May 2023 – Jarrett House North

Freddie Hubbard, Sky Dive

Album of the Week, May 27, 2023

Sometimes when a streak is hot, you just keep riding it. That’s what happened with Freddie Hubbard in the early 1970s and his records on CTI. We’ve already heard three first class records in the series—Red Clay, Straight Life, and First Light rank among some of the finest records from the early 1970s. It turns out that Freddie had one more at this level in him.

Some changes were afoot in the personnel. By this time in 1972, Herbie Hancock was touring with his Mwandishi group, promoting extraordinary odysseys in jazz sound (that hopefully we’ll review one day), so Keith Jarrett (no relation, as far as we know) joined in on piano. And Billy Cobham was in for Jack DeJohnette on drums, hinting at the jazz fusion sound that is featured on the album. Otherwise, most of the rest of the crew from First Light was on board, including Don Sebesky, who continued as arranger. The conception of the album is a little different from First Light, though; where the earlier album ran for five tracks, foregrounded strings and woodwinds, and embraced pop and classical crossover sounds, this is a classic Hubbard record with four tracks, with a mix of originals, standards and a little period pop to round things out.

“Povo” is a classic Freddie Hubbard fusion blues that sounds like it was filtered through early Funkadelic—complete with a spoken word narration at the beginning that seems to be in a mix of Portuguese and English. Ron Carter’s bass groove is the heartbeat of this version, under a superior solo from Hubbard. Benson follows with an assertive statement, accompanied with subtlety by Sebesky’s orchestration for the first verse of the solo, and then kind of overwhelmed by the horn section on the second verse. But he keeps playing, never losing the groove, and passes over to Hubert Laws, who turns in a fiery statement before passing to Jarrett. This is not the Keith Jarrett of the Köln Concert — his solo is more of a tag on Laws’, a concisely funky articulation of the chords before he returns the flow to Hubbard and the orchestra who take the tune out. Check out the percussion under the final repetition of the chorus, courtesy of Airto and Ray Barretto.

Bix Beiderbecke’s “In a Mist” is an odd followup. The rhythm section feels a little like it’s stumbling over the changes for about the first minute as Hubbard plays a blearily dark solo. Everything comes together with the entrance of the winds at around the two minute mark, with a coherent statement of the melody in Keith Jarrett’s acoustic piano and a gearshift from the band into straight jazz that accelerates into a swinging statement of the tune. When Jarrett returns it’s to anchor that swinging moment, until Freddie returns with a statement of his angular solo beneath which Jarrett plays “out,” and the band restates the opening theme. It’s got real imagination, especially when Keith Jarrett’s piano steps to the fore, but I’m not at all sure the track hangs together.

“The Godfather” is a more successful arrangement, starting with a stark unaccompanied statement from Hubbard and transitioning into a statement of the melody on a heavily reverbed bass, with quiet accompaniment by an anonymous voice and some work on the high hats by Cobham. The opening solo sustains a mysterious vibe for the first few minutes, then transitions into a faster swinging version of the theme with Jarrett, Hubbard, Cobham and Carter. The band is tight in this track, hanging closely behind Hubbard’s solo, which starts melancholy and turns blistering. The track closes out with a carefully constructed free-for-all, with Sebesky’s orchestra playing the waltz of the tune at top volume and Hubbard soloing like a house on fire above. It’s completely bananas and you have to hear it to believe it.

Closing out the album is the second Hubbard original, “Sky Dive, ” which is a more gentle funk groove introduced by Jarrett, Benson, Carter, Cobham and the percussionists. Hubbard and Laws then state the theme in a relaxed groove. Hubbard’s in no hurry to get to the solo, which doesn’t start until around the 2:40 mark, but when he hits it, it’s tight and groovy. “Sky Dive” gets in and gets out, which is a rare thing in Hubbard’s originals but which puts a fine punctuation point on this album.

Hubbard was remarkably consistent over the first four albums he made with CTI, and the sound is always immaculate. He could tear it up in live performance, as well, which we’ll hear soon. Next time, though, we check in with one of his collaborators on this album for something completely different.

You can listen to the album here:

Old mix: the bang and the clatter (as an angel runs to ground) (summer 1993)

In the summer of 1993, I was on top of the world. Having finished a great Glee Club season and gotten a literary magazine off the ground, I had just gotten a room on the Lawn and was staying in Charlottesville for the summer as an undergraduate assistant in a physics lab. I had just started listening to the funkier side of James Brown and was starting to discover blues, hip-hop and world music. Plus, I now had wheels, in the form of an incredibly fun but unreliable 1977 MGB.

