TALES OF LOHR: THE (NEXT) BEST ALBUM(S) OF 2023
Much-deserved cap tips to two of jazz's recent best; plus; "This Week in Warhol" names her Mona Lisa
Back in October, I shared my thoughts on Hackney Diamonds, the surprisingly outstanding new studio album by The Rolling Stones. In that review, I called the record my favorite I’d heard this year up to that point, and here, two months down the road, I am still content to call the Stones’ latest my favorite album of 2023. But as we draw ever closer to the commencement of a new year, I want to take a moment to toss some much-warranted laurels at numbers two and three on my personal year-end top ten, as they both represent potentially definitive releases from women whose music and careers showcase the bold, far-thinking energy and expansiveness being brought to a genre so dominated, for far too long, by the creative and professional will of men. One album is by an artist consolidating a claim as the best ever on her unconventional-for jazz instrument; the other is a tragically unexpected but exultant valedictory statement by an ascending talent taken from us far too soon.
In 2019, I attended the opening-night performance of the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival at the city’s August Wilson Cultural Center. The band that night was led by drummer Makaya McCraven, and among the high-caliber musicians playing alongside the self-designated “beat scientist,” the clear standout was harpist Brandee Younger. The harp is an instrument underused in jazz to such an extent that its presence on a jazz recording still carries with it an unmistakable tinge of novelty, despite the efforts of titanic musicians such as Dorothy Ashby to carry the dynamics and improvisational might of jazz to an instrument otherwise wedded in the listener’s consciousness to classical music. Younger has abandoned none of the harp’s inherent elegance and beauty, but infuses her playing with a nimble effusiveness that allows it to more than hold its own amidst the more obviously emphatic instruments in the jazz palate. The resultant sound is simultaneously romantic and stick-to-your-ribs visceral, her playing a chills-inducing gift from the muses.
Younger’s LP Brand New Life (Verve) marks the young instrumentalist / composer’s undeniable entree into the top ranks of contemporary jazz, a record as lush and sensual as the year’s finest R&B releases while still infused with the go-for-broke invention of the jazz pacesetters of any era. The title track, with its breezy rhythms and breathy vocals by Mumu Fresh, sounds like the grandest bedroom-scene score for the coolest unmade blaxploitation film your mind can conjure; a touch of hip-hop enters the mix on the low-key aggressive “Livin’ and Lovin’ In My Own Way,” courtesy of the potent drum programming of guest artist Pete Rock; and the ghostly reverb of Younger’s strings rides the hissing percussion of “Moving Target” for an utterly fresh take on modern club-beat sonics. Produced by McCraven and featuring five tracks written or co-written by Ashby, Brand New Life gives Younger ample opportunity to homage those upon whose shoulders she rose, while fully emerging as an artist with a fresh aural conception and the chops and compositional acumen to pull it off. But all that takes a back seat to how simply joyful the album is to experience, like sinking into a plush feather bed with a cocktail, a whiff of lavender on the air…and the ideal someone with whom to share that eternal instant.
Listening to Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) (International Anthem), on the other hand, cannot help but carry a whisper of tears, as long as one goes in knowing that this is the unintended final album by jaimie branch, a trumpeter, composer, and experimental innovator who had been poised to bring the music into tantalizing other realms before her shocking death last summer at the age of only 39. (The cause was accidental drug overdose; branch had struggled on and off with heroin addiction throughout her brief but dazzling career, perhaps the most unfortunate inadvertent homage she paid to her musical forebears). branch had been slowly but surely forging a forceful yet light-fingered identity as a musician equally comfortable in electronic or acoustic instrumental settings; bringing elements of hip-hop beat-making and rock theatrics into her studio and live outings; and mixing it up with gusto in any milieu into which her horn provided her introduction. With her street-chic sartorial sense and high-to-the-sky horn stance, branch cut a memorable figure on any stage, and the sudden snuffing of her light leaves with it a heavy intimation of so many notes unplayed, so much left unsaid.
Thankfully, ((world war)) arrives, and will endure, as a fervent, eloquent summation of where branch’s musical project had been leading her when it crashed to its close. The opening exaltations of “aurora rising,” with its keening organ-redolent keyboard tones and portentous drums, almost conjures feelings of being called into the hereafter, as if branch somehow knew long before all of us. This segues deftly into the moody acoustic bass and snap-poppy, Latin-tinged drums of “borealis dancing,” over which branch gusts and soars with the full volcanic might at her command. She lends her vocal voice, coated with a pleasing tinge of punkish riot grrrl snarl, to “burning grey”; dips down for a zesty romp in the islands with “baba louie”; and proves unsettlingly at home amidst the cacophonous, violin-seared “and kuma walks.” branch’s music is far more intense, more openly confrontational, than Younger’s, but within the work of both, there is a sense of voices too long suppressed, as women’s have been within both jazz and the world entire, bursting forth to clearly, indisputably make plain: We are here, we are not bowed, and you will simply have to learn how to deal, no matter the cost.
