz had echoed through dim club rooms and lacquered cocktail lounges, a restless Takayanagi began seeking something that couldn’t be satisfied by walking lines or fashionable chords. This was a musician who, by the end of the decade, felt the need to not only question the boundaries of jazz, but to erase them entirely.

By 1969, Takayanagi had formed what would come to be known as his landmark ensemble, New Direction — a name that hints at both hope and rupture. With bassist/composer Motoharu Yoshizawa and drummer/percussionist Yoshisaburo “Sabu” Toyozumi, Takayanagi set a manifesto for the music that would occupy the next two decades of his life. He would later expand this group into New Direction Unit, but even at the earliest moments, what happened onstage was less music in the traditional sense than sound as raw matter — a sculptural force of attack, response, reaction, and recoil. He went on to call his peers in jazz “a bunch of losers” in the press, which didn’t endear him to the heads, even as it signaled where he was going sonically.

Takayanagi’s New Direction was not polite. Nor was it melodic. It was a bloody, wide-open exploration with feedback as a leading force, where rhythm didn’t operate as a timekeeper. Watching a New Direction performance — or imagining it, if you’ve only read about it — is like observing a landscape erode: there are jagged peaks, abrasive collisions, and sudden lulls that make the noise feel alive. And the rules were audaciously simple and direct: play loud, avoid repetition, and — at least to my ear — refuse the idea of anything traditional.

If your ears are accustomed to harmony as a gentle handshake between notes, Takayanagi’s world is more like a blitzkrieg. Take the 1970 recording Independence: Tread On Sure Ground as an example: Here, the trio doesn’t build musical ideas so much as sculpt them in real time, as though each phrase is a shard of glass cutting the air. Melody is teased and oftentimes abandoned. It’s music that refuses comfort, and you feel that refusal with every resonant screech and unmoored echo. On “習作第３番アップ・アンド・ダウン | Study No.3 Up And Down,” in particular, the arrangement just sort of hangs in mid-air, a scant blend of acoustic guitar, drum taps, and upright bass never quite congealing. The same went for “ピラニア | Piranha,” the album’s percussive closing track: Over oscillating drum cymbals, Takayangi plucked the strings sporadically, blending silence and aggression until one became the other. It reminds me of Sonny Sharrock in that way; on his 1969 album Black Woman, it sounded like the guitar sat on top of the composition, trickling down occasionally to sit alongside Linda Sharrock’s voice.

Much like Sonny, Takayanagi didn’t seem interested in showing off technique for its own sake. He would sometimes drag a metal chain across strings, strike them with sticks, and lay the guitar flat on a table — a practice that would anticipate later experimental approaches by players like Keith Rowe — to free the instrument from conventional performance posture. To Takayanagi, these were auditory experiments, each technique a probe into what the guitar could do outside all preconceptions.

One of Takayanagi’s later conceptual frameworks was something he termed “non-section music,” a philosophy that rejected the melody, harmony and rhythm of traditional jazz for sounds not managed or composed in the Western sense. In rejecting such heritage, he was also rejecting the notion that music should have expectations. Because with expectation comes restraint, and he preferred something that felt unleashed. Takayanagi believed in “sound energy.” As a result, his music often felt like a cyclone: turbulent, circuitous, and intense.

To that end, the 1975 sessions for April is the crullest month aren’t songs, per se. They’re storms of the spirit: sweeping arcs of texture, abrupt blasts that feel almost volcanic, and rare interludes (like on “What Have We Given?”) where the chaos seems to take a breath to reorganize for another calculated barrage. The quartet here — Takayanagi’s guitar, Kenji Mori’s reeds and clarinets, Nobuyoshi Ino’s bass and cello, and Hiroshi Yamazaki’s percussion — don’t collaborate in the traditional sense; they occupy adjacent space. Each instrument declares its independence while being forcibly entangled with the others.

And yet, to frame Takayanagi’s music solely as destruction is reductive. Deep within the noise and the abstraction was a musician profoundly rooted in the language of jazz, even if he sought to deny it here and there. Long before he dismantled the guitar, he mastered its grammar, conducting barely perceptible homages that harkened to his formation. The idea, as he saw it, was to use history as a launchpad to the unknown, to know the past and recast it as an arbiter of chaos. To bend it, distort it, and convert it to pure audacity. Takayanagi’s influence extends far beyond the Japanese free jazz scene. Players like Keiji Haino, Otomo Yoshihide, and others in experimental noise and improvised music often cite him as a structural precursor — a musician who showed that guitar didn’t just have to be chords and solos. His methods foreshadowed different approaches in noise music, tabletop guitar experimentation, and electroacoustic improvisation, making him an understudied but towering figure in the global avant-garde. To listen to Takayanagi is to confront the image that shakes you awake.

If John Coltrane took the saxophone to the edge of spirituality, and Derek Bailey dissolved the guitar into pure radicalism, Takayanagi fused that disintegration with unmistakable depth. In the end, Takayanagi’s music compels you to face the uncharted within sound, to rethink what it means to play, to listen, and, ultimately, to experience music. And that is a legacy far louder than any amplifier feedback he ever generated.

In the summer of 2018, I was working as an editor in the Brooklyn office of Bandcamp Daily when my colleague J. Edward Keyes told me about the album Aviary, from the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Julia Holter. I’d been a fan of Holter’s music since Have You In My Wilderness, her 2015 release, so of course I was going to listen. By then, I’d become a full-on jazz head, digging through the back channels of the site, excavating obscure albums by the French pianist Jef Gilson and new ones by the British saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings. If your band had the word “ensemble” in its name, or if the record was some lost relic from 1970s Brazil, chances were I would listen and commission a feature on it.

Back then, Aviary’s opening song “Turn the Light On” hit me like a wave, a jazz-meets-classical composition of billowing strings, rolling drums, and Holter’s voice: filtered but not really, frantic and soaring, sitting atop the dissonant arrangement yet situated within it. “Thank,” she declared flatly, as if revving up, “-ful you’ll come baaaaack.” She ended this line with a full-throated wail, punctuating the words and their place amongst the orchestra. The song erupts immediately, with no buildup or prelude, as if dropped mid-thought into Holter’s internal monologue.

At the time, “Turn the Light On” registered as an excellent track and that was it, something I’d play occasionally and slip into the blends I’d compile for Dublab and WorldwideFM. But after seeing my mother die and coping with the subsequent grief, “Turn the Light On” became something else entirely. I’d play it on long drives and weep uncontrollably, the volume on blast to get the full breadth of sound. It felt like Holter opened the gates for the people I’ve lost since 2023: my mother, my aunts, my dear friend. As if she stood at the pulpit summoning their spirits to enter:

Come in, Delores
Come in, Claudia and Claudette
Come in, Leon

No matter how I felt whenever the song started playing, I’d hear that arrangement, imagine my ancestors walking into paradise, and lose my composure. Though Holter’s opening line referenced a loved one coming back, I knew mine weren’t, at least not physically, and the pain of no longer seeing them alive hurt me the most.

Anyone who’s lost someone close knows how paralyzing sorrow can be. Some days I think I’m getting better: I’ll play “Turn the Light On” or Archie Shepp’s “Rest Enough (Song to Mother)” and not flinch. Other days, I’ll catch a quick thought and can’t move: my mom sitting on the right corner of the chaise, my aunts cursing and laughing their way through the crab feast, Leon and I — in early 2016 — talking about this new kid named Anderson .Paak and his album Malibu. While these are the memories I don’t want to shake, I never know when or where they’ll arise.

