The first release by Craig Taborn since being named a MacArthur Fellow in late 2025, Dream Archives (ECM, 2026) finds the pianist/composer leading an unusual trio with noted cellist Tomeka Reid and in-demand drummer-vibraphonist Ches Smith. All three are acclaimed bandleaders in their own right, with Reid having an extensive history of collaboration through her […]
Sometimes, the voice of an outsider provides a fresh perspective that adds richness to the status quo and pushes things in new directions. This was certainly the case with Ethiopian jazz. Over the last two decades, the music – sometimes referred to as Ethio-jazz – has proliferated via the internet, dissolving geographic boundaries around sounds […]
Coined by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht, the term ‘solastalgia” centers on the theme of homesickness while still at home with a focus towards surveying environmental damage. “Our environment is transforming around us, and we grieve for the landscapes and ecologies we knew,” says Albrecht. These feelings inspire The Solastalgia Suite (Pyroclastic, 2025), Grammy-winning pianist and […]
The most common defense for insisting on genre classifications is that it “simplifies” discussions about music. According to Kelefa Sanneh, author of Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres (Penguin, 2021), “Devotion to a sound is essentially about community and belonging.” In this sense, one can see adherence to genre norms as […]
The popular perception of time is linear. One thing leads to another and then to another. But the passage of time is better viewed as a cyclical path, with shadows of the past and hints of the future emerging throughout. As Marcus Aurelius notes in Book VI of Meditations, “Each thing is of like form […]
Saturday, December 19, 1970 For first-time listeners to The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Columbia, 1970), the first four discs can be like a side trip to unfamiliar neighborhoods of a well-known place. The language is the same, the architecture familiar, but the details are new and delightfully alive. Arriving at discs five and six is […]
Friday, December 18, 1970 When The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Columbia, 2005) recordings were made, none of the members of Miles’ band had yet reached age thirty. The leader himself was only forty-four. But even at their younger ages, the intense physicality of the playing for three sets a night, Friday and Saturday, had to […]
On December 12, 2025, the world lost a truly innovative voice. When any accomplished artist passes, there is a natural inclination to list the other artists that person once called collaborators, as if to provide necessary context to the loss by reference to names perhaps better known. Certainly, one can write a piece about Marilyn […]
Thursday, December 17, 1970 –What I Say. With “What I Say,” Miles Davis and his band answered the bell for Round two at the Cellar Door like a boxer bursting off his stool to land a volley of combinations before his opponent has even reached the center of the ring. It’s not quite shock and […]
Before diving in, a note on inspiration. This project is the child of a small-scale obsession. Last fall, I moved my collection of five thousand, six hundred and sixty-four CDs across town to a new home. I like to file them alphabetically by artist and then chronologically within each artist. Seventy-one of these are by […]
