Ryan Francesconi & Mirabai Peart, Road to Palios

Ryan Francesconi played a major role in one of the defining folk records of recent years: Joanna Newsom’s epic 2010 triple album Have One On Me. Francesconi provided the complex yet spacious arrangements, as well as playing dextrous guitar; Newsom called him “one of the most awe-inspiring musicians I’ve known.” He released a solo instrumental album, Parables, last year and for its follow-up duets with his partner — and fellow member of Newsom’s band — the Australian violinist Mirabai Peart.

As on Have One On Me, the pair meander away from a verse-chorus-verse format and instead build up longer instrumental sections that swell like hills along a coastline. Using lulling repetition, reminiscent of James Blackshaw, they plough tumbling acoustic passages again and again, creating an obscure but tangible sense of narrative. Their playing isn’t showy, but patterned with exquisite, filigree intricacy.

The album was inspired by a trip to the Greek island of Lesvos, and you can hear influence of Mediterranean and Balkan folk music here. But there are other flavours too: Middle Eastern melancholy, Indian mysticism and Celtic drama. As the pair shift between slow, pensive moments and passages of hoe-down intensity, it sounds like folk music from a place that’s far more mysterious than the picture-postcard album cover suggests.

Roomful of Teeth, Roomful of Teeth

Unless you have already seen and heard Roomful of Teeth live, there is little to prepare you for the effect of this avant-garde a cappella octet from New York. Well, actually, there’s a lot to prepare you — if you’ve heard, say, the chanting of Tibetan Buddhist monks, and Bobby McFerrin’s Circlesong improvisations, and John Cage’s Songbook, and the Swingle Singers — and, let’s say, pygmy yodeling and Meredith Monk — then you’re good to go. Roomful of Teeth creates a richly-textured sound that uses a seemingly endless palette of vocal techniques: overtone chant, rhythmic clicks and buzzes, luminous chords and piercing Balkan-style close harmonies, drones, and spoken word (usually to found texts). In the wrong hands, this kind of thing could be dangerous, but Roomful of Teeth has fallen in with the right crowd.

Released by New Amsterdam Records, which has become a home for the so-called indie-classical movement, the group’s debut release includes new works written specifically for the band by some of that movement’s leading lights, including composers Judd Greenstein, William Brittelle, Sarah Kirkland Snider and indie rocker Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs. With such a distinguished list of guest composers, it might be a little surprising to find that some of the record’s highlights come from the group’s own Caroline Shaw, whose suite of pieces named after Baroque dance forms (Passacaglia, Courante, Allemande and Sarabande) is a tour de force of vocal mischief-making, with collage-style spoken texts woven into a web of singing, semi-singing, and other less easily identified vocal noises. Again, in the wrong hands it would be a mess, but Roomful of Teeth is never less than completely musical, even lyrical.

Snider’s “Orchard” is sensuous and beautiful, and possibly a little darker than it seems at first. Greenstein’s works are the most reliably rhythmic and will appeal to fans of Meredith Monk; this particular Meredith Monk fan thinks “Montmartre” might be the best of the three. And Brittelle’s “Amid the Minotaurs,” on the surface one of the most conventionally-structured pieces here, is a truly subversive piece of anti-pop.

Angel Olsen, Half Way Home

“You won’t always be walking the safest street/ but you can find your way home,” Angel Olsen sings in “Lonely Universe,” from her sophomore album Half Way Home. The album’s seven-and-a-half-minute centerpiece is a poignant, gut-wrenching account of losing a loved one: “Goodbye, sweet Mother Earth/ without you now, I’m a lonely universe,” she laments. But instead of just sulking, she assures others in her position that if they’ve even begun to think about the path back to normal, they’re already halfway there. Throughout these 11 tracks, Olsen attempts to make sense of the journey from lost to found, and she does it gracefully with songs about birth and death, darkness and lightness, and giving and receiving love.

Olsen, who’s spent the last couple years singing alongside Bonnie “Prince” Billy, has a soulful voice that often cracks as it slips into her higher register, setting her somewhere in the same range as ’70s folkie Judee Sill. Her songs are often founded on acoustic fingerpicking and vocals, best in delicate tracks like “Safe in the Womb” and “You Are Song.” But in “The Waiting” she channels jangly ’60s girl groups as she sings, “I need you to be the one who calls,” and it’s easy to imagine the album closer “Tiniest Seed” with a gospel choir singing behind her.

