On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ Part of the fun of the new Jeff Parker ETA IVtet track, “Like Swimwear (part one),” off the forthcoming Happy Today album, is it kinda sounds even more like a Battles track than like one by Tortoise, of which Parker is a member.
▰ I’ve been following trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire for quite a while now, and it’s a slow-burn thrill to hear him in a quintet led by the legendary Herbie Hancock on piano, also featuring Walter Smith III (saxophone, and whom I saw at Smoke in Manhattan a couple years back), Ben Williams (bass), and Mark Merella (percussion). The song, “Footprints,” by Wayne Shorter, is associated with trumpeter Miles Davis, as it appeared on, with Hancock as part of a very different quintet, the 1967 album Miles Smiles. Hancock turns 86 a week from today, on April 12.
▰ João Ricardo, aka OCP, has a new album out, titled POC. It’s lowercase noise, rattly systems ambience and utterly fractured dub techno, spare elements dangling in the digital wind. The embed isn’t working, so check it out on Bandcamp.