Aguirre Records

"The Japanese avant-garde pop band strove to create a “sacred ambiance” on their second album, fusing unconventional arrangements with bouncing volleyballs and an eyes-wide air of wonder." “It’s rare that art-pop matches its extravagance with such alluring modesty. In doing so, Paradise of Replica feels like encountering cinematic spectacles in miniature.” —Joshua Minsoo Kim (Pitchfork, September 30, 2022)

An Island In The Moon is the perfectly conceived minimal ambient project from Italian composers Pier Luigi Andreoni (Doubling Riders, ATROX) and Silvio Linardi. Andreolina being a mix of the names of the two musicians who were both deeply involved with the label Auf Dem Nil on which the album was originally released in 1990.

The duo stick to a disciplined and simple palette using only two synthesizers and a Roland S50 sampler. They are joined by fellow electronic journeyman Riccardo Sinigaglia who contributes piano and samples on two tracks. Taking influences from Italian minimalism while adding some jazz hints Andreolina sprawls, weightless instrumentals that never stay soporific for too long on this singular rare album.

Auf Dem Nil or ADN was one of the most adventurous Italian record labels of the 80's and early 90's with releases by De Fabriek, Riccardo Sinigaglia and Pierre Bastien. Leaving their mark on the experimental music scene back than and influencing musicians worldwide up until today.

Edition of 500 copies.

Cauldron is the legendary psychedelic jazzy rock & electronic album by Californian band Fifty Foot Hose. First-time official vinyl reissue since its release in 1967 on the Limelight label. 

Fifty Foot Hose formed in San Francisco in 1967. Like few other acts of their time they consciously tried to combine the contemporary sounds of rock with electronic instruments and avant-garde compositional ideas. They were one of the most radical groups of the psychedelic era, and their experimentalism still has the power to shock and surprise even now.

What set them apart were the pioneering experiments in electronic music, like the band they are often compared to, The United States of America. Incorporating theremin, siren, audio generators, and other various electronic effects as Cork Marcheschi, the band's original bass player had developed an acute interest in the dadaist/futurist experiments of composers like John Cage and Edgar Varese. David and Nancy Blossom brought both psychedelic and jazz influences to the band. Cauldron, their only album, was released in December 1967, including "Fantasy”, “Red the Sign Post” and “God Bless the Child”, a Billie Holiday cover. An intriguing mix of jazzy psychedelic rock tunes with fierce and advanced electronic sound effects. These sound experiments differentiated them from their contemporaries and most audiences didn't quite know what to make of them.

This sprawling collection by Belgian loner blues savant Bram Devens aka Ignatz encapsulates the mystery, murk, and melancholy of his uncanny craft at its most windswept and wayward. Originally issued via Goaty Tapes in September of 2015, this long-anticipated vinyl edition expands the saga with an additional 17 minutes of archival material. Deven’s palette remains constant throughout: feathery fingerpicking, modal loops, and intuitive six-string navigations interspersed with candlelit passages of mournful voice, alternately whispered, mumbled, moaned. His is an aesthetic of embers and resin, cracked masks and distant lights, of what’s left behind and what lingers on. I Live In A Utopia was recorded following a relocation from his longtime base of Brussels to Landen, with a second child due soon: “I remember the weather being nice and having just bought a hammock.” The change of scenery seeded a promise of slower days and lighter times – no utopia perhaps, but a sense of faint hope glowing on the horizon. The songs slide between loose acoustic spirituals and smoky basement ragas, late afternoon haze and midnight moons, a seesawing restlessness reflected in the titles (“I Have Found True Love,” “Time Does Not Bring Relief,” “We Used To Smoke Inside”). The fidelity is grainy but vivid, refracted by tape warp and Flemish dust. As always, Deven’s playing is deceptively elegant, raw but precise, attuned to resonance, radiance, and negative space. Echoes of Fahey and Jandek reverberate in certain moments but ultimately the world Ignatz maps is one incomparably his own. A landscape both doomed and dawning, weary but undefeated, tracing outlines of lengthening shadows. “I walk in the sunshine,” he sings, uneasily. This is music of a rare inner wilderness, poised at cryptic crossroads, devoted to its ghosts. I Live In A Utopia stands as an apex work by one of the underground’s most veiled and visionary talents.

Conscious avant-garde free jazz featuring Roland P. Young originally released in 1975 on the eclectical 1750 Arch records.

“1750 Arch was a beautiful Spanish-style hacienda,”recalls composer and multi-instrumentalist Roland P. Young. “It had a wonderful recording studio in the basement and the salon was converted into an intimate performance setting.” Young played solo gigs at that venue, in Berkeley, California, and also performed there in a duo with cellist Chris Chaffe. He remembers it as a particularly “transcendent” setting for concerts by Infinite Sound, his trio with singer Aisha Kahlil and bassist Glenn Howell.

Infinite Sound’s Contemporary African-Amerikan Music appeared in the uniquely diverse 1750 Arch catalogue in 1975. For Roland Young such a context was not incongruous. Contemporary African-Amerikan Music is a title that positioned the record quite specifically in 1975. But Young shares Buckner’s distaste for labels that fix expectations too rigidly and close down creative possibilities. Culturally and politically the early 70s appeared to Young to be a time of change and spiritual renewal. “There was a vibe in the air that we connected with, along with other kindred spirits world-wide. What appeared to be ‘experimental’ was reaching for sounds and emotions that were unfamiliar. We often performed at rallies in support of various causes: Black Liberation, Women’s Movement, Anti-War Movement, Gay Liberation. While the music came out of the Black Liberation struggle our ultimate goal was a blending of cultures.”

In 1968 Young was working as a DJ at KSAN, an underground rock station in San Francisco. “Glenn Howell used to call me when I was on air to comment about the music I was playing. He told me he was a musician and I invited him to come down to the station. We started to talk about music, then decided to get together and play. Young and Howell met Aisha Kahlil at one of their concerts. “A mutual friend introduced her and told us she was a good vocalist, loved our music and wanted to sing with us. We invited her to a rehearsal and soon after we invited her to join the group. Infinite Sound came together very easily and had a natural feel. We definitely had a shared intuition, and we created a lot of music. Each of us would bring ideas to rehearsals and we would work on them. Glenn tended to bring jazz tunes, Aisha tended to bring African-influenced compositions and I brought world, electronic, classical, jazz and avant garde material. Occasionally we would rearrange standards by composers like Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus. We talked a lot about how to present our material and how compositions would flow, one to the other. We were also conscious of how we dressed for performances, how we moved on stage, how we interacted with each other and the audience. We wanted it to be a ‘happening’. On occasion we would invite dancers to perform with us, friends of Aisha.”

