The music will start at 8pm at eyedrum (515 Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard Southwest, Atlanta, GA). This concert is part of a new weekly creative music series coordinated by Katie Young, Kebbi Williams, Ipek Eginli, Alexandria Smith, Iriamu, and myself, that is hosted at eyedrum every Monday. The admission is sliding scale with $20 suggested, but it is totally cool to pay what you can. We want people to hear the music.

If you want to know what is happening in the Atlanta creative music scene you can get a sense at https://atlnowmusic.org, and if you have something happening that you want folks to know about, please send your gig info to atlnowmusic (at) pm (dot) me.

Thanks for reading and i hope to see you Monday.

Peace,

Jeff

Here is a picture of me and Marco Fiorini at ICMC 2025 in Boston. This was a Somax2 workshop, run by Marco, who is on the IRCAM team that is developing the software. I learned a lot and will be developing new work that incorporates Somax 2 in the next few months.

More details at www.instigationfestival.com

Happy October! Even though we will not be doing jazz fest at the fairgrounds, it seems like there will still be a bit of music happening. It is nice to see some of the dependable music hangs (old and new) returning. Things like George Porter at the Maple Leaf on Mondays have long been a part of our listening and living rhythm in New Orleans, and the fairly recent addition of the great outdoor venue at The Broadside has reopend after a little time off. Carrollton Station is getting back into the music scene, which is nice.

One of those venues that has long been part of the scene at a variety of physical addresses is Zeitgeist. Their new location in Arabi is a great space, and for part of October they will be showing the new free jazz documentary called “Fire Music,” and each showing will be followed by a live musical performance. I will be playing with Dave Cappello on Tuesday, October 12.

Here are my October public performances:

Monday, October 11, 2021: David Bode Big Band at Carrollton Station (8140 Willow St, New Orleans, LA) at 9pm

Tuesday, October 12, 2021: Jeff Albert & Dave Cappello at Zeitgeist (6621 St. Claude Ave, Arabi, LA) at 8pm, following a screening of Fire Music: the Story of Free Jazz

Saturday, October 30, 2021: Luther Kent & Trick Bag at Monkey Hill (6100 Magazine St, New Orleans) at 9:00pm

I hope to see you at one of these. Stay safe.

-Jeff

https://jeffalbert.com/

Photo by Dennis McDonough at The Hungry Brain in Chicago

From September 16 – 19, 2021, I had the pleasure of participating in the Instigation Festival in Chicago. Steve Marquette organizes this long weekend of musical collaboration, and it is always fun and artistically rewarding but this year it felt particular restorative for me. It was the first time I had performed daily for four days in what seems like years, and they were all musically rewarding endeavors.

One of the highlights of the trip was a new piece that the festival commissioned from Mikel Patrick Avery called Nice to Meet You. It is Mikel’s musical exploration of the idea of restarting so many of the relationships that have been paused by the pandemic. We performed the piece at Constellation (which was not the original plan but sometimes things work out for the better) so there is a lovely archive of the excellently produced stream.

This video also contains the second set by Charles Rumback, James Singleton, Jim Baker, and Ed Wilkerson.

It was so nice to hear these musicians tonight. This band was a formative part of my early musical life, and I am so grateful to still be able to hear and talk to them.

I hope your summer is coming together in ways that bring you peace. Mine has been a bit restful so far, and looks to have some excitement upcoming. Part of that excitement is these two upcoming concerts.

Thursday, July 1, 2021 from 7-9pm CDT: Stellar Spells (Rob Mazurek, Jeff Albert, James Singleton, & Mikel Patrick Avery) at The BroadSide (600 N. Broad Ave, New Orleans, LA) presented by Scatterjazz. This is an outdoor venue. Advance tickets are recommended and available from the venue’s website.

Sunday, July 25, 2021: Jeff Albert, Katinka Kleijn, Chris Alford, and Will Thompson at The Hungry Brain (2319 W. Belmont Ave, Chicago, IL) at 9pm.

Rob Mazurek will only be in New Orleans for one concert, and it features some of my favorite people to make music with. Rob is making video to go with the music, so it will take full advantage of the Broadside’s theater projection screen/stage. I am confident that Stellar Spells is the proper name for the band. I will be in Chicago in late July with Will and Chris for a private function, and while we are in town the fine folks at The Hungry Brain are hosting us for some public sound exploration, and we are honored to be joined by the marvelous Katinka Kleijn on cello. Both of these concerts are singular happenings, so please join us for some music and fellowship.

As always there is music to hear and buy at https://store.b4d-records.com, and I will have a concert at a great new venue in Jackson, MS in August. More on that next time.

Thanks for listening.

Peace,

Jeff

“Any time I have an excuse to spend time with any of the people in this band, I will take it,” says trombonist Jeff Albert of the ensemble on the album OMA(H)A. “One of the things I look for in a band is people I want to spend time with. The music part’s important and it’s cool they play good music, but who do I want to hang out with? And these people are definitely the people I want to hang out with.”