This mixtape, accordingly, was shaped by all these factors, perhaps not least of all by the last. Most of the selections on this mix were chosen because they sounded great in the MGB with the top down. That was certainly true of “Ocean Size,” the opening track. After ignoring Jane’s Addiction for many years, I finally got into them about two years after they had broken up. This was a version of Los Angeles rock I could get behind—something like heavy metal for art students. And the lead-in to Hubert Sumlin’s slashing guitar on the great “Killing Floor” remains a potent link from the first song to the second. I had first picked up the Chess blues sound from a phenomenal box set of Willie Dixon recordings, and then this 1965 Chess anthology of Howlin’ Wolf’s work, which had just been reissued on CD. (It’s with no shame that I note that my first exposure to the title of this track was in William Gibson’s short story “Johnny Mnemonic,” where he borrows the phrase and puts it to an entirely different purpose.)

On the strength of Peter Gabriel’s early Real World compilation Passion Sources, I started to branch out and find other artists on the label. The African artists on the label, such as Geoffrey Oryema and Ayub Ogada. Oryema’s “Piri Wango Iya” is a great introduction to the Ugandan’s sound, featuring only his voice and the traditional Ugandan lukeme (a gourd with plucked resonating metal strips).

I was still working my way through Suzanne Vega’s phenomenal 99.9 Fº, and “Blood Makes Noise” was just the sort of twitchy dance that I could get behind. Likewise PJ Harvey’s “Sheela-Na-Gig,” which even then struck me as a striking reversal of traditional gender politics, with Harvey’s narrator confidently offering herself sexually to a man who flatly rejects her as an exhibitionist and is terrified of being dirtied by her. We hadn’t explicitly covered Freud’s take on what would now be called the Madonna-whore complex when I read him in my first year, but it was a pretty clear illustration.

Then follows, for some reason, “Englishman in New York,” a track which I love by itself but which doesn’t flow very well here. Then “North Dakota.” I never had listened to much country music, but a friend who came to visit that summer left me with an aching heart, and a mixtape featuring this phenomenal Lyle Lovett song. “If you love me, say I love you” sounds like the loneliest thing ever, and it resonates at the heart of this tape once you peel back everything else.

I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to acknowledge or linger in my feelings, but I was more than capable of irony, and PJ Harvey was always there to help, as was the gently mocking narrator of Laurie Anderson’s “Language is a Virus.” Self-mockery always made me feel better, so it was a good transition from there into “What Goes On” and “Numb,” which may have been the first U2 song that made me laugh. Ditto the over-the-top apocalyptic Western of Nick Cave’s track from Until the End of the World, another third-year frequent rotation CD that I was still digesting.

The end of this summer, when I was starting to put this mix together, was a rough one physically, and I was starting to feel ragged and tired around the edges. When I came home at the end of the summer for a few weeks before school started, I realized why — I had contracted mononucleosis, probably as a consequence of the close living quarters in the student apartment that was my home for the summer. (While I was dating someone that summer, we only spent a few days together as she was off doing her own things, so I’m pretty sure I didn’t get the “kissing disease” the fun way.) “Run That Body Down” accordingly became my theme song. It’s a good thing I didn’t know then how rundown a body could actually get…

More feelings avoidance, more loud rock! I still love “Ain’t No Right,” though not as much as I love the downtempo shift that follows it. I listened to For the Beauty of Wynona for the first time with a good friend and neighbor who had good taste in music and confused my feelings (a common theme of my college years). And Lanois’ country-infused guitar had a natural connection, at least in my mind, to the freaked-out electric blues that Miles and his band pulled from thin air on “Honky Tonk.”

My immature late teenage feelings (okay, I was actually 20) loved getting lost in Elvis Costello’s Brodsky Quartet collaboration, and on no track was this more true than on “Who Do You Think You Are?,” a paean for those with a more active imagination than love life. And again, any time I felt actual feelings getting close to the surface, it was time for a shift of gears. I have always loved “Le Bien, Le Mal” ever since borrowing Jazzmatazz Vol. 1 (and the first Digable Planets album) from a neighbor in that crowded college apartment (thanks, Patrick!), but the name of the transition technique between the Elvis Costello track and this is called “discontinuity.” Once I found that groove, though, it was a logical connection to James Brown, whose “Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine” had soundtracked a memorable party a few months prior in an apartment full of physics students, quality porter and stout, and someone’s incredible record collection (including, oddly, Speak No Evil).

I didn’t always know how to end mix tapes then, so there’s no real through line for the last few tracks. But “En Mana Kuoyo” is a fine closer, a brightly percolating groove from Kenya that transported me to another place. I hope it does the same for you.

