I wrote about late Coltrane for the Brooklyn Rail, a piece which has generated some heat, particularly on Facebook, where people go to share their most conservative takes on art. Anyway…

Coltrane’s former record label, Impulse!, is focusing their centennial product rollout around The Tiberi Tapes, a collection of amateur recordings made in the early 1960s in New York and Philadelphia nightclubs by obsessive fan (and fellow saxophonist) Frank Tiberi. It’ll be released later in the year, and I may have more to say about it at that time.

The Tiberi Tapes is far from the first unofficial John Coltrane recording to be made available by Impulse!, though. Over the last 25 years, there’s been a string of these releases, and while the playing is always at a high level, the quality of the recordings and the intense, unforgiving nature of much of the material makes them some of the most alienating, for-diehards-only music in his catalog. So let’s talk about which ones the merely Coltrane-curious might actually want to hear.

The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording, released in 2001, was recorded on April 23, 1967 in New York, roughly three months before Coltrane’s death from liver cancer on July 17. It featured his final group — Pharoah Sanders on tenor saxophone, Alice Coltrane on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Rashied Ali on drums — joined by percussionist Jumma Santos and bata drummer Algie DeWitt. They play two numbers, a 29-minute “Ogunde” and a 35-minute “My Favorite Things.” This is a crude recording, made at Coltrane’s behest by an engineer he knew. Sonically, it’s a blown-out, distorted mess, and to my ear it has little to recommend it unless you’re a total free squall diehard. The studio version of “Ogunde,” released on Expression, is a beautiful three-minute ballad. Stretched to ten times its length, and sounding like it’s coming from a malfunctioning public address speaker… no thanks.

Four years later, One Down, One Up (Live At The Half Note) arrived. It featured recordings from March and May 1965 by Coltrane’s “classic quartet” of pianist McCoy Tyner, Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones. The music had been taped by DJ Alan Grant of New York radio station WABC, and copies of the recordings sat in Coltrane’s personal collection until his son Ravi rescued them and got Impulse! to put together a 2CD set. Because they were recorded professionally, for broadcast, the sound quality is excellent, even if the first disc does begin with Grant announcing the performers over a Garrison bass solo already in progress. The subsequent title piece, nearly 28 minutes long, is one of the best live Coltrane performances ever captured, full of the lyricism and passion of his best work. After this, he would dive headlong into the high-intensity free blowing of his final years, but if you’re a fan of his work from My Favorite Things through A Love Supreme, this set is worth checking out.

Offering: Live At Temple University, released in 2014, was another glorified bootleg, recorded with a single microphone planted center stage. It was recorded November 11, 1966 and features Sanders, Alice Coltrane on piano, Sonny Johnson on bass, Ali on drums, and a slew of guests: Algie DeWitt on bata drum, three conga players (Umar Ali, Charles Brown, and Robert Kenyatta), and two local alto saxophonists, Arnold Joyner and Steve Knoblauch, both of whom just asked to sit in. It’s not quite as badly recorded as The Olatunji Concert, but it’s close; the sound is relatively clear, but Coltrane, Sanders, and the drummers are the only audible players 90 percent of the time, and if you’re someone who believes Coltrane lost his way, creatively speaking, after 1965, the performances here will support your position. They are blowing hard, and there’s almost nothing conventionally beautiful about it. The 21-minute version of “Leo,” which has the feel of a vodou ritual, especially when Coltrane begins vocalizing, is of some interest, but still… enter at your own risk.

A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle, released in 2021, is a pretty amazing discovery. Recorded October 1, 1965, the night after a flame-throwing show captured on the Live In Seattle double LP, it’s only the second known live recording of Coltrane’s most famous work, the other having been taped in France a few months earlier, with only the quartet that made the studio album onstage. This features an expanded ensemble — the quartet of Coltrane, Tyner, Garrison, and Jones, plus Sanders, alto saxophonist Carlos Ward, and second bassist Donald Rafael Garrett — and together, they stretch ALS out to over 75 minutes, expanding its four movements and breaking them up with several improvisatory interludes. It’s quite well recorded, and the music is brilliant. The way they segue from the sections of ALS into the more exploratory passages, then bring it back in and keep the piece flowing, is fantastic. I like this even better than the French performance, which is now available on the 2CD ALS deluxe edition.

Evenings At The Village Gate, recorded in 1961 and released in 2023, is co-credited to Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, and also features Tyner, bassists Reggie Workman and Art Davis, and Jones. It was recorded on a single microphone dangling over the stage, so like Offering, it’s in mono, and Jones’ drums are the loudest element in the mix, with Coltrane’s saxophone sounding surprisingly subdued, Dolphy only slightly more present, and the piano seeming to drift in from far away. It’s all really good, but the obvious highlights are tracks that can’t be heard on multiple other Coltrane live albums, like a version of the standard “When Lights Are Low” and a 22-minute “Africa,” only recently recorded for the Africa/Brass album and featuring an extended pas de deux between Workman and Davis. This music was recorded during an era when Coltrane was reaching the first in a series of artistic peaks, and it’s quite beautiful despite the sonic limitations.

I love a lot of John Coltrane’s music, from all his various eras. But I do not put bootleg recordings on the same level as finished, polished studio albums (or professional live albums). None of the albums I have discussed in this essay will ever replace A Love Supreme, Crescent, Meditations, Soultrane, Traneing In, or Settin’ The Pace for me.

(There is one recently unearthed, and somewhat overlooked, Coltrane collection I can wholeheartedly endorse: Blue World, a 2019 release of a 1964 studio session on which the quartet performed new versions of older tunes like “Naima,” “Like Sonny,” and “Traneing In.” It’s great.)

Worse, the proliferation of crude live recordings like these has two potentially negative effects: It risks distracting the new listener from genuinely important works that should be heard first, and it risks turning John Coltrane into a subject for study, rather than a musician whose work can be listened to by normal people for entertainment. So as good as some of the albums reviewed above are, if you’re new to or curious about Coltrane’s music, my advice is to avoid all of them, at least until you’ve checked out the canonical works. Once you’ve done that, by all means dive deeper. But none of the records here should be anyone’s starting point.

Assimilated Transdimensionalization is a solo project of Tisza Kara of Budapest, Hungary. To date, he’s released four EPs — Xenobiotic Annihilation Doctrine, Neuroflesh Incubation Through Cosmic Machinery, and Cosmic Erasure Of Biogenesis — and one full-length album, Neuroforged In The Womb Of Wires. His latest release is Exo-Cognitive Matrix, a four-song EP.

All of this music has been released in less than two years, so there’s not that much stylistic evolution to be heard. The Xenobiotic Annihilation Doctrine EP lays out the template, which is basically chugging, technically complex death metal that reminds me of Wormed or Defeated Sanity. Kara is a really good drummer and bassist, and a competent guitarist. There are occasional jazzy bass passages, but no squiggly guitar solos, just riffs. So many riffs. I like the fact that the snare drum sounds like a snare drum, and not like a metal ring being hit with a hammer. There are a few quiet moments here and there, where Kara actually lets the atmosphere breathe, instead of hitting you with a dialogue sample from some horror movie, and he’s got one production trick I really like where everything drops out except the guitar, and that’s muffled like it’s coming through the wall from your neighbor’s apartment.

The muffled-guitar trick is absent on the new EP, which is unfortunate, but the vocals are great, a mixture of guttural demonic roars and anguished screams, and there are some other interesting touches, like a robotic voice reciting… something… in Hungarian. The whole thing blasts by in just 10 minutes — if you buy the entire Assimilated Transdimensionalization catalog on Bandcamp, like I did, you could fit it all on a single CD.

Organist Larry Goldings, guitarist Peter Bernstein, and drummer Bill Stewart have been making music together for 35 years. I believe their first album was Intimacy Of The Blues, released on the Minor Music label in 1991 as the Larry Goldings Trio, with saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman guesting on three tracks. They’ve also recorded under Bernstein’s name, and served as a backing band for other artists. But somewhere around 15 years ago, they started billing themselves under all three of their names. Anyway, Rhombus is their six hundredth album or so, and it’s a collection of nice, pretty tunes, some of which you may recognize. They play Keith Jarrett’s “Everything That Lives, Laments,” Randy Weston’s “Hi-Fly,” Thelonious Monk’s “In Walked Bud,” Wayne Shorter’s “Penelope,” Irving Berlin’s “They Say It’s Wonderful,” and Abdullah Ibrahim’s “Mamma,” along with two original compositions. Everybody plays clean, and nobody lurches sideways into free jazz or psychedelic rock, though Goldings’ “Rhombus” gets close. It almost sounds like a Doors instrumental, or some of John Zorn’s recent music for organ trio, so of course it’s the shortest piece on the record. There are a few unexpected bursts of energy from Stewart on the Irving Berlin number, too. It probably seems like I’m dismissing this record, but look up at the title of this newsletter again. This is an album you need to hear, because these three men know each other like brothers, and they do their collective thing brilliantly. They’ve chosen tunes that allow each person room to make a statement without Making a Statement, and sequenced them in a way that flows. It’s an album that understands how albums work. It’s one of the best examples of craft I’ve heard all year. And it snuck up on me; I didn’t decide to share it with you until I’d heard it three times.

