My Home Here in DC
(Anthony Pirog and Janel Leppin)
and a World of Guitar Wonders
I have lived in the Washington DC area for 42 years, an area hardly thought of as a hub of creative music. We are next door to Baltimore, which has a scene, and within striking distance of a weekend in New York, which still packs more jazz into one city than any other. But Washington DC is, in fact, cooking. I don’t write often enough about the musicians who live just minutes from my house.
One of the striking releases of the first half of the year was from the trio the Messthetics with saxophonist James Brandon Lewis—the year’s premiere jazz tenor saxophone player with a trio featuring guitarist Anthony Pirog and the Fugazi rhythm section (DC royalty crossing genres), working a vein of music as subtle as jazz and as propulsive as punk. Pirog is one of those musicians who can seemingly do anything even as he disappears inside the band.
Pirog also has a new album from his duo Janel and Anthony with cellist (and wife) Janel Leppin, New Moon in the Evil Age. This two-LP set puts together a series of beautiful and adventurous compositions that are unbounded by category. There is improvising certainly, but they are not “jazz”; the layers of guitar (acoustic picking and strumming, liquid electric single-note lines, distortion or bits of warbling pedal effects) evoke every subgenre of American music you might like from country to rock to folk; the cello conjures classical music of course, but also all manner of impressionistic new music or alt-folk; and there are keyboards, drums, bass lines, and singing that turn this “duo” (supplemented not only by overdubs but also by Devon Hoff on bass and a percussionist) into an indie-pop band.
The album can put you in a mood for contemplation and feeling, that is certain — and the first, instrumental LP works as a travelogue and soundtrack to a movie running in your head as you listen. Standout tracks include the chiming, pulsing “Rhizome” (named for the DC indie venue where the musicians often play) with its arcing cello melody and “Jaimie’s Song”, named for the late trumpeter Jaimie Branch, which moves from delicacy to a steely power as Leppin’s cello is processed like an electric guitar.
The second, vocal disc is even more diverse in range and vibe. “Dreams Come Alive” uses finger-picking and synthesizer to feature and elevate Leppin’s clear-voiced vocal. “Surf the Dead” is a poppy jewel atop a synth drum/bass pattern, with Leppin’s voice bathed in reverb to evoke 1980s pop. The last track, “Find a Way”, is built on a lazy bit of funk that locks together with drums, bass, and all manner of color and harmonized guitars over which Leppin layers her singing in waves of harmony and counterpoint. It is a slinky and joyous end to an enchanting album that defies and exceeds every expectation.
But it doesn’t end there. Leppin and Pirog are also collaborators on Leppin’s Ensemble Volcanic Ash: To March Is to Love, released at the same time as the duo recording. This band is an instrumental sextet that plays gritty, super-smart New Jazz composed by Leppin, with cello and guitar supplemented by two saxophonists (Brian Settles on tenor and Sarah Hughs on alto) plus the outstanding bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Larry Ferguson — all stalwarts of the DC scene. The sound of the band is rubbery and danceable, making it 21st-century jazz that is both “free” and remarkably accessible.
“As Wide as All Outdoors”, for example, opens with an aggressive fanfare and then slips into a funky and simple Stewart bass groove for its anthemic melody — you almost imagine it as an accompaniment to the opening scene of a suspense film. Leppin plays a long and expressive improvisation that ranges across the full range of her instrument. “Union Art” is even funkier, with cello and bass doubling a bass line worthy of James Jamerson, a line so strong that it melds into the march-like main theme. Pirog’s solo on this track is a fiery, wild thing — with bits of John McLaughlin and plenty of Sonny Sharrock blending into overdriven electronics.
In contrast, “Sateatime” is a short, spritely waltz that includes moments of tricky rhythmic syncopation, and “Oh Johnny Dear” puts Hughes’ alto atop a jaunty groove that allows her tone to be airy, dark, and growling in turns. The band has a wide range of gears, from ominous balladry that can move into sustained chaos (“To March is to Love”) or wide open spaces where shivering impressionism is fascinating (“A Man Approached Me”). This album is as wonderful, open-ended, and breathtaking as any I have heard in 2024.