In an email, Holter said she wrote “Turn the Light On” to convey a feeling of deep love. “It’s one of the few songs I have from that era of my music where the love feels warm and undeterred in that way,” she told me. Inspired by Alice Coltrane’s arranging approach (the strings on “Words I Heard” and “Colligere” were influenced by Coltrane’s 1971 album Universal Consciousness), the rest of Aviary is best described as chamber pop, orchestral songs with a light bounce to them, bathing in sun but with palpable weight. “I think that kind of deep, inner vibration way of thinking was what I was trying to channel,” Holter continued. “Like when I first turn on a record like Turiya Sings [Coltrane’s 1982 album], I immediately am sucked into some other level of existence, maybe a vacuum of all-embracing deep love that doesn’t falter.”

Where songs like “Whether” and “Chaitius” were constructed meticulously, “Turn the Light On” was recorded start to finish with everyone in the studio together. “Everyone just jamming really crazy and loud the whole time,” she wrote. “The only instruction I had for the players was just continuous loud tremolos on the string instruments.” And though Holter was initially uncomfortable with having her voice on the track, the album’s executive producer Cole Marsden Greif-Neill convinced her to keep it. “I think the unhinged quality (for me) was intense, but that is also good probably and makes it more interesting,” she continued.

Indeed, Holter’s voice, along with the arrangement, make the song special. That the vocals echo and border on punk give it an edge beyond the concert hall. It’s what I play when I need to blow the dust out of my head — or, more pointedly, when I need to cry alone while traveling along I-95. This past March, I stood behind Holter in a line to see the band [Ahmed] at Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about the effects of the song then. It was a festival after all, and my musings on bereavement didn’t jibe with the free jazz wafting through the glass. We spoke for a little bit, about writing and avant-garde music, then proceeded with our respective evenings. It wasn’t until later that I had the heart to bear such personal emotions about the track.

Having followed her work, “Turn the Light On” felt like a departure from the serenity she’d been cultivating. It had this chaotic ferocity I admired, almost like Sun Ra if he’d played Carnegie, the sax of Marshall Allen shaking the pillars. In a world that’s become too fast and, well, too much, “Turn the Light On” is a reset after all the scrolling and Zoom calls, when you’ve chased dreams to exhaustion and can’t fully convey the fatigue.

“It sounds so full of energy and intense,” she said, reflecting on the track and the album seven years later, “and I always am so enamored of the musicians I’ve worked with, and their work shines through on this recording for sure.”

Ultimately, Holter concluded, “this whole album Aviary will always probably be something that resonates with me because of the indulgence in timbre and layers. It all is bringing together frequencies I want to hear and embracing that, and I am so so glad that any of this can mean something to others as well. Because it always is an experiment.”

Edit: Here’s a full list of the players — sans Holter — on Aviary. They deserve shine, too.

Corey Fogel (drums)
Devra Hoff (double bass)
Dina Maccabee (viola)
Sarah Belle Reid (trumpet, electronics)
Tashi Wada (Prophet synth)
Kenny Gilmore (production, recording, mixing)
Cole MGN (executive producer)

10 times.

Or maybe 12 or so.

That’s around how many plays it took me to move past “Penitentiary Philosophy,” the explosive opening song of Erykah Badu’s sophomore album, Mama’s Gun. When the track fades in through a quiet cadre of whispered voices, wordless hums and hand percussion, I assumed I was in for Baduizm Part Two, continuing the sound she set forth on her debut album three years prior. Just as suddenly, the tranquility gives way to ascendant drums and praise shouts, and the subdued soul becomes propulsive ‘70s-inspired funk: gritty guitar chords, hard-charging percussion, and loud vocals. Less incense, more brown liquor. It was a jolt I wasn’t expecting and one I didn’t know I needed. As it turned out, that charge would last the duration of the LP.

Equally delicate, candid and imperfectly human, Mama’s Gun epitomized the state of becoming, when one can feel the breakthrough nearing, but the grief prevails, and there’s still stretching, searching and unlearning to do. Over its 70-plus minutes and 14 perfect songs, Badu — immersed in the afterglow of fame — eschewed the expectations of what her music should be, sidestepping the manufactured idealism of so-called neo-soul with music that scanned as R&B and landed somewhere else. Where Baduizm felt understated in its conveyance of love and spirituality, Mama’s Gun represented a bolder vision. It avoided the notions of moment for a patient unfurling of life as it stood. Heartbreak, self-doubt, confidence, and the notions of legacy, Badu wrestled with the nuance of these vast emotions by blowing everything up — or, to put it more gracefully, by letting us know who she really was. In its totality, Mama’s Gun was about running toward truth and inner freedom, toward the jagged parts of oneself that are easy to hide and studying what’s there.

From one Pisces to another, I can only sense her weariness and the seemingly insurmountable weight on her shoulders. There’s a deeper fatigue that comes with being a creative person whose birthday happens to be in late February or early March. When I listened to a song like “Ye Yo,” from her live album, I could hear exhaustion drifting to the fore. Pending motherhood, the ticking clock of celebrity and a high-profile relationship with André 3000 seemed like a lot to handle, and on the track — a sauntering reflection about recentering in the midst of chaos — Badu sounded tired, no longer the Dallas kid with a head full of jazz phrasing and drum loops, but the noted phenomenon crowned the successor to a lineage she never asked to inherit. “Sometimes I get so lonely lonely lonely,” she sang. “I feel all by myself up here.”

She took all that anguish to Electric Lady Studios in 1999 and created a magnum opus. A Soulquarian effort, featuring Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson on drums, Pino Palladino on bass, James Poyser on keys, and mixed by the collective’s go-to engineer Russell Elevado, Mama’s Gun addressed the push-n-pull she experienced as a newly minted public figure wanting to evolve privately. The headwraps weren’t as prevalent. Neither was the Billie Holiday-inspired, Southern acoustic soul. Though traces remained, the topics were edgier, socially aware and comprehensive in delivery. The song “...And On” nodded to her biggest single, “On & On,” down to the quiet arrangement that anchored the original. Exactly when I thought she’d keep trekking that road, Badu snapped the listener back into the now with a quick “wake the fuck up” and a sampled gunshot that paused the proceedings. The aforementioned “Penitentiary Philosophy” addressed grind culture, in particular the rat race breaking the spirit of Black men. “Can’t stand to see you hustle, doing bad,” Badu sang. “But you can’t win when your will is weak, when you’re knocked on the ground.”

Another song, “Time’s a Wastin’,” took that same Black man and sat him down for a lesson in focus and socioeconomics. “Livin’ in a world that’s oh so fast,” she observed. “Gotta make your money last. Learn from your past.” On my favorite track, “A.D. 2000,” Badu discussed the death of Amadou Diallo, who was killed by New York City police officers in February 1999. Here, she assumed the identity of Diallo, giving honor beyond the 19 bullets that pierced his skin. The lyrics are sad, though. To this day, I listen to them when I’m feeling especially reflective, as — once again, as a creative Pisces — we downplay ourselves to a fault, even as the world celebrates our work. In moments of solitude, we think that we’re not doing enough and somehow need to do more. So we try to save folks at our own peril and question why we’re burned out. When she sings “you won’t be naming no buildings after me,” it’s both an elegy and an expression of insecurity. On this song and others, Badu’s voice was tender and cutting, drifting across the album from a specific pressure point: the reconstruction of character by peeling most of it away.

