That’s Frank Lacy giving it everything he’s got last night at the Manhattan jazz club Smalls in the West Village. He led a septet of — also seen here — Nicoletta Manzini (saxophone), Felix Moseholm (bass), and Brian Simontacchi (trombone), plus Mike Lee (saxophone), Miki Yamanaka (piano), and Wen-Ting Wu (drums). Wu was a standout, maybe because the show leaned on Lacy’s time with Art Blakey’s band, and Blakey was, himself, a drummer. Moseholm seemed familiar, and only later did I realize he was in a Brad Mehldau trio video (with drummer Jorge Rossy) from October 2024 that I’ve watched on repeat on YouTube. The full video of the septet show is on the club’s website.
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.
▰ There are worse ways to wake up than to news there’s a new track of trademark slacker exotica from Tortoise. Apparently it’s their first new recording in almost a decade. All percolating rhythms and dreamy washes, it almost sounds like they’re auditioning some theme music for an espionage TV series. The most “Tortoise” thing about it may be not so merely how it switches gears at the last moment, but how the contrast let’s you hear the gears grind.
▰ I’m sure I’ve heard, and even seen, the guitarist Simon Farintosh (whom I’ve interviewed about his Aphex Twin transcriptions), play electric — rather than acoustic or, more frequently, classical — guitar, but I don’t recall having done so. Here he performs “Sycamore Trees,” from the score to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The thing about musicians who do a lot of work in the realm of covers and transcriptions is how those pieces of music then, in turn, become their set of repertoire. Thus it’s interesting to think of Badalamenti alongside Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada and the other musicians whom Farintosh has explored.
▰ Listening to the band Earth, you may hear things you’ve heard before, from the rousing bravado of Social Distortion to the fuzzed-out roots rock of Neil Young to the drone metal of Sunn O))), but those are just flavors, not the real thick of it. Earth is its own special entity, and the key to the sound is the pace, set by drummer Adrienne Davies, half the band, alongside with founder Dylan Carlson, in this iteration. This video has been online for a year, but I only just stumbled on it.
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ It’s a lesser-known Gen X superstition that if you happen to walk by an establishment that’s playing “Come On Eileen” before 10:30am, it’s gonna be a better than average day
▰ Current status: trying to run the battery down on a device so I can then see what chargers it does and doesn’t work with. I unplugged it and had it play MP3 files of Buddha Machine tracks on loop with the screen at the highest brightness level.
▰ A beautiful sunny and warm day translates to the sound of emergency vehicles heading quickly to the ocean at dusk
▰ The concise if ambiguous narrative of a car* with a freshly broken windshield and, dangling from the rearview mirror, a bright blue disabled person parking permit
*not mine
▰ Spent the day in nature, which was beautiful, but being now back in the city, I feel the need to take a walk, not for the exercise so much as to feel re-centered. I think “glimpse graffiti” is my “touch grass.”
▰ Vibe: if The Secret Garden was a first-person shooter
▰ I finished reading my fifth novel of the year, Cory Doctorow’s (very good) Walkaway (2017). And now I wonder: Is its use of the word “enfilthening” an origin point of his later and more popular neologism “enshitification” (2022)? I also read the graphic novel Zatana: Bring Down the House, written by Mariko Tamaki and drawn by Javier Rodriguez.
