Grachan Moncur III, New Africa (side A)

As American experimental jazz musicians landed in Europe in the late-60s, their music often grew brash and abstract.  Grachan Moncur III's late-60s albums went in a different direction, as they feel friendlier than his mid-60s US releases.  Where Evolution and Some Other Stuff were often slow and abstract, New Africa's free-spirited energy is more engaging approachable.  Archie Shepp and Roscoe Mitchell avoid abrasive palettes on their saxophones, and Andrew Cyrille's drumming remains fluid and propulsive.  Like Moncur's earlier compositions, the four pieces on 1969's New Africa avoid the head-body structure of jazz standards for a more section based approach that usually begins with Dave Burrell's piano establishing a harmonic content and tempo.  While most pieces involve the players exploring this basic feel, the opening track "New Africa" explores four distinct movements, with changes in tempo and key through the piece.  New Africa never grows as friendly as Moncur's following album, 1970's Aco Dei de Madrugada, with its Brazilian tunes and sidemen. My modern reissue sounds better than the late-60s pressing — the recording quality is simple but competent.  The front photo of Moncur captures his bright outfit, and the remarkable close-up of his face on the back cover captures the energy and vibrancy that he brought this album.

Max Roach featuring Anthony Braxton, Birth and Rebirth (side A)

Max Roach contributed his amazing drumming to albums from seemingly every major jazz figure in the 1950s.  While he continued to record as a leader, his sideman work, and likely his profile, diminished through the 1960s and '70s.  1979's Birth and Rebirth is the first of several prominent collaborations with major avant-garde figures that helped tie Roach's prestige to a younger generation — another collaboration with Braxton, and one with Cecil Taylor, followed soon thereafter.  Birth and Rebirth focuses on Roach, as Braxton seems to purposely maintain a secondary role.  At times, they lock in rhythmically, and at times Braxton's melodic voice comes to the fore.  But most of the time, the star here is clearly Roach.  The drumming borrows from his roots in bop, and it reflects amazing technical precision, but it also feels incredibly contemporary.  The seven pieces, which rely heavily if not entirely on improvisation, move in a linear fashion, without reference to head / body traditions.  Braxton draws emphasis to the jarring quality of Roach's precision, without losing the fluidity and groove that more traditionally rhythmic pieces had emphasized on his early recordings.  There's even some amazing pitch-bending on toms that would be more at home on an FMP release than on a recording by such an early influential legend.  The recording is unfortunately a bit too modern, with each drum placed precisely in a wide stereo field, and not enough picture of the kit as a whole played by one person.  The nondescript cover photo and design fail to illustrate the beautiful cross-generational experiment contained within.

Julius Hemphill, Blue Boyé (side C)

Julius Hemphill might be best-remembered for his work with the World Saxophone Quartet, or perhaps for his classic 1972 LP Dogon A.D.  On 1977's ambitious double-album Blue Boyé, Hemphill plays everything: saxophones, flute, and even a bit of clapping.  Some tracks feature a sole instrumental voice, but most rely on layered overdubs.  A sax melody might sit on a bed of flutes, or multiple saxophones might create contrapuntal interplay which must have been challenging to create using overdubs and not live interaction.  At times, Hemphill's saxophone borrows a bit from Coltrane's propulsive lines, and at others, he creates a harmonic field less referential of jazz traditions.  There are occasional forays into texture and extended technique, but they're used more for punctuation and emphasis than as core elements of the compositions.  Each side contains two long pieces, with each piece maintaining a consistent palette and approach.  Any overdubs that are used to create a piece are kept consistent — while they often drop out and return, they're neither replaced with different instruments nor piled on in layers.  Some instruments are surrounded by room reverb, while others are dry, but it can be hard to tell whether this variety was intentional or coincidental.  The compositions extend for long enough to emphasize their processes and create a lasting environment, to durations that seem to grow less interesting on purpose.  The line drawing and hand written fonts on the cover perfectly capture the music inside, with beauty, simplicity, and slightly chaotic abstraction.