Memory Tapes, Grace/Confusion

Dayve Hawk is the type of artist who frustrates collectors and completists. The one-man synthpop sculptor known as Memory Tapes releases incredible amounts of music, much of it for free online in the form of demos, remixes, vault-clearing collections and even Halloween-inspired mixes. This fluid creative approach also benefits Hawk’s official releases, which tend to sound like well-sequenced mixtapes rather than regular albums. That hasn’t changed with Grace/Confusion, Memory Tapes’ third proper full-length: The album’s six songs effortlessly segue between soft rock, plaintive R&B, prog-funk, proto-synthpop, eerie new wave and even clashing industrial rock.

But Grace/Confusion distinguishes itself in Memory Tapes’ catalog because of its sophisticated arrangements, which deftly merge dense musical ideas and wild mood swings. “Thru The Field,” on which Hawk sounds uncannily like Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes, boasts humming keyboards and abstract crowd noise before adding layers of Depeche Mode-style accents, a flurry of strident guitars and a mournful instrumental coda. And “Sheila” stitches together brief swatches of sound — Fleetwood Mac-esque pastoral folk, debauched disco, lonely solo piano and zippered funk, among others — to create a surprisingly cohesive narrative tinged with increasing amounts of regret and loneliness. In the wrong hands, such complexity would become disjointed chaos — but with Hawk at the helm, Grace/Confusion successfully finds its internal logic.

Ke$ha, Warrior

Is she totally out-of-control, or totally calculated? These are the questions that both define and dog the career of Ke$ha, a pop star so thoroughly of our moment that she seems from a distance more like the virtual manifestation of a marketing campaign than an actual human being. The dance-pop answer to cock rock, the Los Angeles-born, Nashville-raised upstart singer/rapper dwells on themes of partying and self-empowerment — and, especially, partying as self-empowerment — that’s to Ke$ha what blunts are to Snoop Dogg; her lifeblood — if she slipped and cut herself while in burlesque gyration, she’d probably bleed glitter. Having scored seven Top 10 hits and a couple more equally successful cameos in just three years, Kesha Sebert is who she is; what she is not is apologetic.

“I’m sorry but I am just not sorry” is but one of many Ke$ha-isms on parade in Warrior, her second and against-all-odds excellent album. If you’re not favorably disposed to stadium-sized Europop synth riffs and beats, you might not immediately come to the same conclusion: An acoustic guitar opening on “Crazy Kids” and some patches where the drums drop out for a few dubstep diversions only partially disguise the fact that the first six tracks have more or less the same BPMs, same party-like-it’s-the-last-night-of-our-lives desperation, same Auto-tuned choruses alternating with suburban sass-rapped verses, and same swag of her Animal debut and Cannibal EP ramped up one woo-hoo notch higher. As her 100 percent-OTT-in-an-almost-John-Waters-kinda-way video for “Die Young” proves — complete with upside down crosses and Illuminati semiotics — Sebert takes dance-pop cacophony to a new level of blatancy. Complaining that she’s crass is like suggesting that the Ramones should’ve used a fourth chord.

But she nevertheless plays with the formula on Warrior‘s alternately even wilder — and at times actually reflective — second half. “Dirty Love” may become your resistance-is-futile moment with this garish hellcat: She introduces Iggy Pop as if marking the greatest moment of her 25 years, who in turn announces Ke$ha with an eye-rolling awareness of the ridiculousness and perfection of this pairing; the result suggests the White Stripes jamming with glam-rock giants like Slade or Sweet, but with Ke$ha in the Jack White role. Pop’s line about Afghani “rug merchants” sure ain’t PC, but little here is. On the other side of the spectrum, the ballads “Wonderland” and “Love Into the Light” reveal that Sebert devoid of beats, vocal processing, and posturing is essentially Alanis Morrissette.