Full track listing below:

Ocean Size – Jane’s Addiction (Nothing’s Shocking)
Killing Floor – Howlin’ Wolf (The Real Folk Blues)
Piri Wango Iya – Geoffrey Oryema (Exile)
Blood Makes Noise – Suzanne Vega (99.9 F°)
Sheela-Na-Gig – PJ Harvey (Dry)
Englishman in New York – Sting (Nothing Like The Sun)
North Dakota – Lyle Lovett (Joshua Judges Ruth)
Rub ‘Til It Bleeds – PJ Harvey (Rid Of Me)
Language Is A Virus – Laurie Anderson (Home Of The Brave)
What Goes On (Closet Mix) – The Velvet Underground (Peel Slowly and See)
Numb – U2 (Zooropa)
(I’ll Love You) Till The End Of The World – Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds (Until The End Of The World)
Run That Body Down – Paul Simon (Paul Simon)
Ain’t No Right – Jane’s Addiction (Ritual De Lo Habitual)
Still Learning How To Crawl – Daniel Lanois (For The Beauty Of Wynona)
Honky Tonk – Miles Davis (Get Up With It)
Who Do You Think You Are? – Elvis Costello And The Brodsky Quartet (The Juliet Letters)
Le Bien, Le Mal – Guru Featuring Mc Solaar (Jazzmatazz Volume 1)
Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine – James Brown (Funk Power 1970: Brand New Thang)
I’ve Been Tired – The Pixies (Come On Pilgrim)
Jane Says – Jane’s Addiction (Nothing’s Shocking)
Stay (Faraway, So Close!) – U2 (Faraway So Close)
Every Time I Go Around Here – Frank Black (Frank Black)
En Mana Kuoyo – Ayub Ogada (En Mana Kuoyo)

You can listen to (most of) the mix on Apple Music:

Joe Farrell, Outback

Album of the Week, May 20, 2023

Spoiler alert: As we’ll go deeper into the CTI Records discography, we’ll get to a point where a lot of the music will start to meld into a sort of jazz-funk-crossover soup, thickened by a hefty dose of Don Sebesky strings and crossing more and more into pop music. Inevitably it will happen to most of the artists that we will review on this label, buoyed along by the striking success of the CTI sound. But right now, we’re in 1972, releasing a record that was recorded in November 1971, and the transformation hasn’t happened yet. Instead, we still get thunderbolts of genius, like Joe Farrell’s second album for the label, Outback.

Again, as with Joe Farrell Quartet, part of the credit is due to the superb players that make up Farrell’s group. As we discussed last time, Farrell spent time playing with both Elvin Jones and Chick Corea, and both return the favor here, alongside bassist Buster Williams and the indispensable Airto on percussion. The quartet is tight and the music they make is simultaneously tuneful and eye-poppingly adventurous.

We get more of the latter on the first side of the album, which opens with the title track, the John Scott-penned theme to the dark Australian movie Outback. Here the morally ambivalent atmosphere of the film is evoked in the swirling flutes over Williams’ freely walking bass, before Jones’ drums bring us into a more normal time accompanied by a wide-ranging bass line and Corea’s accompaniment on the Fender Rhodes. The chords swirl in a minor mode, with the flute rising to a feverishly high solo, accompanied by the full band who lock in telepathically behind Farrell. Corea moves us forward with statements between the verses, but the focus remains on Farrell as he improvises wilder flights, with Jones staying uncharacteristically subtle in the background on toms and brushed cymbals. It’s a moving, meditative and genuinely exciting journey.

The adventure continues with “Sound Down,” one of two originals on the record. Here Farrell and his wife Geri craft a tune that tilts between a modal statement in 4/4 and a waltz in a more conventional major key. But the modal wins and Farrell is off to the races on soprano saxophone, sounding a bit Wayne Shorteresque on some of the flights. When he shifts rhythmic patterns, Chick Corea is right there with him, zig-zagging across small explosions from Elvin Jones and over the steady heartbeat of Williams’ bass. Chick’s solo, starting just before the four-minute mark, is a right-hand improvisation that picks up some of the modal energy of Farrell’s solo but grounds it in a more persistently major tonality, returning to the mode only at the end with a series of ascending chords that fade out, letting Williams take a breath and explore some differing rhythmic patterns in dialog with Jones. Farrell returns at the end to restate the tune and turn the solo back to a major key.

“Bleeding Orchid,” a Chick Corea composition, opens the second side in a moderately Spanish groove, with a melody that grows from a melancholy minor into a more optimistic major key. Farrell’s solo, again on soprano sax, trades thoughts phrase by phrase with Corea, who seems completely intertwined with the saxophonist’s thoughts. Jones provides a huge voice on the drums on the solos, falling back at the restatements of the theme, and Williams’ constant explorations around the tonality make him the quiet hero of the track.