Contemporary African-Amerikan Music preserves a fascinating glimpse of the trio in action. It testifies to the energy that Infinite Sound channelled into their music, but also to their imaginative breadth and expressive versatility.Their compositions embrace mobile forms, with Howell’s buoyantly springy and resilient bass taking on a strong pivotal role around which Young’s horns and Kahlil’s voice dance and spar and soar and play. Well-defined rhythms dissolve into textures; melodic shapes soften into shadings of timbre or flare into exuberant bursts of tonal colour. The music’s mood swings unpredictably from flamboyance to introspection; pacing shifts spontaneously from languor to urgency. Moments of musical allusiveness, sly quotation or stylistic reference, mutate into passages of wild inventiveness.

Tantalisingly this stimulating and varied set of pieces was this trio’s only release. Times have changed, yet increasingly in recent years creative artists have come to accept the need to erase musical boundaries and erode the constraints of aesthetic categorisation. Infinite Sound, and their enlightened host Tom Buckner, were decidedly ahead of the game.

- Julian Cowley

-Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy-, x2 LPs of long-form, lyrical, groove-based free improv by acclaimed guitarist & composer Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet is at last here. Recorded live at ETA (referencing David Foster Wallace), a bar in LA’s Highland Park neighborhood with just enough space in the back for Parker, drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, & alto saxophonist Josh Johnson to convene in extraordinarily depthful & exploratory music making. Gleaned for the stoniest side-length cuts from 10+ hours of vivid two-track recordings made between 2019 & 2021 by Bryce Gonzales, -Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy- is a darkly glowing séance of an album, brimming over with the hypnotic, the melodic, & patience & grace in its own beautiful strangeness. Room-tone, electric fields, environment, ceiling echo, live recording, Mondays, Los Angeles. Jeff Parker's first double album & first live album, -Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy- belongs in the lineage of such canonical live double albums recorded on the West Coast as Lee Morgan’s -Live at the Lighthouse-, Miles Davis' -In Person Friday & Saturday Night at the Blackhawk, San Francisco- & -Black Beauty-, & John Coltrane's -Live in Seattle-. While the IVtet sometimes plays standards &, including on this recording, original compositions, it is as previously stated largely a free improv group —just not in the genre meaning of the term. The music is more free composition than free improvisation, more blending than discordant. It’s tensile, yet spacious & relaxed. Clearly all four musicians have spent significant time in the planetary system known as jazz, but relationships to other musics, across many scenes & eras —dub & Dilla, primary source psychedelia, ambient & drone— suffuse the proceedings. listening to playbacks Parker remarked, humorously & not, “we sound like the Byrds” (to certain ears, the Clarence White-era Byrds, who really stretched it). A fundamental of all great ensembles, whether basketball teams or bands, is the ability of each member to move fluidly & fluently in & out of lead & supportive roles. Building on the communicative pathways they’ve established in Parker’s -The New Breed- project, Parker & Johnson maintain a constant dialogue of lead & support. Their sampled & looped phrases move continuously thru the music, layered & alive, adding depth & texture & pattern, evoking birds in formation, sea creatures drifting below the photic zone. Or, the two musicians simulate those processes by entwining their terse, clear-lined playing in real-time. The stop/start flow of Bellerose, too, simulates the sampler, recalling drum parts in Parker’s beat-driven projects. Mostly Bellerose's animated phraseologies deliver the inimitable instantaneous feel of live creative drumming. The range of tonal colors he conjures from his extremely vintage battery of drums & shakers —as distinctive a sonic signature as we have in contemporary acoustic drumming— bring almost folkloric qualities to the aesthetic currency of the IVtet's language. A wonderful revelation in this band is the playing of Anna Butterss. The strength, judiciousness & humility with which she navigates the bass position both ground & lift upward the egalitarian group sound. As the IVtet's grooves flow & clip, loop & repeat, the ensemble elements reconfigure, a terrarium of musical cultivation growing under controlled variables, a tight experiment of harmony & intuition, deep focus & freedom. For all its varied sonic personality, -Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy- scans immediately & unmistakably as music coming from Jeff Parker‘s unique sound world. Generous in spirit, trenchant & disciplined in execution, Parker’s music has an earned respect for itself & for its place in history that transmutes through the musical event into the listener. Many moods & shapes of heart & mind will find utility & hope in a music that combines the autonomy & the community we collectively long to see take hold in our world, in substance & in staying power. On the personal tip, this was always my favorite gig to hit, a lifeline of the eremite records Santa Barbara years. Mondays southbound on the 101, driving away from tasks & screens & illness, an hour later ordering a double tequila neat at the bar with the band three feet away, knowing i was in good hands, knowing it would be back around on another Monday. To encounter life at scales beyond the human body is the collective dance of music & the beholding of its beauty, together. —Michael Ehlers & Zac Brenner Pressed on premium audiophile-quality 120 gram vinyl at RTI from Kevin Gray / Cohearent Audio lacquers. Mastered by Joe Lizzi, Triple Point Records, Queens, NY. First eremite edition of 1799 copies. First 400 direct order LPs come with eremite’s signature retro-audiophile inner-sleeves, hand screen-printed by Alan Sherry, Siwa Studios, northern New Mexico. CD edition & EU x2LP edition available thru our EU partner, Aguirre records, Belgium. Jeff Parker synthesizes jazz and hip-hop with an appealingly light touch. The longtime Tortoiseguitarist has a silken, clean-cut tone, yet his production takes more cues from DJ Premier than it does from a classic mid-century jazz sound. In the early ’00s, when Madlib ushered a boom-bap sensibility into the hallowed halls of the jazz label Blue Note, Parker conducted his own experiments in genre-mashing in the Chicago group Isotope 217, dragging jaunty hip-hop rhythms into the far reaches of computerized abstraction. More recently, Parker enlivened quantized beats and chopped-up samples with live instrumentation, both as leader of the New Breed and sideman to Makaya McCraven. Inverting rap’s longtime reverence for jazz, Parker has gradually codified a new language for the so-called “American art form” with a vocabulary gleaned from the United States’ next great contribution to the musical universe. Parker’s latest, the live double LP Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, was largely recorded in 2019, while his star as a solo artist was steeply ascending. Capturing a few intimate evenings with drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and New Breed saxophonist Josh Johnson at ETA, a cozy Los Angeles cocktail bar, the record anticipates his 2020 opus with the New Breed, Suite for Max Brown. Yet Mondays amounts to something novel in 2022: It lays out long-form spiritual jazz, knotty melodies, and effortless solos over a slow-moving foundation as consistent as an 808. The results are as mesmerizing as a luxurious, beatific ambient record—yet at the same time, it’s clear that all of this is happening within the inherently messy confines of an improvisatory concert. Across four side-long tracks, each spanning about 20 minutes, Parker and Johnson trade ostinatos, mesh together, split again into polyrhythmic call-and-response. Butterss commands the pocket with a photonegative of their lead lines, often freed from rhythmic responsibilities by the drums’ relentlessness. Bellerose exhibits a Neu!