So here’s the deal: last night The Cube in Blacksburg wasn’t The Cube at all. It was a wormhole disguised as a black box, a dream-tunnel made of sound and reflections. You walk in, and the air’s already vibrating like it knows something you don’t. Front and center? My friend, Kyle Hutchins. Not just a sax player, an experimentalist sorcerer. A guy who knows the saxophone so well it might […]
Pete Cosey (Chicago, October 9, 1943 – May 30, 2012) was a singular guitarist whose language fused South Side blues, psychedelic studio craft, experimental tunings, and pedal-driven orchestration. Revered among musicians and deep listeners, he stayed mostly off the mainstream grid, yet his impact marks him as a quiet architect of out‑there music. He began in an ebullient laboratory like Chicago in the late fifties, and he followed the transformations […]
If jazz is a galaxy, William Parker is its rogue comet—blazing, untethered, radiant with centuries of ancestral fire and a homemade bow on a one-stringed bass. You don’t just listen to William Parker; you fall into a trance, wake up somewhere in a Brooklyn loft circa 1982, and realize you’ve just witnessed a séance conducted entirely through upright bass, pocket trumpet, and spontaneous human combustion. For the uninitiated, William Parker […]
In a music world obsessed with speed and spectacle, Natural Information Society (NIS) invites us to slow down, listen deeply, and get lost in repetition. Led by multi-instrumentalist and composer Joshua Abrams, this Chicago-based collective creates mesmerizing soundscapes that feel less like songs and more like sonic environments — rich, meditative, and alive. At the heart of NIS’s sound is the guimbri, a three-stringed bass lute traditionally used in Gnawa […]
In the ever-evolving landscape of contemporary music, few artists have demonstrated the fearless innovation and versatility of Ava Mendoza. Born in 1983 in Miami, Florida, and now based in Brooklyn, Mendoza has carved a unique niche as a guitarist, composer, and bandleader, seamlessly blending genres and pushing the boundaries of sonic expression. A Journey Through Sound Mendoza's musical journey began with classical training, but her insatiable curiosity led her to […]
If Salvador Dalí played jazz, he might’ve sounded a bit like Patricia Brennan. In the wobbly, woozy dreamscape of modern improvised music, Patricia Brennan is less a player and more a conjurer—bending metal bars and wooden blocks into whispers, howls, and glimmering labyrinths of sound. Her weapon of choice? The vibraphone—a percussive instrument often thought of as jazz’s background shimmer. But in Brennan’s hands, it becomes a sentient creature, spitting […]
Let’s get this out of the way: Flying Lotus is not from here. “Here” being Earth. Or the solar system. Or possibly even linear time. I mean, just listen to Los Angeles. It’s like someone spliced the DNA of J Dilla, Aphex Twin, Sun Ra, and that weird dream you had where a toaster was DJing in a velvet-walled spaceship. The result? A genre-melting, neuron-frying sound casserole that makes you […]
Some music slides into your life politely. Other sounds arrive like mysterious artifacts—half-remembered dreams, or transmissions from a place you’ve never been but somehow recognize. Jon Hassell’s work belongs squarely in the latter camp: uncanny, enveloping, and oddly intimate, like the voice of a friend whispering in a language you don’t know. Hassell wasn’t just a trumpeter, or even merely a composer. He was a cartographer of phantom geographies. His […]
Let’s talk about Ethan Iverson—a pianist who looks like he might shush you in a library but actually wants to blow your mind with a Monk tune, a snarky tweet, and a five-paragraph essay on Stravinsky’s posture. He’s not your average jazz cat. He’s not even your average jazz dog, if that’s a thing. Iverson is the kind of guy who can play like a bebop demon, write like a […]
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