That camaraderie flows throughout the music on OMA(H)A, named after the musicians: saxophonist Dan Oestreicher, bassist Jesse Morrow, drummer Mikel Patrick Avery and trombonist Jeff Albert.You’ll hear it in the interplay of the instruments, in the shared energy of improvisation, in the generousness with which the players treat one another in the soundscape. It’s a bond born of long years playing together for Albert, Oestreicher and Morrow, plus the energy of newcomer Avery.

Says Oestreicher: “I like to play specifically with Jeff and Jesse together because I feel that we have a decade-plus shared language developing from doing so many things in so many combinations together. [As for Mikel], every time we’ve hung since he moved to New Orleans has been really easy and fun, so it just seemed to make sense to try to throw that into the mix.”

The music on OMA(H)A is a combination of improvisational vehicles created by Albert and Oestreicher plus completely improvised pieces by the entire quartet. The tracks combine the two writers’ trademark senses of humor and draw on the group’s shared appreciation of the Chicago free jazz scene, from the heyday of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) to the present.

“Dan had mentioned an AACM vibe as we were talking about what to do with [the album],” says Albert. “Alvin Fielder was on my mind. Alvin was very influential for me and a super cool dude. He was very warm and inviting and open to all the young guys. Alvin had this thing where even when he was playing super noisy and out, the stuff was always swinging.” 

Like most ensembles of hard-charging free improvisers, this one came together around a shared love of … often struggling baseball teams.

“Dan and I are both baseball fans,” says Albert. “I follow the Kansas City Royals and Dan is originally from Pittsburgh so he’s a Pirates fan. One of the things we do is commiserate over our teams stinking most of the time. We have those glorious moments in our history, each of us, that we can celebrate, but most of the time they’re not that great. Over the summer, the Royals signed free agent first baseman Carlos Santana, so I texted Dan to say that either the Royals are trying to be good or that Santana’s career is over. That text conversation continued into ‘I miss people and playing music and I would love to see you and hang out and make some music because that would be a lot of fun.’ So we started figuring out ways to do that.”

The album was recorded over two half-day sessions at House of 1000Hz in New Orleans. Goat, the engineer, created a space for the musicians where they could feel safe to improvise in the same room despite the pandemic, and everyone could feel the excitement of making music with other human beings again for the first time in a long time.  

“The recording process was very relaxed,” says Oestreicher. “We did two days at Goat’s studio. Mostly single takes of the songs. It was just good to be in the room with everybody doing it. Playing with Jeff is just really easy. It seems like I play whatever kind of nonsensical bullshit I want to play and Jeff is going to find a way to fit in with that.”

The admiration goes the other way, too. Albert says: “[Dan] will poke at my musical conception in ways that I won’t do. I feel like he brings better things out of me than I get to on my own.”

With titles like “Red Scare,” “9^th Ward Trotsky” and “Debs In The Dining Room,” it’s reasonable to ask whether political ideology and activism play a roll in the making of the album. Both Albert and Oestreicher are clear on this topic.

Albert: “I feel like we’ve reached a point where artists have a responsibility to address the world we live in. It drives me crazy that it looks like society is falling apart and as a musician I’m not sure what to do about that other than make music. I feel like all of the music that I make at this point, on some level, is about how do we respect each other’s humanity and try to be just and equitable with each other.”

Oestreicher: “Jazz and politics have always been, in my opinion, inextricably intertwined. The development of jazz was a political statement from the very beginning. And anyone who says that jazz is not political or that their jazz is not political is wrong, and their saying that is a political choice, even if they don’t see it. Choosing not to engage in that way is a political choice. Art is inherently political. Doing something not because it is value-generating in a capitalist sense but because you think it does something for yourself or others outside that system is inherently political and all artists do it.”

Take the New Orleans feeling, add in improvisers steeped in the free improv scene, toss a baseball into the mix and stir in some good old-fashioned lefty thinking. It’s OMA(H)A, and it’s the good kind of vibey. 

https://breakfastfordinnerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/oma-h-a

or 

https://store.b4d-records.com/album/oma-h-a

Brad Farberman talks to Jeff about his upcoming Bandcamp Friday compilation to support live music venues, meeting people on twitter, and other stuff.

https://bradfarberman.bandcamp.com

Brad on twitter (for dad jokes): https://twitter.com/BradFarberman

Disclaimer: All of the sales numbers I talked about were made up. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Kind of weird…in a very good way.

Ken Vandermark is a Chicago based musician and organizer. He helped found Catalytic Sound, and they recently started their own streaming service. Jeff and Ken talk about that…and other stuff.

http://catalyticsound.com

https://stream.catalyticsound.com

https://ess.org/option/

And…if you need the visual stimulation of watching Ken and I talk on zoom, you can see the conversation here: https://youtu.be/_Ybep71Vbxc

Tonight I went to hear my fist live performance since March. It was at The Broadside, which is a great outdoor venue in New Orleans. The chairs are well spaced, the people all wear masks, the sound is good. There is food and drinks. Plus there is a cool view of downtown from the right seats. It was nice to hear music with people and not feel like I was being pandemic irresponsible.

