cosmic jazz lounge with beats & spirituals
music to elevate your soul...or perhaps annoy your spouse-slash-housemate
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# of Tracks: 70+ tracks
Length: approximately 6 hours
Themes: inspired by the questing of 1970s jazz and the chill of 90s electronica ~ equal parts boom-chicka-boom and nam myōhō renge kyō ~ a mix devoted to spiritual and physical propulsion ~ the intersection of syncopated tension and sweet release ~ trip-hop from around the world (Massive Attack, Fishmans, Underworld, Björk), krautrock from Germany (Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Temple and Manuel Göttsching) and jazz searchers old (Joe Henderson, Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra) and new (Shabaka, Moor Mother, Kamasi Washington) ~ also intuitively unlikely selections by the Beastie Boys, Kool & the Gang, and David Holmes1
Link: spoti.fi (Spotify) — apple.co (Apple Music) — youtube.com (YouTube)
I first created this mix for utilitarian reasons, on a long drive between Toronto and New York City near the winter solstice. I don’t do energy drinks. So how do you stay awake on a mid-winter drive through upstate New York during those bleary dusk hours?
I’m now convinced mantras and beats might work better than evening caffeine. Imagine this playlist as the ideal soundtrack for 200 miles of driving on cruise control. Or, rather, a nice place to park your brain so you might endure the boredom of it. Everyone in the car has nodded off or fallen fully asleep. You, being spiritually inclined, attempt to elevate yourself in that drowsy spell before reaching the hotel parking lot.
This mix finds common cause between deeply mysterious jazz works and the sometimes cringe genre that is turn-of-the-century electronica.2 Speaking of cheeseball tech-absolutists, the central image on the cover art was made with generative AI.3 I believe the prompt I used was “Albrecht Dürer Renaissance pencil drawing spinning vinyl records.” Some more thoughts on AI down below…
Spotify version
Apple version
YouTube version
The playlist includes songs such as…
^ Björk: “The Anchor Song”
^ Pharoah Sanders: “Kazuko”
^ Manu Delago: “Parasol Peak”
^ Emahoy Tsegue Maryam Guebrou: “Mother’s Love”4
^ Kumar Gandharva: “Raga Malkauns”
Extra credit: Against the Distraction Engine & AI Generated Creativity
I wanted to use this month’s blah blah blah section to point you toward two fellow Substackers. Both approach the topic of Where Creativity Is Going Right Now with passion and concision.
First Ted Goia’s February article about The State of Culture, 2024. Goia believes we’re heading toward what he terms a “post-entertainment” society. His post presents a succinct version of this story through a handful of infographics. I’ll share two of them. First this visualization of what has happened to art in the 21st century under the leadership of the tech sector’s mendacious fucks.5
Second, a chart which shows the evolution of a variety of invigorating human activities. Under the regime of our digital overlords, once virtuous cultural pursuits are reduced to point > click > scroll > rinse > repeat.
