*I can't stop listening to Peter Brötzmann and Heather Leigh's new Sparrow Nights (out now on the prolific and consistently impressive Austrian label Trost), which I wrote up for Rolling Stone's weekly new-release column (scroll down to near the bottom). So many improv releases are simply recordings of gigs, and those have their place, but as I've written on here before, this music also deserves the proper studio treatment. The Brötzmann/Leigh duo, which I had the pleasure of hearing live in 2017 and which now qualifies as a proper band after several years of consistent performance and live recording, receives that here. I haven't heard, and probably never will hear, every Peter Brötzmann album, but I've heard a whole bunch of them, and for me, this one without question ranks near the top of the pile. Heart-wrenching and achingly desolate music — some kind of spooky ambient blues that sounds like it could go on forever, and maybe has been. It feels like Brötzmann has been waiting decades for a collaborator who could help him zero in on this particular zone of his playing.
Note: for background and context, I highly recommend this 2016 video interview with the duo.
*There is a major new Charles Mingus live box set out. For somewhat obvious reasons (e.g., no jazz artist enjoys Coltrane's level of quasi-religious icon-hood, which only seems to increase with time, a topic explored in depth in Ben Ratliff's masterful Coltrane book), this hasn't been remotely as well-publicized as, say, Coltrane's "Lost Album," but honestly it's probably afforded this listener even greater musical pleasure. My RS review goes into the reasons why.
*Clutch have been one of my favorite bands for going on 25 years. I reviewed their new album a little while back, but I'm glad I was also able to see a show on their current tour, because, as has always been the case, you can never get the full Clutch story from the records. This piece is my heartfelt tribute to a personal fave that I'm happy to say has become a bona fide institution.
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