It should be no surprise, then, that Pirog also shows up on The Middle of Everywhere: Guitar Solos, Vol. 1, a compilation album of today’s most riveting solo guitarists. Presented alongside guitarists Kurt Rosenwinkel, Nels Cline, Camila Meza, Miles Okazaki, Henry Kaiser, and others, Pirog offers “Desire Waltz”, a throbbing setting for his gorgeous finger-picked “clean” electric guitar that develops into a mountain of over-driven sound. The album comes from (guitarist) Joel Harrison and his Alternative Guitar Summit organization.
I could write a 2,000-word column on this album alone, but perhaps its biggest joy for me is discovering some musicians I was unaware of, including guitarist Cecil Alexander, whose solo “Genzlinger” is simultaneously daring and gently engaging. Alexander has recently been playing in the band of Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott), and has credits with artists as diverse as Bill Charlap, Luis Perdomo, and Nathan East. His album of duos with vocalist Ari Alexander bears comparison to the 1980s sensation Tuck & Patti, and his 2022 debut album with an organ trio is the kind of mainstream jazz that always sounds fresh — in the post-bop tradition of Grant Green and Jim Hall but with a harmonic approach that is fully aware of guitarists like Pat Metheny, Rosenwinkel, and John Abercrombie. He’s nothing like Pirog, but this music has room for both of them Check it all out.
Finally, The Middle of Everywhere arrived simultaneously with Joel Harrison’s new book, Pity the Genius, A Journey Through American Guitar Music in 33 Tracks. For guitarists and lovers of guitar music, this book is an addictive joy. It surveys a huge range of American music through 33 specific tracks (not albums but single tracks) by a range of guitarists: the famed (Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, and Prince), the legendary (Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Blind Willie Johnson), the unlikely (Joni Mitchell and Hubert Sumlin), and the largely unknown (Arthur Rhames, among others). The chapters on Allan Holdsworth and Danny Gatton are essential, but that’s just my take.
Harrison and his co-authors are in awe of country, blues, rock, jazz, and every stylistic variation among them. (Harrison’s quiet and humble erudition is the book’s center, but it also includes chapters penned by Vernon Reid, Nels Cline, Henry Kaiser, Bill Frisell, Adam Levy, and Elliot Sharp.) In addition to tuning into the specific tracks they write about, you will read a chapter on, say, guitarist Vic Juris and realize that you need to spend a few weeks (or way more time than that) digging into his huge world of creativity. This is the book to launch so much great listening across many boundaries.
Best Albums of the Summer of 2024
CAN’T MISS PICK
Kim Cass – Levs (Pi, June 2024)
Kim Cass has been playing bass on some of the most daring and exciting albums of the last decade, notably in partnership with Matt Mitchell, the pianist on Levs. Mitchell and Cass share a fascination with compositions that harness the undeniable polyrhythmic groove of jazz but also sew together fragments with a collage-like technique associated with New Music. The compositions on Levs are breathtaking in their nuance and precision, which makes the partnership of drummer Tyshawn Sorey equally essential.
The title track is a small masterpiece. Cass builds his tunes around flabbergasting bass lines that morph tempo and time into something that sounds organic if complex. Mitchell plays the patterns with him precisely or other patterns around him, and Sorey provides precise, targeted hits that ground the composition to a series of syncopated funk ideas. Then, as if he were floating a cool mist across the rim of a volcano, Cass brings in Laura Cocks’ flute and Adam Dotson’s euphonium in haunting harmony to nudge this performance into mysticism.
Despite the abundance of tracks here that keep you — sometimes aggressively — on the edge of your seat, Cass also writes with tenderness. “Body” begins with a luscious bass solo cushioned by sensuous chords from the woodwinds. The performance shivers into a bumblebee of pretty synth sounds. “Ripley” is gently lyrical, with Mitchell playing curious filigree around the groove, but the horns are given a set of spectral harmonies that unsettle the lyricism and bring your heart to your throat.
The other element of the band that provides irresistible tension and sonic intrigue is Mitchell’s Prophet-6 synthesizer. Sometimes it rubs up against the bass or flute in parallel lines (“Sea Vine”), other times it provides eerie orchestration (“Minor”), and occasionally it acts as a madcap lead voice (“Fog Face”). “Tentacle” uses the voices beyond the piano trio subtly — as an orchestral spine around which Sorey, Cass, and the piano dance. What makes that track — and all of Levs — so special is how its five or six voices work as a single organism expressing musical ideas that come from a mind and talent we need to hear much more of.
