I’m not going to pretend that my schedule has been packed with book tour events (there are none that the publisher is springing for) or a full DJ calendar (it isn’t), but nevertheless I have been busy with a few bits of travel here and there. At the end of April, I trained down to D.C. to have a book talk and spin a few records over the course of two days and then had an afternoon set at Eavesdrop in Greenpoint. My Virgo-ness led me to try and document all of those sets, which I did to the best of my documenting skillset.

Neptune Room (Washington, D.C.)

Much thanks to the homie Michael R. Bernstein, who brought me down to do a book talk and also set up a sweet lil DJ night in D.C. I also got to hit up his shop, HR Records, famous for hosting Kamala Harris when she did a lil dig as VP.

Arnie Lawrence- “Blessed is the Match”
Pharoah Sanders - “Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord”
Phil Cohran - “White Nile”
Brother Ah - “Sekou”
Michael White - “Journey of the Black Star” “The Blessing Song”
Joe Henderson - “Air”
Sun Ra - ??
Phil Musra+Michael Cosmic - “We Love You Malcolm X”
Pharoah Sanders - “Memories of JW Coltrane”
Don Cherry - “Malkauns”
Derf Reklaw - “Olé”
(some selections via Mike B.)
Kirk Lightsey & Rudolph Johnson - “Fresh Air”
Alice Coltrane - “Los Caballos”
Cecil McBee - “Mutima”
Dewey Redman - “Qom”
(a drunken tag team with Mike B. for the last hour of the night)
The Pyramids - “Mogho Naba (King Of Kings)”
Miles Davis - “Prelude”
Phil Ranelin - “Sounds from the Village”
Karma - “Funk de Mambo”
Eddie Harris - “Instant Death”
Weldon Irvine - “Love Your Brother”
Archie Shepp and Horace Parlan - “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”

Eavesdrop 5-2
Saturday afternoon breeziness in Brooklyn…

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La belle mystérieuse Mademoiselle Mabry

Las Sunday, I wrote Pitchfork’s Sunday Review about Miles Davis’ oft-overlooked Filles de Kilimanjaro. I’ll admit I’m a little late to the splendors of Miles’ Second Great Quintet, a group whom Greg Tate likened to quantum mechanics and Amiri Barak called “the all-time classical hydrogen bomb and switchblade band.…

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As an American teenager who hung out with potheads, I had heard plenty of Bob Marley in high school, but I was exhausted by hearing Legend for the umpteenth time at a kegger. But it was a friend at Hogwild Records (still going strong after 40 fuckin’ years!) who got me hooked on dub reggae proper. Hunting for records from Jamaica in South Texas was all but impossible, but my friend helped me navigate that smoky new headspace. Experiencing dub at full volume felt like plunging into a bizarro world…

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Back in 2020, in the cloistered early days of the global pandemic, I received a commission to write liner notes for a reissue of Sonny Rollins’s curiously overlooked 1958 album, Freedom Suite. In honor of the legend’s passing yesterday, I’m posting the text here, with some additional quotes from Gary Bartz, which were cut from the final document.

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Last Friday, after a fair amount of travel this past month, I was back in town and back at the Lot Radio. But, perhaps due in part to The Lot also being on the fairgrounds at Horst Festival in Vilvoorde, Belgium this past weekend, The Lot Radio wasn’t quite back. And so despite being back, there was no outgoing signal emanating from that shipping contai…

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“Thurston Moore just gave us a blurb for your book.”

So announced my UK editor just as Cosmic Music was entering its final stages of prep. Thurston doesn’t need an introduction, so let’s just say that when this news came through, I immediately time-traveled back to the forlorn teenaged ‘90s me stuck in South Texas listening to Evol on repeat and told hi…

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Ten years ago this week. Tears while dancing at Questlove’s impromptu wake/ dance party that night. Memories of seeing him at MSG, kicking Kim K off his stage for not dancing. Thinking to myself that we would have decades to enjoy this man and his music. But things looked very different back in 2015.

