Don’t let zombie music eat your brain.
You might feel confident there’s little danger that aggressively bland tunes will infiltrate your playlists, but a recent piece in “The Honest Broker,” cultural critic Ted Gioia’s consistently perspicacious Substack column, suggests otherwise.
Previewing an upcoming investigative book by journalist Liz Pelly, Gioia detailed Spotify’s strategy for siphoning money away from actual musicians and composers by seeding ambient, classical, electronic, and jazz playlists with thousands of generic tracks by pseudonymous “artists.” A jazz playlist quickly accumulated some four dozen versions of essentially the same piece credited to nonexistent musicians with the auto-generated sounding names such as Trumpet Bumblefig, Bumble Mistywill, Whomping Clover, and Qeazpoor.
“An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s ‘We Are’ —which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year,” Gioia reports, meaning that Spotify can further avoid paying actual artists. With so much good new music available, there’s no reason to consume anonymous dreck. Fight the zombies. Support local artists and check out (and even purchase!) some the most interesting 2024 releases by Bay Area artists.
Here’s our roundup.
“Strange Arts,” Ian Carey Wood Metal & Plastic (Slow & Steady): El Cerrito trumpeter/composer Ian Carey pays tribute to his late father, graphic artist and collage master Philip Carey, with a set of bumptious chamber jazz pieces toggling between long through-composed passages and bursts of improvisation. His writing often features vivid voicings, taking full advantage of his bandmates’ voices with alto saxophonist Kasey Knudsen, bassist Lisa Mezzacappa, drummer Jon Arkin, cellist Jessica Ivry and violinists Alisa Rose and Mia Bella d’Augelli.
“Guinga,” Natalie Cressman & Ian Faquini (GroundUP Records): The third album by the remarkably complete Bay Area duo of trombonist/vocalist Natalie Cressman and guitarist/vocalist Ian Faquini basks in the luxuriant musical world of its single-monikered namesake, one of Brazil’s most eminent songwriters. A mentor to Faquini for the past decade, Guinga performs on five tracks (joining the duo on three songs and Cressman alone on two), and his supremely sophisticated lyricism pervades the project.
“Bridges,” Brian Ho (Cellar Music Group): San Jose organist Brian Ho’s second album “Bridges” finds him keeping company with guitarist Paul Bollenback and drummer Byron “Wookie” Landham, the rhythm section tandem of the late B3 legend Joey DeFrancesco. He’s more than up to the challenge, sounding poised, soulful and confidently in control on a set that revels in the organ combo tradition without getting caught in any particular idiomatic rut.
“Esotérica Tropical,” Maria Jose Montijo (self-released): Known as Majo to friends and Esotérica Tropical on the bandstand, Puerto Rican-reared, East Bay-based shaman, healer, vocalist and harpist Maria Jose Montijo celebrates the natural world, ancestral ties and the sheer intoxicating power of rhythm on her debut album. Blending folkloric instruments (harp and drums) with contemporary production via Luis Maurette, Heidi Lewandowski, and Adam Partridge, Montijo crafts an intoxicating sound laced with Afro-Puerto Rican bomba percussion and incantatory vocals.
“Ghosts On the Water,” Erika Oba (self-released): Featuring her working trio with bassist Christian Bastian and drummer Jeremy Steinkoler, Berkeley pianist Erika Oba’s debut album focuses on spikey original compositions that simmer and surge without ever boiling over. The concluding song, with special guest Roopa Mahadevan’s Carnatic-inflected vocals, ties the evocative project together with a bow of uncanny remembrance.
“The Golem and Other Tales,” Sam Reider and the Human Hands (Human Hands Music): Working in an acoustic realm where jazz, chamber music and bluegrass converge, Oakland-based pianist/accordionist Sam Reider and his all-star combo The Human Hands perform his ingenious work inspired by Isaac Bashevis-Singer’s Jewish folktale “The Golem” with nary a reference to klezmer. Featuring a brilliant cast including violinist Alex Hargreaves, alto saxophonist Eddie Barbash and fiddler and cellist Duncan Wickel, Reider artfully deploys an array of influences, creating an utterly personal cosmopolitan folk mélange.
“It’s Here,” Anne Sajdera (self-released): San Francisco pianist/composer Anne Sajdera’s third album is a gorgeous program of arrangements that display her gift for deploying lustrous harmonies on both original pieces and standards. Opening with a bossa-inflected take on “Stella by Starlight” that references Stevie Wonder’s “Creepin’,” she’s in superlative company with drummer Deszon Claiborne and bassist Gary Brown (and trumpeter Mike Olmos and alto saxophonist Jesse Levit on four of the album’s eight tracks).
“You Can’t Stand Still,” Patrick Wolff (Phenotypic Recordings): San Francisco saxophonist Patrick Wolff’s belated release of this 2018 London session with legendary South African drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo, a longtime force on the European jazz scene, and British pianist Alexander Hawkins is a revelation. Focusing on Wolff’s originals, Bay Area pianist Adam Shulman’s “Sweet Pea (Mingus Dreams of Billy Strayhorn)” and Aboriginal Australian songwriter Ruby Hunter’s “Yarian Mi Tji,” the trio sounds limber and kinetic, ebbing and flowing with conversational intent.
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
Honorable mention
Here are another 10 albums that will keep zombies at bay.
“Kind of Kenny,” Jason Keiser (OA2 Records)
“Original Gadjo,” Hot Club of San Francisco (Hot Club Records)
“Synergy,” Michael O’Neill Sextet (Jazzmo Records)
“Itkuja Suite, Invocations On Lament” Rent Romus & Heikki Koskinen (Edgetone Records)
“Vieja Escuela,” John Santos (Machete Records)
“All Species Parade,” Jenny Scheinman (Royal Potato Family)
“Technicolor Ghost Parade,” SticklerPhonics (Jealous Butcher Records)
“Bay Blue,” Patrick Wolff Quintet (Bop City Music)
“Panoply,” Denny Zeitlin (Sunnyside Records)
“Two Roads,” Dann Zinn (Ridgeway Records)