Alto saxophonist Julius Hemphill loved writing for saxophone quartet, and later for saxophone sextet, occasionally adding flutes and clarinets to ensembles as needed. He co-founded the World Saxophone Quartet with fellow members of the Black Artist Group (BAG) Hamiet Bluiett and Oliver Lake, plus David Murray. After leaving the WSQ, he formed his own ensembles and continued to perform saxophone choir music. On this 2CD set, Marty Ehrlich — who played on the Julius Hemphill Sextet albums Fat Man And The Hard Blues and Five Chord Stud — has assembled a pool of players including Allan Chase, Rob DeBellis, Brian Landrus, Andy Laster, Jeff Lederer, Lisa Parrott, and Jason Robinson to record all 40 of Hemphill’s saxophone quartet compositions. And they are absolutely compositions, with a beginning, a middle, and an end (OK, some of them fade out). The harmonies are stacked up beautifully, with Ellingtonian lushness and string quartet gravitas. There are solos, but they’re not the point — the orchestrations and conversations between horns are the point. Indeed, 11 of these pieces are under two minutes long; they’re intended as statements, potent and precise. At the same time, put a swinging drummer underneath these pieces and you’d have the whole room dancing.

I know – and you may know – Lesley Mok as a jazz drummer: a member of pianist Myra Melford’s Fire And Water Quintet, whose next album Sure Grand Out is arriving this month, who appeared on Anna Webber’s Shimmer Wince, and made a terrific album, A Reflection Distorts Over Water, with saxophonist Camila Nebbia and pianist Marilyn Crispell. Mok’s first album as a leader, 2023’s The Living Collection, had horns, strings, and electronics. Transient, on the other hand, is an almost entirely electronic effort. Yes, it features live drums, most obviously on “in the funhouse,” but they seem to be used as source material more than anything else. They’re often surrounded by electronic patterns, reshaped by studio effects, and otherwise disguised or downplayed. When I listen to this album, particularly on speakers (as opposed to headphones, which is my usual listening practice), I’m reminded of Autechre, but also of early Tangerine Dream and even of ultra-minimalist early 2000s works by electronic music artists like Bernhard Günter, Sogar, Taylor Deupree and Motion. I’m particularly impressed by the deep but precise low-end pulses on “midland.”

Sulida is a Norwegian trio — Marthe Lea on tenor sax, flute and percussion; Jon Rune Strøm on bass; Dag Erik Knedal Andersen on drums — whose debut album, Utos, was released on the recently shuttered Clean Feed label in 2024. The following year, they played a concert with trumpeter Axel Dörner, which has now been released as Etiwe. I wasn’t sure what to expect going in; I had this idea of Dörner in particular as a “lowercase” improviser, the kind of guy who makes very soft hissing and kissing noises into the trumpet rather than, you know, playing music through it. But this is very definitely a type of free jazz, one that reminds me at certain points of Other Dimensions In Music, at others of Irreversible Entanglements, and at others of the work of Don Cherry, whether with Ornette Coleman’s quartet, with Sonny Rollins, or with his own groups in Scandinavia in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Dörner fits right in with the ensemble, never feeling like a “special guest” or like he’s being deferred to. Strøm and Andersen are an excellent team, creating forward momentum without “swinging” in the conventional sense, as the horns carry on intriguing conversations. And when Lea begins to sing, Dörner is a friendly shadow/interlocutor, spurring her on.

In the modern era, the Bad Plus built a sizable audience with covers of rock and pop songs by Black Sabbath, Blondie, David Bowie, Nirvana, Pixies, Rush, and many more. Brad Mehldau has recorded songs by Paul Simon, Radiohead, and Nick Drake, among others. And coming at it from the opposite direction, Adam Wakeman (son of Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman and a touring member of both Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne’s solo band) has created Jazz Sabbath to perform piano trio versions of Black Sabbath songs.

Ulysses Owens Jr. is a jazz drummer and a professor at Juilliard. He’s released several albums on his own, and has recorded as a sideman in multiple contexts, working frequently with trombonist Michael Dease and bassist Christian McBride. A couple of years ago, he appeared on the Drumeo YouTube channel, where drummers are played a song they’ve never heard before, with the drum track removed, and asked to come up with a drum part on the spot. They gave him Nirvana’s “In Bloom,” and this was the result:

Owens currently leads a band, Generation Y, composed of musicians he’s worked with at Juilliard and in other educational contexts. He’s attempting to shape and foster them in the way bandleaders like Art Blakey and Betty Carter did for decades, scouting talent and giving them room to run.

The first Generation Y album, A New Beat, was recorded in the Rudy Van Gelder studio in New Jersey (but with a live audience present) in 2023; it features Sarah Hanahan and Erena Terakubo on alto saxes; Benny Benack III and Anthony Hervey on trumpets; Luther Allison and Tyler Bullock on piano; Philip Norris and Ryoma Takenaga on bass; and singer Milton Suggs on one track. They play a few originals (one each by Hervey, Allison and Benack) alongside lesser-known pieces by Cannonball Adderley, Jackie McLean, Roy Hargrove, Louis Armstrong, Luther Allison, Ray Bryant and George Cables.

A New Beat is a good student album. It feels like a final exam (it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the live audience was made up of the bandmembers’ parents), and heard from that perspective it’s perfectly fine. Everybody demonstrates skill and knowledge of the material, and nobody goes off track. (Suggs’ vocal on the Louis Armstrong tune “Heart Full of Rhythm” is the one weak point; he sounds like a Broadway singer, not a jazz singer.) And look, jazz is hard music to play well. So these musicians are to be congratulated on their ability to execute at this level. And Owens understands his assignment, too. He spurs the band on without ever steamrolling them or pushing them beyond their comfort level; he’s a good leader who inspires the musicians in front of him.

On the second Generation Y album, 2025’s Around The World With U, Hanahan, Allison and Benack had embarked on solo careers, so the lineup solidified around Terakubo, Hervey, Bullock and new bassist Yasushi Nakamura, with trombonist Nanami Haruta appearing on two tracks. This time, Bullock, Terakubo, Nakamura, and Haruta brought in compositions, which were recorded alongside pieces by Dizzy Gillespie, Cedar Walton, Hoagy Carmichael, and a version of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso.”

Around The World was recorded after the group had been out on the road, developing the kind of rapport and collective sound that only live performance can inspire. As a result, it’s a more exciting album and one that takes the ensemble beyond “student recital” to “actual band.” Hervey’s trumpet solos in particular leap out — he’s a fleet, lyrical player with a willingness to take a line to unexpected places at times. The version of “Espresso” is more than a novelty; through deft arrangement of the vocal melody, turning it into a conversation between the horns over a dancing swing rhythm, they render the song unrecognizable (in the sense that you don’t sit there the whole time thinking, This is that Sabrina Carpenter song) but create something that’s very enjoyable on its own. “Morning Prayer,” Nakamura’s piece, has some of the contemplative abstraction of the 1960s Miles Davis quintet, and the closing version of Cedar Walton’s “I’m Not So Sure” is a high-energy blowout. On this album, Owens’ role and playing have shifted. He’s no longer an instructor leading his students through a program of material; he’s a race car driver, keenly aware of what his machine can do and pushing it to its limits.

So what’s all this got to do with musical exchanges between jazz and rock? Well, a year or so after the Drumeo video above, Owens and Generation Y were invited into their studio and challenged to create a spontaneous arrangement of another Nirvana song, “Heart Shaped Box”:

That in turn inspired the third Generation Y album, which came out August 14. It’s called Kind Of Grunge, and it’s entirely made up of jazz interpretations of songs by ’90s rock bands. The band’s lineup has shifted again; it now includes Benack on trumpet again, Langston Hughes II on alto saxophone, Bullock on piano, Dan Wilson on guitar and percussion, and Thomas Milovac on bass. Together they essay songs by Mudhoney, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Hole, Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog, Smashing Pumpkins, and Stone Temple Pilots.

This is obviously bait for a guy like me. I saw Mudhoney live in 1989, and TAD in 1990. (TAD were such a great band.) I never got to see Soundgarden live, to my eternal regret, but Badmotorfinger is one of my favorite albums ever. (I was never a Nirvana fan, though.) And even the songs on this record I don’t actually like, I’m very familiar with from the radio. (Shout out to NJ hard rock/metal station WSOU.) So yeah, I was intrigued, and I bought the album out of genuine curiosity.

You can take this as criticism or praise, or just description: the songs are mostly unrecognizable. A lot of them didn’t have very complex forms to begin with — they’re basically a simple verse melody sung over a repeated guitar riff, followed by a chorus melody sung over an even simpler repeated guitar riff. Some of them don’t even have a bridge. That doesn’t give a jazz arranger a whole lot to work with. And the musicians were being asked to create their interpretations on the spot, like they’d done in the video before. So the members of Generation Y largely fall back on jazz methodology, hanging onto the melody and chord changes and just using those to construct an entirely new piece.

