Here’s the final installment of the list of my 40 favorite albums from 2020. As I said at the beginning, there’s a degree of arbitrariness to all of this. On Monday I’ll look back one more time, with a selection of reissues and archival releases, a book that expanded my knowledge and understanding of European free jazz, and one final list of honorable mentions. Once again, 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.

10. Kiko Dinucci, Rastilho (Mais Um Discos)

Since the Tropicália era, Brazilian artists have deftly melded disparate traditions and eras into dynamic hybrids. Considering how São Paulo guitarist, singer, and producer Kiko Dinucci has toggled between samba, post-punk, free jazz, and MPB for more than a decade, it’s no surprise that his newest and best album masterfully reimagines acoustic samba in the midst of a politically-fraught moment in his homeland’s history. He conveys rhythmic sophistication with force, his plaintive voice answered by a female chorus that evokes Os Afros-Sambas by Baden Powell and Vinicius de Moraes in an upside-down world. (From Bandcamp Daily)

9. Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl, Artlessly Falling (Firehouse12)

On the second album from her song-driven Code Girl project, guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson has made a massive leap, transforming the often schematic material of the group’s impressive debut into the kind of tunes that guitarist has long admired. Although the group is rooted in jazz, these tunes have an art-pop sophistication that melds melodic splendor with harmonic sophistication, adding harmony singing, deep hooks, and a rigorous engagement with various poetic forms. Somehow the group enlisted Robert Wyatt to sing on the three songs, but Amirtha Kidambi and saxophonist Maria Grand are worthy of sharing the spotlight with him. (From the Quietus)

8. Alvin Lucier, Works for Ever-Present Orchestra (Black Truffle)

In 2016, Swiss guitarist Bernhard Rietbrock formed this ensemble to focus exclusively on the music of Alvin Lucier, responding to the composer’s newest work using electric guitars as a sonic foundation rather than the pure sine tones he embraced in previous decades. Four of the pieces on this double album were written for the Ever Present Orchestra—whose ranks include Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O’Malley. Each listen has made the room I’m in seem to vibrate, activated by the beating and oscillations of the ultra-precise harmonic motion at the heart of these compositions, which dispatch narrative and melody in favor of pure sound that envelops the listener—imagine it as a kind of installation that can delight or flummox auditory perception. (from Bandcamp Daily)

7. Eric Revis, Slipknots Through a Looking Glass (Pyroclastic)

Over the last few years bassist Eric Revis, who’s long held the low-end in the Branford Marsalis Quartet, has emerged as an insightful bandleader and composer, and he’s achieved an impressive apotheosis with this new collection. Surrounded by an excellent support cast—pianist Kris Davis, saxophonists Darius Jones and Bill McHenry, drummer Chad Taylor (and on two cuts, fellow percussionist Justin Falkner) — Revis veers between ultra-taut funk grooves (the opening track 'Baby Renfro' evokes Steve Coleman’s M-Base sound at its best), extended sound studies, moody post-Ellington balladry, and brooding free jazz. The writing is memorable and efficient, but its main purpose is to foster improvisation and on that count it excels, provoking some fiery playing, particularly in the exchanges between the two reedists. (from the Quietus)

6. Marc Sabat, Gioseffo Zarlino (Sacred Realism)

Canadian composer Marc Sabat, who’s been living in Berlin since 1999, is one of the preeminent scholars on just intonation and other tuning systems. This dazzling long-form work inventively applies some of the ideas developed by the 16th century Italian music theorist and composer Gioseffo Zarlino, who “described a diatonic and chromatic tonal space defined by rational intervals combining the numbers 1-6 and called Senario,” a departure from the then-dominant Pythagorean system. Over the course of 72 minutes, the work cycles through nine dazzling permutations, tracing its simple melody through changing timbres that summon the sounds of Renaissance music with a thrilling minimalism. (from Bandcamp Daily)