“November 68th” concludes the album, with a modal workout in 6/8 that somehow manages to evoke “Ju Ju” era Shorter and Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” in equal measure. Farrell’s other original composition on the album, the track provides him with a prominent soapbox on tenor sax. Here, again, Jones and Williams anchor the soloist, augmented by Airto, as Corea chases Farrell throughout the track. Chick’s solo swings harder than Farrell’s free flights but still has its own moments of brilliance, including a polyrhythmic moment that seems to stop time partway through the solo. As Corea, then Williams fall back, Jones takes a solo that seems to rise and fall like the saxophonist, double-timing the underlying pulse of the track and then dropping back into a one man polyrhythm. When Williams’ searching yet perfectly metrical bass returns, the rest of the band follows for a final statement of the melody followed by a fierce blowout at the end.

The whole album is stunning, a lesser-known but high quality gem. Farrell was to continue in this vein of tightrope-walking free jazz for one further album on CTI before shifting gears; we’ll get to that album in a few weeks. But we’ll check in on a couple of his labelmates first.

You can listen to the album here:

Freddie Hubbard, First Light

Album of the Week, May 13, 2023

In the first two Freddie Hubbard albums that we’ve heard in our exploration of the CTI Records discography, we’ve heard straight-ahead small group jazz, though colored with fusion and jazz-funk. On First Light, his third outing as leader for CTI, his works take on a little more of the colors of Creed Taylor’s universe, with strings, pop music covers, classical arrangements, and casts of thousands, including Ron Carter, Hubert Laws, Jack DeJohnette, Herbie Hancock, Airto, George Benson, joined by Phil Kraus on vibes and a 20 piece orchestra. Throughout it all soars his serene trumpet and flugelhorn, marking this record as undeniably Freddie despite the new ingredients.

The title track is a classic Hubbard composition, with a floating minor-key melody played by the bandleader across a repeating funk accompaniment. Hubbard’s form is without par throughout his solo, beginning with the achingly beautiful opening solo that precedes the first statement of the theme. Unusually for Hubbard, there is an interlude for Hubert Laws and strings in the middle of the first statement before Hubbard returns with the theme once more, then ventures into the solo proper. Here the motifs are more subtle than in some of his solos, featuring some extended passages played on a single note, one stretching as far as 16 bars and punctuated by a sting from the orchestra, which otherwise supports the sound without calling attention to itself. George Benson and Hubert Laws also have solo moments, but for the most part this one is all Freddie, and it fades out the last closing vamp of the music.

What comes back in is unexpected. Unlike the rest of the CTI stable, Hubbard had not really played much contemporary pop music on record, which makes his introductory notes to “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” even more startling. The Paul and Linda McCartney single made its first chart appearance on August 2, 1971, a mere six weeks before Hubbard entered the studio to record First Light, so this may have felt to the trumpeter like striking while the iron was hot. The work, legendarily cobbled together from three different proto-songs, is here played in three different styles: a pure ballad for the opening “we’re so sorry, Uncle Albert,” a funk-jazz voice on “Admiral Halsey notified me,” and an ecstatically free take on “hands across the water.” Throughout it all Hubbard and his band are foregrounded, with the orchestra adding only spots of color throughout. There are so many quotable moments throughout the arrangement, including Ron Carter’s mic-dropping solo halfway through as the rest of the orchestra falls away (later sampled by the Beastie Boys for 1992’s “Professor Booty”!). It’s an exciting and thoughtful arrangement, as striking today as it must have been in 1971.

“Moment to Moment,” a quieter ballad by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, opens with a pensive dialog between Ron Carter’s bass and Hubert Laws’ flute, underscored by the string section. Hubbard plays the melody straight, but here the real star is Sebesky’s sensitive orchestration. He may have been notorious for working so fast that his scores were sometimes as unreadable as a physician’s handwriting, but at his peak there was no one better, as this track shows.

“Yesterday’s Dreams” continues with the orchestra taking a more prominent role, as Hubbard, here playing a muted trumpet, states the melody of one of the few tracks credited to Sebesky as co-composer. Ron Carter’s bass is a prominent heartbeat throughout, with Herbie Hancock’s Fender Rhodes adding a plaintive note. Hubert Laws and the woodwinds in the orchestra call to each other under the last bit of Hubbard’s solo, with Carter adding portamento to his bass obbligato as the track fades.

“Lonely Town” is an unexpected conclusion to the album, with the woodwinds and strings stating the melody of the Leonard Bernstein show tune, then suddenly giving way to Herbie and Ron Carter laying down a groove under Hubbard’s flugelhorn, accompanied only by the lightest of cymbal work from DeJohnette. The second verse picks up steam and features a magnificent bit of improvisation from Hubbard with imaginative underpinnings by Herbie and Carter. At the end the orchestra has the final word, closing out the track with notes of pensiveness and hope.

Hubbard’s work on First Light shows the trumpeter evolving and growing, and gaining a new audience in the process. The trilogy of albums we’ve listened to so far, beginning with Red Clay and continuing with Straight Life, is brought to a natural conclusion here, with all facets of the trumpeter represented. While Hubbard would continue to record for CTI, this three-album stretch is arguably unequalled in his discography for excellence and range. We’ll listen to some of those later performances soon, but next week we’ll check in with another CTI veteran as he journeys into less-traveled realms.

