Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders Tune-Yards
Jon Batiste’s eighth studio album “can’t really be categorized,” said Jackson Sinnenberg in JazzTimes.com.
The 34-year-old New Orleans pianist and
Late Show bandleader always flashes his jazz roots, but We Are “remixes the last 400 years of Black American music to wondrous effect.” Gospel meets hip-hop meets 1960s R&B on these 13 tracks, and his message when he sings “feels imbued with the urgency of the political, social, and physical upheavals of 2020.” While all the genre-mashing serves a thematic purpose, said Matt Collar in AllMusic.com, “it’s also wonderfully fun.” On “Show Me the Way,” Batiste “crafts a buoyant, psychedelic-soul vibe.” With “Boyhood,” he delivers a funky ode to the Big Easy featuring fellow NOLA natives Trombone Shorty and PJ Morton. Batiste wants to take the best of the past to build a better future, and on songs like “I Need You,” that seems possible. The track is “an amalgam of boogie-woogie blues and vintage hip-hop attitude—like an impossible combination of Little Richard and OutKast.”
The gentle music on this brilliant album
“stirs feelings that can be hard to name,” said Mark Richardson in Pitchfork.com. For jazz saxophone legend Pharoah Sanders, it’s “a clear late-career masterpiece,” a collaboration that showcases the 80-year-old’s undiminished ability to listen and respond with fluid melody, here stitching together a gentle 46-minute composition by British electronic musician Sam Shepherd, aka Floating Points. Though Shepherd and Sanders are backed by the London Symphony Orchestra, the recording “feels as subtle and inexorable as a slow-moving weather front,” said Nate Chinen in NPR.org. Each of the composition’s nine subtly separated movements is built on a recurring seven-note arpeggio that “slowly twirls like a hanging prism as shimmering light passes through.” And then there’s the “glistening and peaceful” sound of Sanders’ sax, said Giovanni Russonello in The New York Times. “Every note seems carefully selected, not only to state his own case, but to funnel the soundscape around him into a precise, single-note line.”
Since 2011, Merrill Garbus’ voice “has been the defining element of Tune-Yards’ sound,” said Jesse Bernstein in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Now 42, the Oaklandbased singer-composer who began recording as Tune-Yards in 2011 has “an incredibly expressive voice,” and she uses it to full effect on two songs on her latest album.
But throughout the rest of Sketchy, she and her main collaborator, her bassist husband, Nate Brenner, “seem more interested in playing around than they usually do,” and the result is a joyful and enjoyable indie-pop record that also makes you wish that fewer of Garbus’ vocal tracks had been muffled by effects. As always, the music includes touches of Afrobeat, said Clare Martin in PasteMagazine.com. Garbus, who is white, felt concerned enough about appropriation that she nearly pulled the plug on TuneYards in 2019. Instead, she decided the world could use enjoyable music that also wakes listeners to such issues as sexism, gentrification, and environmental destruction. “Honestly, she and Brenner pull it off.”