Some of the resulting pieces are quite good. Their version of Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow” goes Latin jazz halfway through, without warning, and/but it works. Their take on Soundgarden’s “Spoonman” has a New Orleans feel that reminds me of similar pieces by Wynton Marsalis from the Live At The Village Vanguard box set, and yes, I mean that as a compliment. Others are impressive when taken on their own, but I find it just a little too hard to connect them to the original song. For example, I think Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick” is one of the greatest songs ever. I wrote a whole piece about it for Stereogum. But Generation Y’s version has nothing to do with that song; it’s a post-bop burner that exists on its own merits, demonstrating jazz virtuosity (in contrast to the anti-virtuosity of the original). Similarly, their take on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” sounds more like Steely Dan. Which is fine. Their Brazilian-style version of “In Bloom” is better. And their reggae-fied version of Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” will remind you that the Skatalites were a jazz band.

Owens’ Generation Y project is a valuable one. Jazz needs more artists willing to make an artistic project out of mentorship. I’m gonna be interested to see how long he keeps this going, and I’ll continue listening.

Pussy Galore were one of the best bands of the ’80s. Their relatively compact discography of four EPs (Feel Good About Your Body, Pussy Gold 5000, Groovy Hate Fuck, SugarShit Sharp) and three studio albums (Right Now!, Dial ‘M’ For Motherfucker, Historia De La Musica Rock), plus a couple of live recordings and scattered singles, was a remarkable journey from utterly ramshackle noise to a skillfully crafted mix of punk rock, hip-hop, and industrial clatter… disguised as ramshackle noise. They were smarter than anyone gave them credit for being, and a genuinely exciting live act. (I saw them in summer 1989, on their final US tour.)

The key to the whole thing was the (creative) relationship between the two guitarist/vocalists, Jon Spencer and Julia Cafritz. They met as students at Brown University, and were both just 20 when the band formed in Washington, DC. As Spencer recalled in a 2022 interview, “I was playing in a very straight ’60s garage punk group playing bass guitar and then also at the same time playing in a totally abrasive, totally out there industrial noise group, and in that band I was playing a mixture of drums and percussion, and I was doing both things at the same time. When I finally started my own band with Pussy Galore, on a surface level it was combining those two strains.” Interestingly, that garage punk group was called Pussy Galore; Spencer took possession of the name (with its founder’s permission) at Cafritz’s urging.

(This interview with Cafritz offers a ton of detail about how the band formed and its early years.)

On the group’s first release, 1985’s Feel Good About Your Body, they were a trio: Spencer, Cafritz, and percussionist John Hammill. The EP began with a noisy punk song, “Die Bitch,” then swerved through a number of tangents: “HC Rebellion,” on which Cafritz read letters to the hardcore zine Maximumrocknroll over a repetitive guitar melody; “Constant Pain,” a minimalist guitar noise-over-metal percussion rant; and “Car Fantasy,” a crawling, doomy feedback storm over which Spencer groaned and wailed like Michael Gira of Swans.

Before leaving Washington, DC, Spencer, Cafritz, Hammill and fellow percussionist Rick Hall recorded the seven-track Groovy Hate Fuck EP, a deliberately offensive collection of short, noisy outbursts. (“You Look Like A Jew” was his dismissal of Dischord Records bands and their close-cropped hair.) There was always an element of self-subversion, though; “Cunt Tease” allows Cafritz to counter Spencer’s parodic sexual braggadocio, ending each chorus with a screamed “Fuck you!” and delivering a wrathful, dismissive tirade mid-song.

The dynamic between them, particularly onstage, was fascinating. Cafritz, by her own admission, was musically inept, but the sheer force of her personality made her vital to the entire operation, both onstage and off. As she says in the interview linked above,

“I think that in terms of the image that I projected, that was actually… fueled by something real, in terms of… a real desire, let’s put it this way, to somehow assert myself in an arena that I didn’t really feel like I belonged in. But if I was going to belong in, I wanted to do something well. Consequently, I think between the fact that I was basically just screaming rage-filled insults at men all from stage, and the fact that I was smoking four packs a day, and dressed in black, and — probably sort of the quicker person. I mean, Jon is insanely smart… but he doesn’t like to talk. And so if anybody wanted to talk, they had to talk to me. Because Jon’s very polite, but he can’t — he doesn’t really want to form sentences. (laughs)Or he didn’t back then. And so I could sort of dominate in that way.”

In summer 1986, Spencer and Cafritz moved to New York, where they made friends quickly on the CBGB scene. In Kim Gordon’s autobiography, Girl In A Band, she writes, “Julie Cafritz is one of the funniest people I know, under-acknowledged as an indie rock ‘girl’ guitar player and singer-goddess. When Julie and I first met years earlier, her band Pussy Galore had just moved to New York and was looking for a drummer. I introduced her to Bob Bert, who had just quit Sonic Youth and seemed perfect for them. Julie and her bandmate Jon Spencer were slightly scary, I remember, all black clothes with tons of ’tude.”

In addition to Bert, who, despite being a decade older than the two transplants, was ready to rock, they added two more guitarists, Neil Hagerty and Cristina Martinez. Bert’s arrival solidified the PG sound: he was a good, heavy backbeat drummer, but (at Spencer’s insistence) he replaced his snare drum with a car’s gas tank, giving their rock ’n’ roll a literal junkyard feel. Together, they came up with a brilliantly hilarious idea. As Bert recalled it in a recent interview,

“At the time, Sonic Youth was mouthing off to the press about recording their version of the Beatles’ White Album — of course, it never happened. I think we got through ‘Back in the USSR’ at a rehearsal, that was it. So when I joined Pussy Galore, Jon said to me, ‘In response to that, we should do a version of Exile On Main St. by the Stones.’ I was like, ‘Fuck yeah, it’s a much better record anyway.’ We recorded that in some old school room on a beat up 8-track cassette recorder.”

Pussy Galore’s Exile On Main St. was recorded 40 years ago this month, on August 24-26, 1986. It’s a brilliant idea — a totemic album controversial in the context of its makers’ own career, revived/desecrated by a new generation — and the execution is astonishing.

If it was just a collection of raw, one-take Rolling Stones covers, it wouldn’t be very interesting at all. But Spencer’s always been an underrated musical conceptualist, and there are a whole lot of ideas at work here, manifested through very careful manipulation and assembly of sounds. Yes, the band, which again consisted of four guitarists and a drummer/junk percussionist, bash through the songs, turning the basic rock riffs into mind-warping mantras (often because the guitars were cheap, shitty and out of tune, and playing through equally cheap and shitty amps), but the recordings are extensively manipulated after the fact.

The whole thing begins with Cafritz ranting into the recorder: “Hello, I hate your fucking guts. Fuck you, I hate your fucking guts. I hate your fucking guts. I hate your fucking guts. I hate this fucking machine. I don’t know how the fuck to use it. I hate your fucking guts. I’m gonna make my own fucking music.” The first song, “Rocks Off,” begins, and you can immediately tell that Spencer and Hagerty — who are singing the vocals as one, in rough harmony, over an energetic beat from Bert — are making a serious effort at playing the song, while Cafritz (still barely able to play guitar) adds a one-note line in the middle of the music and Martinez does something similar. But when Cafritz takes the microphone on the second song, a blasting version of “Rip This Joint,” her performance is pure fire-spitting energy, matched by an atonal, clanging solo from (probably) Hagerty.

Every song on the tape is a mix of earnest effort and chaotic subversion. There’s always a steady core (usually Bert’s clattering backbeat and Spencer’s and Hagerty’s guitars), but there’s also always at least one element sliding sideways, whether it’s an unexpected burst of amp noise, a discordant sliding chord, or a rudely shouted vocal interjection. And that’s before we even talk about the post-production work done to the tapes. We hear between-song dialogue (including an enraged Spencer screaming at someone), snippets of the actual Rolling Stones, bursts of static and changing radio stations, and electronic humming from poorly aligned microphones; portions of songs are rewound and played back again; at a few points, the band is singing over the original record… also, the record has a conceptual flow. The first few songs are the most coherent and reverent to the originals, despite possessing a raucous punk energy; by “Shine A Light,” we’re in the realm of almost pure abstraction, a half-heard vocal submerged in electronic drones like something from a Throbbing Gristle live tape, and it ends with a loop of Lou Reed singing the word “Heroin” from The Velvet Underground & Nico. But the closing version of “Soul Survivor” is one of the best and most straightforward performances on the whole thing… until the tape begins to warp and slow down to half speed, looping the last chorus into a doomy groan as whooping, sirenlike sound effects and washes of static and noise take over. Finally, we’re back to Julie Cafritz screaming “I wanna fuck you!” over and over until it all ends with tape slice.