If there’s a centerpiece on Mama’s Gun, it’s the three-part, 10-minute closer “Green Eyes,” a masterclass in emotional sequencing. Running through nonchalance, sorrow and acceptance, each section reads like a crinkled page in a journal written at different stages of heartbreak. The first portion strolls with a vintage swing, and Badu — mixed to sound like she’s singing through a jukebox in the ‘40s — plays coy, claiming she’s okay despite the contrary. Then the second movement slows into a smoky jazz lounge aesthetic, on which she delves into a back and forth of heart over head. Here, she illustrates the internal dialogue by filtering it through the left and right channels. By the third section, she fully leans into the finality of it all: It’s over and she has to learn to move forward. It’s the ultimate break-up song and an act of self-documentation, a blueprint for how to translate private pain into communal meaning. I’ve seen friends, going through the same romantic situation as Badu, visibly break down as the song played. That’s perhaps the greatest compliment any artist can receive, when what they made was so impactful that it elicits visceral reactions from their audience long after its release. With this track, Badu solidified herself as a gifted vocalist and one of the most incisive songwriters of her generation.

Twenty-five years later, Mama’s Gun is just as prophetic, its legacy steeped in the aesthetics of healing. It expands without explanation or permission, standing not only as an all-time great album, but a masterwork of depth, sonic layering and personal transformation. Diaristic and universal, fragmented and whole, the record cemented Badu as a cultural architect — someone who could take the mess of life and alchemize it into something invigorating. Mama’s Gun still feels just as alive, still humming and revealing, still looking for clarity. It’s a living document of a woman in transition, and a testament to how music can hold the parts of us we can’t articulate yet. There’s something to be said about telling the truth and letting the reaction be what it is. A world all its own, Mama’s Gun remains a refuge.

And it still takes me a while to move past “Penitentiary Philosophy” when I play the album.

In 2020, in my second stint as an editor at Bandcamp Daily, I would dig through the site’s back channels late at night, seeing what gems I could bring to the weekly editorial meetings. One time in particular — maybe in the summer or early fall — I stumbled upon the Touching Bass label page, and the album Life Works Out… Usually from the London-based singer Demae. I can’t recall what made me play the EP, but I’m glad I did, because the song “Basic Love” reminded me of ‘90s R&B in the best way. Sauntering drums and light keys evoked a bluesy atmosphere, and the lyrics — equally poetic and straightforward — spoke to the deep devotion one can have in a romantic partnership. “I would climb a mountain for you,” she sang. “Swim through … the deepest, darkest ocean or two.” There wasn’t anything wild happening on the track. Just a soothing groove, plainspoken language, and Demae’s captivating soprano.

There’s a specific kind of hush that surrounds her music, a simplicity, a recollection of innocence and nostalgia, when the sun stayed around a bit longer, and the air anchored itself on your shoulders. It feels vulnerable, honest in how it conveys vast emotions without lingering on them, like old Quiet Storm soul filtered through a contemporary lens. Demae conjures an artist like Raphael Saadiq as someone who can emit ample feelings in a straight line. Songs like “Basic Love” and “Stuck In A Daze” say all the things over beats that just sorta float in the background — there but not overly so, leaving plenty of space for her voice to resonate. That’s not to disparage the producers creating the instrumentals; quite the opposite. In today’s era of noise, where the mixes are louder and the beats are busier, it takes special restraint to evoke a bygone era while leaning into the now. Demae has constructed a vocabulary around this serenity; within it, I hear the echoes of jazz and alternative hip-hop, of Nina Simone and Madlib, a dialect nuanced enough to honor past and present Black music while sounding like herself.

Demae’s biography is that of an artist who’s quietly and steadily doing the work. Raised in Northwest London, she first gained notoriety as one-third of Hawk House, a jazz-rap trio with neo-soul inflections. Their 2014 album, A Handshake to the Brain, earned the group a nice following for its mix of intricate rhymes and R&B-centered production. Think the Fugees meets Floetry: soft percussion, chill bars, and loungy arrangements that slowly ascend. From there, Demae — under the name Bubblerap — started posting her own music to Soundcloud, amassing a fan base beyond Hawk House, setting up the release of Life Works Out… as a proper debut. Musically, the project delved into Demae’s upbringing as having been influenced by J Dilla and A Tribe Called Quest while unpacking a narrative of personal breakthroughs and private reckonings.

On the surface, it would seem that Demae is somewhat underrated in the pantheon of current R&B musicians. But her path feels radical when assessed alongside today’s industry speed. There’s no press cycle jump or viral moment that leaned the universe toward her work. Sure she’s noted, but it’s because the music is simply that good. Demae has made it to this point through a string of deliberate moves: covers that recontextualize old standards, strong singles doubling as statements, collaborations with other noted artists that put her in new spaces. As cliche as it might sound, Demae is here because she makes good music, the type that builds a sustainable career beyond the noise of clickbaity tunes that come and go quickly.

With her, the highs are incredibly high; she creates art that rattles in your head and stays there. Case in point: “Deliver Me,” the title track of her 2024 EP. Here, she crafts the type of tender confessional that can only come from lived experience, exhaling declarations of no longer making herself small. “She’s still searching for a place somewhere to belong,” Demae sings over orchestral strings and subtle pulsing drums. “She neglected her own mind to prove them wrong.” The whole thing creates a sense of longing, gorgeous in its self-hindrance. It’s about self-salvation, the idea that growth is an ongoing process, and that sometimes the most difficult work is inner work. To my ear, the song is also a slight nod to her career so far: “Following gets so contagious / The destination’s close, have patience.” It’s not just the EP’s highlight; in the broader arc of her discography, I’ve never heard her so grounded, so assured in her thesis.

Released Nov. 7, Demae’s latest EP, Deep Dive, feels like a departure from her previous output. Largely uptempo and sonically adventurous, it eschews soft-spoken concessions and minimal backdrops for bigger, more festive tracks that stampede and not glide — stretching out, thumping, and swirling through the speakers. “Mystical Approach” is the best example of this: Hard percussion and acoustic guitars evoke ‘80s funk, and the words express an unabashed sweetness. It’s about finding the right one, moving past “all these fools” toward someone true. The term “mystical” refers to the emotional geography she’s charting here, the celestial quality of the track, the conscious pivot to shine bright while mapping her own terrain. “Steppers” is another deviation in tone: A sleek, two-stepping number, Demae depicts dance as an emotional release, calling out those who move in life, carrying their pasts, their hopes and desires with a graceful stride the world can’t break. It feels communal; she’s talking to listeners as much as she’s talking to herself, inviting us to move with her and heal through rhythm.

“Light” is the album’s emotional centerpiece — a dark sky cracking into color, signaling a breakthrough for Demae’s renewed sense of clarity. It gives me the same feeling “Basic Love” did five years ago, as a gentle and determined song with impeccable rewards. Equally resolute and open-minded, the lyrics suggest she’s allowing herself to emerge. So on the chorus, when she sings, “I just wanna see you in the light / Holding your smile / Nothing in the way to reach your highest heights,” it rings as self-discovery, like she’s singing to her psyche. In doing so, Demae offers listeners a sound that’s contemplative and transcendent, a corner to understand and reimagine identity. It’s audacious in how it moves Demae forward while staying true to its original intent: to be heard closely beyond the veneer of fast fame. We’re witnessing the deliberate shaping of a singular voice. That’s a form of success, too.

When Stevie Wonder released his 16th studio album, Innervisions, in August 1973, the U.S. was in turmoil. Richard Nixon’s presidency was unraveling, the Vietnam War was grinding toward collapse, and the civil rights movement had splintered. Across the spectrum of Black music, artists were shifting from optimism to realism, and the malaise of “We Shall Overcome” had given way to false hope of prosperity. Stevie, one year into pronounced creative freedom thanks to a new recording contract at Motown, stood firmly at those crossroads: Blending political urgency with spiritual renewal, Innervisions lamented drug dependence on “Too High,” denounced sinning on “Jesus Children of America,” and warned against the evils of a deceitful trickster, widely thought to be Nixon, on “He’s Misstra Know It All.”