Helen, Will, and Doug sounded great, and it was great to see and hear my friends. I will be playing there next Wednesday with a new band that will be lots of fun. Tickets here.

My practice has been to list only listening that is new to me here, and technically this is not music that is new to me. It is music that has been recently re-released, so it gets a pass. One should never let one’s rules get in the way of good music, or sharing of such music.

Given how much I have written here in the past few years, it is unlikely that many (any?) of these things will get full reviews, and I am pretty sure I will not assemble them into top 10 lists at this time next year, but I will hopefully at least have a record of the new sounds and live performances I encountered. Wish me luck.

The record is finally out.

Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group

Bang A Gong (Get It On) · U2 · Elton John

Bang A Gong (Get It On)

℗ An Island Records recording; ℗ 2020 Universal Music Operations Limited

Released on: 2020-09-04

Producer: Hal Willner
Studio Personnel, Mix Engineer, Recording Engineer: Marc Urselli
Associated Performer, Piano, Vocals: Elton John
Associated Performer, Vocals: Bono
Associated Performer, Guitar, Recording Arranger: The Edge
Associated Performer, Bass Guitar: Adam Clayton
Associated Performer, Drums: Larry Mullen, Jr.
Associated Performer, Trombone: Trombone Shorty
Associated Performer, Baritone Saxophone: Ray Moore III
Associated Performer, Tenor Saxophone: Brad Walker
Associated Performer, Trombone: Jeff Albert
Associated Performer, Trumpet: Ashlin Parker
Associated Performer, Trombone: Charles Halloran
Studio Personnel, Mastering Engineer: Howie Weinberg
Composer Lyricist: Marc Bolan

Ohmme is one of my favorite bands, and Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham are the guests on this episode. We talk about their new record, the music business, making videos, and I fanboy a little.

https://ohmmemusic.com/

Errata: I misspoke in the episode and said Fox hall is in Kansas City. It is not. It is in Chicago. I knew that. My mouth is just faster than my brain.

“The model examines a hypothetical large university of 20,000 students and 2,500 instructors who interact daily for 100 days. The mean class size in the simulation is 24 students, with 90 percent of classes having 50 students or fewer.

Each day in the model, there is a 25 percent chance that one individual on campus not in quarantine, who has not already been infected, can become spontaneously infected by nonuniversity contact, a rate researchers said was rather low compared to other estimates.

In the absence of any intervention at all, the model suggests that all susceptible community members would acquire COVID-19 by the end of the semester, with peak infection rates between 20 and 40 days into the semester, even if the semester begins with no infections.

A standard intervention, consisting of quarantine, contact tracing, universal mask wearing, daily testing of 3 percent of the university population and large classes (30 or more students) moved online, suggests a slightly rosier picture, with infections kept below 66 people in 95 percent of simulations.”

It is possible to do this in a smart way with responsible amounts of risk. #maskup

Of course if the students are not willing to follow guidelines…

Quin Kirchner is a Chicago based drummer and composer. he and Jeff talk about Quin’s new record, releasing music on vinyl, djing, and more.
https://www.quinkirchner.com
https://quinkirchner.bandcamp.com/album/the-shadows-and-the-light

It does seem weird to be promoting a performance while our society is in the middle of dissolving/re-inventing itself (depending on how full you think the glass is). As musicians what we know how to do is make music, and part of the impetus for this band was a way to say something about the state of our society. Please join us if you can, and we will do our best to help you feel something and hopefully make you think. #blacklivesmatter

Jonathan Freilich is a composer, guitarist, and bandleader in New Orleans. He and Jeff have been friends and colleagues for over 20 years, and here they converse about theirs creative processes, how presentation of music effects performance, and changes in the scene.

https://www.jonathanfreilich.com/

https://www.cosmickrewe.com/ (Michael Ray’s website)

Stream it on Deezer, Apple Music, Spotify, or I am sure you know how the search function works on your streaming service.

Or buy it directly.

Jeff talks about song titles, activism with instrumental music, and asks for listener feedback.

https://www.twitch.tv/the_nest504

https://ohmmemusic.com/

https://store.b4d-records.com/album/unanimous-sources

Cass Faulconer is an electric bassist who has toured with Cirque du Soleil and Cowboy Mouth, and played with many of the great musicians in New Orleans. We discuss life in the circus, rock and roll touring, auditioning for famous people, fostering a dog, and things you learn moving to a new country.

https://www.instagram.com/jennersax/

the best musicians are not professional musicians or “successful” musicians, but the musicians who struggle to deepen and strengthen their voice.

Brad Walker is a New Orleans based saxophonist who has toured with Sturgill Simpson, makes records with his own bands, and plays with just about everyone in New Orleans. Brad and Jeff discuss recording sessions that we didn’t think produced anything good (but they really did), records that are results of stay at home time, playing solo music, and effects as instruments that need to be learned.

Relevant links:
Brad Walker’s website
Tim Robertson’s “Get on Board!” Re-launch video