In a 1987 fanzine interview, Spencer said, “The Exile thing, to come right out and say it, is kind of a joke…” He explained the Sonic Youth/Beatles story, then added, “It’s not really a joke, and it’s not the greatest thing — parts of it kind of suck — but it’s okay. The cover’s real cool. Rick Hall, Julie’s boyfriend, did that.”

The band released Exile as a limited edition of 550 cassettes; obviously, no label would ever release such a thing. But it was instantly notorious, and raised their profile on the scene substantially. A month later, they recorded Pussy Gold 5000, a five-track EP full of short, sex-charged punk tracks (“Pretty Fuck Look,” “Spin Out,” “Get Out” and a cover of Ty Wagner & the Scotchmen’s “No Count”), plus one weird tangent — “Walk,” a hypnotically tuneless five-minute attempt at psychedelic blues, sung by Hagerty. That came out on the Hoboken-based Buy Our Records label, after which Martinez left the group.

Another guitarist, Kurt Wolf, joined, and Pussy Galore signed with Caroline, who released Right Now!, SugarShit Sharp, Dial ‘M’ For Motherfucker, all of which are masterpieces, and Historia De La Musica Rock, which is not. Cafritz quit halfway through the recording of Dial ‘M’… because Spencer had announced, in the middle of a tour, that it would be their farewell album, and Wolf quit after the 1989 tour. Historia… was recorded by the trio of Spencer, Hagerty, and Bert, and is a pretty enervated album. Spencer went on to form the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Hagerty focused his creative energy on Royal Trux (a band I’ve never connected with), and Bert played in Action Swingers (with Cafritz), the Chrome Cranks, and other bands. Cafritz formed the short-lived trio STP and Free Kitten, a project with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Yoshimi of the Boredoms, and Mark Ibold of Pavement (and later Sonic Youth).

For years, Exile On Main St. was a legendary underground thing. You couldn’t find copies of the original cassette, but half of the tracks showed up on a bootleg LP (which I bought at the record store at CBGBs Gallery, next door to the club) and a couple of other songs were recycled on a 45. Four tracks were ultimately included on the 1992 compilation Corpse Love: The First Year.

But here’s the weird thing. Now, in the streaming era, it’s as accessible as anything else they did. More accessible, even. For years, Pussy Galore’s Caroline releases, never mind their early stuff, weren’t on Spotify or Tidal or Qobuz, presumably due to rights issues… but Exile was. In fact, if you have a Qobuz subscription, you can buy it as downloadable WAV files, and I recommend doing so. It’s a genuinely brilliant artistic gesture, and for much of its hour-long running time, it fucking rocks.

[Disclosure: When I was a magazine editor in the early 2000s, I published three articles by Goad.]

When he first emerged in the 1990s, there was more to him than that. There was always an ugly side to his work (N.B. I have never read Answer Me!, the four-issue zine he published with his then-wife Debbie), but he sometimes asked questions that were worth asking. His 1997 book The Redneck Manifesto (subtitled America’s Scapegoats: How We Got That Way And Why We’re Not Going To Take It Anymore) is often crude and overwrought, but there’s a real consciousness at its heart. This is how he began Chapter 5, “Workin’ Hard”:

The working class doesn’t write a lot of history books. The working class doesn’t produce many movies or radio shows. The working class doesn’t tend to hire media consultants or theatrical agents. The working class has played an itty-bitty role in fashioning its popular image.

That’s because the working class was too busy working.

A page or two later, he writes, “If someone were to devise a machine that could measure hatred… I’d bet all my wooden nickels that more hatred exists between bosses and employees than between blacks and whites… Of all the hating I’ve done in my life — and I’ve done my share — ninety-nine percent of it was directed at rich white people, most of them my bosses.” Goad had a keen understanding of class in America, and did his research; there are sections of Redneck Manifesto that can be read alongside any “serious” history of labor you can name. But be warned that even the good stuff is delivered in language that you’re probably gonna hate, so if you decide the digging isn’t worth it, you’ll get no argument from me.

Goad’s life went off the rails in the late ’90s, when he was divorced from Debbie and involved with another woman, Anne Ryan. He was physically abusive toward both, and served two and a half years in prison for assaulting Ryan. When he came out, his writing grew more fevered and self-pitying; his second book was an autobiography called Shit Magnet: One Man’s Miraculous Ability to Absorb the World’s Guilt. No New York publisher would touch it, so it was released by Feral House, a small press run by journalist Adam Parfrey.

Parfrey was a few years older than Goad, and had first come to underground prominence in the late ’80s as the co-founder of Amok Press (related to but not part of Amok Books, an LA-based bookstore and mail-order source for fringe literature). The press released only eight titles, including a novel by Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, Jack Black’s You Can’t Win (I own a later edition from AK Press, but Amok is thanked for bringing the book to light), and Apocalypse Culture, an anthology of writings on subjects ranging from necrophilia to eugenics to extreme body modification. When the company shut down, Parfrey left Los Angeles for Washington state, where he founded Feral House and remained until his death.

Since 1989, Feral House has published hundreds of books on all sorts of subjects related to history, politics, and pop culture. Some of their best-known titles are Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind’s Lords Of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, Rudolph Grey’s Nightmare Of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr., Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight, Steven Blush’s American Hardcore: A Tribal History, and Parfrey and Cletus Nelson’s Citizen Keane: The Big Lies Behind the Big Eyes. All of these inspired, or were adapted into, movies.

Other Feral House titles that I have read and enjoyed over the years have included Ika Johannesson & Jon Jefferson Klingberg’s Blood Fire Death: The Swedish Metal Story (reviewed here), Michael Tau’s Extreme Music: Silence to Noise and Everything In Between (reviewed here), Mel Gordon’s Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, It’s A Man’s World: Men’s Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps (edited by Parfrey, and reviewed here), and Timothy Wyllie’s Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment (discussed here).

Parfrey died in 2018, but Feral House continues under the guidance of Christina Ward. This summer, they published Apocalypse Omnibus: The Adam Parfrey Reader, a thick collection of his journalism, quotes from interviews (blended together into one mega-interview; it’s a good idea that works pretty well), scans of letters Parfrey received from people like Charles Manson, Ted Kaczynski, and John Wayne Gacy, posts from a blog on the Feral House website, and more. (Buy it from Amazon.)

The book is very much a mixed bag. Some of the more traditionally journalistic pieces, including several investigative/immersive features on fringe religious organizations originally published in the San Diego Reader in the early ’90s and later reprinted in Parfrey’s book Cult Rapture, are fascinating and well-crafted. Others, like a story on a physically handicapped couple who formed a small sex-positive group, exhibit a sneering cruelty that’s more than a little off-putting.

There’s an interesting kind of revisionism at work in Apocalypse Omnibus, especially in the section Fascists, White Supremacists, And Their Friends. It includes an interview with a skinhead, an article on SWAT police, a long story about “soldier of fortune” and right-wing activist Bo Gritz, as well as the introduction Parfrey wrote to the Goebbels novel mentioned above. But perusing this section of the book (which is one-fifth as long as the collection of excerpts from his grumpy, misanthropic “HelL.A.” newspaper columns) will not tell you anything about, for example, Parfrey’s decades of friendship and collaboration with fascist artists Boyd Rice and Michael Moynihan, nor about his correspondence with neo-Nazi writer James Mason.

In the introduction to his book Rants And Incendiary Tracts, Parfrey wrote, “To hold an opinion and dare to express it is the final prerogative of the free man. Announcing an incendiary truth may be the last remaining vestige of human dignity.” In the introduction to this book, Christina Ward writes, “Adam Parfrey understood that the only durable response to challenging ideas is to bring them into the open and examine them without illusion.”

In the same introduction, she provides an explanation of his methods that in 2026 reads to this veteran journalist like ass-covering:

Parfrey did not approach his subjects as a journalist seeking balance or as an academic maintaining distance. He approached them as a collector of evidence, which required access to people and networks that do not open themselves to declared opposition. Access was obtained through building relationships, patience, and, at times, strategic accommodation. He listened without interruption, allowed subjects to speak in their own terms, and, when necessary, reflected their language back to them to gain trust. [emphasis mine]

So when Parfrey espoused personally racist views in letters to James Mason, it was just his way of cultivating a source? What about when he became friends with Holocaust denier Keith Stimely, or when he, Rice, Moynihan, and Nikolas Schreck formed the Abraxas Foundation? Same deal, I guess. You never know when relationships will yield a good story, right? It’s just kinda funny that he never wrote about, say, the Black Hebrew Israelites for Cult Rapture. I guess it might have been too difficult for him to reflect their language back to them to gain trust.

People under 50 have no idea what “the underground” was like in the 1980s and even the 1990s. The amount of misogyny, homophobia, and racism that passed under the aegis of “fearless investigation of humanity’s dark side” would, in 2026, send most people screaming out of the room. Apocalypse Omnibus is a time capsule from that era. The sneering, “look at these freaks” attitude of the cult section; the “isn’t this fascinating?” ingenuousness of the profiles of Nazis; the bilious, eye-bulging hatred in a piece on confrontational feminist and anti-porn crusader Andrea Dworkin: it’s all very familiar to me. Even the prose, overheated and wrathful, is very, very ’80s; you could put these pieces right next to anything from back then by Steve Albini (who regretted, and apologized for, his edgelord years before his death) or Lydia Lunch (who never apologizes for anything).