The four final tracks on Warrior‘s deluxe version continue both the deviations from and further amplification of Ke$ha’s rockin’-in-a-Hefty-bag aesthetics: “Last Goodbye” sails into Mumford & Sons sing-along sea shanty territory, while the final slow jam, “Past Lives,” a Ben Folds co-write and duet with the Flaming Lips, recalls Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” The gem here “Gold Trans Am,” a “We Will Rock You” rhythm-driven, Southern rock-rap track that celebrates Ke$ha’s coochie with what is barely a single entendre. Like several cuts, it’s co-written by, among many others, Ke$ha and her mom.

Warrior ultimately works because the production, courtesy mostly of Europop honchos Dr. Luke, Cirkut, Max Martin and Benny Blanco, is so cheerily pummeling, and the songwriting, courtesy of the aforementioned plus the usual song doctors, is so unrelentingly catchy. Epitomizing all that is so wrong and still so right about 21st-century radio pop, Ke$ha’s own grating party girl presence is like the dissonant note in a jazz chord — the bitter that makes the sugar more delectably sweet.

Carter Tutti Void, Transverse

Recorded in 2011 at the Roundhouse in North London, this is a live collaboration between Throbbing Gristle members Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti and Factory Floor’s Nik Colk Void. Which may not sound like a shoo-in for one of the albums of the year, but overlooking the four semi-improvised tracks that make up Transverse would be to miss one of the most darkly visceral releases of 2012. Carter and Tutti have always made unsettling music, and in Void, they’ve found a kindred spirit, decades their junior, but equally adept at machine-made menace. Carter Tutti Void crackles with energy: pulsing bass, distorted guitars and restless atmospherics sparking off Carter’s propulsive, chasmic beats. It’s not exactly easy listening — it actually sounds like someone is playing a dripping tap on “V1″ — but for anyone interested in exploratory electronic music, this is one of 2012′s key releases.

White Lung, Sorry

White Lung’s pummeling second album, Sorry, isn’t for the faint of heart. “I’m the disease that you’ve already caught,” frontwoman Mish Way spits on “I Rot,” one of 10 punk bursts driven by tension-filled riffs, frantic drum assaults and macabre lyrics. Yet Sorry‘s violent imagery is also deeply poetic — more Plath than Poe — and the album has plenty of melodic moments (unexpected chorus harmonies on “Bag,” lively guitar spikes on “Take The Mirror” and “St. Dad”) to temper the aggression. Urgent and inspiring.

The Gaslamp Killer, Breakthrough

Part of Flying Lotus’s cultish Brainfeeder posse, William Benjamin Bensussen’s debut arrives wreathed in smoke and minus any kind of compass to navigate a way through its quasi-mystical miasma of bass music, psychedelic rock, sampledelia and space funk. Guests including Daedelus, Dimlite and Gonjasufi contribute to its moody panoramas, which are spliced with disorienting jump-cuts and spattered with vocal samples. DJ Shadow is an obvious influence, but live guitar and yiali tambur parts from Amir Yaghmai (of LA duo Jogger) on the emotional “Nissim” see the producer tapping his Turkish heritage to counterpoint the crate-digging cool.

Oneohtrix Point Never, Rifts

Last year’s breakout album Replicas elevated laptop noisemaker Dan Lopatin’s bracing Oneohtrix Point Never project to new heights, but it also revealed a new wrinkle in his sound. Built primarily on layers of finely-minced commercial samples from the ’90s, Replicas‘s bright-yet-perplexing sound was a clear break from OPN’s previous output. Rifts, a three-CD or five-LP set, finally culls three of Lopatin’s early albums, along with two extra discs of material, corralling an oeuvre once scattered across innumerable handmade CDRs, noise cassette splits, and ridiculously-limited LPs.

Evocative from his very first effort, 2007′s Betrayed in the Octagon, “Woe is the Transgression” finds Lopatin conjuring a bleak, forlorn, lead-heavy atmosphere of analog synthscapes. While his sonic forebearers — be they Klaus Schulze or Cluster — often emphasized the utopian and bucolic with their array of synthesizers, Lopatin’s vision is dystopian, paranoid, ashen. Two years on, tracks like the arpeggio-heavy “Computer Vision,” soaring nine-minute “Format & Journey North” and epic 16-minute cosmic journey of “When I Get Back From New York” allow in a bit more light.

