New Music Monday: Dutch Hobby Orchestra, Mary Halvorson, Mohini Dey, & IG Recaps!
Stalking Donald Fagen at Tower Records, Psychotherapist Liner Notes and More!
Listening:
Guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson returns with the follow-up to her superb 2022 release Amaryllis with Cloudward, retaining the same sextet but ratcheting up the beauty and complexity of her music. Ms. Halvorson’s solos can summon tears, punch holes through the wall, and make you wonder about the nature of life itself, but overall, she’s very much a team player, and her team delivers. Not every minute of Cloudward is an easy listen, but every moment is rewarding.
An interesting thing about storytelling is that you eventually realize there are a finite number of stories. Sure, there are tangents on themes, creative license, and other enhancements that provide seemingly endless variety, but at the end of the day, we all know Romeo & Juliet when we see it. Similarly, in the music world, you can usually tell that roughly 3/4 of the way through any artist biopic, the bottom falls out due to drugs or embezzlement by manager/spouse/parent, and the remainder is either a redemption story or “where are they now?” docudrama. Or consider the oft-told tale of a group of like-minded, super-talented musicians with aspirations beyond their day jobs of television jingles and incidental music. Conspiring against “the man,” they begin a series of clandestine rehearsals, working diligently on original material and more adventurous arrangements than the coffee and laxative advertisements that bore them to tears (but pay the bills). Still, their efforts fall largely on ambivalent ears, as they spend a couple of years gigging and recording with little income or acclaim to show for it. The jumble of lost tapes never results in an album, and were thought lost forever until liberation from the darkness of obscurity to the light of freedom—now available for all to enjoy. This is an over-simplified (and frankly, not-great retelling compared to the excellent liner notes in the CD package) generalization of how the Dutch Hobby Orchestra (aka Hobby Orkest) came into existence and how this music is now available, courtesy of the Dutch Jazz Archive.
Hank Mobley fans who roll deep with his catalog may be familiar with the Hobby Orkest, who backed Mobley in ‘68 on this excellent archival release from a couple of years back:
Marc Myers has an excellent piece on this Hank Mobley in Holland LP on Jazzwax.
The Dutch Hobby Orchestra’s Our Time is a terrific big band record with a great backstory worth investigating.
The apparent draw might be Mohini Dey’s jaw-dropping bass technique, which is indeed breathtaking. But she transcends technique. Many folks pay homage to Coltrane, play his tunes, and transcribe his solos. Few channel Coltrane as musically and authentically as Mohini Day achieves with her performance here. This might be the most memorable 90 seconds of music you see and hear this week.
Instagram Recaps:
My first exposure to Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders was its presence on the cover of Donald Fagen’s quasi-autobiographical masterpiece, The Nightfly. Like Mr. Fagen, I’d had a fascination with radio disc jockeys, developing a one-way kinship with these sherpas into a more exciting (and accepting) world than the suburban, school, and family life where I felt increasingly like a stranger in a strange land as adolescence took hold. While surrounded by people during the day, I felt less lonely at night, glued to my Zenith clock radio, awaiting the voices from WNEW, WPLJ, and WLIR to drop the needle on the next record that would blow my mind.
Maybe the music wouldn’t make me feel any less like a weirdo, but it was comforting to know that somewhere else where the same radio waves reached, there were other weirdos, too! Though I didn’t know those DJs or what they looked like, they were guides, heroes, and leaders—the voices that pointed the way. I developed a deep respect for their work, spirit, and the art of curation. After all, their subject matter expertise had taught me plenty and turned me on to music that remains the soundtrack of my life. Fagen’s persona on the album photo from The Nightfly perfectly captured the essence of that all-knowing DJ.
I did a double take when I noticed Donald Fagen browsing the Tower Records jazz section early one morning in the mid-1990s. I played it cool but decided to launch a stealth stalking/research/acquisition mission, following him closely enough to see what he bought but not so close to freaking him out. I bought several CDs that day, including a copy of Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders because karma told me to—wouldn’t you?