5. Torbjörn Zetterberg & Den Stora Frågan, Are You Happy? (Moserobie)

Swedish bassist Torbjörn Zetterberg tweaks the sound of his rugged, versatile band Den Stora Frågan (The Great Question) with the addition of Hammond organ or Fender-Rhodes on a few pieces, played either by himself or guest Alexander Zethson, complementing his already blustery post-Mingus attack with drones, extra propulsion, and churchy counterpoint. The core sextet — trumpeter Susana Santos Silva, trombonist Mats Äleklint, saxophonist Jonas Kullhammar, reedist Alberto Pinton, and drummer Jon Fält — is seriously locked in, bringing unrestrained brio and refined focus to his muscular, ebullient themes, with spirited improvisation that seems to bleed naturally from his compositional fabric rather than as pro-forma strings of solos. (from the Quietus)

4. Laura Marling, Song for Our Daughter (Partisan/Chrysalis)

I’ve become exceedingly picky about singer-songwriter fare these days, and more often than not I’m disappointed by critical consensus. My skepticism only makes the seventh and latest album by Laura Marling all the more riveting, as she taps into the indelible phrasing of singers like Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro in her strummy confections, masterfully balancing generous melodies, gorgeous vocal harmonizing (usually with herself), and lean arrangements marked by subtle details that never distract from Marling’s effortless, nuanced singing. She may borrow from those antecedents, but all of her records feel entirely contemporary. The songs grapple with different sorts of disappointments and struggles that emerge from all kinds of relationships, with a deliberate ambiguity that allows listeners to fill in details, but they also let one simply bathe in the tuneful splendor and Marling’s still ascending craftsmanship.

3. Eiko Ishibashi, Hyakki Yagyo (Black Truffle)

As much as I loved Eiko Ishbashi’s 2018 song-oriented album The Dream My Bones Dream (Drag City), uninhibited by a moderately conventional sense of structure she simply killed it 2020. She released a slew of digital-only eps on her own Bandcamp page and another late-year entry on Superpang, and combined with the most accomplished and cogent recording, Hyakki Yagyo, she consistently provided me with spellbinding detours to new worlds. In most cases she weaves together disparate collages of electronics and acoustic instruments, in blurry narratives that each tell different kinds of stories, with her seemingly boundless sound palette painting all the pictures and writing all the words we lack. It’s all abstract in its apparent amorphousness, but for me each richly detailed passage is a new scene or chapter, and the great pleasure letting the music take me for a long ride, with a new destination each time.

2. Susan Alcorn, Pedernal (Relative Pitch)

This pedal steel guitar virtuoso has been making music of lyric extravagance and spectral moodiness for decades, translating the instrumental fundamentals she learned from country music into improvised music — as well as the compositions of Astor Piazzolla and Olivier Messiaen. Finally, at age 67, she dropped her first album as a bandleader and it packs a lifetime of ideas within meticulously pitched arrangements that make the most of a spectacular band with guitarist Mary Halvorson, violinist Mark Feldman, bassist Mike Formanek, and drummer Ryan Sawyer. Some themes are jaunty, some exploratory, and others solemn, yet all of them evoke the splendor of rural and urban landscapes with a humanity that’s nothing short of breathtaking. (from the Quietus)

1. Nate Wooley, Seven Storey Mountain VI (Pyroclastic)

Trumpeter Nate Wooley is known best for his extensive work in improvised music, but since beginning his Seven Storey Mountain project a decade ago his output as a composer has emerged as an increasingly vital practice. His sixth, and deepest, iteration in the series incorporates some unusual sources—whether it’s accretive percussive sounds from earlier installments or the effective interpolation of a feminist folk song by Peggy Seeger—but it’s Wooley’s arrangement of materials, and the way it builds to ecstatic, improvisation-rich climax, followed by a trio of a cappella singers rising up from the fading instrumental din, that makes this the most powerful work I heard in 2020. (from Bandcamp Daily)

Today’s playlist:

Furrow Collective, Fathoms (Hudson)

Mark Turner & Ethan Iverson, Temporary Kings (ECM)

Makaya McCraven, Universal Beings (International Anthem)

Gérard Pesson, Blanc Mérité (Aeon)

Weston Olencki, Emulsions I-IV (Anticausal Systems)

My Favorite albums of 2020—part 4