You can listen to the album here:

The composer and the cosmonaut

Dmitri Shostakovich & Dmitri Kabalevsky, Russian composers, with Yuri Gagarin, Russian astronaut. Photo by Tully Potter.

One moment of our Shostakovich 13 performances leapt off the page at me the first time I heard our soloist, Matthias Goerne, sing it. Toward the end of the final movement there is a complete shift in tonality as the soloist, contrasting those who knowingly perpetuate falsehoods for the sake of their career, sings:

Talent is talent, whatever name you give it.
They’re forgotten, those who hurled curses,
but we remember the ones who were cursed,
(but we remember the ones who were cursed…)
All those who strove towards the stratosphere,
the doctors who died of cholera,
they were following careers!
“Career,” Yevgeny Yevtushenko (trans. Andrew Huth)

Underneath the line about “strove toward the stratosphere” is an unusual chord, one that appears just one other time in the symphony, when the soloist sings about Galileo’s accomplishment at great personal risk. It’s striking and drew my attention to the passage. In the rehearsal I wrote, without thinking too much about it, Gagarin!

(Aside: this whole part of the symphony helped me frame Shostakovich’s perspectives. What I now think is that Shostakovich was a deeply idealistic person who believed in the mission of the Revolution. While he clearly fell out with the Kremlin’s implementation of the ideals of 1917, he remained committed to the idea that life could be better, and held out hope that post-Stalin Russia could make things better for the people. Or at least that’s my read on his newly hopeful tone at the end of the work.)

Shostakovich started work on the 13th sometime after the publication of Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar” in September 1961, and completed it on July 20, 1962. A few months previously, on April 12, 1961, Russia’s first cosmonaut, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, completed his one orbit of earth, becoming the first human in space. Shostakovich would certainly have known about Gagarin, so I assumed that he and Yevtushenko were writing out of a sense of well earned pride in the accomplishments of the Russian people.

What I did not know is that Gagarin and Shostakovich shared a number of other connections. As you can see by the photo at the top of the stage, the composer actually met the cosmonaut (alongside Dmitri Kabalevsky), sometime after Gagarin’s historic flight.

And Gagarin took Shostakovich into orbit with him. The story goes that—after the ground control piped in some love songs so that he would have something to listen to, after takeoff, after orbit, and after a scare where the capsule failed to successfully separate (but ultimately succeeded)—Gagarin began to sing or whistle a tune. The tune? Shostakovich’s song “The Motherland Listens,” whose first line is given in English as “the Motherland hears, the Motherland knows (where her son flies in the sky),” written in 1951 as part of his Op. 86, Four Songs to Words by Dolmatovsky for voice and piano.

So Shostakovich wrote about Gagarin striving toward the stratosphere, and Gagarin sang Shostakovich on his historic flight!

Shostakovich Symphony No. 13

I spent the weekend with Dmitri.

As part of the Boston Symphony’s ongoing (and almost complete) project to perform the complete symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich, I’ve been able to participate in multiple concert runs over the last few years that performed his choral symphonies, and which were recorded by Deutsche Grammophon for eventual release as part of a unique partnership that began in 2015. The first two symphonies, Shostakovich’s Second and Third, were, candidly, hard to love. Exciting and loud, but the choral parts featured a word salad of Soviet propaganda.

The Thirteenth is a different beast altogether. Written from a set of poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the subject matter touches on Soviet antisemitism, inextinguishable humor in the face of repression, the everyday hardships of Russian women seeking to provide for their families, the fear felt under Stalin’s leadership, and the sacrifice of principles in pursuit of a career. And the music is gorgeous and subtle, with multiple earworms that threaten to consume my brain.

I’ll have more to say about some of the interesting corners of the symphony, but for now I’ll just note that it’s been a remarkable journey. Reviews of our performances are in the Boston Globe (paywalled), the Boston Musical Intelligencer, and the Boston Classical Review.

Freddie Hubbard, Straight Life

Album of the Week, May 6, 2023

Hubert Laws’ Afro-Classic may have been the last album recorded for CTI Records in Rudy Van Gelder’s studios in 1970, but it was not the last album recorded in 1970 to be released. A month before Laws’ session, Freddie Hubbard returned to the studio where he had previously cut the instant classic Red Clay for a follow-up session. Again featuring Joe Henderson, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and “Pablo” Landrum, the session also saw the addition of Jack DeJohnette on drums, Weldon Irvine on tambourine, and George Benson on guitar. Together the band recorded a session that was more spontaneous, took more risks, and ultimately may have been more successful than its predecessor.

