These are the albums I added to my music library in February 2024. I am not including any “singles” I added — just the EPs or full-length albums (neè, LPs).
All told, there were 12.
Bewitched
By Laufey
This beautiful album blends classic jazz vocals with contemporary lyrics. Each song explores a young woman falling in and out of love with one-night stands she wishes had become something more. Laufey’s voice is gorgeous and rich, and her lyrics feel contemporary, even if the music does not (“I didn’t call you for sixteen long days, and I should get a cigarette for so much restraint”).
Only The Strong Survive
By Bruce Springsteen
Did the world need a Springsteen album full of covers of timeless soul songs from the Commodores, Franki Valli, the Four Tops, the Temptations, Ben E. King, and Diana Ross?
No. No, it did not.
Will it send it back now that it has it? No. No, it will not.
Natty Dred
& Exodus
By Bob Marley & The Wailers
With the Marley biopic One Love arriving in February, I noticed that these two classic albums were missing from my library. I quickly corrected the oversight.
Cazayoux
By Cazayoux
Imagine taking fourteen musicians who were raised in different parts of the world such as Japan, Mexico, West Africa, and the United States. They play instruments such as upright bass, drums, electric bass, keys, trumpet, baritone sax, flute, djembe, balafon, guitar, percussion, trombone, alto sax, and tenor sax. Add a little bit of Austin, Texas flavor, and you give them to a band leader named Forest Cazayoux. What do you get? Some funky, soulful, and high-energy worldwide jazz. This is probably my favorite new discovery of the month.
Troupeu bleu
By Cortex
At the beginning of the month, a buddy of mine sent me this album, telling me it was some of the best French jazz he’d heard in a long while. On my first listen, the bass player rocked my world, and I was in.
The band formed in Paris in 1974, broke up in 1981, and reformed in 2009 with rotating members. This particular album is from 1975, and it blends jazz, bossa nova, samba, and mood-generating French vocals that mean who knows what.
Welcome
By Don Glori
Another album that fuses jazz, world music, samba, and soul, Welcome, by Melbourne bassist Don Glori (a pseudonym, apparently, for Gordon Li), provides cathartic instrumental jams, addictive grooves, and a swirl of worldless vocal harmonies balanced atop a spectrum of keys, vibraphones, and other melodic percussion instruments. Its laid-back sound rewards both close and background listening.
West
By Lucinda Williams
While waiting for the next episode of True Detective: Season 4 to air, my wife and I rewatched Season 1, and the opening track to this album appeared on Episode 4.
I’m a sucker for Lucinda’s weathered voice, and every track on this album has her pain, grief, and smoke-sung blues. Plus, this album has Bill Frissell on guitar, and he’s one of my favorites.
City of Gold
By Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway
Recommended to me by my brother-in-law, Molly Tuttle was the first woman ever to be named Guitar Player of the Year by the International Bluegrass Association. This album lets her skills shine, backed by the solid pickers of her live band, Golden Highway.
Tuttle and her band recorded this album after playing the songs at over 100 dates on the road, and it shows. The notes are fast and tight, while the playing is lively and loose. Everything hits where and when it should.
And for those of you who like your duets to include famous folk, she’s got a road-trip breakup song that she sings with Dave Matthews. This is bluegrass done right.
Burn
By Sons of Kemet
If you read about the albums that I added to my library in January 2024, you might remember me mentioning a band named Sons of Kemet. While writing that post, I found a couple more of their albums I didn’t have in my library, so I added them in.
Four band members: one plays tuba; one plays saxophone and clarinet; the other two play drums. Yet, the sound is as full as the universe.
Burn, released in 2013, led to them receiving Best Jazz Act from the Music of Black Origin Awards. It was also named Album of the Year by The Arts Desk. One critic said it contains “one of the most beautiful and haunting ballads in any genre this year.”
Lest We Forget What We Came Here to Do
By Sons of Kemet
Released in 2015, this follow-up to Burn feels more sparse than its predecessor without losing a hint of its drive.
If you’re not nodding your head, tapping your toes, and swaying your hips and shoulders to this album, then I dare say you’ve forgotten what we came here to do.
Singularity 06: Anchor Dragging Behind
By 75 Dollar Bill
This nearly nineteen-minute EP contains one song that starts out with about five minutes of droning caused by pulling a bow against a string. Austere percussion joins the drone around the six-minute mark, and by minutes eleven and twelve, more punctuative noises join the mild fray, and you begin to see that the album title is about as perfect as it can be, and the realization is noted with relaxed dueling guitars around thirteen minutes in, a semi-melodic reward for persevering with that anchor around your neck for as long as you have, and by the fourteenth minute, you might even mistake what you’re listening to for avant-garde jazz or the bloody hands of a zombified rock and roll pulling itself out of the grave the culture has dug for it, dragging its body behind it like an anchor.