This jazz guitarist Miles Okazaki is doing this thing that I don’t fully understand, but am watching religiously: He’s somehow made a list of every possible musical scale, and he does these drawings and every day on Instagram he puts up a new scale. There’s 351 possible musical scales, apparently. He improvises things around it, or finds an example of it in music. It’s this thing called “shape theory” — every scale is a different possible shape on a circle. It has been on my mind. It’s beautifully done in this gradient way.
— Jonah Furman
There were two things this year that were particularly interesting to me. One is Etran de L'Aïr's No. 1, an album released by Sahel Sounds. An amorphous group of musicians from Niger who have played together for years took up the most common rock instrumentation and did something completely special with it. I wish it was in my brain to play like that.
The second one was the two Adrianne Lenker albums, songs and instrumentals. The instrumentals one particularly impressed me, I think because it's the way that I'm experiencing making music in the pandemic - solo, instrumental guitar. She did a Tiny Desk concert recently where she took out a paintbrush at one point and started playing her guitar with it. I was just watching kind of dumbfounded, struck by how one comes to relate differently to an instrument when you're spending a lot of time alone with it.
— Joe DeManuelle-Hall
I have two things that are connected to each other. One came out pretty recently, actually, this album by Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra. It’s called Dimensional Stardust. He’s a jazz trumpet player from Chicago; he’s been around forever. The album sounds like it’s improvised but it’s all this amazing composition. I read this interview where he says that it’s based on galactic parables from some man that he made up, who writes the parables to him and then he creates the music from that. It’s got a huge 14-person ensemble, which includes one of my favorite guitar players, Jeff Parker, who also had a really great album this year called Suite for Max Brown. That was the last concert I saw before lockdown in New York. It was an amazing show, but looking back I really feel like I shouldn’t have gone to it, because it was like a dark basement in Manhattan full of people in early March. But the show was amazing.
— Aaron Ratoff
Joe: One I think we all agree on: the Bill Callahan cover of the Steely Dan song.
Jonah: That caused me to listen to the entire Steely Dan discography, which wrecked my November. I’m really happy that we’re coming to the end of the year.
Knot’s self-titled debut record is out now.
As told to Annie Fell.