It took thumbing through hundreds of pages of a certai…

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In light of today’s announcement, I’m thinking back to a Boards of Canada review I wrote back in 2013. I have quite fond memories of that time. Music writing still existed. And there were print magazines that would splurge on airfare for writers to go and profile artists. I found myself in London not interviewing Boards of Canada, but instead interviewi…

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(This piece originally appeared on Pitchfork in 2016.)

On a spring day in 1964, police in Harlem’s 32nd precinct tried to beat a confession out of two black teenagers for a crime they did not commit. The young men, Wallace Baker and Daniel Hamm, were repeatedly bludgeoned with billy clubs while in custody, beaten with such force that they were taken to a nearby hospital for X-rays.

In an interview at the nearby Friendship Baptist Church a few days after the incident, the 18-year-old Hamm recounted being brutalized in shifts by six to 12 officers over the course of the night, along with the fact that “they got so tired beating us they just came in and started spitting on us.” But even after hours of abuse, the cops weren’t about to allow Hamm out of their grasp to be admitted for treatment, since he was not visibly bleeding. Thinking fast, Hamm reached down to one of the swollen knots on his legs where the blood had clotted beneath his skin.

Those 20 words, spoken by a young man who would unjustly remain in prison for nine years, still land like a cop’s night stick to the skull. And utilizing just that one sentence, composer Steve Reich made one of the most visceral pieces of music of the 20th century. Today marks the 60th anniversary of Come Out, which made its live debut on April 17, 1966.

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Longevity lends itself to a certain sort of senility. Write thousands of music reviews and the art of forgetting becomes something of a survival tactic. Listen, tune in, then tune out, and keep it moving. And from that vantage you can observe how what you write about and what you listen to diverge in the woods, the twains rarely if ever crossing again. Is what you love to listen to the same as what you write about? I scroll through old bylines and am sometimes astonished by something I wrote. Not the words themselves, but that I had actually listened to a certain album, as I otherwise have no trace of it left in my memory. Memory separate from music…

Discovering the music of Priscilla Ermel on the 2017 Outro Tempo comp was a revelation and I explicitly recall writing that Pitchfork review. A set of exquisite ‘80s Brazilian music released by a meticulous Dutch reissue imprint, Music from Memory. But a little shiver went through me: Had I not written about Brazilian sound artist/ singer Priscilla Ermel on her own? I loved her music on those sets so much. Did I not share my enthusiasm for her singular music with the world?

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After thinking that a book would never be written. And then that the book would never be finished. And then that the book might never actually get to print. And then that the book would never be glimpsed on a bookshelf, the most unreal idea became a reality. Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane has now been out for a month. I…

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In my mind’s eye, I could still see him: Sunny Murray, his broad shoulders and wide body hunched behind the drum kit, making the ride cymbal sizzle and widen until it felt like the fire of heaven, his teeth clenched in a grin. But I racked my brain trying to figure out who else was with him that night back in the late ‘90s deep in the heart of Texas. It was two jazz legends, but I couldn’t quite conjure who else shared the stage. I did remember that it actually wasn’t a stage, just the weird office carpeting of my roommate’s record store, Thirty-Three Degrees. It took a bit of research to come across this old article in the Austin Chronicle –penned by my future Texas Monthly editor, no less– to remember that the other legend in the room that night was Sonny Simmons.

Sonny & Sunny, of course. How could I forget? My friends and I had blasted those slightly dodgy ZYX CD reissues of ESP-Disks, the fiery din of Simmons and others at the forefront of our lobes, fantasies of life in late ‘60s New York thrashing in our imagination.

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But by the time the 1990s rolled around, Sonny Simmons was all but forgotten in the collective memory, nearly fading out of jazz history entirely. Which went against all of that early promise in his first recordings. A young buck who left California for New York with the ear-turning early classic The Cry! already under his belt, Simmons was soon soaring alongside the likes of his idol, Eric Dolphy. And by 1964, he stepped out with Coltrane’s own rhythm section for Illumination! (Just how did Simmons wind up with so many ‘!’ in his titles?)

