The Listening Guide
🎶 The listening guide: five albums, released during the past twelve months, chosen around a weekly theme 🎶
This week’s theme is music for film, video game, and theatre. Tom Carrell and Vincent Oliver of Skillbard assembled a fantastic group to create dark, nostalgic, and trippy jazz instrumentals for the acclaimed adventure game Genesis Noir. Musicians including Saleem Raman, Josh Arcoleo, Freddie Gavita, and Chris Hyson play on the expansive soundtrack album Big Bang: Music from the Universe of Genesis Noir, which is packed with evocative muted trumpet lines, energising sax solos, and mysterious unresolved chords, perfectly decorating the cosmic detective narrative of the game. Pianist and composer Eiko Ishibashi’s score to Drive My Car—a drama which won three awards at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and is based on Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name—is an atmospheric collection of music, with Ishibashi’s gentle piano and flute playing shining alongside Tatsuhisa Yamamoto’s drumming and Marty Holoubek’s bass playing. Strings and sounds from the film sit perfectly around the core trio on this lovely recording. Improvising vocalist Sanne Rambags collaborated with cellist Lucija Gregov and drummer Mark Schilders to create music for Alexander Turpin’s short film, Paradis. The film addresses how humankind damages the planet and was made in collaboration with MER Film Norway for premiere in 2022. Proceeds from Sanne’s album will be donated to 350.org, an organisation committed to stopping fossil fuel usage and curb climate change. Composer Ryan Blotnick created the score for First Vote, a documentary about Asian-American voters in ‘battleground’ states directed by Yi Chen, with an assortment of talented musicians. Classical strings and woodwinds are at the fore, but there’s plenty of stylistic breadth on show. It’s rare that all of the music written for a typical film, theatre, or video game project is heard, so it’s wonderful that artists are compiling and presenting it as they see fit. On Music for Film and Theatre, pianist Hania Rani compiles music created for an array of motion picture and stage production projects, displaying her multifaceted skills as a writer. There are ambient, largely electronic pieces, alongside pensive piano recordings, and tracks containing strings and voices. You can support Eiko Ishibashi’s album on streaming services and find all of the other projects on Bandcamp!
Skillbard – Big Bang: Music from the Universe of Genesis Noir
Album of the Week
Our NQ Jazz album of the week comes from flautist Nicole Mitchell, cellist Tomeka Reid, and drummer Mike Reed as the all-star trio, Artifacts. Entitled ‘...and then there's this’, the nine-track album hears all three of the performer-educators—who were on the executive board of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) between 2009 and 2011—contributing original compositions, as well as interpreting pieces written by AACM members Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell. Check out the album via Astral Spirits on Bandcamp!
Classic Album
Our NQ Jazz classic album this week is a recently uncovered private recording of John Coltrane performing his magnum opus live at The Penthouse club in Seattle in late 1965. The lineup featured John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders on saxophones, McCoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums, Jimmy Garrison and Donald (Rafael) Garrett on basses, plus a young Carlos Ward sitting in. Engineer Kevin Reeves suggests that the master tapes from which this recording was restored and mastered are “in excellent condition”, adding that they’re “among the best amateur recordings of John Coltrane we’ve had the pleasure to work on.” You can find the album on all major platforms.