The album opens with the title track, and it’s immediately arresting, with Hubbard’s fierce articulation of a rapidly tongued fanfare alternating with eruptions from DeJohnette. The tune then abruptly swings into a Latin-tinged funk groove, anchored by Herbie’s Fender and Ron Carter’s bass line, which alternates arpeggiated fifths, octaves and diminished sevenths. Joe Henderson takes the first solo, playing bold runs and then repeating the theme in ascending keys. This session was recorded a few months after his 1970 legendary live session for Milestone, which was released as “If You’re Not Part of the Solution, You’re Part of the Problem,” and he is at the top of his improvisatory game here, transitioning seamlessly from ferocious runs into more serene reflections before handing over to Hubbard. Freddie’s trumpet tone was flawless at this point, pivoting from relaxed, precisely articulated runs to screaming blues shouts within a few bars. Along the way the music slips out of the funky groove into a more abstract utterance, then quietly returns to the groove with the burble of Herbie’s solo. He begins by taking a key from Freddie’s solo, but then takes off in a more abstract direction, playing against the rhythm and finally landing in time for George Benson to pick up the thread. You can hear players shouting encouragement behind Benson’s solo, as his soul-inflected licks shift into funk, then like Herbie shift out of time for sixteen bars or so before crashing back into the rhythm of the groove. The band then locks into the groove as DeJohnette and Landrum trade polyrhythms underneath. Hubbard returns with a high keening line that echoes his opening statement before bringing the volume down for a restatement of the theme. If certain performances of “Red Clay” leave one with the impression that Hubbard had given his all and could not possibly play more, “Straight Life”’s insistent groove and the fade-out insist that he could keep playing all day.

Weldon Irvine’s “Mr. Clean” follows. A grimier funk workout that sees the bass clinging to the tonic like a life raft, the horns call to mind a James Brown line before Freddie makes like Miles with a high lonesome call, as George Benson and Herbie Hancock trade licks beneath. Joe Henderson’s solo explores the tonality of the theme in an abstract workout as the band digs deeper into the groove. Van Gelder’s engineering here is amazing as the bass seems to deepen the further out Henderson goes, followed by Hancock, who innovates both in rhythm and in tonality. Hancock’s solo continues after Henderson drops back, continuing to echo into outer space yet still rooted in the groove. Benson’s solo is similarly deep, bridging over from soul to funk to abstraction in the same breath. Throughout the rhythm section of DeJohnette and Carter stay locked into the groove.

For the final track, a rendition of the Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke standard “Here’s That Rainy Day,” Freddie switches to the flugelhorn. In a 1973 interview, he noted that he had been playing the more mellow cousin of the trumpet for “about three or four years” (though his earliest recording credit on the instrument came on 1967’s Backlash). He claimed in the interview, “Now I can play it better than the trumpet, because it’s so much easier to play.” The creamy tone of his flugelhorn became one of Freddie’s signature sounds, and here it is put to superb use in a stripped down setting, recording the ballad with sensitive accompaniment from Benson on the guitar, for an effect that is reminiscent of “Why Was I Born?,” the duet that Coltrane recorded with Kenny Burrell on their 1962 collaboration. Hubbard closes the track with a long coda that seems to float effortlessly and eternally.

This second Hubbard album on CTI established his role as a leader among the label’s artists, and he would continue to record groundbreaking sets throughout the next few years. We’ll hear another, very different one next time.

You can listen to the album here:

Exfiltration Radio: say what you mean

With great Veracode hackathons come more Exfiltration Radio episodes. This time around, I have a playlist of indie/alternative/etc. rock with female voices that I’ve been building for a few years. Only I didn’t realize it.

The original version of this playlist had basically the same intro as the final version but segued into a hip-hop and funk set halfway through. While it made sense from a musical and beat perspective, something bugged me about it, and that something revealed itself over the past few weeks as the half-forgotten memory of an observation my sister made about some of my mixes twenty years ago: that they were heavy on dudes with guitars, or dudes, period.

I’d say the rethinking of this playlist was worth it, as it made me listen more closely to what the songs had to say. And they aren’t shy. Let’s begin with Caroline Polachek. In her 2020 solo spot on KEXP, she comes across as thoughtful, deep, a little shy. There’s all of that in “Welcome to My Island,” but there’s also a huge self-confidence on display, along with a magnificent set of pipes and what she has called “brattiness,” a.k.a. a well-earned swagger.

I have been listening to Dum Dum Girls for almost ten years—long enough for lead singer Dee Dee (née Kristin Gundred) to release her solo debut in the meantime. I came on board with the Too True album, and it’s a piece of work. It reminds me of William Gibson’s description of AIs battling AIs in Neuromancer, in a passage that seems prescient now: “He … swung the program in a wide circle, seeing the black shark thing through her eyes, a silent ghost hungry against the banks of lowering cloud.” Which is to say, the song is sleek, fast-moving, and ready to take precious things from the unwary.