But it was the album’s third song, “Living for the City,” that became a cultural touchstone for its vivid portrayal of existence as a Black person in 1970s New York. A progressive funk song that forecasted rap music, it predicted the nascent genre’s tone and sound by nearly a decade, and one can draw a direct line from it to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” — released in 1982 — as having been influenced by Stevie’s mix of storytelling, sound design and social commentary. On the surface, “Living for the City” is an upbeat stomp of thumping drums, deep Moog bass and pitched-up vocals, but the vitality leads to a deeper conversation about racism and idealism, how the dream of a better life in the big city isn’t always realistic.

The song follows the story of a young Black man who is raised by a hard-working family in Mississippi, where he sees his parents labor for long hours, and low pay, as they struggle to raise their children. The man travels by bus to New York City to build a prosperous new life. Yet when he gets off the bus, he’s met by a drug dealer who offers him $5 to run a package across the street. Police officers show up, stop and frisk the young man, and arrest him. A judge then informs the man that a jury has found him guilty and sentences him to 10 years in prison. In the last scene, a white prison guard orders him into a jail cell, using the n-word, and slams the door.

Here’s what’s fascinating about this scene: Stevie conveys most of it through an extended skit in the middle of the song, an approach that hadn’t largely been done to that point. By sampling city sounds — vehicle horns, sirens and people chattering outside — he put the listener right in the middle of Manhattan, using the location’s intensity to punctuate the song’s narrative: That, in those days, New York City could be a cold, desolate place full of crime and violence in which generosity doesn’t reside.

Was Stevie’s depiction a bit dramatic? Yes. But it also aligned with other songs of the era — namely James Brown’s “Down and Out in New York City,” released that same year. There, James offered similar insight, this time from the perspective of a native trying to navigate the landscape. “You try hard, or you die hard,” he sang. “No one really gives a good damn.” Where “Down and Out…” doesn’t end happily, Stevie (being Stevie) at least tries to end “Living…” on a positive note. “I hope you hear inside my voice of sorrow,” he sang through the growl he’d sometimes use to emphasize his point. “And that it motivates you to make a better tomorrow. This place is cruel, nowhere could be much colder. If we don’t change, the world will soon be over.”

Once again, Stevie was making space for joy and outrage to rest within the same song, much like he’d done on tunes like “Evil,” “Heaven Help Us All” and “Do Yourself A Favor” years prior. Though on “Living for the City,” a seven-and-a-half-minute short film disguised as a funk song, he operated as a one-man band against the country’s false promises.

“Living for the City” begins already in motion, the Moog bass tuned to emulate the heartbeat of urban confluence. As the drums and keys come in to bolster Stevie’s fervent singing, the groove locks into something hypnotic. Equally gritty and industrial, the intro sounds like Manhattan waking up, the steam wafting through manhole covers before the day comes to test aspirations. Stevie’s use of street noise makes the song one of the earliest examples of audio vérité in pop music, predating hip-hop’s sample-driven narrative.

I remember the first time I listened to the song’s middle section. I was impressed by its audacity, the strong language, and the vision it took to put a whole skit in the song. It took bold ingenuity to do something like that, but in doing so, Stevie pulled listeners out of poetic abstraction and into the system’s machine. Plus, practically speaking, it’s a whole-ass diss track to New York City — a hardcore move. Again, hip-hop before hip-hop was born. Not only does the tension between order and chaos make “Living for the City” a timeless cut, it solidifies the song as my favorite in Stevie’s vast discography. Yes, I know that’s an impossible task — everyone has a different fave of Stevie’s and they’re all correct — but when it’s time to play his music, I find myself circling back to track 3 on Innvervisions before any other.

When I play the track nowadays, I consider how so much of Stevie’s music feels ancestral. It feels like generations collapsed into a single note, tracks that speak to children and elders at the same time. “Living for the City” makes me think about how hard we work just to be seen, and how perilous the grind can be without the right support. I think about how the protagonist wasn’t given the chance to endure, and I’m floored once again by Stevie’s genius. Because no matter where you play the song — in New York or Philly or any major city — the beat fits the ecosystem, the bassline pulsing, menacing yet alive, ominous and full of possibility. In that way, “Living for the City” is the sound of expectations and heartbreak dancing in the same room, a story of American racism as old as time. By turning pain into melody, Stevie sings about strife without drowning in it. Though it takes faith to survive in a major metropolis, “Living for the City” easily lights the path.

I can’t remember the first time I heard the drummer Rashied Ali, but I can’t remember not hearing him, either. On his work with John Coltrane, Ali’s percussion sounds liberated — each thump rethinking how gravity works within the avant-garde. To that end, on Coltrane’s Interstellar Space — recorded in 1967 and released in 1974 — Ali’s frenetic rhythm kept pace with the saxophonist’s furious wailing, his play worthy of equal billing alongside the cornerstone bandleader.

Perpetually off-axis and headed in different directions at once, Ali’s drumming was all spirit, dancing and jabbing around horn lines, splashing through open air with controlled intensity. On Interstellar Space, in particular, I can hear Ali and Coltrane broadening their respective horizons, trying to land someplace new while staying within range of each other. That sense of expansion, of never wanting to stay in one place too long, carried Ali through the rest of his career. He died in 2009 at the age of 76.

Born Robert Patterson in Philadelphia in 1933, he came up in the city’s rich jazz scene, studying under Philly Joe Jones in small clubs and barrooms that prioritized substance over flash. Under Jones, Ali learned how to catch the pocket and break it open, perfecting the multifaceted swing that would define him later. In the mid-‘60s, Ali moved to New York and immersed himself in the avant-garde community, alongside players like Archie Shepp, Don Cherry and Pharoah Sanders. He connected with Coltrane at a time when the saxophonist was pushing beyond modal structures and song form, toward pure intangible expression that bucked tradition. Ali’s propulsive drumming — a sound equally raw, patient and volatile — matched perfectly with this era. So when he joined Coltrane’s group in 1965, for the recording of Meditations alongside Sanders on saxophone, Elvin Jones on drums, Jimmy Garrison on bass and McCoy Tyner on piano, he helped launch one of the most radical phases in modern jazz.

“When I really got enough experience to try and play with him,” Ali once said, “he was down in Philadelphia and I asked him a couple of times if I could sit in with him, but he said, ‘Not right now.’ I came to New York and then I got a chance to sit and play with him in New York and the rest is history.”

After Coltrane died of liver cancer in 1967, Ali started working with his widow, Alice, a landmark jazz musician as well. Where John’s sound prioritized aggressive transcendence, Alice’s carried a slower form of ascension. Albums like Journey in Satchidananda and Universal Consciousness offered gentle treks through the divine, and Ali — his sound anchored and subdued — provided a celestial pulse. Where her harp rippled through the compositions, Ali’s precise drumming underpinned her strings. His playing with Alice was never about dominance; rather, it was about moderation, a means to bolster her invocations.

In 1973, Ali co-founded Survival Records with the saxophonist Frank Lowe as a way to preserve new music that couldn’t find label homes elsewhere. Alongside Lowe, Ali released Duo Exchange that same year as a roaring, intimate record that distilled the idea of liberation down to two bodies shifting air. It seemed the mainstream didn’t want this music because it was too untethered, Black and radical, so Ali created his own ecosystem for art like this to exist.