-like sense of consistency, just screwed down a whole bunch of BPMs. His kit sounds as dusty as an old sample, and his hypnotic rhythms evoke humanizers of the drum machine such as J Dilla or RZA. You could spend the album’s 84-minute runtime listening only to the beats; every shift in pattern queues a new movement in the compositions, beaming a timeframe from the bottom up. Bellerose’s sensitive, reactive playing, though, is unmistakably live. We can practically see the sweat beading on his arm when he holds steady on a ride cymbal for minutes on end, or plays a shaker for a whole LP side. He begins the understated opener “2019-07-08 I” with feather-soft brush swirls, but on the second cut, he sets Mondays’ stride, as a simple bell pattern builds into a leisurely rhythmic stroll. Thirteen minutes in, the mood breaks. Bellerose hits some heavy quarter notes on his hi-hat; Butterss leans into a fat bassline; saxophone arpeggios, probably looped, float in front of us like smoke rings lingering in the air. It’s a glorious moment, punctuated by clinking glasses and a distant “whoo!” so perfectly placed we become aware of not only the setting, but also the supple knob-turns of engineer Bryce Gonzales in post-production. Anyone who’s heard great improvisation at a bar in the company of both jazzheads and puzzled onlookers knows this dynamic—for some, the music was incidental. Others experienced a revelation. Lodged in this familiar situation is the question of what such “ambient jazz” means to accomplish—whether it wants to occupy the center of our consciousnesses, or resign itself to the background. The record’s perpetual soloing offers an answer. Never screechy, grating, or aggressive, each performance is nonetheless highly individual. Even when the quartet settles into an extended groove, a spotlight shines on Johnson, Butterss, and Parker in turn, steadily illuminating a perpetual sense of invention. Their interplay feels almost traditional, suggesting bandstand trade-offs of yore, yet the open-ended structure of their jams keeps it unconventional. Mondays works in layers: Its metronomic rhythms pacify, but the performers and their idiosyncratic expressions offer ample material to those interested in hearing young luminaries and seasoned vets swap ideas within a group. In 2020, Johnson dropped his first record under his own name, the excellent, daringly melodic Freedom Exercise, while Butterss’ recent debut as bandleader, Activities, is one of the most exciting, undersung jazz releases of 2022. Akin to Parker’s early experiments with Tortoise and Chicago Underground, Johnson and Butterss’ recordings both revel in electronic textures, and each features the other as a collaborator. Mondays captures them as their mature playing styles gain sea legs atop the rudder of Parker’s guitar. The only track recorded after the pandemic began, closer “2021-04-28” sculpts the record’s loping structure, giving retrospective shape to the preceding hour of ambience. In the middle of the song, Parker’s guitar slows to a yawn; the drums pipe down. After a couple minutes of drone, Bellerose slips back into the mix alongside a precisely phrased guitar line strummed on the upper frets, punctuated by saxophone accents that exclaim with the force of an eager hype man. Beginning with a murmur, the album ends with a bracing statement, a passage so articulated that it actually feels spoken. Mondays drifts with unhurried purpose through genres and ideas, imprinted with the passage of time. The deliberate, thumping clock of its drumbeat keeps duration in mind, and, as with so many live albums, we’re reminded of how circumstances have changed since the sessions were recorded. Truly, life is different than it was in 2019—and not just in terms of world politics, climate change, the threat of disease, or the reality that making a living in music is harder than ever. Seemingly catalyzed by COVID-19’s deadly, isolating scourge, jazz has transformed, hybridized, and weakened tired arguments for musical stratification and fundamentalism. Even calling Mondays a “live” album is a simplification, considering how Parker and other top jazz brains have increasingly availed themselves of the studio—including, in a sparing yet dramatic way, on Mondays. Near the end of the first track, the tape slows abruptly. The plane of the song opens to another dimension: This set, Parker seems to be saying, can be manipulated with the ease of a vinyl platter beneath a DJ’s fingers. Parker’s latest may be his first live album, but it’s also the product of a mad scientist, cackling over a mixing board. Time is dilated, curated, edited, and intercut, and the very live-ness of a concert recording turns fascinatingly, fruitfully convoluted—even when the artists responsible are four players participating in the age-old custom of jamming together in a room. --Daneil Felsenthal, Pitchfork, 8.4 Best New Music Turn to Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy and you’re in another world. Recorded live (it’s apparently Parker’s first live record) between 2019 and 2021 at a bar in Los Angeles’ Highland Park neighborhood that’s named for the principal setting of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest(and Parker’s ETA 4tet named, in turn, for the room). As producer Michael Ehlers points out in a press sheet, It is “largely a free improv group —just not in the genre meaning of the term.” Mondays… will include all the things that free improvisation leaves out, modes, melodies, key centres and regular (though often multiple) rhythms; in effect, the musicians are free to include the conventionally excluded. It’s a kind of perfect opposite of Eastside Romp – clear tunes rarely define a piece, there’s no solo order, actually few solos, no formal beginnings or endings – instead substituting the extended jam for the tight knit composition. It’s a two-LP set, each side an excerpt from a long collective improvisation, a kind of electronic jazz version of hypnotic minimalism with Parker and saxophonist Josh Johnson both employing loops to build up interlocking rhythmic patterns and a kind of floating, layered timelessness, while bassist Anna Butterss and drummer/ percussionist Jay Bellerose lay down pliable fundamentals. Often and delightfully, it answers this listener’s specific auditory needs, a bright shifting soundscape that can begin in mid-phrase and eventually fade away, not beginning, not ending, like Heaven’s Muzak or the abstract decorative art of the Alhambra. It can sound at times like, fifty years on, Grant Green has added his clear lines to the kind of work that over 50 years ago filtered from Terry Riley to musicians from jazz, rock and minimalism. Though the tunes are described as excerpts, we often have what seem to be beginnings, the faint sound of background conversation and noise ceding to the music in the first few seconds, but the “beginnings” sound tentative, like proposals or suggestions. The most explicit tune here is the slow, loping line passed back and forth between Parker and Johnson that initiates Side C, 2019 May-05-19, the earliest recording here. The music is a constant that doesn’t mind omitting its beginnings and ends, but it’s also, in the same way, an organism, a kind of music that many of us are always inside and that is always inside us. All kinds of music stimulate us in all kinds of ways, but for this listener, Jeff Parker’s ETA Quartet happily raises a fundamental question: what is comfort music, what are its components, and could there be a universal comfort music? Or is comfort music a universal element in what we may listen for in sound? Modality, rhythmic and melodic figures/motifs, drone, compound relationships and, too, a shifting mosaic that cannot be encapsulated? The thing is, any music we seek out is, in our seeking, a comfort, whether it’s a need for structures so complex that we might lose ourselves in mapping them, or music so random, we are freed of all specificity, but something that may have healing properties. This is not just bar music, but music for a bar named for art that further echoes in the band’s abbreviated name. Socialization is enshrined here. There’s another crucial fiction, too, maybe closer, The Scope, the bar in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 with its “strictly electronic music policy”. Consider, too, the social roots reverberating in the distant musical ancestry, that Riley session with John Cale, Church of Anthrax, among many … or the healing music of the Gnawa … or the Master Musicians of Jajouka with Ornette Coleman on Dancing in Your Head. And that which is most “natural” to us in the early decades of the 21st century? … Jamming, looping, drones…So perhaps an ideal musical state might be a regular Monday night session with guitar, saxophone, loops, bass and drums…the guitarist and saxophonist using loops, expanding the palette and multiplying the reach of time, repeating oneself with the possibility of mutation or constancy. In some long ago, perfect insight into a burgeoning age of filming and recording, Jay Gatsby remarked, “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!” We might even repeat the present or the future.

-Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy-, x2 LPs of long-form, lyrical, groove-based free improv by acclaimed guitarist & composer Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet is at last here. Recorded live at ETA (referencing David Foster Wallace), a bar in LA’s Highland Park neighborhood with just enough space in the back for Parker, drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, & alto saxophonist Josh Johnson to convene in extraordinarily depthful & exploratory music making. Gleaned for the stoniest side-length cuts from 10+ hours of vivid two-track recordings made between 2019 & 2021 by Bryce Gonzales, -Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy- is a darkly glowing séance of an album, brimming over with the hypnotic, the melodic, & patience & grace in its own beautiful strangeness. Room-tone, electric fields, environment, ceiling echo, live recording, Mondays, Los Angeles. Jeff Parker's first double album & first live album, -Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy- belongs in the lineage of such canonical live double albums recorded on the West Coast as Lee Morgan’s -Live at the Lighthouse-, Miles Davis' -In Person Friday & Saturday Night at the Blackhawk, San Francisco- & -Black Beauty-, & John Coltrane's -Live in Seattle-. While the IVtet sometimes plays standards &, including on this recording, original compositions, it is as previously stated largely a free improv group —just not in the genre meaning of the term. The music is more free composition than free improvisation, more blending than discordant. It’s tensile, yet spacious & relaxed. Clearly all four musicians have spent significant time in the planetary system known as jazz, but relationships to other musics, across many scenes & eras —dub & Dilla, primary source psychedelia, ambient & drone— suffuse the proceedings. listening to playbacks Parker remarked, humorously & not, “we sound like the Byrds” (to certain ears, the Clarence White-era Byrds, who really stretched it). A fundamental of all great ensembles, whether basketball teams or bands, is the ability of each member to move fluidly & fluently in & out of lead & supportive roles. Building on the communicative pathways they’ve established in Parker’s -The New Breed- project, Parker & Johnson maintain a constant dialogue of lead & support. Their sampled & looped phrases move continuously thru the music, layered & alive, adding depth & texture & pattern, evoking birds in formation, sea creatures drifting below the photic zone. Or, the two musicians simulate those processes by entwining their terse, clear-lined playing in real-time. The stop/start flow of Bellerose, too, simulates the sampler, recalling drum parts in Parker’s beat-driven projects. Mostly Bellerose's animated phraseologies deliver the inimitable instantaneous feel of live creative drumming. The range of tonal colors he conjures from his extremely vintage battery of drums & shakers —as distinctive a sonic signature as we have in contemporary acoustic drumming— bring almost folkloric qualities to the aesthetic currency of the IVtet's language. A wonderful revelation in this band is the playing of Anna Butterss. The strength, judiciousness & humility with which she navigates the bass position both ground & lift upward the egalitarian group sound. As the IVtet's grooves flow & clip, loop & repeat, the ensemble elements reconfigure, a terrarium of musical cultivation growing under controlled variables, a tight experiment of harmony & intuition, deep focus & freedom. For all its varied sonic personality, -Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy- scans immediately & unmistakably as music coming from Jeff Parker‘s unique sound world. Generous in spirit, trenchant & disciplined in execution, Parker’s music has an earned respect for itself & for its place in history that transmutes through the musical event into the listener. Many moods & shapes of heart & mind will find utility & hope in a music that combines the autonomy & the community we collectively long to see take hold in our world, in substance & in staying power. On the personal tip, this was always my favorite gig to hit, a lifeline of the eremite records Santa Barbara years. Mondays southbound on the 101, driving away from tasks & screens & illness, an hour later ordering a double tequila neat at the bar with the band three feet away, knowing i was in good hands, knowing it would be back around on another Monday. To encounter life at scales beyond the human body is the collective dance of music & the beholding of its beauty, together. —Michael Ehlers & Zac Brenner Pressed on premium audiophile-quality 120 gram vinyl at RTI from Kevin Gray / Cohearent Audio lacquers. Mastered by Joe Lizzi, Triple Point Records, Queens, NY. First eremite edition of 1799 copies. First 400 direct order LPs come with eremite’s signature retro-audiophile inner-sleeves, hand screen-printed by Alan Sherry, Siwa Studios, northern New Mexico. CD edition & EU x2LP edition available thru our EU partner, Aguirre records, Belgium. Jeff Parker synthesizes jazz and hip-hop with an appealingly light touch. The longtime Tortoiseguitarist has a silken, clean-cut tone, yet his production takes more cues from DJ Premier than it does from a classic mid-century jazz sound. In the early ’00s, when Madlib ushered a boom-bap sensibility into the hallowed halls of the jazz label Blue Note, Parker conducted his own experiments in genre-mashing in the Chicago group Isotope 217, dragging jaunty hip-hop rhythms into the far reaches of computerized abstraction. More recently, Parker enlivened quantized beats and chopped-up samples with live instrumentation, both as leader of the New Breed and sideman to Makaya McCraven. Inverting rap’s longtime reverence for jazz, Parker has gradually codified a new language for the so-called “American art form” with a vocabulary gleaned from the United States’ next great contribution to the musical universe. Parker’s latest, the live double LP Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, was largely recorded in 2019, while his star as a solo artist was steeply ascending. Capturing a few intimate evenings with drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and New Breed saxophonist Josh Johnson at ETA, a cozy Los Angeles cocktail bar, the record anticipates his 2020 opus with the New Breed, Suite for Max Brown. Yet Mondays amounts to something novel in 2022: It lays out long-form spiritual jazz, knotty melodies, and effortless solos over a slow-moving foundation as consistent as an 808. The results are as mesmerizing as a luxurious, beatific ambient record—yet at the same time, it’s clear that all of this is happening within the inherently messy confines of an improvisatory concert. Across four side-long tracks, each spanning about 20 minutes, Parker and Johnson trade ostinatos, mesh together, split again into polyrhythmic call-and-response. Butterss commands the pocket with a photonegative of their lead lines, often freed from rhythmic responsibilities by the drums’ relentlessness. Bellerose exhibits a Neu!