Jason P. Woodbury

1 week ago | aquariumdrunkard.com | Jason P. Woodbury

Composers Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer are inveterate collaborators. Compile their past work together and you're staring down a list that includes Bill Frisell, Jack DeJohnette, Pauline Oliveros, DJ Spooky, John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, and more. But something singular and deeply special happens when they work one on one, as they do on the recently released Defiant Life. "We just create," Smith says.

1 week ago | jasonpwoodbury.substack.com | Jason P. Woodbury

Hola and welcome to my new subscribers, many of whom have found this publication via the recommendation of my friend Mitch Horowitz via his Substack . Mitch is, as the late David Lynch noted, “solid gold.” He’s also a Satanist, so I present this week’s newsletter with a cheeky wink and crooked smile sent his way, and yours, too. It’s a talk from my archives: my 2011 Tiny Mix Tapes interview with New Jersey’s Daniel Christopher Smith, leader of the art rock band Danielson.

1 week ago | aquariumdrunkard.com | Jason P. Woodbury

Sam Beste of the Vernon Spring emerged first as Amy Winehouse’s favorite piano player, later taking part in the fusion-jazzy Hejira and assisting in various behind-the-scenes capacities for Matthew Herbert, Floating Points and other jazz-electronic ensembles. Here, in his solo project, all these elements of his past as a musician flit through the mix. Lyrical runs of trebly piano touch on jazz. Note-shifting, syllable stretching vocal phrases send a tendril out towards soul.

1 week ago | aquariumdrunkard.com | Jason P. Woodbury

Do you ever connect with an old friend and find that, despite however many years it's been, you pick up right where you left off, as if no time has passed at all? That’s sort of what happened between today’s guest, Dean Wareham and producer Kramer in the making of Dean’s new album, That’s the Price of Loving Me. You know Dean from his work with Luna and Dean and Britta, his duo with his wife Britta Phillips, but when Kramer and Dean last teamed up, it was for the recording of Dean’s old . . .

1 week ago | aquariumdrunkard.com | Jason P. Woodbury

What began as a DIY operation by two jazz visionaries to release their music became a home for bold young talent, avant-garde masters, experimental eccentrics and middle-aged mavericks. After years of stratospheric Discogs prices and zero streaming presence, the Strata-East label has returned, with an extensive physical and digital reissue campaign.