A lot of people, in the old days, would claim that it was OK to use racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist language because they didn’t actually hold those views and didn’t know anybody who did, so it was understood in their circles to be all in good fun. Or they’d argue that when you were exploring the dark side of American culture, you had to expect to get a little bit on you. I don’t know what Adam Parfrey actually believed. His writings are deliberately opaque in that regard. He operates as a mouthpiece for his subjects. Which is fine. But his choice of subjects — the people he thought were worth handing a megaphone to — provide some clues.

I’m glad Feral House exists. Their catalog is wide-ranging, full of valuable and informative books. But the world has no more need of edgelords. The age of material and political comfort that allowed (white) “underground” culture to spend its time being “provocative” has passed. We live in an America governed by a senile criminal and his fascist goons, where cities are subject to military assault and citizens are swept up in racist purges, where women’s rights — not just the right not to have children, but the right to vote — are under direct threat, and trans people are being legislated out of existence. In this America, Adam Parfrey’s work has some historical value, but the attitudes underpinning it are a different story. His decades of playing footsie with neo-Nazis and serial killers, occasionally winking at the reader to let us know it’s all fine, we’re just turning over rocks to watch the bugs scatter, don’t feel so much like a warning (the back cover copy to Apocalypse Omnibus begins, “Adam Parfrey saw it coming”) as like a relic: something you find on a dusty shelf in the garage and ask, Why are we still keeping this around?

I’ve been a fan of the heavy psychedelic rock band Elder for almost a decade; I came on board, like many others, with their fourth album, 2017’s Reflections Of A Floating World. They’re currently based in Berlin, but got their start in Boston, and they have some qualities in common with another band from that city, Isis. Elder frontman Nick DiSalvo’s voice sounds a little like former Isis frontman Aaron Turner’s, at least when the latter is singing rather than roaring, and both groups favor long songs and patient rock-tumbler rhythms. But where Isis plumbed the ocean’s depths, Elder is much more interested in soaring skyward.

Through Zero, their seventh and longest album, was released at the end of May, and it took me a while to get around to it. When I finally did, I was blown away. The songs are quite long; five of the six run between eight and 11 minutes, which makes the six-minute final track, “Blighted Age,” feel like a tacked-on coda, and they combine a bunch of elements, all from the transcendent side of rock. “Capture & Release” has dreamlike AOR-prog synths, a motorik beat that eventually explodes, big anthemic riffs and howled vocals, and I’m sure the lyrics are about big life stuff, in a post-Ronnie James Dio sort of way, but I don’t pay attention to lyrics. I’m mostly interested in the way the music surges and recedes, and surges again, like ocean waves. Elder aren’t unique; there are other bands doing similar work. I would put their albums on the same shelf as Baroness, Kylesa and Mastodon (particularly Mastodon’s more hard-rock-oriented discs like Emperor Of Sand and Once More ’Round The Sun), and I hear a lot of commonalities between Through Zero and Fantasia, the latest album by French cosmic stoner trio Slift. Weirdly, the two records came out only a week apart. (Elder’s is better.)

Psycroptic is another band I’ve been aware of for a long time. The first album of theirs I heard was 2006’s Symbols Of Failure, which was a very good technical death metal record with the same level of complexity and punch as Decapitated’s Nihility or Cryptopsy’s Once Was Not. I stuck with them through their next release, 2008’s (Ob)servant, but they took four years to make another album and I had moved on. I hadn’t thought about them in years until their ninth album, The Pulse Of Annihilation, landed in my inbox. And no, I haven’t listened to any of the albums in between since getting this one, so these are only my thoughts on where Psycroptic are in 2026. The Pulse Of Annihilation is a catchier, more rifftastic album than Symbols Of Failure or (Ob)servant. It’s still very much death metal, but I would recommend it to fans of face-punching, aggro but still hooky (by death metal standards) bands like The Black Dahlia Murder or Misery Index. The vocals are clearer, less gurgling and guttural and more indebted to the furious ranting of modern hardcore. They give you a break every once in a while — “Our Pillars Fall” begins with a long moody passage before the riffs resume — but generally this is a high-energy, cathartically assaultive album.

Clarinetist Sayyod Mirzomurodov and pianist Mariya Akhadjanova have recorded an album of Contemporary Uzbek Music For Clarinet And Piano that’s called exactly that. (Classical artists need to come up with more exciting titles.) It consists of world premiere recordings of pieces by Farrukh Akramov, Mustafo Bafoyev, Anyar Ergashev, Nurali Erkaev, Habibulla Rahimov, and Sherzod Sobirov, none of whom I’ve ever heard of. (Mirzomurodov emailed me this album, and I was intrigued enough to give it a listen.) The instrumentation places a lot of limitations on the composers, so these are pieces that feature strong up-front melodies played on clarinet, with mostly delicate, romantic countermelodies from the piano. The other option would be heavy, clanging chords beneath shrill mathematical exercises from the reed, but I guess — based strictly on this evidence — there’s not a whole lot of atonality and/or dissonance in Uzbek music. Everything here is very pretty, and played with the precision and bright-eyed energy of the studied virtuoso. Four of the nine pieces are by Bafoyev; the other composers get one each. I wish I could hear Bafoyev’s 22-minute Sonata For Clarinet And Orchestra in the fullness of its grandeur, but even as a stripped-down duo piece, it’s quite nice. (The only place I’ve been able to find a physical copy of this album for sale is via the label, Samek Music; they’re based in the UK.)

Can instrumental music have polemical value? Composer Frederic Rzewski certainly thought so, and so does Colorado-based pianist Walton Lott, it seems. He performs Rzewski’s Four Pieces For Piano on his new album Impulses, alongside John Harbison’s Piano Sonata No. 2. In the liner notes, Lott writes, “Rzewski shows us that music can take on an observational role, shaping political topics into forms mimetic to the often inhumane aspects of our society.” I… guess? I don’t know. My favorite example of music being, in Dewey Redman’s phrase, in the ear of the behearer is Charles Mingus’s “Remember Rockefeller At Attica” — a title like that makes you expect roaring, Archie Shepp-esque protest jazz, but the actual piece sounds like the theme to a late night talk show. Anyway, Lott’s performance of Rzewski’s piece is quite beautiful, in an intense way, and the Harbison piece matches its energy quite well, while also feeling more conventionally romantic (whether with a lower- or upper-case R).

I grew up hearing one or two songs on the radio (“Roundabout” on the classic rock station, “Owner of a Lonely Heart” on the top 40 station), but the first full Yes album I heard, in the early 2000s, was the remastered two-CD version of their 1973 triple live victory lap, Yessongs. And while I’ve now heard all their Atlantic albums and most of the ones afterward, and I have a deep love for their golden-era studio recordings (Fragile, Close To The Edge, Tales From Topographic Oceans, Relayer and Going For The One), Yes’s live releases — Yessongs, 1980’s Yesshows, and the 2015 box Progeny: Seven Shows From Seventy-Two — have always been my favorite items in their catalog, because all the precision and shine of the studio work goes out the window and they become an ass-kicking rock band jamming out these songs with breakneck energy and anarchic zeal.

Live At Roosevelt Stadium, Jersey City, NJ July 17, 1976 is exactly what its title claims: a complete concert from 50 years ago by vocalist Jon Anderson, guitarist Steve Howe, keyboardist Patrick Moraz, bassist Chris Squire, and drummer Alan White. The show was broadcast on WNEW-FM (a station I grew up listening to), and has been bootlegged a million times over the years, but this is its first official release. I have no idea what source Rhino used for their version, but the mix is kinda rough, very focused on Anderson’s vocals and Moraz’s synths, and there are some passages of distortion and heavy tape hiss, especially during the version of “The Story Of I,” from Moraz’s solo album of the same name. (The concert also includes an excerpt from Anderson’s solo album Olias Of Sunhillow.) That said, it’s a really enjoyable document of Yes at their wooliest. Nearly two hours long, it includes versions of two of Relayer’s three tracks, “The Gates Of Delirium” and “Sound Chaser,” and a more than 26-minute version of “Ritual (Nous Sommes Du Soleil)” from Tales From Topographic Oceans. Plus, of course, classics like “Siberian Khatru,” “Long Distance Runaround,” “Heart Of The Sunrise” and more. If you’re as big a fan of Yes the ass-kicking rock band as I am, it’s a must-hear. Especially if, like me, you somehow neglected to ever see them while Chris Squire was alive. Get it from Amazon.

I did not go out to see any bands in 2020, 2021 or 2022, and in 2023, I moved to deep northwest Montana, where almost nobody tours. (There have been a couple of interesting jazz shows here — Branford Marsalis’s quartet came through, and Joshua Redman’s group — but I wasn’t able to make it to either one.)