With titles like “Transmat Memories” “Laser to Laser” and “Zones Without People” and analog tones, Rifts most readily brings to mind pulpy sci-fi paperbacks of the 1970s, the strange new worlds that OPN details like something arising from a Martian landscape. Lasers and hovercraft drones abound, but there’s always something solemn at work as well. Take the relatively concise three minutes of “Emil Cioran.” Named for the bleak 20th-century Romanian existential philosopher (who once quipped: “Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart”), the hyperdrive effects at the start quickly dissolve into a melancholic melody lying just beneath its jittery haze. Throughout Rifts, a suspension of time can be felt, but that sound of Cioran’s tearing is also audible, as Lopatin remakes and remodels these old kosmische sounds into something new in the 21st century.

Vessel, Order of Noise

The temptation with any new talent operating on the fringes of a genre is to tag and file, but parameters are precisely what young Bristol electronicist Seb Gainsborough seeks to avoid. He lobbed his debut into the minimal techno ballpark, but his mastery of the chilly spaces between beats is matched by an urge to humanize them. Order of Noise is aptly titled — it’s both precise and controlled — but the evocative crackle, clicks and clanging, the hissing and the haunted mechanical sighs are variously soaked in gloomy dub, offset by swathes of seductive synths or made to move with a Teutonic strut. Menace and foreboding are everywhere, but there’s a surprising degree of charm in the deliberately gauche, digitized funk of “Moon Dub.”

Lianne La Havas, Is Your Love Big Enough?

While inspired by the more robust Who Is Jill Scott?, Lianne La Havas’s promising debut Is Your Love Big Enough? ponders dating an older man (fluttering ditty “Age”) and lobs bitter accusations of betrayal (downbeat duet “No Room for Doubt”) over finger-picked, reverb-tinged guitar tinged. Over top, La Havas’s vocals beckon like flickering candlelight.

DIIV, Oshin

In Britain in the early ’90s, the influence of My Bloody Valentine inspired a briefly flickering generation of lank-haired solipsists defined by effects-laden guitars and breathy vocals. DIIV, from Brooklyn two decades later, would have been at home on the same bill as Chapterhouse,
Ride and Slowdive, but Oshin would assuredly have been one of the scene’s better albums. “How Long Have You Known” and “Air Conditioning” are especially pretty confections, and the more upbeat likes of “Wait” nod towards the poppier moments of The Cure and Sisters Of Mercy. A brilliant reimagining of some unlikely inspiration.

Amit Friedman Sextet, Sunrise

Creating his own mix of jazz and Middle Eastern music, saxophonist Amit Friedman offers a debut album of richly-textured tunes full of bombast and beauty. The use of additional percussion and an oudist brings intricacy and detail to the music, but it’s Friedman’s crafting of simple yet vivid melodies that elevates the songs to something very special, a splendid balance between the complex and the catchy. Furthermore, the addition of a string trio lifts songs up to euphoric heights, but amidst all that soaring, Friedman doesn’t forget to let his jazz ensemble swing. This is the kind of majestic album that’ll sweep listeners up out of their seats.

Laurent Coq and Miguel Zenón, Rayuela

Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar’s 1963 classic Rayuela — in English, Hopscotch — is a fragmented tale of a Bohemian adrift on two continents. To underscore his hero’s dislocation and odd thought processes, Cortázar maps a zigzag alternative route through the book for adventurous readers. On their Rayuela, Puerto Rican alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón and French pianist Laurent Coq variously evoke the novel’s playfulness with language, mobile-like structure, transatlantic breadth and fascination with jazz, as well as the bittersweet nature of expatriate life. Ably abetted by instrument switchers Dana Leong on cello and trombone and Dan Weiss on drums and tabla, they make smart, inventive, heartfelt music.

Screaming Females, Ugly

New Brunswick, New Jersey’s Screaming Females have turned out roaring punk album after roaring punk album since 2006, amid booking hundreds of their own shows — some in basements and others in massive club venues warming up for the likes of Ted Leo, the Dead Weather and Garbage. Their Steve Albini-produced fifth LP Ugly is a darker, less melodic affair than its 2010 predecessor, which thrived on a perfect balance of hooky choruses and frontwoman Marissa Paternoster’s masterful guitar acrobatics. Paternoster hasn’t lost any of the full-throated, low-alto howl, best showcased in “Rotten Apple” (“Hell is within me/ Hell’s all around me now,” she snarls), and as she bellows “I want you to tell me to expire” in “Expire.” Ugly is long and it can feel that way, at 14 tracks, almost 54 minutes, but the high points (“Expire,” “Help Me,” the acoustic, string-backed closer “It’s Nice”) are high enough to make it worthwhile.

