Friday roundup
Microtonal Jazz for Bandcamp, David Torn for We Jazz, The Wire...
My guide to the current wave of microtonal jazz (and those who paved the way) for Bandcamp Daily has just dropped. I love the alternately sharp and woozy effects composer-performers like Anna Webber, Amir ElSaffar, Alec Goldfarb, Steve Lehman and others are creating through the use of alternate and hybrid tunings. You’ve got everything from chamber jazz and wiggly fusion to big band and maqam in here. Dive in! I’ve written quite a bit on this scene/movement. Check out this roundup for The Quietus (subscribers only) and my interview with Anna Webber from the spring 2026 issue of We Jazz.
For the current issue of The Wire, I’ve reviewed new reviewed Christian Lillinger’s latest alongside a batch of albums by Berlin guitarist Olaf Rupp on Palilalia and scatter archive: Rupp Roundup-ah as Mark E Smith almost said.
I’m also on jazz/improv column duties, with new releases from Caroline Davis (sax and wonky electronics, love it!) , Beglian-based Iranian clarinettist Ghazal Faghihi (a great new discovery from Relative Pitch), Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra & Pat Thomas on a Monk tip, cosmic flute & pipe organ from Delphine Joussein & Kit Downes (Sun Ra meets Messiaen), Virginia MacDonald (more mainstream than I’d normally go for, but a confident debut), super heavy & beautiful bass explorations from Henry Fraser, lucid chamber jazz from Micah Thomas, and a spiky wee bastard from Otomo Yoshihide & Kei Matsumaru (fuck yeah!).
Nice to see a bunch of letters responding positively to the “ear opening” tunes I chose for the Guttersnipe Invisible Jukebox (if you’ve not checked their new album Extinction Burst! get on it right away - best rock album of the year, gloriously noisy and mutated sci-fi ecstasy). Who knew that played at a low volume, Carcass and To Live And Shave In LA could have “ a suitably ambient effect”?
Had fun reviewing David Torn’s now I imagine a place not the same for the latest issue of We Jazz. If Sunn 0))) made an album for ECM it might sound a bit like this. The guitarist complements his fuzz worship with a widescreen Americana that had me reaching for various reference points: Neil Young’s peerless Dead Man soundtrack, Ry Cooder’s Paris Texas, Daniel Lanois’ productions for Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris… Also got in a nod to Morbid Angel, which is surely a first for We Jazz. I had 1500 words to play with, so included a footnote on the conversation between jazz and metal. I’ve reproduced it here with a few links. I noted Tyshawn Sorey’s love of Gorguts, but should have mentioned his incredible album Pillars, which is heavy as fuck: totally metal without necessarily sounding like metal. Of course, there will always be more albums than can be mentioned in a small space - feel free to make suggestions in the comments.
Of course, the links between metal and jazz - even ECM style jazz – are well documented. Scratch a metalhead, find a fusioneer. As Jim O’Rourke has pointed out, Eddie Van Halen had clearly been listening to Alan Holdsworth’s pyrotechnics, while any number of ‘80s shredders copped moves from their Mahavishnu and Billy Cobham records. And it goes both ways, from John Zorn and Bill Laswell teaming up with Napalm Death’s Mick Harris in Painkiller, to the likes of Tyshawn Sorey, Wendy Eisenberg and Kate Gentile professing their love for the likes of Gorguts, Portal and Krallice on Hank Shteamer’s illuminating Heavy Metal Bebop podcast. There’s an alter-history of jazz and metal to be traced through Sunn 0)))’s nods to Alice Coltrane and Julian Priester on Monoliths & Dimensions. Priester performed on that avant-doom landmark and his own 1974 ECM album Love, Love suggests an alternative path for jazz fusion, where the emphasis is on texture and collective improvisation over complex structures and lightspeed soloing. Coltrane’s Indian classical drones and Priester’s electro-acoustic drift resonate with Sunn’s glacial minimalism. To this lineage we could also add Bill Dixon’s incredible Son of Sisyphus (Soul Note, 1990), where the trumpeter huffs and growls over gloomy tuba and arco bass: as metal as jazz gets!
My talk on Jazz and Poetry In 1970s Glasgow for JGU Mainz's Reading Scotland series - mentioned in my previous newsletter - is now available to watch at your leisure.
The slides feature beautiful photographs by John Gilmour and music (and poetry) from Tom McGrath, Derek Bailey, Bob Cobbing/David Toop/Paul Burwell, Andy Law Project (feat Allan Tall) and Birth (George Lyle, Nick Weston et al).