Well, I finally made it back out into the world of live music this past Friday, when I drove just under 100 miles each way to attend Fire In The Mountains, an outdoor heavy music festival held at Red Eagle Campground in East Glacier Park, Montana, on the Blackfeet Reservation.

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Fire In The Mountains is a four-day event that features some genuinely amazing, one-off performances. This year the lineup included exclusive appearances by Neurosis, 16 Horsepower, Borknagar, Full Of Hell, Subrosa, The Ruins Of Beverast, Gallowbraid (making their US live debut), and Abbath, Ice Dale and Armagedda performing their album Between Two Worlds (released as I in 2006), as well as Enslaved, Agalloch, Baroness, Sigh, Old Man Gloom, Yaotl Mictlan, Galvanist (a Montana band I wrote about here) and more.

I couldn’t attend the whole event (I had other stuff going on, and I don’t camp), so I chose to go on Friday because I wanted to see Baroness. I’ve been a fan since their full-length debut, 2007’s Red Album, but had never seen them live. I was also excited to see Yaotl Mictlan, a band from Salt Lake City that plays black metal inspired by Mesoamerican mythology and the Zapatista movement in Mexico.

They were the first band onstage at three in the afternoon, but they drew a sizable crowd. Their eight-song set featured a heavy, pounding tribal beat and indigenous instruments — rattles and flutes — and the guitars were sometimes a fuzzy black metal shriek, but doomy and psychedelic at other times. What sets Fire In The Mountains apart from other metal events was instantly visible in the pit, which was not a crowd of young men banging into and bouncing off each other, at least not entirely. For much of the set it was a circular dance, like a metal powwow, and indeed, before their last song, YM vocalist Tlatecatl said, “Feel free to dance on this next one, fellas,” and people did.

The Native nature of the event is impossible to miss. It’s organized in collaboration with the Firekeeper Alliance, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention and mental health awareness within the Blackfeet community. One of its founders, Charlie Speicher, also teaches at Buffalo Hide Academy, an alternative school in Browning, encouraging the students to express themselves through a love of heavy music.

(After reading that article last year, I sent a package of Burning Ambulance CDs to the students there.)

Firekeeper Alliance had a booth offering a student-created zine and information about their work, and other Native health organizations were also present on site. The entire festival was alcohol-free, and I barely saw or smelled anyone smoking, tobacco or otherwise (Montana has legal weed).

The first day began with traditional dances and ceremony, and bands from Buffalo Hide Academy performed. There were workshops and panel discussions throughout the weekend in addition to the music. There were Native vendors offering food, art, and other things. The women who drove the shuttle buses from downtown East Glacier to the festival grounds and back were Native, and so were many if not most of the other event staff. But perhaps most importantly, there were Native people there to watch the bands and enjoy the festival. And maybe it was because it was held on the reservation, or because heavy music is multi-generational now, but I saw a lot of families with kids, kids playing in the dirt during bands’ sets, kids hanging out in the woods and skipping rocks into the lake, and groups of teenagers walking around. When I went to metal shows in the past (and this may just have been the shows I was going to), my impression was of a bunch of aging (mostly white) dudes gathered to watch other aging dudes play the old songs. This was not that. And even though some people had traveled great distances to be at Fire In The Mountains (I spoke with two guys who’d come — separately — from Australia, and another from London), many others were local, and it reminded me that Montana is less white than people may think.

(A side point: The quantity and variety of tattoos, piercings, etc. I saw were astonishing, and fuels something I’ve been thinking about for several years. I have been witnessing what I can only read as a major societal transformation over the past decade-plus, of which the rise in facial tattoos and back-of-the-hand tattoos are an inescapable signal. See, when I was young, the phrase was, “Don’t get any tattoos where the judge can see them.” Nothing on your face, nothing a long-sleeve shirt won’t hide. But now, face tattoos have been normalized by musicians and their fans, and I keep reading it as a rejection of societal standards fueled, at least in part, by a perceived lack of economic opportunity. How can you say to someone, as you once might have done, “You’ll never get a good job looking like that” when the simple truth is, there are no good jobs to be had? I believe the rise in elaborate tattooing is not just tribal unity but a way of saying, “Fuck it — your [societal] game is rigged, and I’m opting out.”)

The second band I watched was Wayfarer, a group from Colorado. They, too, had black metal at the root of their sound — their first song was a harsh, primitive blast — but added a lot of atmospheric elements drawn from blues and country. Most of their other songs featured steel guitar sounds and proggy keyboards. They premiered a new song — “Hollow Hearts On The Trail To Eden” — which they said had been written with David Eugene Edwards of 16 Horsepower, and announced that they’d have a new album soon, their first since 2023. At the end of their set, they brought a bunch of Blackfeet kids from Buffalo Hide Academy onstage, one of whom shouted, “Suicide is never an option!” and got the crowd to repeat it back.

I had been hoping to see Raven Chacon (a Diné artist from Arizona who won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022) performing in duo with former Sepultura drummer Iggor Cavalera, but their travel to the festival was delayed, and their set was moved to Saturday. So after a meal break, I found a spot to watch Baroness.

Originally from Savannah, Georgia, Baroness have been one of my favorite bands since I first heard them. Their music started out as arty, sludgy psychedelic doom; they were part of a small school of 2000s Southern bands that also included Mastodon, Kylesa, Red Fang and others, but bandleader John Baizley always seemed more interested in soaring than headbanging. Their third album, 2012’s Yellow & Green, should have been their breakthrough to the big time, but instead they were nearly destroyed by a horrifying bus accident that took several years to recover from. By the time their next album, 2015’s Purple, came out, they’d lost two key members. But their current lineup, with lead guitarist Gina Gleason, bassist Nick Jost, and drummer Sebastian Thomson, feels like the best version of the band yet. The two albums they’ve made together, 2019’s Gold & Grey and 2023’s Stone, feature some of their most anthemic songs, and Gleason’s harmony vocals balance Baizley’s gruff roar beautifully.

Their set was extremely bass-heavy; in fact, I had originally been standing toward the back of the crowd, but the bass became so overwhelming that I retreated to a grassy slope and sat down to watch the rest. But the songs were great, and the band was obviously excited to be there. That was a very common sentiment all day long, from artists and attendees alike. A big part of the Fire In The Mountains experience is the sheer natural beauty of the location. Early in the afternoon, I took a walk through the woods, away from the stage, and squatted by the shore of the nearby lake so I could stick my hands in the water. The mountains rose all around us, and the sun was high in the sky until nearly nine PM.

By the time the sun did begin to set, I was ready to embark on the nearly two-hour drive home. I was fried from the sun, and I wasn’t that interested in seeing the headlining acts, Agalloch and 16 Horsepower.

Even that drive to and from the site was beautiful. I have learned that going pretty much anywhere in Montana requires highway driving. In this case, my journey was 15 miles on one highway, 10 miles on a second, and 70 miles on a third, the latter of which took me all the way through Glacier National Park. And when I say “highway,” what I mean is a curving two-lane road on which vehicles are traveling at 70-80 miles an hour, with gigantic mountains covered in 60-foot trees on one side and a steep slope down to a river on the other side. Making the trip in the daytime was fantastic; coming back home in the dark was a little more nerve-wracking, but the site of a gigantic orange moon above the trees was strangely calming.

I’m really glad Fire In The Mountains exists. Its unique qualities (the location, the people behind it, the one-off performances they’re booking) are getting it a lot of attention from the music press, and I hope that’s going to translate into material benefit for the Blackfeet Nation. I hope there will also be a knock-on effect whereby booking agents will realize that there’s an audience for this type of music in this corner of Montana, and get bands to play Kalispell instead of just Missoula or Billings. Will I be back next year? I don’t know; I’m gonna be 55 in December, and the “I’m too old for this shit” feeling is strong within me. But as my first experience with live music in more than six years, it was a hell of a thing.

But then, in the middle of the decade, there was a sudden flurry of activity. First, he received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1994, which allowed him to start his own label, Harmolodic Records, and sign a distribution deal with Verve/Polygram. Under that arrangement, he released Tone Dialing, the first Prime Time album since Virgin Beauty and one that featured a new lineup of the group, including two keyboard players. The following year, Coleman released two albums simultaneously, with a new acoustic band that included a piano player, for the first time since he’d recorded with Paul Bley in 1958.

Sound Museum: Hidden Man and Sound Museum: Three Women, released 30 years ago this month, featured Geri Allen on piano, Charnett Moffett on bass, and Denardo Coleman on drums. Each album contained 14 tracks, 13 of which were versions of the same compositions and one of which was unique (Hidden Man’s exclusive track was a version of the spiritual “What A Friend We Have In Jesus”; Three Women’s was “Don’t You Know By Now”). They even had almost the same running order: the first six tracks and the last two were the same on each disc. Many of the compositions — “What Reason Could I Give,” “European Echoes,” “Mob Job,” “Mothers Of The Veil,” “Home Grown,” “City Living,” “Yesterday, Today And Tomorrow” and “Biosphere” — were ones he had recorded before, in some cases dating back to the early ’60s. The biggest difference between the two albums was that “Don’t You Know By Now,” the exclusive track on Three Women, was an atmospheric, reverb-soaked R&B ballad featuring vocals by Chris Walker and Lauren Kinhan.