“Headspins” has been in my playlists for almost as long. Forming in 2012 and breaking up in 2018, the band (formed in London by Australian ex-pats) does a fine job of updating the sound of the Breeders and bringing them into the 21st century.

If you haven’t heard “Chaise Longue” by Wet Leg, you’re welcome. If you’ve heard it a million times, this is your opportunity to revel again in the slyly dadaesque innuendo of the verses, as well as the sheer joy of the guitar work.

It took me a while to get into the latest St. Vincent, a deeply personal work about her father’s release from prison, partly because of her artistic choice to lean into a 1970s-inspired set of styles throughout the record. But there’s nothing wrong about the funk that drives “Pay Your Way in Pain,” to say nothing of the deep discomfort just below the surface of the lyrics.

“So Unreal” is the oldest track on the mix. Post-punk has been a reliable well of inspiration for me, albeit one that gives me no small amount of impostor syndrome. After all, I was alive and listening to music when the Creatures formed their splinter group off of Siouxsie and the Banshees, but wasn’t nearly hip enough to know they existed.

Originally, “Kyoto” was the pivot point of this mix, and a different version of it followed up Phoebe Bridgers’ meditation on jet lag and alienation set to a brass section straight out of an old Beulah record with Thundercat’s “Tokyo” and a general pivot into 21st century funk and electronica. But I decided against taking what was, for me, the easy path; hopefully you’re as glad as I am.

“Silk” has been on this mix since it came up on a random shuffle through my music while I was blowing snow one bright winter day. I dearly love Wolf Alice on the basis of this early album and am almost afraid to listen future iterations of their sound. I might have said the same of Neneh Cherry, having been a huge fan of her first few albums but not closely following her since then. Broken Politics is a pretty darned impressive follow-up, albeit one more closely related to the remixes of “Move With Me” than to the funk of “Buffalo Stance,” and “Black Monday” is a pretty spectacular representation of the album’s pleasures.

Soccer Mommy (aka Sophia Allison) made one of the quintessential albums of the early pandemic years with Color Theory, and a slightly brighter version of the same introspective sound is in her latest release. By contrast, Liz Phair’s Soberish appears to have come and gone without an impact, which is a shame as I think the songwriting on it is as strong as anything since Whitechocolatespaceegg.

And then there’s Sales, whose “Pope is a Rockstar” probably would have languished in limbo were it not for TikTok, where mondegreen readings of the title as “go little rockstar” made the song go viral. But on its own it’s a woozy hybrid between indie pop and, maybe, surf rock? There’s something in those guitars, is what I’m saying.

I fell in love with Laura Marling a few years ago, on her album Once I Was an Eagle, which featured prominently on my 2013 mix “Something Other Than Regret.” Her most recent album, Song for Our Daughter, takes the stark template of that sound and layers on Laurel Canyon harmonies that go on for days, especially on this track.

Lavender Diamond, aka Becky Stark, is another artist who appeared on that 2013 mix, and promptly disappeared until their 2020 album Now is the Time. All the hallmarks of the sound are there — the high vocals, the chord progressions out of an evolved version of the American Songbook — but where their 2012 album Incorruptible Heart dwelt in heartbreak, the new album seems to seek out hope behind horror.

One of the newest tracks on the album, boygenius’s “$20” from their debut LP The Record is a sublime and angry tune about the desperate need to escape the ordinary, with layered and shifting vocals from Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker. It’s stunning. The following tune, from the final Low album before Mimi Parker’s tragic death from cancer last year, underscores and reinforces all the themes with its own harmonies, but the anger is replaced with resignation and sadness. “Always looking for that one sure thing/Oh, you wanted so desperately.”

The final track is something of a lost gem: the final cut from the debut album of Eggplant, released in 1996. While most of the songs on the London trio’s indie rock driven album nod to punk with short run times and brisk beats, the final song, “We Only Wanted to Be Loved,” is a heartbreaker of a ballad. The trio deserved better than the oblivion their records found on initial release; here’s hoping they get a good afterlife via the Bandcamp rerelease of their music.

I hope this show brings you some sounds you haven’t heard before and makes you think—or move your booty, or both. The full track list is below:

Welcome To My Island – Caroline Polachek (Desire, I Want To Turn Into You)
Rimbaud Eyes – Dum Dum Girls (Too True)
Headspins – Splashh (Comfort)
Chaise Longue – Wet Leg (Wet Leg)
Pay Your Way In Pain – st. vincent (Daddy’s Home)
So Unreal – The Creatures (A Bestiary of (Spectrum))
Kyoto – Phoebe Bridgers (Punisher)
Silk – Wolf Alice (My Love Is Cool)
Black Monday – Neneh Cherry (Broken Politics)
Feel It All The Time – soccer mommy (Sometimes, Forever)
In There – Liz Phair (Soberish)
Pope Is a Rockstar – SALES (Sales Lp)
Held Down – Laura Marling (Song For Our Daughter)
This Is How We Rise – Lavender Diamond (Now Is The Time)
$20 – boygenius (the record)
Days Like These – Low (HEY WHAT)
We Only Wanted To Be Loved – EGGPLANT (Catboy/Catgirl)

We have taken control, and we will return it to you as soon as you are exfiltrated.

