International Anthem Records' genre-fluid jazz (part 1). A deep-dive playlist.
With pipelines to NYC, LA, London, Jo'burg + beyond, Chicago's decade-old International Anthem may be the most exciting new music hub on Earth. A chat w/ Scottie McNiece, the man keeping his ears out.
NB: No paywall on this week’s post and playlist. If you dig the music, and this newsletter in general, please recommend/share on your Substack, socials, and IRL. It helps a lot! Thanks for your support — Will
Living in Minneapolis in the ‘90s, where I wrote for the late great alt-weekly City Pages, our crew would take frequent road trips to Chicago — a mere seven-hour drive, six if you’re living dangerously — to see live music (touring bands often skipped Minnesota in winter, where the weather was even scarier than the Windy City’s). I grew to admire Chicago’s music scene, its clubs and taste-making indie labels: Thrill Jockey, Drag City, Bloodshot, Touch & Go, etc. Like Minneapolis, which had a similar culture on a smaller scale, the scene seemed supportive, genre-fluid, cross-pollinating. And the music reflected it.
Launched in 2014, International Anthem Records has been embodying this Chicago tradition, which dates back to pioneering indies like Delmark and Chess, and in many ways they’re directly connected to it (Jeff Parker and Rob Mazurek, key figures in the IA universe, made important records for both Thrill Jockey and Delmark). And with over 100 albums in their catalog — check the menu on Bandcamp — they’re most certainly advancing that tradition. For a generous taste, check the 4+ hour playlist I made on Apple Music (click here), YouTube Music (click here) and on Spotify (link at bottom of this newsletter).
The label hit cultural radars beyond the jazz world when some of their artists began signifying beyond it: Makaya McCraven, Angel Bat Dawid, Alabaster DePlume, the late Jaimie Branch. I started clocking International Anthem more closely after writing a review of Step On Step, a compilation of solo recordings by the late Charles Stepney, the visionary Chicago pop and jazz producer (Earth, Wind & Fire; Minnie Riperton, etc.). More recently, IA artist Carlos Niño was the key figure in a band assembled by André 3000, the one-time Outkast rapper, for his New Blue Sun album and tour. The LP wasn’t an International Anthem release, but it sure sounded like one.
Another trademark: The label issues almost all its music as beautiful, physical artworks. These are albums in the old sense: collected recordings to perhaps be listened to while seated between two good stereo speakers, with the LP jacket in your lap, reading the liner notes, admiring the cover art, passing the sleeve around the room to others you’re sharing it with. For those of us old enough to remember when this experience was inextricably linked to being a music fan, and for those just discovering the pleasure, it’s a gift. Among recent releases, the double LP Placenta, by Carlos Niño & Friends (the latter includes André 3000), was pressed on two purple-swirled translucent discs, tucked inside a jacket with a wordless, dazzlingly psychedelic cover image (see above) by the French visual artist & musician Bernard XOLOTL. Like all good album covers, it’s an evocative channeling of the music within.
Equally potent, inside and out, is the new LP by South African composer and drummer Asher Gamedze with the Black Lung Ensemble, a powerful work with wrap-around cover art by Johannesburg artist Leila Khan.
All this made me want to know more, so I jumped on a Zoom with International Anthem co-founder Scottie McNiece, who broke it down. (Our conversation was so inspiring, I’m running it long; I’ll post Part 2 in a bonus newsletter on Sunday.)
WILL HERMES: You’ve really been banging out records, man.
SCOTTIE MCNIECE: We're trying to go out swinging, as the whole world crashes down.
We'll be going down together, my friend. I wanted to ask how you got started— how you came up in Chicago’s indie music scene, and are now a part of it.
The label grew out of a company I started called Uncanned Music, which I still have and still run. Me and David Allen, who runs the label primarily. People would hire us to make playlists for their restaurants, and we got into designing their sound systems as well. At the time, all my clients were in Chicago. Some of these clients would ask me to program live music, because I’d started doing that, too. That was concurrent with me transitioning into being very passionate about jazz and improvised music.
