FILTER ALBUMS
It’s In The Trees
Chicago-based jazz drummer’s eloquent chamber meditation on the rhythm of life.
By Andy Cowan. Illustration by Simon Prades.
Makaya McCraven
★★★★
In These Times
INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM/NONESUCH/XL RECORDINGS. CD/DL/LP
W HEN MIDWEST DIY-punk scene veterans Scottie McNiece and David Allen founded Chicago-based label International Anthem in 2014, they began by documenting the emerging community plying their trade at Curio, a basement club beneath the city’s Gilt Bar. There, the energy mirrored that of the underground punk scene, even if their music paid greater heed to the avant-garde instincts of Chicago institution AACM (Association For The Advancement Of Creative Musicians).
International Anthem duly laid down its manifesto to challenge existing musical classifications, beginning with 2014’s Alternate Moon
Cycles by Rob Mazurek, a lavish, Kickstarter-funded vinyl press of abstract cornet improvisations over swooshing ambient drones. Eight busy years later they have developed a progressive roster that includes the breezy R&B-laced fusions of Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker, soul-voiced trumpeter Jaimie Branch, wayward operatics of Black Monument Ensemble singer/clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid and, more recently, raspy Mancunian saxophonist and poet Alabaster dePlume.
While the label’s ethos of creativity, friendship and community has further obfuscated the lines about whether what they do is jazz or not – they prefer to describe their output as ‘boundary-defying music’ – International Anthem’s rapid progression from an indie outlier to a globe-spanning cultural game-changer (with a distribution deal with Nonesuch) – was rapidly expedited by the deep impact of the label’s second release in 2015, Makaya McCraven’s In The Moment.
The Paris-born percussionist, who followed his wife Nitasha Tamar Sharma to Chicago after she took up a professorship at Northwestern University, stumbled upon a radical new approach to production when he took 48 hours’ worth of live improvisations from his band’s residency at old bank vault The Bedford back to his home studio and looped, layered and spliced them into something new. Its febrile results – 19 short but sophisticated melds of trumpet, saxophone, bass, vibes and guitars over pin-sharp, hip-hop-edged beats, complete with crowd chatter – mirrored the similarly labour-intensive craft of magpie-minded rap producers Madlib and J Dilla, while keeping the energy and impulsiveness of the not its original performances intact.