This week I previewed a knockout bill on Saturday night at Thalia Hall that’s organized by the folks at International Anthem. As part of the show, powerful quintet Irreversibile Entanglements (with members in NYC, D.C., and Philadelphia) make their Chicago debut, celebrating the physical release of their self-titled album. I’ve previously written about the group’s galvanizing vocalist, inventive poet and sound artist Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), but alto saxophonist and fellow Philadelphian Keir Neuringer is no less riveting on his own. He uses postproduction in fascinating ways—as does one of the other acts playing Saturday, shape-shifting Chicago drummer Makaya McCraven.
This approach is certainly related to what Neuringer and Wright have done, but the results couldn’t be more different. The music on Highly Rare was recorded live with a four-track cassette machine at beloved Bucktown bar Danny’s in November 2016, and as a result it sounds bracingly raw, with a muscular, muddy heft. McCraven then spent four months building the tracks on the record from these tapes: he diced up grooves and horn licks and then reassembled them into funky, hard-hitting jams marked by relentless rhythmic shifts, pounding repetition, and extreme dynamic changes.
Louis Hayes, Serenade for Horace (Blue Note) Del Sol String Quartet, Terry Riley: Dark Queen Mantra (Sono Luminus) DeJohnette/Grenadier/Medeski/Scofield, Hudson (Motema) Tomasz Stanko New York Quartet, December Avenue (ECM) Ambrose Akinmusire, A Rift in Decorum: Live at the Village Vanguard (Blue Note)