Exfiltration Radio: Too Short

When Wayne Shorter died on March 2, 2023, it was like the closing of a book that you knew was going to run out of pages soon, but hoped it never would. Shorter had retired from performance in 2018 due to worsening health, but was still composing and releasing new music up until last summer.

Having already put together an Exfiltration Radio episode of Shorter’s music, I debated doing another—I could easily do twelve or thirteen episodes of his works. But I decided to dedicate this episode to his music by highlighting performances of his compositions by others. Most of the recordings here come from the last few years, but there are two from the 1990s and one contemporaneous with Wayne’s most productive period as a composer in the 1960s—albeit with a very different approach.

I considered doing the entire album with covers and performances of “Footprints,” the Shorter classic that was dramatically reimagined by the Miles Davis Quintet on Miles Smiles. In the end I settled for two very different approaches to the standard, starting with Herbie Mann’s 1968 version. Recorded with an unusually star-studded group—Sonny Sharrock on guitar, Roy Ayers on vibes, and a very young Miroslav Vitouš on bass, with drummer Bruno Carr—the recording will surprise those who primarily associate Mann with his notorious early 1970s record Push Push.

David Ashkenazy’s “Chief Crazy Horse” is a 2008 performance compiled on a 2021 tribute album on Posi-Tone Records. Drummer Ashkenazy leads a quartet with Matt Otto on tenor sax, Steve Cotter on guitar, and Roger Shew on drums, playing a version of the closing song from Adam’s Apple that manages to be at once familiar and new, thanks largely to Cotter’s sterling guitar work.

One of my favorite large-band renditions of Shorter’s work, David Weiss’s “Fall” comes from a live tribute to Wayne recorded in 2013 with a group that includes Ravi Coltrane on tenor, Joe Fiedler on trombone, and the great Geri Allen on piano. While the arrangement undoes the innovation of the original Miles recording, in which the horns repeat the theme while the rhythm section improvises underneath, the performance is not to be missed, especially for Weiss’s trumpet solo.

More “Footprints” follow, this time in a duo recording by Dave Liebman and Willy Rodriguez from the 2020 compilation album 2020. The album is credited to Palladium, an effort by Shorter’s social media rep Jesse Markowitz to get his music better known. The performances here run from more traditional to more avant-garde and this one is firmly on the latter side of the spectrum, with Liebman’s soprano sax and Rodriguez’s drums moving things along briskly.

Walter Smith III is having something of a moment, coming off several collaboration albums with Matthew Stevens as In Common, guesting with Connie Han on several of her excellent recent albums, and about to release his Blue Note debut. The performance of “Adam’s Apple” here from his 2018 release Twio foreshadows much of that greatness, including his impeccable taste in sidemen. I’m not sure how the studio didn’t explode with the fury of Eric Harland’s drums on this number, and Harish Ragavan’s bass is nothing to sneeze at either.

The vocalist Clare Foster recorded an entire album of vocal adaptations of Shorter’s work at the beginning of her career, in 1993. While some of the lyrics are flights of fancy only tangentially connected to the work, her “Iris” precisely captures the mood of Shorter’s ballad. This track is followed by the other 1990s performance on the mix, the great Kenny Kirkland’s take on Shorter’s “Ana Maria” from his sole outing as a leader before his untimely death in 1998.

We close with another performance from Shorter Moments, a 2009 performance of Wayne’s phenomenal “Infant Eyes” by Wayne Escoffery on tenor sax with Avi Rothbard on guitar. While Shorter did not only write ballads, there was arguably no one in the second half of the 20th century who was better at writing ballads, and this recording makes a persuasive case in favor of that argument.

Full track listing and link for playback are below. Enjoy!

Footprints – Herbie Mann (Windows Opened)
Chief Crazy Horse – David Ashkenazy (Shorter Moments – Exploring the World of Wayne)
Fall (Live) – David Weiss (Endangered Species: The Music of Wayne Shorter (Live at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola))
Footprints – David Liebman & Willy Rodriguez (2020)
Adam’s Apple (feat. Eric Harland & Harish Ragavan) – Walter Smith III (Twio)
Iris – Clare Foster (Clare Foster sings Wayne Shorter)
Ana Maria – Kenny Kirkland (Kenny Kirkland)
Infant Eyes – Wayne Escoffery (Shorter Moments – Exploring the World of Wayne)

Do not attempt to adjust your radio; there is nothing wrong.