To that end, also in ‘73, he opened Ali’s Alley, a loft club at 77 Greene Street, as a hub for like-minded players who refused to compromise. There, he took on the roles of elder and conspirator, someone who understood that sustaining freedom required invention and ownership. That context echoes through the Survival catalog, including the albums Sidewalks in Motion and Swift Are the Winds of Life, which were reissued earlier this year. Each offers a different portal into Ali’s sensibility, and his deep and equal administration of peace and tension. With its bluesy cadence, Sidewalks actually feels like a city in lockstep, breathable yet complex, shrouded in overcast skies. Conversely, Swift — recorded with the violinist Leroy Jenkins — pivots between pressure and release: unbridled and rife with intensity.

Ali’s music always pointed toward community and continuity. Through the ‘70s, he used the label to document collaborations with peers and protégés alike: musicians who also refused to bend toward the market for visibility’s sake. Survival released only a few titles before pausing in the ‘80s, but each one offered a lesson in self-determination. The label’s rebirth keeps his voice alive in the digital era, allowing new ears to experience Ali’s iconoclasm.

Revisiting Ali, I’m taken by how current he sounds, and how I can hear the cross-sections of electronic music in the stems, the way the producer Madlib and the drummer Makaya McCraven bend time signatures, splicing improvisation and arrangement. Ali did that decades earlier on live stages, encouraging generations — and younger drummers like Tyshawn Sorey, Kassa Overall and Marcus Gilmore — to carry this vocabulary forward.

Ali’s legacy is one of insistence — of Black music’s ability to contain multitudes, and on freedom as practice. I’ve long admired his ability to operate in mainstream jazz while maintaining the underground’s bold ethos. In an industry that nudges creators toward one way of making music and selling records, there’s something to be said about Ali staying true to his intent while carving space to play with a vast array of performers: the Coltranes, Gary Bartz and Tisziji Muñoz, among others.

Ali constructed his own rhythm, found solace in the irregular, and melody in the noise. In the best way, his approach prioritized control belonging to the creator, and the vitality of intuition as a guide. His music reminds me that art this free never really ages, and that the best work tends to resonate mentally and physically. The glide in his snare, the brush against cymbals, the fills: they ask you to move differently, to breathe with the band, to lose your balance and find it again. It’s all nimble, unpredictable action, fierce and delicate, an endless dialogue with the drum then, now and always.

There’s a moment, on the back side of Jeanne Lee’s 1975 album Conspiracy, where her voice cuts through the silence like a light beam. It’s not a note in the traditional sense, not even a word exactly, more like a gesture or an offering. It’s on the song “Angel Chile” that she exhales sounds both human and cosmic, intimate yet unplaceable. Her voice is the track, Lee’s solo experimentation — the warm laughter and adoring sighs — the only sound needed to pronounce her daughter’s name: Naima. Right there, in the center of the quiet, Lee sings with a stillness that makes time irrelevant. That’s her power.

To listen to her is to experience a sonic paradox: a voice firmly rooted in the human body, yet somehow untethered to the laws of earthly gravity. Across her career in jazz, Lee — who died in 2000 at the age of 61 — was an improviser of uncommon depth, a vocalist who could unravel language until words dissolved into pure feeling. She assessed the act of communication itself, asking what happened when syllables were bent, cadences were warped, and breath stretched into architecture.

Conspiracy is the album that fully captures her radical sensibilities. It thrives on tension: between freedom and form, jazz tradition and the avant-garde, vocal intimacy and the sprawling ensemble. Listening to it 50 years later, the album feels prophetic, a blueprint for experimental singers who would come after, echoing through history and actively disrupting it.

Born in 1939 in New York City, Lee grew up in a family that valued art and education equally. She studied dance and literature, and eventually gravitated toward voice at Bard College. By the early ‘60s, still nascent in her career, she began to explore the depths of her artistry, reshaping the tried-and-true songbook that others held so dear. Her earliest recordings with the pianist Ran Blake — 1962’s The Newest Sound Around — displayed her iconoclastic sensibility, as a calm, deliberate voice that took standards and turned them inside out, revealing new layers of meaning.

Elsewhere, on Archie Shepp’s 1969 album Blasé, and his rendition of “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” in particular, Lee reached past the hymn itself, tapping into something meditative and ancestral. Her voice was pristine, equally hopeful and deliberate, and felt both sacred and bruised, through a tone teetering between lament and release. The song wasn’t just a spiritual interpretation, she reshaped it into an act of resistance. The way she angled the melody, the way her voice cracked the air, in her breath she refused to surrender, thus setting the table for the abundant Conspiracy, her magnum opus.

Recorded in New York in 1974 and released on Lee’s own label, Earthforms, Conspiracy found Lee in full bloom, surrounded by a cast of improvisers just as bold as she was. Gunter Hampel — her long-time collaborator — is central on vibes and reeds, but the record also features the likes of Sam Rivers on saxophones and flute, and Steve McCall on drums — all of whom contributed to the album’s bigger communal aesthetic.

From the first track, “Sundance,” the album shuns parameters. Lee’s voice floats above a fractured rhythm, her words more incantation than lyric, as she elongates phrases until they blur into horn lines. Then she snaps into sharper, percussive phrasing that mimics the drums, firmly in dialogue with the band — sometimes leading, sometimes dissolving, molding language like malleable clay. “Take a breath, let it go,” she intones, each repetition a nudge toward acceptance. In turn, the music builds beneath her, all winds and staggered drums, a shifting arrangement that mirrors the tranquility of her message. Conversely, on “Subway Couple,” the band’s frenetic composition matches the energy of New York City in the ‘70s. Here, Lee takes a voyeuristic stance, observing a loving pair across the platform as cymbals crash and horns blare. It’s a song about a man and woman protecting each other from chaos, even as Lee’s voice navigates sonic cacophony.

On these and other tracks, Lee rejects the tidy contours of mainstream jazz vocals, opting instead for a fluid approach that destabilizes expectation. Throughout Conspiracy, her voice leaps from low hums to soaring falsettos, from guttural whispers to piercing wails. There are moments of sublime beauty where she sings with such clarity that it feels like sunlight penetrating heavy clouds.

It’s important to understand Conspiracy in its historical moment. By the mid-‘70s, the avant-garde jazz scene was in full swing, as musicians operated beyond the limitations of the American music industry, finding receptive audiences and labels in Europe. Concurrently, the civil rights movement had given way to a broader push for Black liberation, feminism and artistic autonomy — the unique space from which Lee created.

As a Black woman in experimental jazz, Lee was marginalized. At a time in which vocalists were often expected to serve as entertainers, singing standards with polish and charm, Lee refused that role. Instead, she insisted on being a full improviser, a composer and an equal among instrumentalists — and far too often, singers like Lee, Linda Sharrock and June Tyson are often left out of history when discussing the evolution of avant-garde jazz in the ‘70s. They weren’t auxiliary characters; they were just as important to the subgenre as the men we all praise. And for Lee, especially, Conspiracy was her declaration, a refusal to be boxed in by conjecture.

When I think about Conspiracy, I consider how it resonates today. We live in a time where genre boundaries have collapsed, and artists like Meshell Ndegeocello, Moor Mother, Georgia Anne Muldrow and Matana Roberts freely combine poetry, song, noise and groove. Lee did this decades earlier, mapping possibilities the world wasn’t ready to hear. Often overlooked in jazz history, Conspiracy tends to resonate in smaller circles, whispered about among collectors and like-minded musicians. Hearing it now, though, it feels timely, as Lee — a theorist of language and liberation — commands deeper dissection and reverence.