-like sense of consistency, just screwed down a whole bunch of BPMs. His kit sounds as dusty as an old sample, and his hypnotic rhythms evoke humanizers of the drum machine such as J Dilla or RZA. You could spend the album’s 84-minute runtime listening only to the beats; every shift in pattern queues a new movement in the compositions, beaming a timeframe from the bottom up. Bellerose’s sensitive, reactive playing, though, is unmistakably live. We can practically see the sweat beading on his arm when he holds steady on a ride cymbal for minutes on end, or plays a shaker for a whole LP side. He begins the understated opener “2019-07-08 I” with feather-soft brush swirls, but on the second cut, he sets Mondays’ stride, as a simple bell pattern builds into a leisurely rhythmic stroll. Thirteen minutes in, the mood breaks. Bellerose hits some heavy quarter notes on his hi-hat; Butterss leans into a fat bassline; saxophone arpeggios, probably looped, float in front of us like smoke rings lingering in the air. It’s a glorious moment, punctuated by clinking glasses and a distant “whoo!” so perfectly placed we become aware of not only the setting, but also the supple knob-turns of engineer Bryce Gonzales in post-production. Anyone who’s heard great improvisation at a bar in the company of both jazzheads and puzzled onlookers knows this dynamic—for some, the music was incidental. Others experienced a revelation. Lodged in this familiar situation is the question of what such “ambient jazz” means to accomplish—whether it wants to occupy the center of our consciousnesses, or resign itself to the background. The record’s perpetual soloing offers an answer. Never screechy, grating, or aggressive, each performance is nonetheless highly individual. Even when the quartet settles into an extended groove, a spotlight shines on Johnson, Butterss, and Parker in turn, steadily illuminating a perpetual sense of invention. Their interplay feels almost traditional, suggesting bandstand trade-offs of yore, yet the open-ended structure of their jams keeps it unconventional. Mondays works in layers: Its metronomic rhythms pacify, but the performers and their idiosyncratic expressions offer ample material to those interested in hearing young luminaries and seasoned vets swap ideas within a group. In 2020, Johnson dropped his first record under his own name, the excellent, daringly melodic Freedom Exercise, while Butterss’ recent debut as bandleader, Activities, is one of the most exciting, undersung jazz releases of 2022. Akin to Parker’s early experiments with Tortoise and Chicago Underground, Johnson and Butterss’ recordings both revel in electronic textures, and each features the other as a collaborator. Mondays captures them as their mature playing styles gain sea legs atop the rudder of Parker’s guitar. The only track recorded after the pandemic began, closer “2021-04-28” sculpts the record’s loping structure, giving retrospective shape to the preceding hour of ambience. In the middle of the song, Parker’s guitar slows to a yawn; the drums pipe down. After a couple minutes of drone, Bellerose slips back into the mix alongside a precisely phrased guitar line strummed on the upper frets, punctuated by saxophone accents that exclaim with the force of an eager hype man. Beginning with a murmur, the album ends with a bracing statement, a passage so articulated that it actually feels spoken. Mondays drifts with unhurried purpose through genres and ideas, imprinted with the passage of time. The deliberate, thumping clock of its drumbeat keeps duration in mind, and, as with so many live albums, we’re reminded of how circumstances have changed since the sessions were recorded. Truly, life is different than it was in 2019—and not just in terms of world politics, climate change, the threat of disease, or the reality that making a living in music is harder than ever. Seemingly catalyzed by COVID-19’s deadly, isolating scourge, jazz has transformed, hybridized, and weakened tired arguments for musical stratification and fundamentalism. Even calling Mondays a “live” album is a simplification, considering how Parker and other top jazz brains have increasingly availed themselves of the studio—including, in a sparing yet dramatic way, on Mondays. Near the end of the first track, the tape slows abruptly. The plane of the song opens to another dimension: This set, Parker seems to be saying, can be manipulated with the ease of a vinyl platter beneath a DJ’s fingers. Parker’s latest may be his first live album, but it’s also the product of a mad scientist, cackling over a mixing board. Time is dilated, curated, edited, and intercut, and the very live-ness of a concert recording turns fascinatingly, fruitfully convoluted—even when the artists responsible are four players participating in the age-old custom of jamming together in a room. --Daneil Felsenthal, Pitchfork, 8.4 Best New Music Turn to Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy and you’re in another world. Recorded live (it’s apparently Parker’s first live record) between 2019 and 2021 at a bar in Los Angeles’ Highland Park neighborhood that’s named for the principal setting of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest(and Parker’s ETA 4tet named, in turn, for the room). As producer Michael Ehlers points out in a press sheet, It is “largely a free improv group —just not in the genre meaning of the term.” Mondays… will include all the things that free improvisation leaves out, modes, melodies, key centres and regular (though often multiple) rhythms; in effect, the musicians are free to include the conventionally excluded. It’s a kind of perfect opposite of Eastside Romp – clear tunes rarely define a piece, there’s no solo order, actually few solos, no formal beginnings or endings – instead substituting the extended jam for the tight knit composition. It’s a two-LP set, each side an excerpt from a long collective improvisation, a kind of electronic jazz version of hypnotic minimalism with Parker and saxophonist Josh Johnson both employing loops to build up interlocking rhythmic patterns and a kind of floating, layered timelessness, while bassist Anna Butterss and drummer/ percussionist Jay Bellerose lay down pliable fundamentals. Often and delightfully, it answers this listener’s specific auditory needs, a bright shifting soundscape that can begin in mid-phrase and eventually fade away, not beginning, not ending, like Heaven’s Muzak or the abstract decorative art of the Alhambra. It can sound at times like, fifty years on, Grant Green has added his clear lines to the kind of work that over 50 years ago filtered from Terry Riley to musicians from jazz, rock and minimalism. Though the tunes are described as excerpts, we often have what seem to be beginnings, the faint sound of background conversation and noise ceding to the music in the first few seconds, but the “beginnings” sound tentative, like proposals or suggestions. The most explicit tune here is the slow, loping line passed back and forth between Parker and Johnson that initiates Side C, 2019 May-05-19, the earliest recording here. The music is a constant that doesn’t mind omitting its beginnings and ends, but it’s also, in the same way, an organism, a kind of music that many of us are always inside and that is always inside us. All kinds of music stimulate us in all kinds of ways, but for this listener, Jeff Parker’s ETA Quartet happily raises a fundamental question: what is comfort music, what are its components, and could there be a universal comfort music? Or is comfort music a universal element in what we may listen for in sound? Modality, rhythmic and melodic figures/motifs, drone, compound relationships and, too, a shifting mosaic that cannot be encapsulated? The thing is, any music we seek out is, in our seeking, a comfort, whether it’s a need for structures so complex that we might lose ourselves in mapping them, or music so random, we are freed of all specificity, but something that may have healing properties. This is not just bar music, but music for a bar named for art that further echoes in the band’s abbreviated name. Socialization is enshrined here. There’s another crucial fiction, too, maybe closer, The Scope, the bar in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 with its “strictly electronic music policy”. Consider, too, the social roots reverberating in the distant musical ancestry, that Riley session with John Cale, Church of Anthrax, among many … or the healing music of the Gnawa … or the Master Musicians of Jajouka with Ornette Coleman on Dancing in Your Head. And that which is most “natural” to us in the early decades of the 21st century? … Jamming, looping, drones…So perhaps an ideal musical state might be a regular Monday night session with guitar, saxophone, loops, bass and drums…the guitarist and saxophonist using loops, expanding the palette and multiplying the reach of time, repeating oneself with the possibility of mutation or constancy. In some long ago, perfect insight into a burgeoning age of filming and recording, Jay Gatsby remarked, “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!” We might even repeat the present or the future.