That said, each version of the 13 tunes that the two albums have in common is different from its counterpart, often significantly so. To pick one example, the take of “Biosphere” on Hidden Man is a three-minute flurry, with Ornette clearly leading the music, Denardo battering his kit, and Allen and Moffett filling in the middle, while the one on Three Women is more than a minute longer and begins with a bass solo, followed by a solo piano passage, and when Ornette and Denardo come in they’re both playing much more lightly and airily.

Geri Allen’s approach to the music varies more from track to track than anyone else’s. The two versions of “City Living” are particular standouts to me. They’re both fast, high-intensity pieces with Denardo all over the kit, but as always, there are differences. On Hidden Man, Moffett briefly picks up the bow in a passage that sounds touched by post-production, while on Three Women, the rhythm is a little less intense, with an almost Latin feel. But Allen’s playing on both tracks is what draws my ear. The way she sweeps across the keyboard, then pounds a two- or three-note figure over and over again, then launches another full-spectrum assault, is like an overt homage to Cecil Taylor. It’s a more extreme version of what she did on “Vertical Flowing,” a duo with Ornette that she recorded for her 1997 Blue Note album Eyes… In The Back Of Your Head:

(Taylor and Coleman were friends for decades, and even rehearsed together at one point in the 1980s, but never recorded or performed together, so these Geri Allen sessions are the closest we’ll ever get to knowing what that might have sounded like.)

The two versions of “P.P. (Picolo Pesos)” are another example of the stark variations the quartet was able to ring on the same tune. The Hidden Man take is a speedy, typically Ornette-ish piece with a vamping sax line and a hard-swinging rhythm; Allen’s piano mostly offers trills as the bass and drums jump off. The Three Women version, though, foregrounds the piano and the whole thing has a jumpy, high-energy, almost Caribbean feel that I love.

Allen told Ted Panken in a JazzTimes interview, “Playing with Ornette shifted my conception of the piano. The sound was more important than the notes, though technical prowess was important, too. It’s very much like your first try at double dutch — what not to do, how not to reduce what’s there, but contribute something to help propel the music.”

In a later conversation with fellow pianist Renee Rosnes, also for JazzTimes, Allen said, “When I came into the band, it was a well-developed trio without the piano. So it was more about me finding a space in something that was already complete. At least, it felt complete to me. So he would give me this music and I would hear how he would play. I would hear the velocity and the virtuosity in the approach and the fact that everyone was playing to their full capacity — going for it. So I learned from the combination of hearing him describe the kinds of things that he liked and the kinds of things that maybe were reducing a moment… him articulating the things that were working or not working for him.”

She added, “To hear Ornette’s sound next to you — the impact of what that is, and the sound in and of itself — just the weight of that really made me want to figure out how you develop that when you play a note as a pianist. We have to find a way to do that. It doesn’t feel like a piano anymore, it doesn’t feel like a particular instrument, it’s something more. I think Ornette was looking for that from me: to find that place where it wasn’t really a piano, or it didn’t matter what the instrument was.”

And indeed, what’s interesting about what Allen does throughout the Sound Museum albums is that she really isn’t playing the role of a “jazz pianist.” That’s partly because Ornette Coleman’s compositions don’t lend themselves to that approach. Chords are often beside the point — he relies on melody and rhythm for his structure, so a pianist could get by with just their right hand and fit in perfectly well. Thus, on these records, Allen often plays chords as rhythmic elements rather than harmonic-structural elements. It’s a James Brown-esque “everything is a drum” approach, though the music is not funk-based.

The production on the Sound Museum albums is also a surprise. Ornette’s saxophone is clean and just slightly augmented with reverb; Allen’s piano sounds beautiful; Moffett’s bass is woody and fully present at all times; and/but Denardo Coleman’s kit sounds absolutely huge, surprisingly dry, and is mixed like he’s playing on a rock record. Taken all together, it sounds like no other jazz album I can think of, but it’s also not weirdly garish like 1987’s In All Languages (a double LP that featured Prime Time and his reunited 1959 quartet playing the same set of pieces) or some of Coleman’s other studio releases.

Now for the bad news. Sound Museum: Hidden Man and Sound Museum: Three Women are not easy to find these days. Coleman’s deal to distribute Harmolodic through Verve yielded four albums of new material — Tone Dialing, these two, and Colors: Live In Leipzig, a duo with pianist Joachim Kühn — and reissues of the Prime Time album Body Meta, In All Languages, and his duo album with bassist Charlie Haden, Soapsuds, Soapsuds. But of all that material, only Colors is currently available on streaming services, and none of it remains in print on CD. So if you want to hear these two excellent records, you’re gonna have to either listen on YouTube, or dig them up on Discogs or eBay. But trust me, you’ll be glad you did.

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I’ve been following viola player Mat Maneri’s work for more than a quarter of a century. I remember seeing him perform with his trio with bassist Ed Schuller and drummer Randy Peterson at Cornelia Street Café in the late ’90s, and listening to him in guitarist Joe Morris’s quartet with bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Gerald Cleaver, and in many other contexts. I interviewed him once in the early 2000s, and got to talk to him about playing a duo concert with Cecil Taylor at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. (It was recorded and can be heard on the CD Algonquin.)

More recently, Maneri has been leading a quartet with pianist Lucian Ban, bassist John Hébert, and Peterson on drums. (Maneri and Ban have another project on which they and reeds player John Surman interpret the Transylvanian folk songs composer Béla Bartók collected at the dawn of the 20th century, and which inspired his own work.) The quartet has released three albums on Sunnyside. The first, Dust, was released in 2019; Ash followed in 2023; and Mist was released last month, concluding the trilogy.

Maneri is regarded as an important figure in the subgenre known as “microtonal jazz.” Though none of his own albums are included in this recent survey by Stewart Smith, he’s mentioned in the context of his work with his father, saxophonist Joe Maneri. Personally, I don’t think the m-word is all that important a factor when considering Maneri’s music, and neither does he; in that early-2000s interview I mentioned, he said, “Honestly, the microtonal shit is hardly existent in my jazz. Yeah, I play microtonally, I bend notes, I play out of tune, in tune, but I’m not sitting there measuring note against note… But I’m not really a big fan of people saying ‘microtonal violinist Mat Maneri’ because it has nothing to do with my jazz at all, honestly. It’s like saying ‘microtonalist Ornette Coleman,’ ’cause he was always playing weird notes, out of tune, this or that, but nobody calls him a microtonalist. I don’t believe in that. I just do what I do.”

Dust, released in November 2019, contains nine tracks, seven of which were written by Maneri and two — the opening “Mojave,” and “Two Hymns” — by Ban. One of the pieces, “51 Sorrows,” originally appeared on a late ’90s album of the same name by the trio I mentioned above, and another, “Red Seven,” is kind of a sequel to “Blue Seven,” from that group’s first album, Fever Bed. The music all has a hushed, cautious feel, like the players are feeling their way through a darkened room, or learning the song as they go. Maneri’s viola playing is astonishingly captivating; his long wavering lines pull you along with them, and he’s recorded so closely you can hear him breathing, which makes this album extraordinarily intimate when heard on headphones. The most upbeat piece, “Two Hymns,” has a melody that made me think of late-period Radiohead.

Ash, the quartet’s second album, was released in August 2023. The seven compositions — five by Maneri, two by Ban — were organized around a concept/theme of half-remembrance, of things that are so deep in your personal history that they’re part of your DNA. The liner notes tell us, for example, that the melody from “Earth” is derived from something Maneri heard his father Joe play, while “Brahms” is adapted from the composer’s Viola Sonata No. 1, which he heard James Bergin, a student of his father’s, practice in their house. “Moon” is also derived from something he heard Bergin play. And the album’s final track blends three melodies, one of which is a Sicilian lullaby Maneri’s grandfather used to sing to him. Ban’s “Dust to Dust,” meanwhile, is related musically and mood-wise to “Mojave,” from the previous album.

The bass and drums are slightly more active on Ash than on Dust. There’s still no suggestion of a steady beat, but Peterson in particular is doing more, working to keep the energy level up. This brings Maneri’s particular skills into sharp relief. What you realize listening to Ash is that it’s not about his timbre or the specific notes he chooses; it’s about his sense of time. His lines flow across the rest of the music in a way that seems counterintuitive, but never comes off as contrarian. There’s a kind of stillness to his playing that’s like he’s saying, You guys go on without me; I’m just gonna hang out here for a minute. But don’t worry, I’ll catch up. And he does, every time.