((world war))’s penultimate track, which makes it unintentionally the next-to-last of branch’s cumulative career on record, finds the artist intoning, in near-frantic, lightly sonically distorted reverb, “gonna take over the world.” Sadly, 39 years is maybe too short a time to allow one to execute such a lofty task, even with all the gifts branch had at her disposal. In the last few years of her time, branch adopted an all-lowercase appellation, following in the footsteps of the equally iconoclastic likes of k.d. lang, bell hooks, and e.e. cummings. But tales of her artistry should be etched in the largest letters you can find, and if this paragraph, and the ones preceding it, do even a little to bring more ears to branch’s brief catalog, and to the hopefully-still-expanding discography of Brandee Younger, than I will have done my part to fulfill what is, at core, the ultimate calling of people like myself: To call others to the callings of Younger and branch.
In case you were curious, with the Stones, branch, and Younger (in that descending order) as my year-end top three, here are the remaining releases rounding out my list of the best listens of 2023:
11 Guys Quartet - 11 x 11 (VizzTone)
Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids - Afro Futuristic Dreams (Strut)
Depeche Mode - Memento Mori (Columbia / Mute)
Sparks - The Girl is Crying in Her Latte (Universal)
rum.gold - U Street Anthology (Leola)
Blackburn Brothers - SoulFunkNBLUES (Electro-Fi)
Allison Miller - Rivers in Our Veins (Royal Potato Family)
THIS WEEK IN WARHOL
DECEMBER 21, 1962
This day’s issue of Time Magazine features an article on an upcoming major event in art: The exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci’s overwhelmingly famous Mona Lisa at the National Gallery in Washington, DC and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first time the painting has been brought to U.S. soil in the 450+ years since its completion by the master. The Time piece, almost cheekily featured in the magazine’s “People” section, speaks of the sentries guarding the door of the painting’s cabin aboard the S.S. France, charged with transporting the artwork from its usual home at the Louvre in Paris. The painting is packed in an airtight, water-impermeable plastic case weighing in at 160 pounds, and remarkably, is making this journey without the benefit of insurance. No firm will grant the work a policy, asserts Time, “because she is priceless.” This exhibition is being carried out largely due to the efforts of first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, a good friend of National Gallery director John Walker.
There are those in the arts intelligentsia who express skepticism over the painting’s U.S. visit. One critic imagines the painting being showered with confetti in an absurd ticker-tape parade, and another, in an extremely Warholian analogy, compares the work to a Beverly Hills blonde being safeguarded against appearing too “shaky” before the inevitable cameras. But the anticipation is largely high, and such care is taken to ensure the painting’s safe passage and exhibition that the thermostats at the National Gallery are meticulously recalibrated to replicate the work’s accustomed air temperatures at the Louvre. Media coverage of the exhibitions is pervasive, with Art News and Life both giving full spreads to the painting in their January 1963 editions to coincide with the Jan. 8 commencement of viewings at the National Gallery. The painting is on display here until February 3, when it is transported to New York for its unveiling four days later at the Met, which shows the work until March 4. During its stay in the States, the painting is hailed in a speech at its D.C. opening by President Kennedy himself, who likens it to another famous French “lady” on American shores, The Statue of Liberty, and the piece is visited by nearly two million visitors at its stops on the tour.
Andy Warhol is of course well aware by this moment of the prominence the Mona Lisa bears within the canon of Western art. In one of his collegiate textbooks, he has noted a line praising Da Vinci as one of painting’s premier intellectuals. Warhol is perhaps inevitably among those who visit the painting during its stay at the Met, and, equally inevitably given its status as what the Pop artist’s own catalogue raisonné describes as the moment’s top “topical celebrity,” he turns his attention, in early 1963, to his own interpretation of the famous canvas, following in the footsteps of his progenitor Marcel Duchamp, who famously graced the Da Vinci work with a mustache in his own burlesque of the piece, and his contemporary Marisol, who sculpts La Gioconda in her own distinct rough-hewn style. Warhol responds, as is his custom, with numerous repetitious iterations of the Mona Lisa in a variety of silkscreened portraits, sizes and colors varying to dramatic degrees. Arguably the most celebrated of these pieces is the explosive 30 Are Better Than One, which displays the famous Italian lady in triplicate times ten. Warhol himself later hails this canvas as one of the best among his own entire body of work.
Warhol returns to Da Vinci far later in his career, with a series of riffs on the master’s celebrated Last Supper mural that represents one of the final major cycles of serialized works he will undertake before his death. Warhol’s Last Supper, said to have been visualized from a plastic reproduction purchased at a swap meet, filters the image through a number of signature Warholian styles, from thick, loose pencil and charcoal line to his evocative late-period camouflage textures. In January 1987, a pair of Warhol’s Last Suppers are put on exhibition in Milan, in a converted-bank gallery directly across the street from the Church of Santa Maria della Grazie, home of Da Vinci’s original mural. This is the last Warhol exhibition to open during his lifetime. His stay in Italy is cut short by persistent ill health, and a month later, after his return to New York, he dies after complications from surgery to remove an inflamed gall bladder.
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Interesting, I have my top 20 albums coming Friday. I have not listened to any of these records, but I'll check a couple of them out.