Jeremy Siskind, Finger-Songwriter

There is a classic intimacy to the piano, sax, vocals of the Jeremy Siskind’s Finger-Songwriter. Siskind’s piano is a mix of elegance and storyteller charm. The slow burn of Nancy Harms’s vocals is an enchantment oftentimes dispelled with a smoldering vulnerability. On sax, Lucas Pino is drifting smoke, and on clarinet, a brooding melancholia. Siskind’s love of literature the inspiration for each album track, he’s created an album of songs about heartbreak, loss, and hope, delivered with a warmth and immediacy that brings the late-night jazz club to the listener.

Julia Holter, Ekstasis

Julia Holter’s quietly ecstatic music is mostly made, like eMusic Selects alum Julianna Barwick, from swirls, wisps and loops of her own voice. But Holter’s music isn’t a chamber of echoes, like Barwick’s, whose music often seems to mist the minute you reach for it. Holter’s voice is firmly grounded in her body, and her viewpoint is similarly earthbound, recording dreamy, but piercing, observations about the world around her. The music sounds like collection of madrigals sung in a stone church, but the mind lurking just beneath the architectural columns of Holter’s compositions is modern; mixing her words in with quotes and scraps from Virginia Woolfe and Frank O’Hara, Holter has created a serenely inscrutable Chinese finger trap.

John Talabot, Fin

John Talabot’s Fin opens with a quiet halo of evocative nighttime sounds — owls, crickets, croaking frogs. It evokes a David Attenborough-narrated nature film, and is definitely not the intro one might expect from a house DJ based in Barcelona, let alone a guy who grabbed so many ears with a song called “Sunshine.” The mist-filled seven-minute song that emerges from this dark bog, called “Depak Ine,” an inscrutable reference to the seizure medication Depakote, gathers force like a nagging doubt, accruing melodic force and rhythmic layering as it goes.

It is the first of the 11 consecutive welcome surprises that comprise Fin, a record that quietly upends whatever narrative expectations you assign to it at every turn. If you heard the first single, the fleetly throbbing “Destiny,” and expected a record full of moody Depeche Mode-aping synth pop, you will hit a big red Stop sign the second the following track, a motionless, melted pool of sound called “El Oeste,” begins. I have listened to it 30 times or more so far this year already, and my memory still hasn’t quite nailed down the track listing’s pretzel logic — always a good sign.

Interview: Michael Formanek

Michael Formanek is one of jazz’s formidable bassists: fast and limber with a full expressive sound, instantly responsive to whatever his fellow improvisers invent on the spot, and able to sing for himself. He’s also a master of fiendishly involved, mutating rhythms, tossed off like they’re no big deal.

You can hear all that in his powerfully resourceful quartet with old ally Tim Berne on alto saxophone, Gerald Cleaver on drums, and the apparently limitless virtuoso Craig Taborn on piano. Their tough and tender fall 2012 release Small Places, with its aural de Chirico colonnades and Escher staircases, is their second for ECM, sequel to 2010′s acclaimed The Rub and Spare Change.

Starting in his teens in the 1970s and into the ’80s Formanek played straight-ahead jazz with the likes of Chet Baker, George Coleman and Freddie Hubbard before he got deep into New York’s downtown scene. He began stepping up as a leader with a pair of frisky/melodic/noisy quintet albums from the early ’90s, followed by two colorful septet dates studded with distinguished peers, among them Dave Douglas, Frank Lacy, Steve Swell, Marty Ehrlich and Marvin “Smitty” Smith.

eMusic’s Kevin Whitehead spoke with Formanek about his recordings as bandleader just before Thanksgiving, at his home outside Baltimore.

When we made this appointment you said something like, “I just had two gigs in a row where I had to play 4/4. Enough of that for awhile.” Isn’t walking the meat of jazz bass playing?

