RUBATO — a music journal | Downtown Piano Lab

Jazz · New releases · July 27

For the Coltrane centenary, the record nobody copies

Branford Marsalis could have marked the centenary with fast notes. Instead he chose the 1963 album with a singer on it, and woke up one morning with the name Dianne Reeves.

In 1963 Impulse released "John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman": a saxophone, a baritone voice, six songs and no hurry. It has always sat oddly in the catalogue. Anniversaries tend to be celebrated with speed, and tribute albums are built out of it. Marsalis says he wanted the road less travelled.

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AI and music · July 27

Ninety thousand songs a day, and almost nobody listening

In June, more than half of everything uploaded to Deezer was machine-generated. The listening figures tell a stranger story than the upload figures do.

Soul · From the archive · July 27

George Michael wanted to disappear behind other voices

A million pounds, a studio in Encino, and a list with Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder and Prince on it. Thirty-three years later, ninety minutes of tape show what was actually happening in the room.

Jazz · World · July 27

On the fifth album he finally wrote down his own name

Blue Note releases Linda Sikhakhane’s "LINDA" on 4 September. His mentor produced it; his brother plays the trumpet.

World · Soul · July 26

Cesária Évora and the sixteen-year-old at the piano

Cape Verde's World Cup run sent people looking for the islands' music. What they found was a generation that no longer needs anyone's permission to sing.

Cape Verde's run at the World Cup turned attention toward a West African island nation that most people knew by a single name. That name is Cesária Évora, the singer who carried her country's music into the world and died in 2011 at the age…

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New releases · July 26

Ninety-nine years from poem to song

Michael Stipe has released "Hum Desiderata" — a 1927 poem read over an instrumental. You cannot find it where you normally look for music.

From the archive · July 26

Quincy Jones versus 29 seconds of patience

The most famous bass intro in the world nearly got cut by its own producer. Dancing won.

World · July 26

Forty-four bells that are never rung

Bill Fontana taped silver thimbles onto them and let the cathedral hear what the bells hear when nobody touches them.

Jazz · Soul · July 25

She got to know the songwriter before she recorded him

Oscar Brown Jr. would have turned a hundred on 10 October. Amber Weekes releases an album of his songs on 7 August — a tribute record made by someone who knew the man, not just the catalogue.

Oscar Brown Jr. was a songwriter, a poet and a civil rights activist, and his subject was the lived experience of Black Americans, written into songs. He would have turned a hundred on 10 October. The Los Angeles jazz singer Amber Weekes…

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Jazz · New releases · July 25

The producer you are not supposed to hear

Kenny Beats says that if you catch the production tricks, the production has failed. FATHERS is a record where testing that is harder than it sounds.

Jazz · New releases · July 25

Twenty tracks, and the poem is what stays

Nicole Zuraitis is releasing her new album in instalments across the year. Having heard the full apparatus, her reviewer wanted her alone at the piano.

AI and music · July 25

TIDAL stopped paying the machines

Since 15 July, fully AI-generated tracks earn nothing on TIDAL. You can still listen to them.

Jazz · New releases · July 24

Two landmark albums, recorded without a single rehearsal

Nicholas Payton climbed onstage during a Butcher Brown set and played a Coltrane theme over a house groove. He texted the drummer that same night.

It began with something nobody had arranged. During a Butcher Brown show, trumpeter Nicholas Payton stepped up and started playing along with a band deep in a house-inflected groove. Into that groove he dropped “Acknowledgement”, the…

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From the archive · Soul · July 24

“Ba-dee-ya”: how Earth, Wind & Fire defended nonsense

The most famous chorus of 1978 means nothing at all. Which is exactly why it works.

World · New releases · July 24

The conductor who drove supply vans into a war zone

Dalia Stasevska opened this summer’s Proms season in London. A few years earlier, in the same months, she was driving a van into Ukraine.

World · New releases · July 24

An organ nobody had tuned in 150 years

Four Canadians drove thirty hours to Newfoundland to record church organs. They came back with a record in which the empty rooms are also playing.