Conspiracy is both an album and a treatise, a reminder that music can be beautiful, confrontational, intimate and world-shaking at the same time. Fifty years later, Conspiracy still feels ahead of the curve, demanding our full attention. An invitation to slow down and sit fully with our emotions, it’s also a call to sidestep instant gratification and embrace the comforts of serenity. It also seems to ask the following questions: What does it mean to communicate? What possibilities emerge when we break apart language and rebuild it in sound?

On Conspiracy, the answers are never simple, but they’re always profound. In the end, Lee shows us that voice is more than a vehicle for melody. It’s a force that can reshape how we convey the soul.

Jazz and rap have long been in conversation: a long, braided history of borrowed drum breaks, sampled horns, shared rhythms and socially-pointed lyricism. From the hard-bop cadences that undergirded some early rap loops, to the Blue Note and Verve records that producers mined for texture, the two genres have traded vocabulary for decades.

But that relationship is not just sonic; it’s genealogical and philosophical: jazz music’s openness to improvisation found a new democracy in rap’s collage. That mutuality — jazz as source, rap as commentary, both as sites of Black musical invention — is the terrain Kassa Overall stakes out on CREAM, a compact, bracing project that reimagines eight golden-era rap songs as live, improvisatory jazz statements. The album isn’t nostalgia; rather, it’s a conversation, a series of questions posed to canonized tracks, with the answers arriving in extended solos, subtle reharmonizations and the moment-to-moment risk of an ensemble listening to one another.

Kassa’s career is a hybrid itself. A drummer first, schooled in the discipline of jazz but fluent in studio production and contemporary songcraft, he’s moved through vast idioms without apology. He’s been a hired hand for jazz luminaries, a collaborator with electronic and rap artists, and the auteur of records that collapse the distance between drum-set logic and beat-making. That trajectory is important: where earlier projects felt like attempts to corral disparate impulses into a single grammar, CREAM sounds like the mature work of an artist choosing one radical constraint (no samples, no machines, no overdubs) and using it to magnify his habit of cross-pollination. The album, released September 12, reinvents certain classics, and the choice of material gestures toward Kassa’s central thesis: rap is now an American standard, and it deserves new contextualization.

Constraints are the album’s statement of faith. Where a producer can create whole worlds with a laptop, CREAM centers the gorgeous alchemy of people playing together. This is not a throwback to rigid “jazz purity.” Instead, Kassa uses the band format to highlight the impromptu nature of rap: the call-and-response of an MC and their audience, the cyclical groove of a beat, the layering of texture across repeated bars. On CREAM, a Notorious B.I.G. hook becomes a vamp for modal exploration; a Wu-Tang cipher dissolves into free-time exchanges. The album makes a persuasive claim that the best way to honor rap’s legacy is not to copy its surface, but to translate its nuances into something greater.

Kassa’s previous records — from the live-meets-studio amalgam of Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz to the sprawling collages of Animals — have tracked an artist testing form and temperament. Animals spread outward: guests, electronics, and a thematic ambition that asked uncomfortable questions about humanity, performance and social systems. CREAM tightens the aperture. Where Animals was a terrain of many voices (Nick Hakim, Danny Brown, Laura Mvula and Vijay Iyer, among many others), CREAM is a focused dialectic between jazz’s communal listening and rap’s melodic memory. For listeners who admired Kassa’s appetite for fusion, CREAM shows how restraint can function as a new kind of experimentation.

The record opens, tellingly, with Eddie Harris’s “Freedom Jazz Dance,” a reminder that jazz itself can soothe and revolt. The band’s reading is lithe and taut: the melody is familiar but recast through a contemporary blend that suggests the horn players are both honoring a lineage and testing its elasticity. From there, CREAM moves through an unapologetically canonical list: Biggie’s “Big Poppa,” Wu-Tang’s “C.R.E.A.M.,” A Tribe Called Quest’s “Check the Rhime,” OutKast’s “SpottieOttieDopaliscious,” Digable Planets’ “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)”, Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin But a ‘G’ Thang” and Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up.” Those songs are rote fixtures in hip-hop culture — not just because of their hooks but for the social worlds they encoded — and Kassa treats them as living organisms rather than museum pieces. The arrangements resist mere novelty; they’re less about clever rewrites and more about re-listening.

Take “Big Poppa.” On wax, the Notorious B.I.G. song is velvet and swagger, a late-night poem. Kassa’s band unspools the motif and then suspends it, elongating the spaces between phrases, letting the rhythm section drift into cross-currents, and allowing the saxophone to bloom like an after-hours solo in a smoky club. The soloing isn’t a spectacle, but an act of translation. The band keeps the groove recognizable enough to anchor the memory but open enough to allow new flourishes. There’s a risk that the tune might lose its identity, but Kassa avoids that trap by honoring the original’s mood before dismantling it. The result reads like a respectful reading of a beloved song, not a parody.

“C.R.E.A.M.” is more radical. The Wu-Tang classic, with its austere piano motif and moral fatalism, becomes a study in tension. Kassa’s adaptation keeps the original’s harmonic scaffolding but splinters the rhythm into polyrhythmic fragments. Instead of the record’s steady, ominous pulse, the band plays with displacement: cymbal patterns that float, bass lines that tug against the meter, horns that answer the piano with fractured phrases. It’s both homage and critique: Kassa radiates the song’s historic sting, widening the space so players can interrogate the emotional subtext. Where the original felt like reportage from the curb, this version feels like a group therapy session for the original’s prevailing anxiety.

There’s a formal elegance to the project as well. Kassa and his band aren’t simply transcribing rap melodies into horn charts; they’re asking how melodic language can shift a song’s meaning. A Tribe Called Quest’s laid-back, jazz-inflected flow is turned back on itself, its syncopation exaggerated and turned into a series of modal excursions. OutKast’s elasticity is matched by textural surprises: whispered horn lines, sudden shifts into waltz-time, moments where silence functions as punctuation. In this way CREAM is pedagogical, revealing the rhythmic sophistication already present in these rap tracks and then pushes them further. The album’s approach is not academic display, but a demonstration of how much there is to discover when two lineages — jazz improvisation and rap’s looped motifs — are made to listen to each other again. It’s one thing to hear “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” at a barbecue and smile; it’s another to hear it stripped and reassembled as a piece that contains both celebration and historical weight.

Kassa’s drumming anchors these interpretations with both subtlety and force. He’s a percussionist who knows when to lay down a statement and when to cede space. He’s also the translator who can hear the cadence of an MC inside a horn riff. On CREAM, his touch is elastic: sometimes he’s a metronomic pulse, sometimes he’s an atmosphere maker, and sometimes his fills reframe a bar. This elasticity is crucial because the album’s success depends on authority in the pocket as much as daring in the solo.

Artistically, CREAM is also a statement about medium. In an era when the historical relationship between jazz and rap is often framed through sampling archives and crate-digging, Kassa’s insistence on live reinterpretation is radical. And there are moments where the concept flirts with predictability. Fans of the originals may wish for fewer detours. But those are quibbles against an album that’s both generous and exacting. Kassa knows how to let a tune breathe; he also knows how to pull it apart. CREAM asks for deep dissection, not to reveal gimmicks but to make the listener witness the slow accretion of meaning across the ensemble’s choices.

At the end of the album, it’s clear that Kassa has made a claim not just about these songs but about the cultural work of reinterpretation. Jazz has always repurposed the present into something malleable; rap has always turned memory into future. CREAM does both simultaneously. It’s an LP that listens as much as it speaks, that honors lineage while insisting on remaining in the present. For Kassa, this is not retro curiosity; to me, it feels like the continuation of a lineage in which the past is engaged, argued with, and made to bloom again.