Leroy Jenkins, Mixed Quintet (side A)

The breadth of Leroy Jenkins's violin playing was already obvious as early as Anthony Braxton's 1968 debut Three Compositions of New Jazz — Jenkins adds rapid runs to Braxton's spirited compositions and slower, airier lines to Leo Smith's piece "The Bell".  Jenkins's dexterity and skill grew ever more impressive in both areas, with both increasingly frenetic rhythmic moments and more lyrically complex and beautiful melodic lines growing evident on albums like 1977's Solo Concert.  On 1983's Mixed Quintet, Jenkins focused solely on the quietest, most introspective parts of his playing, and built a drummerless ensemble around them.  The title of the piece filling side A, "Shapes, Textures, Rhythms, Moods of Sound" nicely describes Jenkins's approach here — texture and mood are definitely central elements to his thinking, though I hear more melody and less rhythm than the title might indicate.  Lines (and some extended technique scrapes) from the clarinets, flute, and horn float past each other in space, frequently with some sense of key, but never emphasizing harmony.  The sidemen tend to play simpler lines, while Jenkins develops his more jagged tonal ideas alongside them — while he's not exactly assuming the role of front-man, and he's even panned all the way to the far side, he definitely contributes the richest and most developed lines to the field of sound.  While the piece filling side B is similar in style, it has a much less evocative title, "Quintet #3".  For a brief moment on side A, Jenkins speaks up — while it's nice as a personal touch to feel a bit of his personality, his speech adds little to the structure of the piece.  The recording is a bit bright and modern and sterile, relative to the rich personality of the piece.  The children's drawings bring personality to the cover, even as they don't easily reconcile with either Jenkins's methodical approach to the music or the careful photography and design that surround them.

Hüsker Dü, New Day Rising (side A)

While Hüsker Dü are widely admired for their impact on young rock fans, their albums can also attract negative attention.  While Spot's mixes of their classic albums translate impressively well across stereo systems, they sound a bit dated today.  On 1985's New Day Rising, the drums, in particular, sound a bit disembodied, without the fullness that's common and popular in contemporary mixes.  Offsetting the drum sounds are some really impressive guitar textures that fill the field with both thickness and energy — it can often be hard to tell how this massive roar was created or captured.  These big guitar sounds nicely complement Bob Mould's guitar playing, as its precision and energy is always preserved through the din.  The songwriting of Mould's songs fits nicely with this mix and arrangement approach, but Grant Hart's simpler pop songs sometimes feel oddly juxtaposed.  Hart's anthemic choruses want to stand out from the drone that's in the foreground here.  I was also surprised how much of the angst and energy is drawn from Mould's guitar — it makes sense to feature the guitar in the foreground, as these performances give Hüsker Dü their passionate impact.  While the cover design has little clear relationship with the music, its distinctive and iconic nature fits the band's personality well.

Kemialliset Ystävåt, Alkuhärkä (side A)

Finland's Kemialliset Ystavat, which consists of Jan Anderzén and a rotating cast of frequently unspecified collaborators, fits loosely into the folk-psych idiom that was prevalent in the early 2000's.  By the time of 2004's Alkuhärkä (reissued on vinyl in 2007), Anderzén had developed a recognizably mature style.  The collection of short tracks, often driven by looping pulses of primitive percussion, might owe a debt to Moondog's Prestige albums.  The palette of sounds, which engulfs traditional acoustic instruments in radically synthetic environs, each for the duration of a distinct, short sketch, seems like a descendent of the Tower Recordings' most abstract explorations on Furniture Music for Evening Shuttles.  Where both of these referents are obstinately lo-fi (the Moondog out of necessity, and Tower Recordings more intentionally), Kemialliset Ystävät do not immerse themselves in this lo-fi approach.  While sounds are often unrecognizable, with their source obfuscated as the song's arrangement is built, this result is rarely accomplished by murkiness and blurriness — many sounds seem clear, even as it's hard to identify their origin.  The individual tracks rarely evolve through a compositional arc, but Aderzén exploits their short duration to immediately jump to a different set of sounds and ideas for the next sketch.  Alkuhärä comes beautifully packaged, with a bright image on a semi-gloss cover, but the repeating patterns on the printed inner sleeve more closely tie to the consistent use of repetition in the music's structure.

