My Favorite Albums of 2024, part 3

*Not* a "best of" list!

Welcome to the third and final installment of my favorite albums of 2024. You can find part 1 here and part 2 here. Read, listen, enjoy!

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Ron Miles: Old Main Chapel

We lost this wonderful jazz cornettist far too early in 2022. Blue Note has provided a special live set from 2011 for us to appreciate him. Here he teams up with veteran collaborators Bill Frisell (guitar) and Brian Blade (drums). The recording is gorgeous and creates a holographic effect with good headphones or IEMs. The absence of the upright bass (whose range is mostly covered by Frisell in any case) creates a sweet sense of spaciousness and allows for apparently telepathic interaction between the players. A magical album.

Mitski: The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We

There is no one quite like Mitski, and it seems that often Mitski is not quite like herself, since this new album ventures into some unexpected directions. The country inflections in the music are perhaps related to her recent move to Nashville, as is the sound of the album, which was apparently recorded in a local bomb shelter, a space that lends the production an eerie, non-digital reverb. Her lyrics are as quirky and personal as ever. In “I Don’t Like My Mind,” a song that sounds mid-60s in its wall-of-sound production, she sings:

I don't like my mind, I don't like being left alone in a room,
With all its opinions about the things that I've done,
So, yeah, I blast music loud, and I work myself to the bone,
And on an inconvenient Christmas, I eat a cake,
A whole cake, all for me,
And then I get sick and throw up,
And there's another memory that gets stuck
Inside the walls of my skull, waiting for its turn to talk.

Note how the opinions of self are projected onto the room, as if the space around her is judging her, and this brings to mind the experience of the public musician—often alone but always surrounded by opinions that inhabit the very air—a state of existence about which Mitski has expressed considerable ambivalence in the past. Meanwhile, “Star,” which seems to be on its way to becoming a traditional love song, transforms its titular heavenly body into a metaphor for a distant, lost love—just as the light that we see from a star had its origins in the distant past. As with Shakespeare’s “star to every wandering bark,” love becomes something so removed from the body that it loses its immediate reality.

Mishka Rushdie Momen: Reformation

—keyboard works by William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, John Bull, & Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck

In the self-authored liner notes to this record, British pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen writes eloquently about how music can convey an emotional sense of the past and recall historical moments that were politically and culturally fraught—which she relates to the great Catholic composer William Byrd, who made a space for himself in Protestant England during the Tudor period. True enough, though to me these sentiments do not capture the accomplishments of this record. Indeed, these performances are intentionally anachronistic, because they bring the compositions to an instrument that the composers never heard nor imagined—the modern piano. The effect is a glorious fusion of past and present, and while it may not be “authentic,” this music is beautifully expressive on Rushdie Momen’s Steinway.

Kelly Moran: Moves in the Field

Speaking of expressive pianos, Kelly Moran creates a dazzling range of elegant effects on the modern equivalent of the player-piano. Moran’s own press release about the album explains it best:

In early 2020, Yamaha loaned me a Disklavier player piano—a special instrument that allows you to record your performance for the piano to play back on its own. I was initially working on a duet for myself and another pianist, but when the pandemic hit, the player piano became my duet partner. I began writing a series of duets for myself and the Disklavier, exploring all the different ways I could utilize this instrument to merge its inhuman capabilities with my own playing. The Disklavier allowed me to record multiple layers of my playing so I could create music on the piano that would require more fingers or greater endurance than I physically have - like chords that had more than 10 notes in them, or chords that were spaced out farther than my hands could stretch. Sometimes I’d record a pattern and then speed it up to play back faster than I could ever physically play. My imagination exploded at all the possibilities this instrument allowed me to create, and these explorations culminated in my new record, Moves in the Field.

The results are surprising and arresting but subtle. This has become for me a deeply meditative record that I play over and over again.

Baby Rose and BADBADNOTGOOD: Slow Burn

This EP clocks in at a concise twenty-four minutes, and it leaves you wanting more. It as if Ronnie Spector has come back to life, and 1960s Motown and Stax Records have been retooled with modern production techniques. I'll say no more; that should be enough to get you to listen.

Nala Sinephro: Endlessness

Sinephro merges the jazz and ambient worlds through her modular synths and harp. But while the music is subtle, there is more of interest for the attentive listener than there is in most of the bland, Spotify-playlist ambient music that is all too familiar these days. This is partly thanks to the presence of the excellent jazz musicians whom Nala has chosen as colleagues here, including saxophonist Nubya Garcia (whose new album was featured in part 2 of this list), trumpeter and flugelhornist Sheila Maurice-Grey, and drummer Natcyet Wakili. So this album will lower your blood pressure, but it won’t put you to sleep—unless you want it to.