If anything about the album feels definitive, it’s in how it makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. That alchemy is Kassa’s gift here. He asks us to reconsider what counts as standard repertoire, to accept that a rap song can be as worthy of repeated, improvisatory scrutiny as a Thelonious Monk tune. In doing so, he expands the canon, honors the lineage and stakes a claim for future experiments. CREAM isn’t simply a covers album, it’s a manifesto: jazz and rap are engaged in an ongoing dialogue, and Kassa Overall is one of our most eloquent orators.

Every year, I’ll hear an album that I assume everyone loves, only to be left wondering why more people didn’t love it. I remember playing Common’s Electric Circus in 2002, falling instantly for the psychedelic rap, soul and rock of songs like “Aquarius,” “Come Close” and “Jimi Was a Rock Star.” Yet others didn’t dig it, and some of them blamed his then-girlfriend Erykah Badu for its eccentric direction. In 2013, Black Milk, an accomplished rapper and producer from Detroit, released what I thought was one of the year’s best rap albums with No Poison No Paradise, a semi-autobiographical walk through his upbringing that used gospel, jazz and electro-funk to convey the nuance of adolescence and young adulthood. Critics thought it was cool, but not a knockout, citing his lyrical ineffectiveness as a supposed hindrance.

Old feelings arose when, after listening to an early copy of Mndsgn’s (pronounced Mind Design) Rare Pleasure, I just knew we’d all be here for this album. I mean, who could deny its sun-drenched soul, those billowing arrangements, the way it felt like an heirloom but also a modern R&B suite featuring some of today’s best musicians. Just look at the lineup: Swarvy on bass and guitar; Kiefer on keys; Will Logan on drums; Carlos Niño on percussion; Miguel Atwood-Ferguson on strings; and Fousheé and Anna Wise on backing vocals. These are all A-plus musicians with their own noted works, yet there they were in one space, lending their talents to this unprecedented studio session. While Mndsgn’s name appears alone on the front cover, Rare Pleasure is very much a team effort. The band crafts a stellar set of music that just sort of drifts along, swirling around bright notes meant to signify a new way forward for the protagonist. Still, it seemed people only whispered about this album when shouting was more appropriate.

Up to that point, Mndsgn had been known as a beatmaker, not so much a conductor of live arrangements. Born Ringgo Ancheta in San Diego and raised in southern New Jersey, he was introduced to hip-hop culture and beatmaking by his older brother. By 2008, the budding producer — who had been posting his work on MySpace — linked with producers Suzi Analogue, Devonwho and Knxwledge, forming a new collective called Klipmode. The group uploaded its music to Bandcamp and developed a cult following that launched their respective careers.

Mndsgn moved to Los Angeles in 2011, where he self-released instrumental tapes and played various clubs throughout the city. He soon caught the attention of Stones Throw Records, the vaunted label that released this classic; in 2014, he put out his debut album, Yawn Zen, a mostly-instrumental collection of downtempo beats and ambient soundscapes. Mndsgn broke through two years later: His sophomore album, Body Wash, a multifaceted mix influenced by ‘80s boogie and funk and ‘90s R&B, showed the creative strides he’d made in a short time. It was a fully-formed record with fleshed-out songs, pronounced vocals and mesmerizing grooves, far beyond the nice yet half-sketched compositions of Yawn Zen. With Body Wash, it was clear that Mndsgn wasn’t just a guy pressing pads on a beat machine, he was a developed artist whose music scanned several eras and genres.

The genesis of Rare Pleasure dates back to 2018, when Mndsgn started sketching rough drafts that would become this album. Not one to stay in the same creative place for long, the work he compiled involved melodic blends of jazz, soul and soundtrack music — the feeling of sunrise over the ocean. On purpose, Rare Pleasure felt like a warm embrace, doubling as a gentle reminder that you’re not alone. That explained the track “Hope You’re Doin’ Better,” which Mndsgn wrote in the wake of a loved one’s endeavor with mental illness. The lyrics bolster that togetherness. He sings:

“Since the last time that we spoke on the phone
You were stuck in cold weather
I know you're going through the motions like I do
You're not alone
You know you got a friend whenever you need one
Pick up your phone”

Indeed, there’s a feeling in those down moments that you have to work through it in solitude. You convince yourself that everyone’s busy, that the looming gray clouds are just temporary. But what you don’t realize is that others are battling the same strife, and that the issues aren’t resolved without community. You have to repeat these things to yourself to avoid falling into deeper distress.

The album itself focused on repetition as therapy, through four variations of the title track. The first three versions are slow and meditative; the last an upbeat blast of nostalgic jazz fusion. When listened to after the album’s best track, “Medium Rare,” it felt like a cathartic moment: the melancholy has dissipated and better days are ahead. To that end, “Medium Rare” might be the best song in Mndsgn’s catalog. Over spacious piano chords and drifting swings, he urged us to move past stillness. “Fear is just a comfy queen-size bed,” he sang. “Won't you get up and start your day?” Elsewhere on the LP, there were tracks about the wonders of self-love (“Colours of the Sunset”) and the beauty of new romance (“Slowdance”). On “Masque,” Mndsgn lamented the facade; it’s OK to simply be yourself.

I would never call Mndsgn underrated, because doing that negates the fanbase he’s rightfully earned. But I can’t help but wonder why more people didn’t praise this album, given its superiority to certain mainstream records with bigger marketing budgets. All that to say this: We should start discussing Mndsgn as one of the world’s greatest producers, underground or otherwise. To me, Rare Pleasure remains the brightest spot in a still-growing catalog with limitless potential.

In 1979, an upstart trio called The Sugarhill Gang released “Rapper’s Delight,” a disco-sampling party anthem with what would be the most recited opening line in rap history. It’s the most important song ever released in the genre, credited as the first big track to introduce hip-hop culture to the masses. “Rapper’s Delight” wouldn’t have happened without Sylvia Robinson, a singer, record producer and label owner who once saw an interplay between the DJ and the crowd and decided to cut a rap track.

As the story goes, her son, Joey, brought the group to his mother’s studio to write and record the song, and Robinson told them to play the instrumental of Chic’s “Good Times” as a musical backdrop. The song was put out as a 15-minute extended cut that exceeded everyone’s expectations.

Three years later, Robinson was the catalyst for another groundbreaking rap song: “The Message,” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, an acerbic track about the struggles of poor Black communities. It was equally important for different reasons. Compared with the celebratory nature of other rap cuts, “The Message” was the first to break down civic plight in raw, unflinching ways.

Yet before she was Hip-Hop’s Godmother, she was a capable singer-songwriter with four good albums to her credit: 1973’s Pillow Talk; 1975’s Sweet Stuff; 1976’s Sylvia; and 1977’s Lay It On Me. The genesis of her career dates back to 1960, when, as a 25-year-old upstart, she produced the song “You Talk Too Much” by the New Orleans vocalist Joe Jones but didn’t get credit for it. She was also one-half of the R&B duo Mickey & Sylvia and scored the hit “Love Is Strange” (featured 30 years later in the cult classic film Dirty Dancing).

Robinson was equally revolutionary in the early ‘70s. In a time where male singers were lauded for making sensuous — if not downright nasty — strains of soul, musicians like Robinson, Betty Davis and Millie Jackson boldly proclaimed their sexuality without worrying about the dudes. Men were celebrated for being raunchy; when women did it, it was somehow too much or not ladylike. These women were breaking down barriers, proving they could be artful and erotic just like the guys.