In his book Powershift, published in 1990, writer and businessman Alvin Toffler predicted that the century ahead would be defined by speed and that time itself is destined to become our most valuable commodity. When Joshua Abrams recorded Natural Information, originally released by Eremite in 2010, he was reacting against such commodification of time and the diminishing attention span that accompanies it by offering music with an irresistible groove, rooted in the sinuous rhythms of the human body and the full play of our senses.

At the heart of this music is the sound of the guimbri, a North African three-stringed bass lute, which Abrams started to play following a visit to Morocco during the late 90s. Traditionally the instrument has a key role in mystical healing ceremonies. Abrams, already a well-established figure in Chicago’s vibrant musical communities, had no desire to repackage tradition. He recognized however that the involving, springy and percussive sound of the guimbri was just the right voice to communicate vital data, to relay the natural information we all need in order to get back in touch with the pulsating continuities of a world we all share.

With Natural Information Abrams entered a new phase of his musical life, extending an invitation to the trance, where time intersects with timelessness. He carried with him a wealth of playing and listening experience. As a bass player he had worked with a host of notable musicians including guitarist Jeff Parker and percussionist Hamid Drake, and had been a member of back porch minimalism outfit Town And Country and the improvising trio Sticks And Stones.

The guimbri is a shaping presence on this remarkable recording, but Abrams also plays bass, bells, kora, sampler and synthesizer. Sympathetic friends including guitarist Emmett Kelly, vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz and drummers Frank Rosaly and Nori Tanaka join him  for the project. They set out not to contrive some neat hybrid but to enable coordinated energies and enriching influences to pulse and flow through living, breathing music. Ten years further into a century seemingly dedicated, as Toffler foresaw, to the survival of the fastest, the deep involving groove of Natural Information seems still more relevant, more illuminating, more vital.

