Tracks listened in 2024
Although few could tell the difference, this is not actually an image of me enjoying some tunes in my study, but rather a nefarious piece of AI slop! Specifically, “A scholarly older gentleman in the style of a medieval illuminated manuscript wearing headphones.” (by DALL·E)

What a great year for music, with an abundance of new releases and newly discovered goodies. We recommend queuing up the 2024 playlist before reading further.

Tracks listened in 2024

Streaming services are so good for exploratory listening. Following the threads of “if you like this, you’ll probably like that…” will lead you down some very enjoyable rabbit holes.

On the other hand, it remains to be seen whether streaming music is sustainable for musicians or even technology companies. Enshitification is taking hold. Platforms are being flooded with ghost music, fake artists, and AI generated dreck. In the race to the bottom, you can’t outrun spotify. Funny how tech folks, myself included, spent years preaching “disintermediation” only to devolve into online middlemen and virtual robber barons - Amazon, Spotify, Uber, etc. One day, all will be replaced by open protocols and optimized for human flourishing rather than “engagement” which is a proxy for addiction and ad revenue.

For now, like ocean currents washing up pretty shells onto golden beaches, the algorithms surface plenty of organic hand-crafted tunes and I am grateful to our digital overlords for that.

Live music

The best way to be sure you’re getting real human-generated music? See it live. Showing up and dropping a bit of disposable income on tickets, drinks, and snacks helps keep the scene alive and lets creative folks know you value what they do. I’m old and lame and don’t get out much, but I saw some good shows this year.

There were a few pleasant Sunday afternoons spent taking in a jazz set at Undercurrent Books. Esperanza Spalding graced the 2024 Wellington Jazz Festival. Japanese math-rock legends Toe closed out their APAC tour to a packed house at Meow. Louisa Williamson’s Heavy Flow series of shows feature a rotating cast of very talented Wellington musicians having fun. I finally got out to the last one of 2024.

Toe at Meow

While visiting Toronto, I briefly became a regular at the Rex. I grooved to a couple of piano trios, one consisting of Duncan Wilson (p.), Chris Parnis (b.), and Petros Anagnostakos (d.), and a second trio led by bassist Jesse Dietschi. I keep coming across solid bassist-led jazz ensembles, for instance Ben Wolfe, Michael Janisch, and Michael Feinberg. You can hear the Jess Dietschi Trio’s thoughtful chamber jazz on their 2023 album Gradient, which I highly recommend.

In Toronto’s lovely Koerner Hall, I took in a recital of Handel, Beethoven, and Prokofiev performed by Vadym Kholodenko, sort of a journey through time from baroque to high classical to modern.

Hyperion Records

Speaking of classical, Hyperion Records was one of the last holdouts against streaming. In February of 2023, Hyperion was acquired by the Universal Music Group and in the later half of that year their deep and wonderful catalog started appearing on streaming platforms.

It’s hard to do justice to this trove of music, but, for me, one highlight is Angela Hewitt’s gorgeous piano playing. She’s known for Bach, but there’s so much more, in particular her sweetening of Ravel’s sometimes harsh piano works. Stephen Hough’s playing of Mompou and Lívia Rév’s of Debussy are also top notch.

Are Universal and the streaming platforms strip-mining a lovingly crafted body of work impoverishing the creators and curators in the bargain? I truly hope an economic model emerges that rewards the best in human creativity and enables ‘musician’ to be a viable profession. In the meantime, hearing this music has certainly enriched my small corner of the world.

New releases

A lot of great music came out this past year. Below is a list of those that, for whatever reason, resonated with me. If an AI apocalypse is coming to destroy music, it hasn’t hit just yet. If we discount the possibility that we’re all living in a simulation, I’m pretty sure all of the following are real live human musicians.