But where was Sonny’s own Impulse date? And how was he not in the mix when Coltrane lifted up that entire New Thing scene for Ascension? There were two furious ESP-Disk albums that proved he had the vision, now manifested by Simmons and his wife/ trumpeter, Barbara Donald. But soon after the couple’s phosphorescent-hot double-album Burning Spirits in 1971, Simmons and Donald dropped entirely out of earshot. Over the course of the next two decades, his entire discography became impossible to find. Simmons had seemingly vanished.

Inner gatefold for Burning Spirits, a remarkable double album furnace blast of early ‘70s fire music.

But then he blipped back onto the scene after more than a decade in Reagan’s America living on the streets of San Francisco, fueled by heroin and white port and lemon juice. Then, with a stroke of luck akin to a lightning bolt from the hand of God, Simmons roared back in 1994, releasing two albums on Quincy Jones’s record label, a recently housed man suddenly finding himself on a roster with the likes of New Order, George Benson, and The Winans. And until his death in 2021, Simmons in the 21st century released an exhausting array of music in microscopic CDr editions, capped by an 8CD boxset.

The first two albums that announced this return from oblivion were Ancient Ritual and American Jungle. In another curious bit of memory hole, I have no recollection of hearing or seeing either CD at the time of release. But I tracked both down while reading Blank Forms’s Better Do It Now Before You Die Later. The book acts as a massive correction to that historical record, capturing over the course of 12 years of conversation with writer Marc Chaloin.

Die Later finds Simmons holding forth on the myriad reasons why he slipped into oblivion. One has to do with the systematic racism of the United States; another with life as a Black man married to a white woman in that same society (Barbara Donald, who he calls “Trumpet Lady” throughout the book); another the predatory nature of the music business; the cruelty of man to his fellow man. And then there was his unearthly appetite for drink and drugs, neither of which seemed to diminish his memory or lessen his grudges one iota, all of which he wolfed down “like a big dog,” as he puts it hundreds upon hundreds of times in his book.

Part diatribe, part fascinating history of a forgotten time, part eyewitness account of a player there for jazz’s dizzying heights and the lows that followed soon after John Coltrane’s death, but still mostly a diatribe against everybody he played with, loved, or ignored on the scene, Better Do It Now Before You Die Later tells the whole Sonny Simmons story in exhaustive detail.

Born in the backwoods of rural Louisiana, on a tiny island called Sicily Island, Simmons captures an idyllic slice of that life, pears, figs, peaches deep in the bush, his father tying a rope around Simmons waist as a young boy so as to literally use him as alligator bait. And his memory recalls music as a reflection of the wilderness around him, while also being a manifestation of voodoo. That tactile mystery and power in the tones he could summon from his horn hearken back to that place.

Better Do It Now Before You Die Later might get redundant in some of its details, but it’s an excellent document of a jazz player “talking his shit.” Simmons goes on at length about all those on the jazz scene that were hacks; hacks who didn’t know how to play Bird, hacks that didn’t have their own sound, hacks that recorded more than he did, hacks that got rich. The list of players who ain’t shit in Simmons’s opinion runs long: Pharoah Sanders, John Handy, Joe Henderson, Frank Lowe, even Sun Ra. Yet Simmons counterbalances it with a fawning love and admiration for the players who never laid down a single note on record, names wholly lost to the void: Jewel Sterling, Stanley Willis, Alfred Franklin, someone by the name of Hop.

Ancient Ritual and American Jungle announced that this living legend of ‘60s free music still walked in our midst. Ritual is a trio date with Charles Moffett’s son Charnett on bass and his son Zarak Simmons on drums. It would turn out to be Zarak’s lone studio date, as he had his own struggles with alcohol and addiction. (By the looks of it, Zarak dealt with his demons and works as a counselor in Olympia working in the field of mental health, addiction and recovery.)

Back cover art for Burning Spirits

Having not been in a proper recording studio since 1971, all of Ritual’s tracks gush like an uncapped oil geyser, Simmons’s melodic ideas coming in a torrent, as if he’s waited decades to put it all down. Simmons is totally relentless in attacking the music from every angle like a swarm of hornets. And as the session goes, he just gets stronger, the last three tracks all topping ten minutes.