Colin Stetson: The Love it Took to Leave You

Colin Stetson produces an incredible range of noises with his saxophone through the use of various audio techniques, along with circular breathing and virtuosic chops. This is not an easy listen, but it is immersive and impressive if you are willing to embrace Stetson’s unique sound world. The centerpiece of the album is the 20-minute "Strike Your Forge and Grin," which is beautifully structured and makes you doubt that it is possible that all of these sounds came from one horn—percussion, bass, vocals, even string-like and guitar-like effects circle around your head. Mesmerizing.

Various Artists: The George Lloyd Signature Series

OK, so this isn't exactly an album but, rather, a project to gather together in a series of releases the Lyrita label’s recordings of the music of neglected English composer George Lloyd—including his symphonies (all twelve of them, conducted by the composer), concertos, brass band music, choral music, and solo piano music. If you are unfamiliar with Lloyd (and I suspect that you are; I was until fairly recently), you are in for a treat. A good place to start is the tuneful and lively Symphony No. 5. But don't stop there: keep listening, and you will wonder why this composer doesn't get more attention.

Joanna Wang: Hotel la Rut

You are unlikely to hear a stranger album this year. Taiwanese-American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and singer Joanna Wang hits us with a dizzying series of styles and influences on this noisy, catchy, hilarious, and often baffling record. It is something of a concept album that draws its inspiration from the Canadian comedy trope The Kids in the Hall's sketch of the same name about a flophouse filled with eccentric guests. I can give you a sense of the album's aesthetic with song titles like "You Lost Me at the Spanking Machine" and "Gasp! That Plastic Bag is Watching Me!" There is a song about a deranged, self-described "pacifist" who devises ways to kill the pigeons on his balcony. And it just gets stranger from there. If you don’t like one track, just wait, because the next is probably in a totally different style and will arrive in about a minute and a half. I keep going back to this record and enjoying it more with each listen. Your mileage may vary. This video for “She Had a Habit of Meeting All of the Artists Backstage” is hilarious—but also quite creepy:

Paul Wee: Henselt & Bronsart: Piano Concertos

It’s difficult to believe that Paul Wee has a full-time job that has nothing to do with music. He is a barrister. In recent years, however, he has produced a number of memorable records as a piano virtuoso, including this latest one, which revives two once-popular piano concertos that have dwindled into obscurity. Adolf von Henselt’s concerto was premièred by Clara Schumann with Felix Mendelssohn conducting in 1845, and for the second half of the nineteenth century it was part of the standard repertoire. And while Hans Bronsart von Schellendorf’s concerto was not as famous, it had the support of the likes of Franz Liszt and Hans von Bülow, both of whom performed it. When you listen to these works, especially the Henselt, you won’t be able to understand why there aren’t hundreds of recordings of them, so convincing is Paul Wee’s playing, ably accompanied by Michael Collins and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. These are grand statements of musical Romanticism.

Arcadia Quartet: Weinberg: String Quartets, Vol. 4 (Nos. 6, 13, and 15)

Mieczysław Weinberg was a Polish composer who escaped as a young man into the Soviet Union at the outbreak of World War II. He remained there for the rest of his life. Shostakovich became a mentor and friend, and we can hear the older composer's influence in Weinberg's music. He seems finally to be getting more attention, with a number of major-label recordings in the past few years. This project of recording his complete string quartets by the Arcadia Quartet has been impressive through its first four volumes, and this fourth volume is the best of all. This is introspective, brooding music that will reward multiple listens.

Nilüfer Yanya: My Method Actor

And last but certainly not least, this young London-based singer-songwriter has been compared to Sade, but while I can hear this in her vocal timbre, she doesn’t quite carry off Sade’s suave sprezzatura. This is not a negative criticism: instead of coolness, she conveys a quiet intensity—which is matched by this album’s subtle, gorgeous production. In addition to being a great singer, Yanya is an accomplished and distinctive rhythm guitarist, and she demonstrates this throughout the album. She sometimes trades in her usual acoustic guitar groove for effective distortion effects, as on the choruses of “Like I Say (I runaway)” and the title track “Method Actor.” Her band is in the pocket and the songwriting is strong. What more could you want?

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I’m going to take a few days off, but I’ll be back after Christmas for one final list of the year for premium subscribers: honorable mentions and the final selection(s) for album(s) of the year (out of these three dozen nominees from the past three posts). Then in the new year, we’ll begin our reading of the major works of Chaucer! Meanwhile, Happy Holidays!

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet player-piano to yours.

Photo by Morgan Von Gunten on Unsplash