In 2021, the reissue label WeWantSounds re-released Sweet Stuff on vinyl. Though I hadn’t heard of the album, I purchased it because the imprint tends to do a fine job excavating the past. The music impressed me as soon as the opening song took shape. The production was immaculate and the groove was palpable. I was taken by how great the arrangements sounded tumbling from the speakers, the way the drums hit hard without overtaking the acoustic guitars and electric bass. Then I realized just how influential the album has been to certain rapper-producers, and that I’ve heard these songs resurface in sampled form at least twice (I won’t mention the tracks because sample snitching isn’t cool).

Sweet Stuff sounds remarkably retro and current at the same time. Some of my favorite new musicians lean into analog sounds to give their projects the warmth of yesteryear’s work. To me, a record like Sweet Stuff draws a direct line to modern soul, and could work just as well now as it did in 1975.

Like Pillow Talk, it didn’t skimp on sexuality; her whispers and sighs crafted the sort of wistfulness and romance that was commonplace in that era of soul music. “Private Performance” harbored a late-night disco mood that worked equally well in the bedroom and the dance floor. On “Sho Nuff Boogie,” Robinson’s voice echoes through the track; the results are hypnotic — the perfect backdrop for, ugh, whatever you’re doing to this song. Conversely, “Alfredo” was more direct. “What are you waiting for?” she asked. “Dim the lights and lock the door, and make me yours.” In the end, Sweet Stuff was an exercise of quiet rebellion for which Robinson should be applauded. While she should be celebrated for helping build rap music, we shouldn’t forget her own art in the process.

Two years ago this past Friday, my mother died after a short illness. She had been in the hospital battling a number of complications, only to make it home and succumb to renal failure her first day of hospice. I know I’ve written and talked about my mother’s death a lot, but I can’t seem to move past the trauma. It’s one thing to know that your closest loved one is leaving, it’s another to see it happen. I can’t forget her breathing slowing down, her face freezing, and the paralyzing grief that set in. It changed me in ways that I’m still processing, and some days I wonder if I’ll get over it, or if that’s even possible.

It’s the type of agony I’d only seen play out through films, conversations and albums. Before my own suffering, I would listen to records like Earl Sweatshirt’s I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside and wonder how someone could sound so despondent, angry and tortured. Then I realized that Earl felt helpless, sore from the loss of his grandmother, shackled by the throes of addiction. In 2015, when this album was released, I could listen to a song like “Grief” and appreciate the creative intent, but I did not relate to the pain he exhibited. Though I felt his stomping through the dark, I couldn’t duplicate the steps just yet. So I listened without much connection, revisiting the album when traffic worsened or professional frustrations arose. I had forgotten the “why” of the album until recently.

As with any sort of heartache, soon the clouds break and, for a moment, you think maybe you’re on the other side of it. Work becomes a nice, pretty distraction we throw ourselves into, yet time can’t fully heal the wounds. Two years on, I still can’t sit in silence for long, and I can’t sip coffee in my aunt’s house (where my mom lived) without her voice ringing in my head. When I’m alone in those morning hours, I look up and see her looking down into the kitchen from the second floor. I see her in that pink robe sitting on the edge of the chez chair, watching TV with the sound barely on. I’ve learned to not suppress the tears when sadness arises, and to lean into whatever emotion surfaces that day. Try as I might, there’s no escaping what’s there: The books, the writing, the music, all that is cool (and I’m truly thankful that people care), but the discomfort is palpable. The demons don’t disappear. The sorrow persists but you need to face your challenges.

This is the theme of Earl’s new album, Live Laugh Love, his fifth solo studio LP. A brief listen, at just 24 minutes across 11 tracks, Earl ascends from melancholy by leaning into it, acknowledging that he can’t outrun the past through arbitrary amusement. Once the comfort food loses taste and the sitcom concludes, he still needs to address what ails him — in a healthy way. In years’ past, as referenced on his previous album, 2022’s Sick!, Earl may have isolated himself or doused his shortcomings with liquor. Here, he tackles said problems by acknowledging them, or, as a guest vocalist exclaims on the opening track “gsw vs sac,” by no longer hiding. “You ain’t running from nowhere but your own self,” he tells Earl, “and that’s where you exactly need to be.” In a way then, Live Laugh Love continues the story he started three years ago, and orchestrates the healing the rapper sought on that LP. But it also punctuates I Don’t Like Shit… as a breaking from despair and the sadness of losing family. If the 2015 album found Earl at the height of his grief, this one finds him at the apex of joy and prosperity.

A full circle moment, he sounds lighter, focused and more exuberant. Even on a song like “Well Done!,” where his voice is downcast, Earl doesn’t come off sedated. Groggy, sure: The rapper’s monotone mumble has inspired a generation of like-minded lyricists to rap in low, conversational tones over obscure soul samples — and that doesn’t change on this song or LP. But his inflection is pointed, almost combative. And when he wags his finger at an unknown foe, saying, “you never gon’ get a rise out of a real one … ain’t gon’ lie you prolly should get ya sales up,” it’s the most antagonistic I’ve heard him. While Earl talks more shit on Live Laugh Love, he never punches down; instead, he sounds confident, as if stepping into his own to remind us and himself who he really is.

Earl is a true Pisces creative person in that regard: We tend to humble ourselves to a fault, minimizing our impact even as peers and onlookers loudly celebrate the work we’ve put forth. Earl, 31, has been famous since he was 16, and rarely have I heard him take credit for the influence he’s had on hip-hop culture. When it was brought up in years’ past, he’d quickly shout out other rappers for inspiring his sound. So the song “Heavy Metal aka ejecto seato!,” where Earl references a time almost 10 years ago when he doubted his creative path, isn’t surprising.

Artists of my sign tend to question themselves, downplaying the unique left turns for which they’re known. It’s why Erykah Badu, on the track “A.D. 2000,” once proclaimed “you won’t be naming no buildings after me,” and why Tyler, The Creator, throughout his 2024 album Chromakopia, lamented his loneliness despite a life of fame and Grammy awards. There can be this feeling of darkness around the corner, like it’s all set to vanish, and any sort of acknowledgement somehow facilitates the dissolving — like you’re “still in a void,” as Earl mutters on the song “Live.” When he remembers the past, it’s a brave act, a recollection through praying hands, a thank God I got past that. “I released it,” he repeats, referencing stress and uncertainty. “I never got on LinkedIn.” Of course, there’s nothing wrong with job hunting on the social media site, but when you’re one of the world’s foremost musicians, posting a résumé would be a down moment.

There’s something to be said about the breakthrough, how the winding, iconoclastic path suddenly isn’t so singular. Indeed, one day you look up and see adoring eyes staring back and you wonder how they arrived. Or why they’re there. When I hear “exhaust,” the album’s concluding track, I hear fatigue of the best kind. Here, it seems, the job is done: Earl’s family is safe and healthy and his influence radiates. He’s looking back, taking stock of the journey, reveling in the accomplishment — in his own way, of course. “Worked harder than a bitch,” he declares with a sigh. “At the end of the day,” Earl raps later on the track, “it’s really just you and whatever you think. I'm airmailing you strength.”

There he is again, leaning into the moment — no more running, no more cozy diversions, just him and the thoughts he sought to evade. But Earl realized that blessings are evident, and instead of overthinking the negative, he’s focused on what could go right. I’ve noticed myself doing that as well. Even as the pain of loss comes up occasionally, I think of my mother with a smile and consider how far I’ve come over the past two years. It’s okay to accept nice things. Sounds like Earl knows that, too.