My Favorite albums of 2020—part 1

Sylvie Courvoisier Trio (photo: Mimi Chakarova)

Well, here we go. I don’t need to remind anyone that 2020 was a clusterfuck of outsized proportions, and I think enough people have shared words about what it all means, how it’s impacted us, and threatened our future (to say nothing of our sanity). When I wasn’t caught up in more pressing problems, I did think about the role music played this year, and as the deluge of new releases seemed to carry on unabated, largely oblivious to the meltdown surrounding us on all sides, I felt an increasing disconnect between the sounds flooding my inbox and the silence off stages. I have always viewed recorded music through the lens of live performance, but 2020 threw that relationship on its ass. I was lucky enough to experience a slight reprieve during late summer and early fall in Berlin when small-scale concerts were permitted—a respite we foolishly hoped might signal that the worst might be behind us—and it provided a much-needed jolt of energy and perspective. I probably listened to at least eight-ten hours of music every day last year, but the stuff hit me differently without the grounding concerts provides. Obviously, something is missing.

This year-end exercise always fills me with a certain amount of dread, since it’s ruled by arbitrary influences: mood, timing, and skewed perspectives. But the forty recordings (followed by a list of honorable mentions and a run-down of reissues and archival recordings) I’ll be posting here in the coming days unequivocally made life more bearable. Naturally, there are tons of things I didn’t get to hear, and some of those titles might have ended up here under different circumstances, but as of this week, here’s where I stand.

Following this countdown I will really launch my previously announced Nowhere Street Substack in earnest. The newsletter is designed to share materials I’m working with as I proceed on a book project examining the vibrant collisions of free jazz, experimental, and underground rock that occurred in Chicago circa 1992-2002. If you haven’t already done so, please consider signing up here: https://petermargasak.substack.com/p/coming-soon.

40. Joan Shelley, Live at the Bomhard (No Quarter)

I don’t know if this remarkable live recording was slated for release before Covid upended the music biz in 2020, but it came out during an early wave of archival stuff propelled by the shutdown. But this record deserved a much wider hearing, capturing the lovely Kentucky folk singer fronting a superb band fleshing out the arrangements for her gorgeous songs, which are typically stripped-down to bare essentials on studio efforts. As usual, her own acoustic guitar playing is flanked by the measured filigree of guitarist Nathan Salsburg, but the group also includes Jake Xerxes Fussell on bass, Nathan Bowles on drums, and Anna Krippenstapel on voice and fiddle. Further vocal harmonies come from guest appearances by Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Julia Purcell, singing beautifully behind Shelley’s sweetly delicate but sophisticated delivery. The band treatments underline the grace and maturity of the singer’s writing, providing an instrumental richness to complement her thoughtful lyrics, giving them extra oomph and gravity. I enjoy the austerity of the studio albums, but here’s hoping she’ll take these folks with her the next time she cuts a record.

39. Bill Nace, Both (Drag City)

Guitarist Bill Nace is a collaborator at heart, thriving in a zillion partnerships hell-bent on exploring new terrain on a mass of land that’s been picked clean. He’s a marvelous listener who can maintain a long-game focus while making room for or reacting to spontaneous external input. This mind-fry of a record is billed to the guitarist, but producer Cooper Crain (Bitchin Bajas, Cave) definitely feels like a different kind of collaborator, helping Nace construct harrowing layers of metallic crinkles, low-end rumbles, and live-wire sizzling into concise sound excursions that groan and sigh. It’s a puzzle of raw material transformed into three-dimensional objects that seethe with vitality. In some ways there’s a parallel with how Okkyung Lee collaborated with Lasse Marhaug on Ghil, but the roles, procedures and results couldn’t seem more remote. Amazingly, Both feels like Nace is only scratching the surface.