The meat and potatoes. I have nothing against walking bass, but I like it best when it feels like the right thing to do as opposed to the only thing — those Freddie Redd and Matt Wilson gigs were really fun to do. But now, I’m less likely to put myself in situations where I have to do that. The feel and emotion generated is what’s important; when the music wants forward motion and propulsion, there’s always more than one way to get it. Other instruments can carry that 4/4 feeling. Or you can play other kinds of phrases in that situation.

There are plenty of odd meters on Small Places, as on The Rub and Spare Change, but weird time signatures never sound like the whole point. For one thing, your slippery patterns aren’t easy to count out.

I may have gone as far in that direction as I can go, at this point. “Small Places” has one of the most complex rhythm cycles, but all those intricate metrical things, the fast odd subdivisions, relate in my mind to one long beat — a pattern that doesn’t always repeat perfectly. The beat is very precise at some times, less so at others — a very big groove you can relax with a bit, though one 9/32 bar threw rehearsals into chaos.

The layers of rhythm are like different size gears moving at different speeds. “Rising Tensions and Awesome Light” starts in 4/4, then goes to a very slow 5/2, with fast-moving eighth notes over the top. Gerald plays the eighth note rhythm on cymbals, but the real pulse is very slow.

I’ve used that idea a lot on the last few years — literally keeping two, or even three, rhythms going at the same time. In contemporary music, that’s not at all unusual. In jazz, it’s less common. But with improvisers, I like to set certain ideas in motion. It creates drama. Things can come completely unhinged, and then reassemble.

Do you worry about what you can play when you write it?

I don’t write it as if I’m the bass player. But I might dare to write things now I wouldn’t have five years ago. I write a little above what I know I can play.

On “Pong,” there are these leaping unison figures for bass and piano. As the bassist, you really have to nail those intervals to get that cavernous merged-timbre effect.

I like a big sound, and you get it with that doubling of parts. And since Craig can do that and one or two other things at the same time…

Was “Parting Ways” designed to bring out the 19th-century romantic in your piano player?

The thing about Craig is, he really knows all that music. You can prompt him in that direction in subtle ways. “Parting Ways” is the closest I ever came to trying to squeeze emotion into a piece of paper. There’s such a filtration process before the music gets written, but this time I tried to keep that emotional quality at the forefront. Even Tim — there’s a totally improvised moment where he sounds like Mahler.

For all Berne’s gifts as an improviser, he sounds great just playing a tune. He makes difficult lines sing.

He has stretched himself a lot. When we started playing together in the early ’90s, he hadn’t done much as a sideman, but he really opened himself up to that. He brings a lot to the table, and comes away with a lot. His melodic playing has become much more refined and confident. On “Soft Reality,” crying toward the end, his playing has an eastern double reed quality I hadn’t heard before.

Like you, Gerald Cleaver plays odd meters without being obvious about it. He may sound like he’s just playing free accents.

He is a master of that. Amazing. Aside from that, they’re all great improvisers. When we play together, the music always feels new and complex.

Jazz musicians have explored harmony and melody so much, but with rhythm there’s still a frontier there. The way complex meters are used now, the ease with which people can navigate them — it wasn’t always like that. Most odd-time playing before 1990 reminded me of a three-legged dog: like it was supposed to be in 4, but with a beat missing. I learned from a lot of drummer friends that those meters could be much rounder. Or look at Elliott Carter’s music.

I don’t think I ever used Carter’s metric modulations literally, but I’ve stolen rhythmic ideas from him. I’ll get a general idea of how something works — like Messiaen and his synthetic scales — without necessarily worrying about how the composer used them. The more I learn, the more I can incorporate into a personal system.

Did Tim Berne influence your long pieces that begin in one place and end in another?

I probably got that from listening to his music, even before making my first CD. I was looking for ways to make the music personal, and Joey Baron recommended I check him out. I liked the ways his pieces unfolded, and started working along those lines. Playing with him definitely reinforced that. The quartet Bloodcount must have played hundreds of gigs, at the Knitting Factory and on tour.

Bloodcount’s Berne, Jim Black and Chris Speed are on your ’96 recording Nature of the Beast, but the core band is two brass and two rhythm, with Dave Douglas, Steve Swell and Jim.

