Music Week (10:1)

A few select reviews from week 1 of month 10 (October).

September in Wichita is usually hot, and this one was hotter for longer than any I can recall. The heat finally broke last week, so the coming of October wasn't such a surprise. But very little of what I imagined doing in September got done, which leads me to the apprehension that October won't be any more fruitful. Take this past week, straddling the two months, for instance. I started the week figuring I should do the minimum effort to close out Loose Tabs, which I finally did on Sept. 30, with 16414 words. As I had, in the meantime, neglected Substack, I figured the least I could do was to write up a short overview, which took two more days. That pushed my cutoff back to Friday evening, this advance synopsis to Saturday, and the full report? Typically, it takes another day, but that depends on how much rewriting I do. And at the moment, I have very little to say.

One reason is that while I wound up listening to quite a lot of music last week (40 albums), I didn't write much about most of them, and struggled to pick out six below. (My original plan was to do 6-8 albums here, but I've often wound up with 9. I think this is the first to settle on six. And two of the A− albums were promoted at the last minute, although they struck me as likely contenders from the first hearing.)

I'll write a bit more about what else I listened to in the full report. But I can note that I sent a ballot in for Brad Luen's 1996 poll. I wasn't keeping annual lists then, but I did have a 1996 list that (judging from the formatting) I constructed around 2005. And being easily tempted to dig up data, I scrounged up an updated list. Both show that my interest in keeping up with new music had given way to a greater focus on finding old music I had missed: the latter has 68 A-listed new albums vs. 91 old music compilations. That's probably typical for me in the 1990s, when I was scouring through music guides to see what I had missed, and through used CD shops to see what I could find. I was successful enough at both that when Michael Tatum offered to publish a column by me, my choice was Recycled Goods. I might also note that earlier, back in 1996 in fact, Robert Christgau asked me to review Rhino's jazz anthologies, in a piece the Village Voice published as Jazz for Dummies. It still offers a fair sense of where I was at as a fledgling jazz fan in 1996, including the now quaint line, "some 900 CDs later, I'm still learning new things." Well over 9000 CDs later, I worry that I've finally entered the phase of just coasting, but this week's old music (only the ultra-obscure Jon Waine below, but a good deal more to come) is mostly still new to me.

Plans for October: try to write up that Israel-genocide essay; add some significant detail to the "Weird" book outline; do the groundwork for the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll, including at least a rough scaffold for his website; sign up for at least one AI tool; clean up some things around the house, including an initial stab at filling up and emptying the recycling kiosk; make a birthday dinner (I'm thinking I'll finally try my hand at Italian, but ingredients are harder to find around here than my recent stabs at Burmese and Indonesian, and I see other problems with selection and staging, so this could get tricky). But the only thing on that list I'm looking forward to is cooking.

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Defcee & Steel Tipped Dove: We Will Be Brief (2026, Fused Arrow): Chicago rapper Adam Levin, several albums since 2018, with producer Joseph Fusaro. Brief indeed: 12 songs, 28:24. But packed with ideas, quips, and deft beats. A−
[Bandcamp]

Branford Marsalis and Dianne Reeves: Dedicated to You (2026, Blue Note): Presented as a John Coltrane tribute, the idea is to have Reeves sing the six songs from 1963's ballad album, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, backed by the saxophonist and his quartet: Joey Calderazzo (piano), Eric Revis (bass), and Justin Faulkner (drums), who add instrumentals, three as bonus tracks. The Coltrane/Hartman album has long struck me as one that should be great but isn't — although Coltrane's Ballads, from the same year, is so sublime you have to blame Hartman. Reeves is a superb singer, but that doesn't seem to help much here. Most modern saxophonists are indebted to Coltrane, and few more so than Marsalis. But why aim for his most anodyne gestures? B+(*)

Houston Person: From the Heart (2026, Arbors): Mainstream tenor saxophonist, started with Prestige in 1966, where he also did A&R, continuing with Joe Fields through the Muse and HighNote labels, so it's a surprise to see him show up on a different label (especially one that's been relatively quiet of late). With Eddie Allen (trumpet), John Di Martino (piano), James Chirillo (guitar), Sean Smith (bass), Vincent Ector (drums). Standards, nicely done, easy. B+(***)

Polyfillas: An Assortment of Punk Originals (2026, Dangerous): Punk band from Sunderland, in far northeast England (just southeast of Newcastle), principally Ava and Jamie Dangerous. First album, an EP (whence "Rude Boys of England") and several singles. Title suggests a formal exercise, more a love letter to history than the upswell of primal rage that drove punk in the 1970s. But now I'm old enough I not only don't mind, I applaud. A−
[Bandcamp]

Cameron Brown and Dannie's Calypso: Remembrance (2011 [2026], Sunnyside): Bassist, b. 1945 in Detroit, first albums in his Discogs list were: Massimo Urbani, Beaver Harris, and George Adams/Don Pullen Quartet; although his first side credits were with George Russell, and one quickly notices Archie Shepp, Mal Waldron, Dewey Redman, Dannie Richmond, and Sheila Jordan. The band name here is a tribute to Richmond, and song titles name Russell, Jordan, and Don Cherry, and the songs include material by Richmond, Redman, Cherry, and Jobim. Quintet: Lisa Parrott (alto/soprano/baritone sax), Jason Rigby (tenor/soprano sax), Russ Johnson (trumpet), and Tony Jefferson (drums). That roster suggests serious postbop, but the reality is raucous freebop, with a nod toward calypso. A−
[Bandcamp]

Jon Waine: Second Skin (1975-1983) (1975-83 [2026], Corbett vs. Dempsey): New Jersey experimental/post-punk band, principally Brian McCormack (guitar) and William Pope (vocals, aka Pope.L, who "went on to have an illustrious career as a conceptual visual artist"). They produced one single in 1982 (per Discogs, "Do the Tic/Boogie Down the Congo," now "impossibly rare"). This gathers up 30 recordings, putting the more mature 1980-83 material on the first CD, with home recordings from 1975-81 filling out a second CD. Interesting sound here, some novel kind of fractured no wave funk, the closest analogue Pere Ubu (with nothing quite like David Thomas or Peter Laughner). This could have been edited down, but history is inevitably messy. B+(***)
[Bandcamp]