38. Shirley Collins, Heart’s Ease (Domino)

It was impossible for me not to be delighted by the return of Shirley Collins, but the sound of her younger voice was so deeply ingrained in me, that I was taken aback that her voice was subject to effects of aging on Lodestar. Her voice was huskier and deeper, without the gossamer purity of classic work. I quickly realized the simplicity of my reaction, because Collins’ masterful phrasing remains undiminished. Still, this wonderful follow-up—recorded at a proper studio thanks to the singer’s revived confidence, rather than at home as on its predecessor—feels much more comfortable and self-assured. While she includes some relatively new material, including a new setting by guitarist Nathan Salsburg for “Sweet Greens and Blues,” she devotes most of the record to finding fresh nuances in songs she’s been singing for much of her life. As she told Jonathan Williger in a great interview published by Tone Glow, discussing the eternal utility of folk music:

I also think a lot of people have what I think is a false idea that they’re more creative if they write their own songs. When you hear some of the songs that they write there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of creativity needed. (laughs). Sorry, I’m not really being mean, I’m just… especially when they say “I've written a folk song.” No, you haven’t. You can’t! 

These songs just contain everything I need, or want, or love. These songs are just so precious, and so beautiful, and when they’re not beautiful you don’t have to sing them. But I think, in a way, there’s a sort of vanity with people. All they feel is all “me, me, me” nowadays. “Look at what I’m doing, look at this song I’ve written.” They’ve spread it out all over Facebook and what not. And I think “Help! What’s the future with this sort of music?” Whatever it’s gonna be, it’ll be, and I can’t stop anything.

In her erudite and personal song notes she provides one of the great pleasures and markers of folk tradition, when singers share their personal history with a tune (either in liner notes or live introductions), like where they first heard it, what variations they know about, or how narrative tropes have been repurposed over centuries. The arrangements are lovely and more complex than on most Collins records, but this is her music, but it’s also ours.

37. Coriky, Coriky (Dischord)

I fear some nostalgia on my part, but hearing the debut by Ian MacKaye’s trio with drummer Amy Farina and bassist Joe Lally (all three of them sing, although it’s mostly the former two) really grabbed me instantly. I can’t help but think it’s because the music reminds me of when I heard the first Fugazi record, before the band began drifting toward more expanded structures and before a few of its songs became cultural landmarks. Coriky is leaner and more patient, with an almost folksy charm, and a sincere sense of indignation and critique unencumbered by punk’s dogmatism. If I try to divorce my appreciation from my own experiences and memories, Coriky doesn’t end up on the list, but why would I do that?

36. James Elkington, Ever-Roving Eye (Paradise of Bachelors)

With the wonderful new Ever-Roving Eye Jim Elkington’s songs are more varied and distinctive, with more intricate band arrangements, and the singer has found a sweet spot for his vocals that feel much more naturalistic and generous. Added up, the project represents a huge qualitative leap. Over the decades I’ve observed plenty of expat musicians gaining a deeper understanding and loving embrace of musical traditions and traits from their homeland years after they departed, whether Brazilian singer Vinicius Cantuaria or Malian powerhouse Rokia Traore, and on the new record Elkington follows that pattern with various threads of English folk music. Elkington seems to have profoundly settled into his own music here, with a killer band that feels tailor-made to his songs. He’s long been terrific at figuring out what he can do to improve the music of other bandleaders, but now he’s learned to do it for himself. (from Nowhere Street)

35. Jeff Parker, Suite for Max Brown (Nonesuch/International Anthem)

Guitarist Jeff Parker’s second album beautifully melding hip-production with jazz improvisation and indelible compositions, Suite for Max Brown crept up on me as the year passed. I liked it on first listen, but some ingrained prejudices initially damped my enthusiasm. Thankfully, the music’s rigor and imagination helped me see clear and remember that Parker has always played by his own rules. I’ve always admired that about his work, and this time I was fooled by one of his head fakes. Whether the rubbery R&B of the opener “Build a Nest” (with his daughter Ruby Parker coming into her own as a singer, and the leader summoning the spirit of Jeff “Skunk” Baxter) or the way both skittering, twitching grooves and as single cycling guitar lick “Fusion Swirl” cradle an insanely endless long tone of feedback on “Fusion Swirl,” each piece takes us to a different world.