Before that album I’d made Low Profile [1993, for seven pieces] and really liked the sound when the ensemble broke down to just trumpet, trombone, bass and drums. The horns don’t fill up the overtones, like saxophones with their rich harmonics. It could all sound so clean and well-defined. So I started building some new music around that sound. Then I thought of adding Tony Malaby on tenor a little, and then Tim, and finally Chris’s clarinet at the last minute. (We’d been rehearsing for the date at Jim Black’s and heard him practicing upstairs. I did like the idea of having all the Bloodcount guys on it.)

With two brass and two rhythm, you get a certain kind of sonic thing; you can almost visualize the shapes. I was thinking about it architecturally.

Like the floor plan of a church.

Or the McDonald’s arches.

That was your last date as leader before The Rub and Spare Change 13 years later.

People have written that I didn’t do much after 2000, around when I started commuting to teach at Peabody in Baltimore. But I worked with pianist Dave Burrell a lot, and we made a good record, Momentum. I also made a whole bunch of SteepleChase CDs led by trumpeter Dave Ballou or pianist Harold Danko that I think are really good. And a bunch of stuff with pianist Jacob Anderskov.

Your first two early-’90s albums stand up very well, with catchy or dippy tunes like “Yahoo Justice” and “Coffee Time,” New Orleans funk and Braxtonian angularity, and that raucous quintet with alto sax, violin, electric guitar, bass and drums. At the same time, you were playing very refined jazz in Fred Hersch’s trio.

I wasn’t listening to Braxton, but Schnittke — probably not understanding it, but getting the idea.

Playing with Fred, I learned a lot about music and myself — learned I didn’t want to be in situations where I always had to be that careful. Sometimes I had to fight the Evil Mike from coming out. When that happened Fred would say, Mike is being Willful.

Tim Berne ended up in the quintet, but the altoist on your debut Wide Open Spaces is Greg Osby.

I liked him a lot from playing with him on Franco Ambrosetti’s Movies, Too. I was clueless about the M-BASE thing, but I had checked out his recordings. Basically that band was people I liked. Drummer Jeff Hirshfield and I had been working with Fred a lot, and we’d get together and workshop ideas. Guitarist Wayne Krantz is such a powerful rhythm player with a great sense of timing.

The combination could seem a little bizarre, but the front line of alto and Mark Feldman’s violin made perfect sense to me. I had been trying to learn about different kinds of music, scoring student films with small groups, and was getting into the habit of writing for strings. All those small pieces we played came from not knowing how to develop or end anything — the Monty Python problem.

When the band started getting gigs, Greg wasn’t always available. I used Marty Ehrlich and Andy Laster, who were great. But with Tim — he and Wayne hit it off, and with Feldman in there too, it unleashed the band’s comic side. We did a West Coast tour, and then the CD Extended Animation, three grueling days in the studio. I was trying to get everything perfect, but in the end the early takes were better.

I have to say I’m really proud of those records. There’s nothing I’d do differently. Had I tried to make records designed to be more “successful,” I doubt they’d have turned out so well.

Osby’s sound is well matched to yours, playing the melody in unison on “Cloak and Dagger,” and you have similar ways of approaching the chords from odd angles.

He does have that weird way through changes. We got to record again later with Gary Thomas.

The album Pariah’s Pariah from ’97, for two saxes and two rhythm. A nice example of the bass used as a percussion instrument.

I didn’t know John Arnold, who had a fusion kind of drum set, a sound I wasn’t used to hearing at that time. Maybe I was trying to impose…[shakes his head] I was being Willful.

Ab-Soul, Control System

Ab-Soul is the resident word-nerd of Black Hippy, the rap crew that includes the Dr. Dre-anointed young rap prince Kendrick Lamar and the brooding, heavy-lidded, ex-Crip leader Schoolboy Q. He’s easily the most cerebral of a fairly brainy crew, and on the ferociously excellent Control System, he produces an immersive, dark and wide-ranging piece of work that takes listeners to Saturn and Andromeda (“Pineal Gland”), sardonically salutes Obama as a “puppet” (“Terrorist Threat”), breaks our heart with a devastating first-person tale of young love and loss (“The Book of Soul”), puffs out some post-Tribe Called Quest weed clouds (“Bohemian Grove”) and oh, also finds room for a sex joke as goofy as “She got that magical vag/ Let me hocus poke.”