I came to it as an outsider. I grew up as a musician, but played in mostly rock punk and metal bands, and I developed this passion for jazz. My interest in it was part of a transformation from being a working musician to someone who just wanted to facilitate music. David is an audio engineer, and I was trying to get him to come work with me on sound systems for these clients. He and I are both musicians, and I was like, “man, I'm also doing all these jazz and improvised music series. Maybe you can come and record some of what I'm doing?”
I was admiring the label’s mission statement on the website. Maybe you could unpack it a bit.
International Anthem is a Chicago-born recording company that produces and promotes progressive media […] The mission of International Anthem is to make positive contributions to the changing state of the music industry and to vitalize the demand for boundary-defying music by presenting unique sounds in appealing packages to untapped audiences.
I wrote that in 2014. It was on our first record, and it's been on every record since. I think the only word that changed is that it used to say “a new Chicago born label” and now it just says “a Chicago born label.”
If you're writing a mission statement, you want to say something that you feel like will keep you grounded into the infinite future. And it really has, actually. I think in my early drafts, I was saying “experimental,” “avant garde” “jazz” and “improvised music” — I was using all those words, and I was like, “man, I don't think what we're going to do here is only that.” And all those words come with so much baggage, so much pigeonholing, and so many different loaded perspectives on what it means to be those genres. I wanted to choose a word that speaks to the binding approach to all these kinds of music that we're interested in, but isn't necessarily a loaded genre word —even though, at the time, everyone we were working with was essentially a jazz, jazz trained or jazz-adjacent artist from the Chicago music scene.
I guess, if this was 1971 and we said “progressive,” people would think a certain thing about that. But I felt like it kind of meshed with people who are trying to push whatever music they're making into new directions. It also felt like it fit the politics of what we wanted to be doing — not only the kind of music we were doing, but the kind of releases we were doing. We wanted them to feel like they were pushing things in a positive direction. And we called it “media,” because we didn't know how the format of these music-born creations was going to evolve, whether it was always going to be LPs, or virtual reality.
We didn't even know we were going to start our label when we started recording stuff. David and I both had a little experience in putting out records through our bands, just doing it DIY. And then we were like, “man, we really love these recordings. We really love facilitating this music. We love these artists. We're super-inspired by them.” So we decided we wanted to start a record label. Our attorney for Uncanned Music, a music lawyer, was like “are you serious? Why would you start a label right now?” This is 2012, 2013, before streaming had come in, after piracy had “destroyed the music industry,” or whatever. Everyone was just like, “no one's making money off of music. How are you going to do that?” And the more people said that to us, the more we're like, “man, maybe we really should do this.” I felt compelled to be really optimistic about something that everyone thought was doomed.
And the other side of it was becoming very passionate about music from the Chicago jazz and improvised music scene. I came to it as someone who got bored of punk, basically. I was interested in musicianship, but a lot of the people I was surrounded by thought it was lame to care about playing your instrument really well. I was in my mid-twenties and I'm starting to go to all these gigs around Chicago as I'm becoming passionate about this music — and it's usually me and four other really old guys in the crowd. I just thought that was a fucking shame. I play these punk shows, there's a thousand people in the crowd, and I felt like punk was really about community. And I was like, if we just build community around this music, the crowds will accept these musicians who are pushing themselves. I want to try to build this energy around this music, the energy that inspired me to get involved in the punk scene in the first place, which was the community energy.
Right on. Who were some of the artists who gave you “aha” moments when you were going to those early jazz, jazz-adjacent shows?
Going back to 2010, Frank Rosaly was the first musician I encountered, just out of luck — I walked into a bar near my house [The Hungry Brain] on a Sunday night, they had an improvised music series, and he was playing. I'm a drummer, he's a drummer. And watching him play the kit was a huge revelation. I was like, “damn, I need to be putting my ears here.” It triggered something. My first impulse as a musician at the time was like, I got to get some lessons from this guy. He was my teacher for a little while. But through that whole process, I was just kind of realizing, honestly, I'm more interested in just listening.
Then I went back to the Hungry Man a couple weeks later, and Jamie Branch was playing. Nick Mazzarella was playing. I was familiar with Rob Mazurek — I’d been a fan of Tortoise for many years, and of the Chicago Underground — and around that same time Rob moved back to Chicago from Brazil, and I started going to see him whenever possible. Seeing these musicians play inspired me to start my own series at the end of 2011 at the bar where I was bartending.