X, Los Angeles (side A)

For an obviously canonical album, Los Angeles has a lot of unusual qualities and quirks.  Albums often ease their way in, but Los Angeles starts with one of its most aggressive tunes — while there's a bit of a let-down, the sequencing still manages to be a strength.  John Doe is one of the group's focal members as the male voice, but his bass gets mostly lost in the mix.  The lowest frequencies are filled by the kick drum, and his bass ends up fighting with the lower guitar frequencies.  It's hard to tell if this was on purpose because of weak playing, as the bass is just too hard to hear.  The guitar playing and drumming are both really consistent for what seems like an inexperienced band — they keep up their intensity and hold together nicely.  Exene's lead vocals are consistently special, and Ray Manzarek's occasional organ solos show a perfectly jagged and jarring side of his playing beyond anything I can recall on a Doors album.  The recording and mix are pretty lo-fi and hollow and unimpressive, but it accentuates the energy of the band as much as it gets in the way.  The grainy, powerful, and iconic cover photo emphasizes and draws attention to the band's impressive energy.

Wyatt / Atzmon / Stephen, For the Ghosts Within' (side C)

2010's For the Ghosts Within' is an unusual Robert Wyatt album, even within his already-diverse catalog.  Since his early membership in groups like Soft Machine, Wyatt has always taken credit as leader on his albums, where here it's shared with two other musicians, and their input is quite obvious.  In part because of Ros Stephen's arrangements of his Sigamos String Quartet, this might be Wyatt's most consistently pretty album, with less grit than he usually prefers.  And while Wyatt plays bits of percussion and trumpet, he mostly contributes vocals here, and on one song does not perform at all.  There are few Wyatt compositions here, but unlike the diverse content of Nothing Can Stop Us, For Ghosts Within' focuses largely on jazz standards.  Two tunes familiar to Wyatt's fans turn up again, a radically reworked version of his own "Dondestan", now titled "Where Are They Now?", and another surprising reworking of Chic's "At Last I am Free".  The third primary collaborator here is Gilad Atzmon, an Israeli-born clarinetist of Jewish descent, known for his outspoken critiques of Israel.  His playing on Wyatt's pro-Palestine "Dondestan" is a natural fit, though the rap-like vocals that also appear on "Where are They Now?" feel like a less natural fit.  Juxtaposing this track with standars like "What a Wonderful World" and "In a Sentimental Mood" certainly fits Wyatt's fondness for juxtaposing aesthetically jarring choices, and the album manages to hold the content together nicely.  The production style is generally very modern, with compression used to bring the acoustic instruments perceptibly forward, though occasional, stylized hints to more classic sounds peek through.  The three-sided double album is packaged in two layers of impressively thick, matte paper.

Pete Swanson & Rene Hl., Waiting for the Ladies split LP (side A)

Pete Swanson and Rene Hell released this split LP, with each artist filling a side, in 2010, though I have a later pressing from 2012 — from what I can tell they preserved the original packaging design of Waiting for the Ladies.  2010 marks a transitional point for Swanson, who fills side A with one continuous piece.  Yellow Swans had ended in 2008, but his more overtly dance-oriented style had not taken hold.  His piece "Self Help" begins with a noisy and dense section including buried vocals that would fit on a Yellow Swans album.  The piece takes a sharp turn somewhere before its mid-point, and becomes a lot sparser.  The modular analog synthesizer origins of the sounds grow more obvious, as the piece now uses a less dense and less distorted palette.  At times, the sounds have propulsive and rhythmic qualities that hint at the direction Swanson would explore.  Rene Hell's work on side B is split between three tracks that all utilize a similar concept and palette.  There's no clear evolution within or between the pieces.  The analog oscillator tones here are almost pretty, though a rough signal path along the way introduces a tiny bit of harshness.  There are also often sputtering clicking rhythms that move against the tones, creating an odd electronic polyrhyhtm.  The smeary cover image is printed on nice reverse-stock paper, with some digital design elements that don't neatly mesh with the retro-analog content of the music.