Dancing with Salt | Outside the Changes, Q1 2025
My new favourites from the rest of the world: Matt Carmichael, Amy Denio, Chaerin Im, Marshall Allen, Sam Amidon, & more
Let's try a new segment that I'll call Outside the Changes: sharing my personal favourite new creative music releases I've heard over the past few months that I wouldn't normally cover here – that means nothing from Canada, and as usual nothing from my clients.
We'll start with releases from the recently-ended first quarter of 2025. I'll list them in alphabetical order by artist name. I have ten for you today, plus four honourable mentions. Let's do it...
Amy Denio: Varieté
The fiddle music that begins on "Femme Faceoff" feels like those Scandinavian folk tunes I played in the North Shore Celtic Ensemble and have heard at the Rogue Folk Club. It continues through to about "Rendezvous". The album's first and third act are closer to chamber music and don't quite draw me to revisit the project as much as that fiddly middle.
Chaerin Im: Midnight Resets
A moving keys-and-guitar quartet with electric bass led by the keyboardist Im. Favourite tracks: "Khyte", "Dancer Dom", and "Summer Dream Forever" with guest tenor saxophonist Nicolò Ricci. I discovered this while writing the big Jamie Lee feature and thought a couple times about shoehorning it into that story, but cooler heads prevailed.
Marshall Allen: New Dawn
Give it next year's Grammy already! The music grooves and soothes, and what it means to drop a debut album at age 100 is unfathomable. Probably more accessible to an uninitiated like me than much Sun Ra. One of the bassists in the ensemble cast is Jamaaladeen Tacuma, who's here now to play an Infidels Jazz show called Harmolodic League tonight.
Matt Carmichael: dancing with embers
No artist influenced me more in let's say 2022-23 than Carmichael and his Scottish folk designs. He brings back the band from his second album Marram plus guests on guitars and more. There's a tune of his I lifted from a live set back then, new at the time. Calling it "Untitled", I played it at an Infidels show. Now I know it's called "stone skimmer".
Myra Melford: Splash
Powerful bass playing from Michael Formanek, and having Ches Smith on vibraphone as well as drums – within the same pieces– takes what would've been a KneeJerk-style piano trio record to parts unknown. It's also the first time I'm listening to Smith after seeing his We All Break project live at last year's festival. I hadn't listened to Melford, dig her lots.
Nels Cline: Consentrik Quartet
"Surplus" is right where I currently aspire to play: guitar-based, riffy and even cowboy-chording, free-minded but still quite tame for those folks who love free improv. By the time you're reading these words, maybe Coastal Jazz has progressed through their magical history tour to the 2014 jazzfest, when Cline came to play duo with Julian Lage. [post publication edit: haha I wrote this three weeks ago and nailed it, they posted the 2014 festival yesterday]
Sam Amidon: Salt River
No artist has influenced me more over the past 12 months than Amidon. Check out his arrangement of Ornette's "Friends and Neighbours". Here's hoping I get to hear him live soon, though I did meet and hear percussionist Philippe Melanson last fall (in Brodie West's quintet) when I hosted IronFest 2024 for Coastal Jazz.
Sasha Berliner: Fantôme
Berliner is one of many great vibes players born in the '90s: Atley King, Jalen Baker, Joel Ross of course. The trumpet playing makes this album closest to Atley's I guess. My favourite track is "Construction". Bassist Harish Ragavan also appears on a Cellar album out last week, Conceptions by Geoffrey Dean.
Silvan Strauss: Flukin'
Music I put on while working. My favourite track is "Diving" because the melody sounds like a folk tune despite it being in this beat-driven context. British keyboardist Joe Armon-Jones is featured on the first track; he goes way back with Nubya Garcia, so who knows, maybe he'll come along in June.
Whait: Close Quarters
longformeditions
[July 2025 update: it looks like the label and/or artist took down this track. However, I bought and downloaded it! If you want to hear it, let me know.]
You could call this a single track, not an album. It's Wendy Eisenberg and Mari Maurice, who are a couple, on tension-filled duo strings. The liner notes on the Bandcamp page are first-person accounts of what they were after in capturing this take. I'd love to perform something like this somehow.
Honourable mentions
- Billy Mohler: The Eternal (ft. Jeff Parker, Damion Reid, & Devin Daniels). I like this stuff, the blues "Adaptation" is nice, I'm just not sure when I'd put it on over the Parker ETA IVtet records.
- Believers (Brad Shepik, Sam Minaie, & John Hadfield): Hard Believer. It's the instrumentation I find myself in most often, down to the electric bass. Minaie's sound on "Pilgrimage" is close to what I get out of my axe these days. I just dig the first track and then the next one or two. I'm particularly underwhelmed by the "Falling Grace" – I'm good with the Crystal Silence take.
- Chris Cochrane / Collapsible Shoulder Big Band - Live 2019: A Map Of Books. I didn't pick this up, though it definitely intrigues me. I enjoy pointing out here that it isn't a "big band" but rather a large skronk ensemble with guitars, strings, percussion, and singing.
- Laura Cocks: FATHM. Solo experimental flute, fascinating but doubt I'll feel like revisiting it.
Thanks for trying a new thing with me today. I intend to write this sort of diary of what I like, sharing it with you along the way. Maybe my biggest takeaway from this first edition is the extent to which I still can't avoid listening to music in the first-person with the view of being a player.
Let me know if you checked out any of that music and what you discovered.