34. Deerhoof, Love-Lore (Joyful Noise)

Deerhoof put the neck-snapping medleys of Love-Lore together for a commission from the 2019 edition on New York’s Time:Spans Festival, building upon a request from curator and writer Benjamin Piekut, who wrote the essential Henry Cow: the World is a Problem (Duke). In an accompanying essay he discusses how the mainstream ubiquity of records in the 1960s began to erase the boundaries between disparate musical traditions, beginning the long process of chipping away at cultural silos. Looking at year-end lists for 2020 I’ve never noticed more openness, with folks listening to more diverse sounds than ever, with those old lines crushed to dust by the Internet. I love that development, but it also threatens to dissolve the learning, conventions, and history behind the vast world of music. Traditional music from Mali might sound great next to a Mississippi Delta blues record, but I fear that easy commonalities might flatten how three-dimensional these traditions are. The music packed into Love-Lore focuses on some notion of the “avant-garde,” which for Deerhoof is catholic enough to contain Eddie Grant, Pauline Oliveros, Ornette Coleman, and John Williams (along many others). These meticulously assembled medleys required keen listening and deep understanding in how to fit all of this stuff together without cheapening or dismissing individual components. The arrangements are superb, full of sharp splices and illuminating transitions. It’s as fun as anything I heard all year, but it’s also educated me, even with music I’ve listened to for decades. I’m sure part of my attraction owes to how much Deerhoof’s nonchalant curiosity and enthusiasm for different sounds feels akin to mine.

33. Roomful of Teeth, Michael Harrison: Just Constellations (New Amsterdam)

Composer Michael Harrison studied with both La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath, and those experiences reinforced a career-long interest in Indian classical music and just intonation, an ancient tuning system where the intervals in a scale are derived not from a constant frequency multiplier but from varying ratios of whole numbers. This stunning work commissioned by the sublimely versatile vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth is his first piece for a choir, and he worked closely with the group to refine his ideas, responding to recordings of each new iteration to further fine-tune the four-part composition. The results are gorgeous; sonorous long tones glide in ever shifting harmonic combinations, each of which hang patiently in the air. (from Bandcamp Daily)

32. Charles Rumback, June Holiday (Astral Spirits)

Drummer Charles Rumback is the sort of musician who makes Chicago’s scene tick. He’s a sublimely versatile player who consistently but quietly lifts up every session he’s involved in. Over the years, he’s led a variety of groups, but this agile trio with pianist Jim Baker and bassist John Tate is proving to be his most profound. June Holiday is the group’s least aggressive, but the leader frequently builds in an exquisite sense of tension, pitting surface placidity against rumbling anxiety. All three musicians contribute tunes here, and most of them convey a distinct ballad-like feel. The tunefulness comes in spare, single-note tangles: Overtones hang in the air only to be juddered by spasmodic clusters of cymbals and toms, summoning something far more meaningful than an unabashed love song or a freak-out. (from DownBeat)

31. Sylvie Courvoisier Trio, Free Hoops (Intakt)

On the third album by this superb trio, pianist Sylvie Courvoisier balances her compositional rigor and improvisational élan with astonishing results. Each of her nine compositions embraces a specific idea, all tied to a particular dedicatee, and her process fans out from there, taking flight thanks to the connections she’s developed with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen. “Birdies Of Paradise,” written for her ornithologist bassist, is built on imaginary birdsong, Courvoisier mimicking a woodpecker with some of her inside-the-piano clanking. Despite the references, there’s nothing pastiche-like about Free Hoops, which positions the group as one of the most exciting piano trios at work today. (from DownBeat)

Today’s playlist:

Igor Levit, Life (Sony Classical)

Geir Sundstøl, Brødløs (Hubro)

Luke Stewart, Works for Upright Bass and Amplifier (Astral Spirits)

Jackie Oates, The Joy of Living (ECC)

Katia Labèque, David Chalmin, Massimo Pupillo & Raphaël Séguinier, Moondog (Deutsche Grammophon)