  • Living 12 Strings - Anders Miolin
  • Mid Spiral - BADBADNOTGOOD
  • The Understated - Ben Wolfe
  • HOPE - Bill Laurance
  • Bloom - Bill Laurance, The Untold Orchestra & Rory Storm
  • Keeping Company - Bill Laurance & Michael League
  • Après Fauré - Brad Mehldau
  • Call For Winter II: Resonance - Daniel Herskedal
  • Echoes of Solitude - Daniel Herskedal, Mattia Vlad Morleo
  • To the APhEX - Dorian Dumont
  • Spirit Box - Flying Lotus
  • From the North - GoGo Penguin Live in Manchester
  • The Bounding Line - Greg Reitan
  • In A Landscape - Max Richter
  • Moodial - Pat Metheny
  • Code Derivation - Robert Glasper: Wake Up is a great song.
  • Fruit Galaxy - standards
  • Complex Emotions - The Bad Plus: I especially like the song French Horns from the new guitar-driven Bad Plus.
  • Now I See The Light - Toe
  • Continuum - Víkingur Ólafsson: Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson followed up a 2023 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations with a 6-song EP of selected Bach pieces. To all who caught Ólafsson’s tour last year, I am deeply envious.
  • Standards - Yotam Silberstein

Dorian Dumont

If you’ve had a years-long obsession with Aphex Twin covers on acoustic instruments (and who hasn’t?) you might have been a bit giddy when Brussels-based pianist Dorian Dumont released a second album of Aphex Twin covers. Dumont’s lush and meditative version of Rhubarb is a highlight, infused with scattered raindrops of dissonance precipitated from Bill Evan’s Peace Piece. Windowlicker morphs into a banger of a piano sonata. I’m a dedicated tech enthusiast, there’s something satisfying about reclaiming electronic music for the organic. Humans can still hold our own with the machines.

Following threads, new Discoveries

Tracing connections to discover new music is fun—even if it’s just new to me. For example, Seattle native pianist Aaron Parks played on saxophonist Dayna Stephens’ 2015 album Reminiscent who plays on the tracks Minority and Infant Eyes on Victor Gould’s In Our Time, which is an album that keeps growing on me. Victor Gould is in Black Art Jazz Collective who released the very solid Truth to Power in 2024.

Robert Glasper and Nicholas Britell collaborated on the soundtrack to an HBO series called “The Winning Time Sessions”. Apparently, the show is about basketball, a sport I was so bad at, my middleschool coach told me to go back to my skateboard. These bite-sized groove-oriented tracks will help you bang out some code. A short click away, you’ll find Britell’s tender soundtrack for “If Beale Street Could Talk”.

I’ve been a math rock nerd for some time, falling hard for Tricot, Rega, Toe, Covet, Piglet, Floral, Don Caballero, Tortoise, Fago Sepia… So, I a bit flummoxed as to how I missed Japanese math rockers Hyakkei. Luckily, my 17-year-old is developing an ear for good music and said I would like them. Yep, I do.

O’Higgins & Luft

Saxophonist Dave O’Higgins & guitarist Rob Luft recorded an excellent album of Monk and Coltrane covers in 2018 and followed that up with the equally good Pluto in 2022.

Pluto by O'Higgins & Luft

Chosen jazz

Early in the year, guitarist Gilad Hekselman put out an excellent cover of Coltrane’s Equinox. Following the “you might also likes” led to a whole slew of incredible Israeli jazz musicians including guitarist Yotam Silberstein, and pianists Yaron Herman, Nitai Hershkovits and Anat Fort. Fort’s piece “First Rays” from the 2016 release Birdwatching by Anat Fort Trio with Gianluigi Trovesi is quite good.

The Garden Suite by Nitai Hershkovits & Daniel Dor is a unique piece of music. If Frank Zappa and Aphex Twin had collaborated on the soundtrack to a Studio Ghibli film, it might sound something like this.

Labels

No streaming platform that I know of does a good job of representing record labels, which is a shame. A good label curates a stable of musicians that cohere. I found drummer, saxophonist, and bandleader Karl-Henrik Ousbäck through [Fresh Sound Records][]. They’ve also put out music by Ari Hoenig, Tom Ollendorff, George Colligan, and Simon Moullier among others. Other labels worth checking out include ECM, Blue Note, Criss Cross, Sunnyside Records, Origin Records, Edition Records, and ACT. If the algorithms don’t serve up the good stuff, go to the source.

Analysis paralysis

Last.fm gives some nice end-of-year listening analysis. Apparently, I had poor listening stamina in January through February and again in July. Next year, I’ll do better.

Listening 2024

Glad to see that I was 9% more obscure in 2024 than my already obscure self of 2023. I just keep moving out into that long tail of “nobody gets that weird shit you listen to.”

The good, the bad, and the obscure

Happy 2025

Whether the coming year finds us hiding underground from the all seeing eye of Skynet or transcending our Earthly bonds to become beings of light in rapturous singularity, happy listening in 2025.