FOUR GREAT ONES (THREE FEATURING MARK TURNER)
Kurt Rosenwinkel – The Next Step Band Live at Small’s 1996 (Heartcore, July 2024)
Kurt Rosenwinkel has occupied an important place among his peers across the last 25 years. He started as one of those Berklee students tapped by Gary Burton (who ran the famous jazz school) to tour with his quartet before Rosenwinkel had even graduated. He played in drummer Paul Motian’s Electric Bebop Band through much of the 1990s — alongside or in rotation with guitarists like Steve Cardenas, Brad Shepik, Wolfgang Muthspeil, and Ben Monder. When Motion wasn’t using Rosenwinkel, he played with guitarist Bill Frisell — that’s what you call amazing company. By the late 1990s, he was developing his own band with Jeff Ballard on drums, bassist Ben Street, and the vital young tenor saxophonist Mark Turner. The band (with keyboardist Scott Kinsey) released The Enemies of Energy on the major label Verve in 2000. But the album that made Rosenwinkel and this band legendary was 2001’s The Next Step. That Verve record hit an ideal balance between a daring, fresh sound and a connection to the audience.
To my ears, Rosenwinkel was doing something with his guitar that Keith Jarrett had done two decades earlier on piano. He had absorbed the languages of several predecessors (Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, Bill Frisell, Allan Holdsworth, and John Scofield — as well as older influences) and advanced a fluid and personal style that incorporated modern harmony and real freedoms but was still singing, appealing, and accessible. To reinforce the comparison to Jarrett, Rosenwinkel developed facility on another instrument (piano) and would sing along with his guitar lines through a lapel mic fed through his amplifier.
The material that would appear on The Next Step was developed in years of live gigs by the band at Small’s, an intimate Greenwich Village jazz club. And now live recordings of sterling quality have been released from 1996, capturing the quartet (along with pianist Brad Mehldau guesting on one tune) in the process of becoming. Five compositions from The Next Step are here — and hardly in embryonic form but fully, resounding alive. Turner was already a formidable artist in 1996, and his playing across this live set is extraordinary. His reputation as a lyrical and brainy creator of counterpoint and melody is proven but supplemented by his capacity for fire. “Alpha Mega” (not on The Next Step) gives Turner a playground to ramble over. The title track (with Rosenwinkel on piano) finds Turner burning and even growling at times, allowing his inner Coltrane to rise over the controlled turmoil of the rhythm section.
Of course, the leader is the highlight. His solo guitar introduction to “A Shifting Design” alternates knotted flurries of single-note lines with harmonies that outline the song before the band kicks in. “Zhivago”, probably the most famous tune from the session, sets up a Rosenwinkel solo that has the momentum of a windstorm, and both the solo guitar introduction and the main theme of “A Life Unfolds” showcase the guitarist’s beautiful control of melody, subtle guitar effects, wordless singing, and orchestration for the small band. With his alternate tunings and riveting writing, Rosenwinkel sounds like no other jazz musician.
If The Next Step is a masterpiece that significantly molded the direction of 21st-century jazz, then it seems only fair to have our breath stolen by a live version of that album from five years earlier, already an eagle cutting through the clouds.
John Escreet – The Epicenter of Your Dreams (Blue Room, June 2024)
Mark Turner is also featured on a new recording by British pianist John Escreet, who has added saxophone to his existing trio, which first recorded two years ago. The result is a modern jazz recording that covers many bases with swift and exciting action. Bassist Eric Revis and drummer Damion Reid have experience in a huge range of music, from free to hip-hop refracted New Jazz to straight-ahead swing, and the leader plays with a chameleon-like facility, moving his compositional ideas all around the board.
The band sounds natural playing spritely, upbeat material like “departure no. 1”, which hops out of your speakers with surging chordal figures reminiscent of Chick Corea. Turner is utterly at home on this track, playing athletic and clean in his pure upper register. Similarly, “call it what it is” leads off the recital with the rhythm section playing a busy figure for bass and left-hand piano while Reid rat-a-tats top to bottom like a modern Tony Williams. Again, Turner solos with fleet ease.