American Jungle feels more buttoned down in comparison. Simmons isn’t quite as exhaustive as on Ritual, but sounds too tamed as a result, his version of “My Favorite Things” doing little to distinguish it from countless other versions. At times it feels like only drummer Cindy Blackman is willing to match his energy. There’s also something about a lot of jazz recordings in the 1990s that just feels too clean. Simmons would continue recording in any number of settings for many years after, but as the book makes clear, he never quite got ahead of his demons.

At its best, Better delivers passages as direct and agonizing as an arrow through the heart:

“After I got through playing, I’m a wild, dangerous motherfucker. I’m drunk and full of heroin. I don’t feel nothing. All them cold nights in the jungle, I just didn’t feel it.”

“Loneliness will kill you. I’m in a lot of pain because of loneliness, so I’m shooting junk like a motherfucker.”

“I was on a dark planet. I was an alcoholic and a drug addict–and most of the time I was in never-never land. But I was still in touch with my music. I knew that when I picked up my horn, I became right.”

And the feeling that Sonny’s horn conveys can never truly be forgotten.

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New month, new Lot Radio show. Last Friday was an auspicious day for listening, one that started with John and Alice Coltrane’s “Peace on Earth” and concluded right at the stroke of midnight when Four Tet dropped the needle on one of my favorite tunes off John Coltrane’s Ballads, “Say It (Over And Over Again),” thus wrapping his luminous set at Planetar…

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Today is the release day for Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane. I’m sure I’ll have more to say in the coming weeks, months, and hopefully years about it. But for now, I just want to say that I’ve spent the last twelve to fifteen years waiting to read a biography on this awe-inspiring woman and most profound human being. I …

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It’s near the end of November in 2019, mere weeks before news of a mysterious virus spreading across China will start to each the headlines. Within a few weeks, the modern world as we know it will grind to a halt, that frenetic pace slowed to a still. A new sense of time can be felt then. But there was no way to know any of that when I descended to a chilly gallery basement to experience magnetic tape playback of Eliane Radigue’s epic Trilogie De La Mort.

Upon news of her passing to the next world, I dug up this live review written for the second issue of Maggot Brain. Much like the what Radigue realized in this world, the memory of experiencing that sound seems to hearken not from seven years ago, but from another reality entirely.

A friend recently told me that his fandom for French electroacoustic composer Eliane Radigue knows few limits. He nearly named his daughter after her. He also confessed that his preferred method for listening to her hushed music was on a long airplane flight. And there was always that indelible moment when he would be roused from sleep of not knowing what was Radigue’s music and what was the din of the engines.

Fitting in a way, since the sound of a jet engine was the catalyst for one of the 20th century’s most ineffable sound artists. By the 1950s, the Parisian-born Radigue was married and raising three children in Nice. The housewife who had studied both piano and harp at conservatory now became enamored with the sound of airplanes taking off at the nearby airport. Radigue had a clear vantage to listen to the dynamic roar of the engines and the hanging harmonics they left behind as the planes streaked away. As she told Louise Gray in an essay on the origin of her singular sound work, “I remember [listening to] a flight between Nice and Corsica. It was like a symphony!” An orchestra in a blast of white noise.

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This month’s edition of The Lot Radio found me in a bit of a quandary. As of early December, the jack no longer works on my phone, making it impossible to load any new music onto the device. There are dozens of albums sitting in a Downloads folder that I have yet to properly spend any time with, be it at the gym, in commuting, at home listening, or muck…

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It’s in the middle of “Ultimate Conditioning,” some 45 minutes of working out at my local gym “via plyometrics, core, and flexibility work,” that the thought slips in. That memory of my father and all the mixtapes he would make for his workouts back in the 1980s. One side of the Maxell tape would be 45 minutes of music suitable for a cardio workout, the flip side for 45 minutes of weights. It was that era I guess, as one of my earliest records I owned was Mousercise, that warped Disney mirror of adult reality. “Let’s do the Buggaboo.” That crazy bug-voice breakdown has lived rent-free in my head for decades now:

But the hours my father spent fine-tuning the selections, knowing just what order in which to arrange Madonna, Level 42, Erasure, Boy George and the hits of the day, the flow of the workout, and the fine art of finding a song that would work at the end of each side –even if it just had to fill that dead zone of the last 2-3 minutes of tape– he worked harder on those mixtapes than on working out itself.

