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Talkhouse

Vijay Iyer has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, shape-shifting presence in twenty-first-century music. A composer and pianist active across multiple musical communities, Iyer has created a consistently innovative, emotionally resonant body of work over the last twenty-five years, earning him a place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation.
He received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, the Alpert Award in the Arts, and two German “Echo” awards, and was voted Downbeat Magazine’s Jazz Artist of the Year four times in the last decade. He has released twenty-four albums of his music, most recently UnEasy (ECM Records, 2021), a trio session with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh; The Transitory Poems (ECM, 2019), a live duo recording with pianist Craig Taborn; Far From Over (ECM, 2017) with the award-winning Vijay Iyer Sextet; and A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM, 2016) a suite of duets with visionary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith.
A longtime New Yorker, Iyer lives in central Harlem with his wife and daughter. He teaches at Harvard University in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies. He is a Steinway artist.
(Photo Credit: Craig Marsden)

Vijay Iyer

Music

Role Models: Prince Challenged Vijay Iyer’s Sense of What Music Was

Shakey Graves is the brainchild of Alejandro Rose-Garcia, who released Roll The Bones on Bandcamp in 2011 without any promotion and little information about Shakey Graves. That year, Bandcamp made it a featured album for a month and from there it has stayed among the website’s top-selling records. Rose-Garcia has released a ranging catalog since, but just released a tenth anniversary edition of Roll The Bones complete with 15 additional tracks and a new vinyl pressing.
(Photo Credit: Magen Buse)

Shakey Graves

Three Great Things: Shakey Graves

Island is the latest album from Oscar-nominated composer and songwriter Owen Pallett. Almost entirely acoustic, Island begins with 13 darkened chords, and was recorded live at Abbey Road Studios with the London Contemporary Orchestra. The introduction is sound of waking up alone, and on the shore of a strange land. What follows is a shimmering and luscious orchestral album that draws across the full breadth of Pallett’s discography, from Heartland’s Technicolor to the glittering, fingerpicked guitar that marked Pallett’s first records with their trio, Les Mouches.

Owen Pallett

Three Great Things: Owen Pallett

Potty Mouth is a pop-rock band from Massachusetts now living in LA.

Potty Mouth

Three Great Things: Potty Mouth

Across almost 25 years, Michael Feuerstack has built an underground canon of crooked and beautiful songs. Aside from his own song-craft under his name and former alias Snailhouse, his reputation is also as an exceptional collaborator, producer and general facilitator of music. Mike is a core member of Bell Orchestre, producer for Camille Delean, Paper Beat Scissors, and has contributed to countless performances and recordings with the likes of The Luyas, Thus Owls, Land of Talk, Julie Doiron, and many many more. While Feuerstack arranged and recorded his new album Harmonize the Moon completely solo at his apartment in the spring of 2020, the songs that compose it were written over the past couple years, on wanderings and tours as well as at home. He embarked on a slow process of balancing the poetic with the narrative, producing songs that flow naturally instead of adhering too rigidly to established forms. The result is a collection that’s pensive but playful, introspective yet generous, and achingly intimate.

Michael Feuerstack

Three Great Things: Michael Feuerstack

As a band, Lake Street Dive epitomizes democracy in action: the group, expanded into a quintet since touring keyboardist Akie Bermiss officially joined in 2017, share writing and arrangement duties. Their personalities, skills, and wide-ranging taste in pop, rock, R&amp;B, and jazz have long blended together to make an impressively cohesive sound, both sophisticated and playful, combining retro influences with contemporary attitude. For their new album Obviously, the band turned to Mike Elizondo — songwriting collaborator for Dr. Dre and Eminem, producer for Fiona Apple, Mary J. Blige, and more — to help flesh things out and take them in a new direction.
(Photo Credit: Shervin Lainez)

Lake Street Dive

Three Great Things: Lake Street Dive

Visionist is the UK-based electronic artist Louis Carnell. His third album, A Call To Arms, is out now via Mute.
(Photo Credit: Peter De Potter)

Visionist

A Guide to Visionist’s A Call To Arms

A son of country music royalty, a teenaged Baptist preacher turned addict and actor, Waylon Payne sings about fathers and sons, faith and addiction, recovery and renewal with devastating clarity. His latest character-rich collection, Blue Eyes, The Harlot, The Queer, The Pusher &amp; Me, harks back to a way of telling stories in song that revealed kept secrets and promised mystery. Over his years, Payne has felt the terrible power secrets can hold and learned the transformative value of releasing them. Finally, he’s in a place where he can harness that power to create transcendent work.

Waylon Payne

Three Great Things: Waylon Payne

Push Back is the first full-length record from Jetty Bones, the relentlessly hopeful alt-pop solo project of Ohio artist Kelc Galluzzo. Galluzzo worked alongside producer and mixer John Fields (Jonas Brothers, Demi Lovato, Miley Cyrus) to fully realize a set of bedroom recordings she had mapped out in 2019. The 11 songs on Push Back document Galluzzo’s wrestle between two selves: the one on stage espousing hope and love, and the one in the van after the show crying helplessly, living with depression, anxiety, impostor syndrome, and suicidal ideations. The record tracks Galluzzo’s reckoning with these two selves, willing them to meet in a permanent ceasefire where they can coexist.
(Photo Credit: Lindsey Burns)

Jetty Bones

Three Great Things: Jetty Bones

Larry Livermore was the co-founder of Lookout Records, the editor and publisher of Lookout magazine, and a longtime columnist for Maximum Rocknroll and Punk Planet. Long before there was an East Bay pop punk explosion, Livermore fronted solar-powered punks the Lookouts and the Smiths-like acoustic pop band the Potatomen. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and recently published his fascinating memoir, How To Ru(i)n A Record Label.

Larry Livermore

Three Great Things: Larry Livermore of Lookout! Records

Ned Russin co-fronted Title Fight for many years before the band suspended operations and Ned became Glitterer. He initially self-released two EPs that were odd, charming, clever, eloquent, and highly proficient records, hand-made in the spartan bedroom-pop mode: some programmed drums and keyboards with an electric bass and a voice. The songs were about the trap of self-awareness and the impossible dream of self-negation; and despite their being, combined, all of about 18 minutes long, they left long-lasting impressions, stuck themselves in peoples’ heads and stayed put. Lyrically, many of the songs on Glitterer’s debut full-length Life Is Not A Lesson are short, dialectical considerations of the countless daily miniature panic attacks that attend the rigorously examined life. Life is Not a Lesson proves to be a rigorous reckoning with the life of the mind at a time when there’s not much life outside the mind.
(Photo Credit: Farrah Skeiky)

Glitterer

Three Great Things: Ned Russin of Glitterer

XIXA’s Gabriel Sullivan and Brian Lopez’s combined credits include Calexico, KT Tunstall, Orkestra Mendoza, and more as well as both being members of Giant Sand. For their new album Genesis they’ve delved even deeper into their admiration for Peruvian chicha, extracted and refined the core, and given voice to their most primal instincts. They are joined on select tracks by renowned artists from across the globe including Sergio Mendoza, Imarhan, and the Uummannaq Children’s Choir, which features youth from an orphanage in a small village in Northern Greenland. They’re also joined by drummer Winston Watson, who has done long stints with Bob Dylan, Alice Cooper, and Warren Zevon, among others.
(Photo Credit: Julius Schlosberg)

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