Escreet also improvises with elegant speed. His “call it what it is” solo is brief but wonderful, building with different patterns, intervals, tremolos, and jittery rhythmic syncopations. In fact, on these active, flashy tunes he threatens to be too slickly dazzling — a robo-Chick Corea, you might say. It’s a relief, then, to hear the band on “meltdown”, where Turner lets his tone crack open a bit and the tempo becomes a feeling. The ballad “erato” gives you all of this together: elegant composition, thrilling Damion Reid groove, old-fashioned swing, and a solo from Escreet that takes its time but still shimmers with surprise.
While I appreciate the less flashy pleasures of The Epicenter of Your Dreams, my favorite track is “lifeline”, which leans toward the angular and modern while still gleaming. Escreet’s solo is dramatic and works precisely because of the conversation it creates with his trio. The dose of Don Pullen — knuckle-rolled swirls and speedy, light lines — in his technique is a jolt of electricity. And when Turner solos here, he takes a cooler approach, making this performance ideally balanced.
Nasheet Waits – New York Love Letter (Bitter Sweet) (Giant Step Arts, June 2024) (Giant Step Arts, June 2024)
This refreshing, live recording is yet another quartet date on which saxophonist Mark Turner is a star soloist. Waits is exceptional at opening up space for his fellow musicians with his drums. That sense of openness is accentuated with this quartet because Steve Nelson, a senior practitioner on the vibraphone, is here in place of a pianist or guitarist. The band’s version of Andrew Hill’s “Snake Hip Waltz” is memorable, with every note coming through with clarity. Nelson and Turner state the repetitive, hooky melody but the accompanying bass notes from Rashaan Carter are so clear and choice that they become a melody of their own. Nelson’s vibes improvisation is angular like Monk, and then Turner offers a classic and economical solo that could have come from the horn of Joe Henderson, rich in cool ideas.
The band plays two Coltrane tunes. “Liberia” is given a moody reading for its first three minutes before it tumbles into Afro-Cuban groove and swing that invite Turner to play with great melodic freedom on the stop-start structure. “Central Park West”, a ballad, is a strong opportunity for Nelson’s endearing style, but it is highlighted by a Waits drum solo that plays out in gentle tom rumbles and cymbal color atop clouds of harmony from Carter and Nelson.
For all its lightness, the band is equally good when it burns. “The Hard Way AW” features a tricky little dance step of a melody that sets up a linear bit of swing over which Turner plays with an athletic limberness — he is fast and light and then develops tougher lines that go past any set chord changes. The rhythm section cooks, stutters, puts little hiccups of trouble in his path and eventually the performance melts away into no tempo at all. It is a compressed drama. After a brief vibes solo, the band explodes the tune even further, with Turner going way outside as the rhythm section plays a sloppy groove and sets up Waits’ hippest solo. Best of all? The composition ends as the album’s most romantic ballad. These musicians, you think, can do it all.
Tarbaby – You Think This America (Giant Step Arts, June 2024)
This longstanding trio (Nasheet Waits on drums, bassist Eric Revis, and pianist Orrin Evans) has a new live set on offer, made up of relatively brief performances of originals and diverse covers that suggest the range of passions embraced by the band. Just as the name of the band has several contradictory associations, this band moves in several directions at once. Not many records these days include two Ornette Coleman tunes and an unapologetically romantic take on “Betcha By Golly Wow”, the hit by the Stylistics.
That last track is a sensual success without a lick of improvised melody, and yet no band could sound more open than these guys on “Blues (When It Comes)”, a loose-as-it-gets ramble that moves across tempos but keeps you close all along because the band plays with so much swing even when the melody is elusive. The Coleman tunes are very different. “Dee Dee” is a well-known, puckish theme played by Evans and Revis in octaves, a big game of tag during which someone is always right on the joyous theme. “Come Il Faut” is mostly out of tempo, with a haunting melody developing out of Revis’s bass line and limned by Evans, loosely.
Lots of the music here comes at you with ebullience. “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” is a through-back standard I would not expect from this band, and they play like they are aware they are playing the listener a bit. The interpretation flirts with some old-fashioned corniness, but then it veers off course in hip little ways. David Murray’s song “Mirror of Youth” is an upbeat jaunt-fest with Waits powering every second with happy, Afro-Cuban accents around a feeling of triplets inside a 4/4 groove.
Tarbaby rides the line between being a classic piano trio and being a new-century group of musical tricksters — a productive place to generate magic.