Full playlist on Spotify
Full playlist on Apple Music
Dear reader,
As the spring comes and the world is changing, here are three albums that you won’t regret hearing this month.
Jon Batiste: Beethoven Blues
Seldom do I laugh out loud when listening to music, but I can tell you that I did just that multiple times listening to this album. It can be such a tacky thing to take classical music and make it “jazzy”, but this album was a classy and inspired take on Beethoven’s most iconic works that I’m sure he would have been just as tickled with as I was.
Jon Batiste’s journey has been an incredible one. Growing up in a musical family in New Orleans, he was introduced to music at a very early age, playing drums in the family band, the “Batiste Brothers Band” from age 8 and switching to the piano at age 11. He released his first album Times in New Orleans at age 17 and went on to earn bachelors and masters degrees from the Juilliard School for jazz studies.
From 2005, he performed regularly with his band “Stay Human”, which after a performance on the Colbert Report in 2014, was selected to be the house band for “the Late Show with Stephen Colbert”. The band would serve in that role until 2022.
In 2020, he wrote the score to the film “Soul” which would later win both an Academy and Golden Globe award for best original score. In September 2022, Batiste conducted the premiere of his first full orchestral work, American Symphony at Carnegie Hall.
Hear it on:
BITOI: Sirkulu
I discovered BITOI (which stands for Bass Is The Original Instrument) at a live show last fall. When they announced from the stage that this album would be coming out, I’ve been waiting impatiently for it to come out. It was worth the wait.
The Swedish/Danish group’s lyrics are based on phonetic pronunciations of bird sounds. Bird whistles, vocal cord drumming (have you ever seen that before?) and wind sounds are interwoven into this rich sonic tapestry by the three vocalists (Alexandra Shabo, Anja Tietze Lahrmann and Lise Kroner). The whole colorful ecosystem is undergirded by the one-man orchestra, the understated but omnipresent electric bassist, Cassius Lambert.
Lambert says this about BITOI: “The focus for BITOI is in interweaving the voice and electric bass. And that is mostly because of the differences between them. The voice has always been a part of us and is an instrument that exists everywhere, which makes it the most diverse, used and investigated instrument we have. The electric bass, on the other hand, is an instrument that is very young and is often put in the same context, no matter the genre. My goal and ambition with this project is to merge these two very different entities into one bigger monolith, mixing up the perspectives and roles of what these instruments can and cannot do.”
You can see my review of BITOI’s “Oo” from their debut EP our New Year’s Playlist which I referred to as an “epic elven cave rave”. This album is perhaps a little more collected, but no less vast.
Hear it on:
Matt B. And the London Philharmonic: ALKEBULAN II
In his GRAMMY acceptance speech Matt B. said this: “and to think that this whole things started with a DNA test where I found out I was mostly Nigerian. This album was created as a way of shining a light on Africa and the beautiful culture that we, from the diaspora come from. I hope that this work comes to bridge the gap between Africa and America and from Africans and African Americans.”
This speech finally made the album click for me. It didn’t sound completely African, nor did it sound completely American, and then there was a British orchestra in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. What was this thing? But then it became clear that it is an incredible synthesis of all of these places and the musical traditions they contain – a truly global music album (which was just awarded best Global Music Album at the Grammy’s)
In his own words “the album offers a harmonious fusion between the rhythmic percussion of traditional African music, the soaring emotions of the orchestra, and deep, introspective narration from the art of spoken word. This musical blend takes the listener on an epic and theatrical voyage of sound and soul as Matt B unravels the layers of adversity and perseverance.”
Hear it on:
