Deadwax Noir

Christian Dillingham's As It Relates To Now carries that quiet confidence you find in the finest contemporary jazz albums. Rather than flaunting technical skills just to impress, Dillingham builds the record around  ...

Billy Cobham’s Spectrum hit in 1973 like a blown fuse in the middle of polite jazz fusion. By then, Cobham already had serious credentials: a Panamanian-born drummer raised in Brooklyn, veteran of Horace  ...

There’s a peculiar kind of loneliness that only certain jazz records understand. Not sadness, exactly. More like urban dissociation. The feeling of sitting in a parked car at 1:17AM outside a diner that never closed, watching neon  ...

The room is already dim before I drop the needle, but Components somehow makes it darker in the best possible way. A single lamp glows amber across the wall, rain slips softly against the window, and a  ...

It turns up when he’s not even really looking—just thumbing through a worn jazz bin in the back corner, fingers dusted with cardboard and time. The sleeve catches him first: Piccolo. Ron Carter. That’s enough to pause. He slides the  ...

Some debut albums introduce an artist. Others arrive already in motion, fully combusted. Land of the Midnight Sun does the latter. It doesn’t ease in, doesn’t posture, doesn’t bother with polite handshakes. It rips open ...

Some records arrive polished. Some arrive dangerous. Head Hunters slithers in. Released in 1973, this still feels illicit, less like an album than contraband passed between dimensions. There is funk here, certainly, but funk under ...

Some albums feel like they were made for late-night discovery, and Apogee is absolutely one of them. It slipped out in 1978 during this incredible stretch when jazz was going everywhere at once ...

There’s something intoxicating about Mysterious Traveller. Weather Report’s fourth album doesn’t just play—it hovers, slithers, pulses. And it builds into a cohesive whole which feels downright crystalline as this  ...

There’s a reason John Coltrane’s Om still feels like it landed from somewhere ahead of us, not just outside its own era. Recorded in October 1965 but not released until 1968, Om sits in a strange pocket of time. By the moment ...