eremite presents the definitive vinyl edition of the most legendary private press underground jazz album of the 1970s. There’s not another record on the planet that sounds even remotely like vibraphonist Khan Jamal's eccentric, one-of-a-kind masterpiece, Drum Dance To The Motherland. In its improbable fusion of free jazz expressionism, black psychedelia, & full-on dub production techniques, Drum Dance remains a bracingly powerful outsider statement forty-five years after it was recorded live at the Catacombs Club in Philadelphia, 1972. Comparisons to Sun Ra, King Tubby, Phil Cohran & BYG/Actuel merely hint at the cosmic otherness conjured by The Khan Jamal Creative Arts Ensemble & by sound engineer Mario Falana's real-time enhancements. Originally issued by Jamal in 1973 in an edition of three hundred copies on ‘Dogtown’ records, Drum Dance To The Motherland was effectively a myth until eremite’s 2005 CD reissue. eremite’s LP edition has been a long time coming. With the master tapes long vanished, the audio was transferred on the pneumatic Rockport table at Sony Music's 54th street studio from a minty copy of the original LP, manually de-clicked, & remastered on Sony's vintage outboard tube EQs by Ben Young & Andreas K. Myer. The LP is pressed on premium audiophile quality vinyl by RTI from a Kevin Gray lacquer. Alan Sherry at Siwa Studios screenprinted by hand every component of the package: the screenprinted labels & heavyweight stoughton laserdisc jackets reproduce exactly the artwork of the original Dogtown release. A screenprinted insert with Ed Hazell's detailed telling of Drum Dance's incredible history & eremite's signature retro-audiophile screenprinted dust sleeves are unique to this edition. 999 copies. Jesus. Forget what you know. Every now and then, a record comes along that sneaks up on you and punches you in the back in the head so hard, it sends you reeling for days. This is one of them. Recorded live in 1972, this holy grail private press album by vibraphonist Khan Jamal probably qualifies as a "jazz" record, but not as this world knows it, as it sounds like it was recorded in a spaceship, an echo chamber, and a cave all at once, which makes it virtually impossible to put a timestamp on. The dubbed-out percussion intro of "Cosmic Echoes" sounds like Sun Ra overseeing an Aggrovators session, yet strangely contemporary, and it only gets more inspired and unfathomable from there. The extended free jazz shocks (complete with recording engineer's mystery effects!) and cosmic black psychedelia dreamed up by this underground Philly collective explores outsider worlds that Actuel never knew existed, and emits a kind of smoke ESP-Disk never had a whiff of. Drumdance to the Motherland will render a majority of your record collection somewhat useless, but you're going to want to take that gamble. Utterly unique and essential document from way left of center. --[AK], Othermusic Vibraphonist Khan Jamal has been around since the mid-1960s, and his Drumdance to the Motherland--recorded in 1972 Philadelphia, released this year on Michael Ehlers' flawless Eremite label--reveals an ensemble approach to rhythm calisthenics on par with anything Sun Ra, Beaver Harris, or Sam Rivers cooked up. This 12-minute beast is a percussion smorgasbord, with any number of the quintet's members--Jamal, bassist Billy Mills, guitarist Monnette Sudler, and percussionists Alex Ellison and Dwight James--taking on the sidewinding pulse and bending, twisting, and reinventing its magic to his will. Dig: Jamal's vibes solo seven minutes into this jam is just as third-eye jubilant as anything Konono No. 1 has kicked out. --Bret Mccabe, Baltimore City Paper Online In all my perambulations during these decades of record hunting, i have never seen a copy of khan jamal's drumdance to the motherland. it's so rare that i'd never even heard of it, despite liking jamal & generally looking for unusual 1970s free-jazz. &, despite the fact that it has now been lovingly reissued, i still have no idea what the record looks like. so, let's get extra geeky & talk about record covers. when eremite repackaged drumdance, they put a nice new image on it. the original issue, on the microscopic dogtown label from philadelphia, came with individually designed covers, a probable nod to jamal's then-fellow philadelphians in sun ra's arkestra, who regularly decorated records by hand, often just before a big gig. there's more than just the cover about drumdance that's ra-esque. wave upon wave of tape delay recalls the ra lps, nearly a decade earlier on which drummer tommy 'bugs' hunter first accidently put the microphone into the wrong jack & discovered the supernatural, spaced-out powers of over-driven echo. jamal's is a fantastic record, with funky grooves & maniacal blowing periodically reflected in the funhouse mirror of slapback. jamal's vibraphone & marimba are, in some sections, featured in an unfettered & undistorted way. it's a real treat, as is monnette sudler's aggressive guitar. an absolutely unique lp, drumdance is testament to the liberating powers of the underground, the shared do-it-yourself mentality that links fringe jazz & punk. hats off to eremite for dredging it up, even with its new visage. --John Corbett, Downbeat Originally released on obscure Philadelphia label Dogtown, Drumdance to the Motherland has long been a sought after collector's item of early 70s underground free jazz. Literally underground: it was recorded in a basement coffeehouse in October 1972, & features Jamal on vibraphone, marimba & clarinet, Alex Ellison & Dwight James on drums, percussion & clarinet, Billy Mills on bass & Fender bass, & Monnette Sudler on guitar & percussion. Titles like "Drum Dance" indicate there is plenty of deep African groove on offer, but thanks to the input of sound engineer Mario Falana, whose use of reverb is so outstandingly musical he deserves to be listed as a group member in his own right, the album sounds nothing like any of the other extended riff workouts that appeared in the early 70s when the major labels tried to move in on free jazz. On "Inner Peace," the combination of Mill's loping bass riff, Sudler's cool bluesy guitar licks -more Montgomery than McLaughlin-- & the kind of raucous shrieking clarinet Arthur Doyle would be proud of is truly striking. & in Falana's hands, the gently cycling riffs of "Breath of Life" sound not so much spaced out as otherworldly --even without the kind of chemical stimulation one suspects helped inspire The Creative Arts Ensemble & their producer, you wouldn't be surprised if someone told you this was a mid-90s release on Thrill Jockey beamed back through time. --Dan Warburton, The Wirepiece! Legendary new remastering specifications such as and . Pressed from Kevin Gray's lacquer discs to audiophile quality records at RTI.

High quality reissue of the monumental work August 1974 by Japanese experimental music ensemble Taj Mahal Travellers. Pressed on 180gr. vinyl with extensive liner notes by Julian Cowley.

In April 1972 a group of Japanese musicians set off from Rotterdam in a Volkswagen van. As they crossed Europe and then made their way through Asia they made music in a wide range of locations. They also paid close attention to the changing scene and to differing ways of life. Midway through May they reached their destination, the iconic Taj Mahal on the bank of the Yamuna river in Agra, India. The Taj Mahal Travellers had fulfilled physically the promise of the name they adopted when they formed in 1969. But their music had always been a journey, a sonic adventure designed to lead any listener’s imagination into unfamiliar territory.