The final volume in the trilogy, Mist, came out just a few weeks ago, in late June. It’s more collaborative than its two predecessors — Maneri and Ban divide the writing evenly between them, four compositions each, and the title piece was contributed by the pianist. But there’s no immediate way to tell who wrote what, because a group voice has developed and established itself over the course of the two previous albums, and is unmistakable here. I can say that the music often seems to rise to a crescendo, particularly on “Achlys” and the short “Paul Motian,” which begins with a bass-and-drum passage that’s maybe Hébert’s most emphatic statement of the entire series. Maneri isn’t playing faster on Mist, but he does seem to be playing more notes, if that makes sense. Occasionally, he’ll end a line with a short burbling phrase in a kind of call-and-response with himself that’s obviously part of jazz language — it’s something a tenor saxophonist would typically do. There’s also more of a blues feel to Ban’s playing at times, though the rhythm section hasn’t changed their approach; time is always both implied and subverted. They require the listener to internalize a pulse, almost by osmosis. But by three albums in, if you’ve been listening carefully, you’re arguably the fifth member of the group and can do your part.

It’s not unusual for groups to stick around long enough, with the same members, to develop a collective voice. Saxophonist JD Allen’s trio with bassist Gregg August and drummer Rudy Royston made six albums between 2008 and 2015 that were different — one was mostly a suite, another a collection of pieces so short they were almost punk jazz — but unmistakably the sound of three people becoming one. Or think of the Miles Davis quintet of 1965-68, and how quickly and alchemically they became who and what they were, even while E.S.P. and Nefertiti were very different albums. But it’s more common in rock and metal than jazz. AC/DC, Motörhead, Rush, and ZZ Top all had the same lineups for decades, and while each album was slightly different from the one before (yes, even AC/DC), there were strong enough aesthetic through-lines that you could press Play on a new one with a few basic expectations, have those met, and enjoy the small surprises that much more.

Dust, Ash, and Mist are all quite consciously one body of work, a little more than two and a half hours of music, recorded in different studios over the course of seven years but conceptually and methodologically unified. In a way, these three albums can be compared to Bartók’s six string quartets, written over the course of 30 years but, when recorded/performed together (I recommend the Takács Quartet versions, from 1996), all one thing, a coherent world of sound. Approach them in that spirit.

Astriferous are a death metal band from Costa Rica. They debuted in 2019 with a four-track demo, Raise High The Scepter Of Indulgence, following that up with the 2020 EP The Lower Levels Of Sentience and finally making their full-length debut on 2023’s Pulsations From The Black Orb. Their core sound was in place from the beginning; the demo kicked off with an eerie synth intro straight out of late ’80s/early ’90s death metal, and the riffs were a mix of downtuned chugging and dissonant squeals. The vocals were Rottweiler-esque, guttural to the point of incomprehensibility, and slathered in reverb.

On their first couple of formal releases, all of which have come via the London-based Me Saco Un Ojo label, they’ve cleaned up their music slightly, getting a little more punishing each time out. The mix on Pulsations From The Black Orb was loud and clear, allowing José Pablo Phillips’ bass to break through Federico Gutiérrez and Felipe Tencio’s storm of guitars and keeping the drums thunderous instead of typewriter-y. José María Arrea is not a subtle drummer, but his big rolls and almost hostile approach to the cymbals give the music a lot of energy. A weak drummer can make a death metal band sound like it’s hovering in place; Arrea keeps the train speeding down the tracks. And the vocals — from Tencio and Phillips — developed a flames-belched-in-your-face feel in the vein of Deicide or Ringworm (whose vocalist is literally named James “Human Furnace” Bullock).

The second Astriferous full-length, Atavistic Unraveling, came out last month. On first listen, it feels like a retreat from the occasionally almost prog-death creativity of Pulsations. The songs are a little more straightforward and pummeling, and the mix is thick and constricting. But as it goes on, subtleties reveal themselves, like the keyboards nestled within “The Floating Catacombs” and the repeated tempo changes in “Proto Embryo (The Third Tribulation).” They’ve got a new guitarist — Estaban Sancho has replaced Gutiérrez — and I’m gonna assume he’s the one throwing down all the shreddy solos. I’d be lying if I said I don’t miss the arty flourishes (and prominent bass breaks) of Pulsations, but Atavistic Unraveling is a powerful and confident statement from a band that’s continuing to grow and evolve. And the album’s eight-minute closer, “Resonance Cascade,” is a doomy epic that makes me think of a cross between Immolation’s Diabolical Conquest and Godflesh’s Pure. Astriferous are a band to catch up with, and keep an eye on.

This year is the 30th anniversary of DJ Shadow’s immortal debut album, Endtroducing….., and DJ/producer Akhavelli offers fantastic new work in the Shadow-y spirit on his own debut, Moorthodox Psyence. Where Shadow’s album was a dreamlike voyage through a late-night landscape lit by aurora borealis-esque swirls, Akhavelli’s is harder and heavier. Although it’s technically instrumental, there are voices on every track, drawn from records by screwface MCs and monologuing conspiracy theorists (as in the track above). The drums are huge, and Akhavelli samples psychedelic rock guitars and music from around the globe, giving every track an epic sweep. But there’s a darkness to this music, too. Lyrics are slowed down to a sepulchral crawl, singers groan wordlessly, the beats roll like tanks through the streets. It sounds like an alternate-universe version of Endtroducing….. that was released on WordSound instead of Mo’Wax. And if you’re an aging hip-hop head, it’ll push your nostalgia buttons like someone mashing keys on a sampler.

Michael Cloud Duguay is a Canadian composer, producer and sound artist. Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go is a collection of pieces performed on seven church organs, some of them quite decrepit, in communities around Newfoundland. The album was made using a solar-powered mobile studio and incorporates field recordings from the areas where the organs were located, including spoken monologues from some of the church/organ keepers talking about the old days in thick Newfoundland accents. If you’re expecting something like Áine O’Dwyer’s Music For Church Cleaners or Kali Malone’s The Sacrificial Code here, think again. Duguay is joined in this project by more than a half dozen collaborators, some playing flute, saxophone, or violin and others singing wordlessly. And the recordings are not presented “purely”; there’s plenty of overdubbing. Indeed, the track “Damnable Island” features all seven organs striking the same note, but because of their varying degrees of decrepitude and detuned-ness, it’s not the same note at all. The effect is like a huge wavering chord, with over- and undertones swirling and mingling together until you start staring at your palm, waiting for ants to come crawling out.

Greg Kelley is a trumpet player of the “extended technique”/hiss-and-whistle school; Yoona Kim plays the ajaeng, a zither-like Korean instrument that sounds something like a cello. Distractions For Trumpet & Ajaeng is a collection of five duo pieces on the Relative Pitch label. This is an album that requires headphones. Not because it’s quiet — it’s often very loud — but because the way the stereo field is laid out (Kim on the left, Kelley on the right) is a clue toward deciphering the music. If you were listening to this in mono, through speakers, there would be a great many moments where you would be unsure who was making what noise.

The 15-minute long “Dispute” is the album in microcosm; working very close to the microphone, Kelley creates an extraordinary array of sounds, from relatively clean squiggly passages to thick hisses and pops to a kind of metallic roar that I thought must surely be an overdubbed passage from Kim; it genuinely sounded bowed. Kim’s ajaeng is bowed, and somewhat heavier/lower than the gayageum, another Korean instrument recently brought to avant-garde listeners’ attention by DoYeon Kim (no relation). She creates a range of scrapes and drones, wavering in the air like a mirage, or the sounds a possessed house makes shortly before tearing itself apart.

The Phoenix Trio is a new group featuring saxophonist Mark Turner, bassist Joe Martin, and drummer Marcus Gilmore. Tomorrow Is Today is their debut album, released with funding from Giant Step Arts. Turner has made quite a few albums under Giant Step’s auspices, including 2023’s Live At The Village Vanguard (a counterpart to his ECM studio date Return To The Stars) and 2025’s Reflections On: The Autobiography Of An Ex-Colored Man. He has also appeared on four Giant Step-funded releases by trumpeter Jason Palmer (the two have developed a strong creative bond over the last decade-plus, appearing on almost all of each other’s albums) and Live In Brooklyn, the debut of another collective ensemble, The Fury, with guitarist Lage Lund, bassist Matt Brewer, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. And he, Martin and Gilmore have creative relationships going back decades. The saxophonist and bassist worked with guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel in the early 2000s, and all three of them played on guitarist Gilad Hekselman’s Hearts Wide Open and This Just In, and on Turner’s 2014 album Lathe Of Heaven.

Tomorrow Is Today offers six new compositions, four by Martin and one each by Turner and Gilmore. They’re straightforward tunes, meditative and gentle, beautifully recorded onstage at Ornithology, a club in Brooklyn. Turner’s always been a somewhat restrained player, but that’s even more true here than ever before. This album reminds me of late-period Joe Henderson; in the late ’80s and 1990s, the saxophonist toured often with trios (I saw him with George Mraz on bass and Al Foster on drums) that allowed him to explore standards and his own well-known tunes in a mellow, dry style, and that’s what the Phoenix Trio are doing here, except they’re not playing “Beatrice” or “Isotope.”