This links to Goia’s whole piece or visit the footnotes for a preview.6 I think it’s well worth understanding what tech “leaders” are attempting to lead us toward…
Elsewhere, John Strohm—a musician-cum-attorney-cum-entertainment executive—wrote a passionate defense of human creativity in the face of AI, and urges bravery and unity in rejecting the AI industry’s claims of fair use. He warns of the dangers ahead:
For those of us who believe that music is primarily an expression of our HUMANITY - which I hope is everyone in the music ecosystem - it’s time to call bullshit on this bullshit. I am not anti-innovation, anti-tech, or even anti-AI. What I’m against is using our collective work - including some of humanity’s greatest achievements - to outsource human creativity to robots… Using music as training data without permission or payment is the next frontier in the devaluation of our work
As with the Goia piece there’s a longer preview in the footnotes.7
We need more voices like Goia and Strohm speaking truth to the powers that be at Meta and Alphabet and Open AI: 🗣️🤞🤖
People Who Died: Shigeichi Negishi ~ Dexter Romweber ~ Richard Serra ~ Marian Zazeela
Besides Richard Serra, a titan of sculpture,8 I imagine most of the folks listed this month might be foreign to the normies out there.9
In particular, Dexter Romweber and Marian Zazeela occupied the subculture that lies beneath the underground. They are influencers on other influencers. Dex was a garage rock / rockabilly musician who emerged in the 1980s with his project Flat Duo Jets whose sound was gothic and fried, both avant and primitive. His echo-drenched version of the South was cited as an influence by Neko Case and Cat Power as they emerged in the 90s. Same with Jack White in the 2000s. I loved White’s sweet obituary for one of his idols. An excerpt:
He wasn’t a Rock N’ Roll musician, he WAS Rock N’ Roll inside and out, without even having to try, he couldn’t help himself. People toss that around a lot, but in Dex’s case it was actually true. To call him Punk would be like calling the Great Pyramid a sand castle. He was the type that don’t get 3 course dinners, awards, gold records and statues made of them because they are too real, too much, too strange, too good. Dex was a true tortured romantic, unfairly treated and broken hearted at all times but still hopeful. He was an electrical outlet, an old soul, a vampire, a cave man in a modern age, a WWI trench soldier, a different kind of American, out of luck living on the outskirts of town, lonely even when in a room of thousands. He ate dinner with Van Gogh, loaned your friend his last ten dollars, and exuded innocent love and naivety. He stared at the moon, communicated with Gene Vincent from another plane, while reading George Gurdjieff by thrift store lamp and all out of cigarettes at 3 a.m. He was forever getting the short end of the deal but anyone who spoke with him could only want him to live in peace and love with no way to know how to truly help him get there. He was one of my favorite people I’ve ever known and one of my most cherished influences. He once finished the last chord of a song during a concert, threw his guitar down, jumped off the stage at St. Andrews Hall in Detroit, and ran straight up to me in a theater of ten people at the back of the room and immediately started talking to me. I had never met him before that. I was 18. Over time he passed on secrets I’ll never tell, and brought tears to my eyes when he told me how proud of me he was. But I was proud of him first, and always will be.
Zazeela was best known as the partner and collaborator of ur-minimalist composer La Monte Young. Married since 1963, together they were stewards of the Dream House, a key pilgrimage site for anyone searching for evidence of a cooler, more extreme, pre-Internet NYC.10 Individually, she possessed a gorgeous and distinctive sense of design, both in the graphics she created and otherwise.11 It’d be fair to cite her hallucinogenic typography as a key influence on the look of psychedelic gig flyers to this day.
Long may these weirdo spirits haunt us.
Holmes’ tracks are all short cues created as part of the soundtrack for the Ocean’s Trilogy series of heist films
Not always cheesy! A major inspiration for this mix was Headz, a series of three mid-90s compilations on the Mo’ Wax label. They’re long out-of-print but beloved enough folks have reconstructed them on the YouTubes.
Specifically I used Craiyon. I played around a bit on the way to my final ‘Durer-meets-DJ culture’ prompt. I’ll be honest when I say the result below, at center, made me feel a bit self-conscious.
Here Guebrou’s piece is performed by Maria Corley, a Jamaican-born Canadian of diverse talents. Check her website if you want to know more.
That phrase really rolls of the tongue, huh? Well, they’re not my words. All credit due to my favorite podcasters Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway who utter that insult frequently on their show Pivot.
Sculpture is what Serra is best known for. I’ve always been struck by this uncategorizable piece plainly called Verb List (1967-68). Is it a drawing? A listicle? A prelude to a performance? I think I first came across it in the early 2010s when I was commissioned to write a description of The National’s particularly dense fifth album High Violet.
To be fair Negishi’s name was entirely new to me. He is credited with inventing the first first commercially-available karaoke machine.
It’s right near the Ghost Buster’s sign. What an incredible NYC tourist one-two punch! Below photo credit: Rusty Santos
From right to left: Marian Zazeela, La Monte Young, and their longtime student Jung Hee Choi in New York City in 2009. Zazeela’s sense of visual style extended into her daily wardrobe.