In that moment, it’s a passing blip of a thought. No time for thought during “Ultimate Conditioning” class, you have to really nail the moves and –much like when dancing in the club space– you need to be in the moment, physically trying to keep in sync with that relentless beat. Have that beat you out of your own head, into your burning muscles. You’re too busy trying to find the rhythm, that it’s just the song that’s blaring, no time for memory of another song.

I go to a few of these types of classes a week. And like just about any gym, the music is dreadful. I like to think of myself as someone forever on the search for that next spiritual jazz gem, a sleek boogie b-side, or a mysterious new track, that next new audio thrill. So the music blasting at the gym is decidedly not it. In every class, I cringe at most selections.

One instructor always chucks in some modern country twang, which always trainwrecks into the ‘80s hit they also play. Another instructor invariably starts her workout with a crazy sped up version of U2 and ends her heart-exploding workout with a song I hated yet ultimately memorized. Amidst my burpee’d delirium, I somehow knew every idiotic contour of its plastic robot gloss without ever knowing what it was. After a few months, I decided to Google it and within two words in the search bar, the internet instantly knew it: “Play Hard” by David Guetta (Feat. Ne-Yo & Akon). Ughhh.

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At least in “Ultimate Conditioning” class, the tracks do tend to get switched up. Would I have ever caught on that I was now sweating to a bass-boost version of “Life of a Showgirl” if it didn’t broadcast the album title in the chorus? But then there’s this stretch of the workout that brought to mind those old workout mixtapes in the first place. It was so bad that I couldn’t help but come to love these tunes, a sweaty iteration of Stockholm Syndrome.

These are exhaustively familiar songs, in that my wife and child often play Sombr and Katseye. I’m somewhat in disbelief that they have somehow escaped from their Spotify playlists and followed me to the gym. Now there’s a weird muscular heft to them in here that makes them hit different in HIIT. A ludicrous remix of Sombr’s “12 to 12” is like those old Charles Atlas ads, his waifish original instantly cockdiesel. Being subjected to my daughter’s exhaustive playing of “Gabriela” at home makes it even more torturous in class at a volume that is inescapable.

And then there’s this sweat-soaked moment when a thumping beat and warped voice going “Hey-ey-ey hey-ey-ey” emerges in the mix. It’s a voice that I’ve been trying to avoid since I graduated from high school (to say nothing of hearing it as a recent remake in that recent promo video of Nicki Minaj and Katie Miller). But now there’s no way to duck a trance remix of “What’s Up?” But Linda Perry’s pitched-up voice shouting Hey-ey-ey makes for a serotonin release or something, as I’m now doing jumping jacks and jump squats and I cringe and laugh at the absurdity of what can get turned into a sweat-inducing banger.

Wrung out at the end of class, I think more about these mixes my father made…

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Photos by Sandy Moon

Every Valentine’s Day finds me scrambling to get gifts for my sweethearts, while also avoiding the flower vendors squeezing sidewalk space alongside the black exhaust ice of winter. I almost always forget to get a ticket for The Loft, which some 56 Valentine’s Days ago, began a party that joyously continues on to this day. As I wrote…

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Despite the single digit temperatures, the mountains of perilous gray and black ice that made walking a city block a harrowing nighttime adventure, not to mention the hourlong ride each way on the subway, I found myself deep in Ridgewood twice this past weekend, making what has become an annual pilgrimage to experience one of Chee Shimizu’s Planetarium …

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It’s been roughly 85 days since my last appearance on The Lot, due to the specific timing of holidays across November and December. In that time, The Lot revamped its website and interface. So in lieu of a YouTube embed, you can now visit the page itself, with a full tracklisting to boot! Less typing for me. A Soundcloud link here:

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