The double album August 1974 was their second official release. The first July 15, 1972 is a live concert recording, but on 19th August 1974 the Taj Mahal Travellers entered the Tokyo studios of Nippon Columbia and produced what is arguably their definitive statement. The electronic dimension of their collective improvising was coordinated, as usual, by Kinji Hayashi. Guest percussionist Hirokazu Sato joined long-term group members Ryo Koike, Seiji Nagai, Yukio Tsuchiya, Michihiro Kimura, Tokio Hasegawa and Takehisa Kosugi.   

The enigmatic Takehisa Kosugi, whose soaring electric violin was such a vital element in their music, had been a pioneer of free improvisation and intermedia performance art with Group Ongaku at the start of the 60s. Later in that decade, before launching the Taj Mahal Travellers, he had become known internationally through his association with the Fluxus art movement. During the mid-70s the Travellers disbanded and while his colleagues more or less stopped performing as musicians Kosugi continued to reach new audiences across the course of several decades as a composer, regular performer and musical director for the acclaimed Merce Cunningham Dance Company. 

August 1974 captures vividly the characteristic sound of the Taj Mahal Travellers, haunting tones from an unusual combination of instruments, filtered through multiple layers of reverb and delay. Their music has strong stylistic affinities with the trippy ambience of cosmic and psychedelic rock, but the Taj Mahal Travellers were tuning in to other vibrations, drawing inspiration from the energies and rhythms of the world around them rather than projecting some alternative reality. Films of rolling ocean waves often provided a highly appropriate backdrop for their lengthy improvised concerts. This is truly electric music for the mind and body.

Famed free jazz concert registration of an early New Direction for the Art performance. Recorded in 1971. Old-style Gatefold LP, with rare photographs & extensive liner notes by Alan Cummings. The performance by Takayanagi Masayuki New Direction for the Art at the Gen’yasai festival on August 14, 1971 was an intense, bruising collision between the radical, anti-establishment politics of the period in Japan and the febrile avant-garde music that had begun to emerge a few years before. The ferocious performance that you can hear here was received with outright hostility by the audience, who responded first with catcalls and later with showers of debris that were hurled at the performers. Takayanagi though described the group’s performance to jazz magazine Swing Journal as a success, “an authentic and realistic depiction of the situation”. In 1962, Takayanagi, bassist Kanai Hideto and painter Kageyama Isamu went on to form an AACM-style musicians’ collective called the New Century Music Research Institute. Every Friday, members gathered at Gin-Paris, a chanson bar in the fashionable Ginza district of Tokyo, to push the outer limits of jazz creativity. But the pivotal moment for his music was the creation a new trio version of his New Directions group in August 1969, with the free bassist Yoshizawa Motoharu and a young drummer Toyozumi (Sabu) Yoshisaburō. Experiments eventually led to the creation of two basic frameworks for improvisation that Takayagi referred to as Mass Projection and Gradually Projection. “La Grima” (tears), the piece that was played at the Gen’yasai festival, is a mass projection and listening to it, you can get a clear sense of what Takayanagi was aiming at. Mass projection involves a dense, speedy and chaotic colouring in of space that destroys the listener’s perception of time, and thus of musical development. The ferocity of the performance of “La Grima” at the Gen’yasai Festival in Sanrizuka on August 14, 1971 was consciously grounded by Takayanagi in a particular historical moment, ripe with conflict and violence. A month after the festival, on September 16, three policemen would die during struggles at the site. This was the context that the three-day Gen’yasai Festival existed within. The line-up reflected the radical politics of the movement, with leading free jazz musicians like Takayanagi, Abe Kaoru, and Takagi Mototeru appearing alongside radical ur-punkers Zuno Keisatsu, heavy electric blues bands like Blues Creation, and Haino Keiji’s scream-jazz unit Lost Aaraaff. New Direction for the Arts trio topped the bill on the opening day, playing an aggressive, uncompromising “mass projection” set of polyphonic improvisation. Alongside drummer Hiroshi Yamazaki and saxophonist Kenji Mori, Takayanagi soloed hard and continuously for forty minutes. This was performance as precisely calibrated metaphor: three musicians responding to the demands of the moment with instinctive force and fury, untethered by rules, leaderless yet not rudderless (the direction part of the group’s name was no accident). The piece was entitled La Grima – tears - and the fusion between the palpable anger of the performance and hopeless sadness of its title were also perfectly apt for the situation. This was a fight that the state was always going to win. Yet, by all accounts, the band’s set went down like a fart at a funeral. The band were showered with catcalls and debris throughout, and by chants of “go home” when the music finally came to an end. However, looking back at the event in the year-end issue of Japan’s leading jazz magazine, Swing Journal, Takayanagi was surprisingly upbeat: New Directions brought a solid political consciousness to our performance and succeeded in an authentic and realistic depiction of the situation. But journalism revealed its superficiality in its inability to penetrate the core of the music. I don’t know much about anyone else, but we at least left behind a competent record. It’s a fascinating statement in many ways. Perhaps on one-hand it can be read as stubborn, solipsistic and self-justifying, yet in conjunction with his statement in 1971 there are points that guide us towards an understanding of just what Takayanagi intended with his performance at the festival. As Kitazato Yoshiyuki has argued, it becomes an almost religious act, directed at the earth deities of the land. A union of anger, sorrow and malevolence that can be placed nowhere effective, all it can do is find expression and channeling. The forcible land seizures at Narita, the eviction of farmers from land that had been in families for generations, the destruction of communities: none of this can be prevented, not least by an artistic action. All that can be done is an attempt to mark the land itself, to soak it with the combined force of emotions and the volume of the performances, to bury something there that cannot be drowned out, even by the coming roar of jet engines.

From the landlocked tropical savanna of Upper Volta, an ever-evolving cast of musicians brought the world’s rhythms to the streets of their native Bobo-Dioulasso. Combining Congolese rhumba, American R&B, French yé-yé, Cuban son, and regional Senufo and Mandingo traditions, Orchestre Volta Jazz was at the epicenter of the West African musical explosion of the ’60s and ’70s. Air Volta compiles nine original songs originally issued on the Disques France-Afrique and Sonafric labels, a peerless primer of a group that turned the brutality of colonialism into something beautiful and enduring. “Boisterous and simmering in equal measure.”—Pitchfork “Infectious and filled with joy.”—The New Yorker