A few months into that, Makaya McCraven came to play with Marquis Hill and Matt Ulery. I saw Makaya and was like “damn: this dude is amazing.” He's super easy to talk to — he'll talk to you for hours. He would come and play my series, and we would stay there until three, four in the morning just talking.
I would say him, especially, and Mazurek — those two were the ones inspiring me to take what I was doing a little farther and try and start a label. Like, there's a lot more that could be done here than just putting on shows for 15 people in my bar.
Makaya McCraven. Photo by Nate Shuls
One of the things I love about Makaya’s work, and a lot other stuff on the label, is how it speaks modern drum languages, breakbeats and dub and other electronic stuff. As a fan, and a crate-digging DJ, I love that. The packaging, too. You clearly put effort into the vinyl releases; it’s even in the mission statement. Was that always a part of the plan?
Definitely. Another thing that motivated me and David to start the label is we're both record collectors. We wanted to make things that looked and felt beautiful, and put out music that felt unique. I remember saying my hope is that people who follow our label would be surprised by every new release. Like “oh wow, interesting” — not “oh yeah, that makes sense” or “that sounds familiar.” There were other labels at the time that had kind of developed a sound, and were just doing that sound across every release. I thought that was kind of boring; I thought the most exciting thing would be for people [to hear a new record] and be like, “whoa, that's crazy.” Uniqueness is very important when we're thinking about what to release.
And making a great looking product — that's one of the most enduringly fun parts of running a label. Especially in the digital streaming world, there's so much time you spend doing dumb shit that isn't fun at all. But making a great record, the process of production, what it could look like and how it could be packaged, all those things, that's fun. Most records that we make, we're thinking about the vinyl product first and foremost. The music gets fit into other formats behind that.
Let me get wonky and ask about the ecosystem of labels. It’s interesting that you've got a connection with Nonesuch. And maybe I saw a connection with Leaving way back?
We've never done a co-release with Leaving, though some artists we work with are also involved with [the label]. We're colleagues and friends. With Nonesuch we have a distribution partnership where, for two albums per year, we distribute through them. It is just for North America. They gave us some increased support, and we worked together on the marketing of the records. And in turn, we present them as co-releases, even though we're still effectively the label on behalf of the artists.
I met David Bither, who's the president of Nonesuch, in 2018. It was right after we put out Makaya's record Universal Beings, which was kind of a breakthrough moment for us and for Makaya — there was increased interest in the label, a little bit of hype around it, and it happened to coincide with the term of our existing distribution deal ending. I met David when he came to see Makaya play in New York around that record. He just became a friend. I met him through Yale Evelev, who runs Luaka Bop, who I consider to be not only a friend, but kind of a mentor. We talked pretty regularly.
So yeah, starting in 2019, we started doing these partnership releases with Nonesuch. Jeff Parker was the first, and we’re doing our eighth release with them this fall, another Jeff Parker record. There was other opportunities for us floating when we decided to do this with [Nonesuch]. I just looked to them as maybe a blueprint for how a label could be genre-agnostic and creative and vibrant and high level, and can persist. It just seemed like it would be a great group for us to learn from. Most of the things I do, I do because I want to learn something.
The first [co-release] we ever did was with Don Giovanni records. We did the first Irreversible Entanglements record with them. And the reason we did is the same reason that I did [co-releases] when I had a punk band back in the day, which was “we can't afford this, so we have to find more people to pitch in so we can put this shit out.”
We signed Irreversible Entanglements in 2016, and originally I was going to put out their first record just on cassette. I was like, “man, this record's so sick, wouldn't it be awesome to be able to put it on vinyl?” And David was like, “yeah, but we don't have the money to put it on vinyl.” So I hit up Joe with Don Giovanni — “you work with Moor Mother. We're putting on this record that she's part of. We need some fucking money. Do you want to re-release it?” It was totally the same move that I remember from being in a punk band, when we put out a seven-inch with four labels on it. When you don't have money, you have to get other people involved. So that was how it originally started. And we've done a bunch of different collaborations in that way since.
I believe in collegiality, I believe in cooperative economics, and I don't believe in being competitive with other labels. There are some people who I maybe, for fun, feel competitive with. But truly I think that with the kind of music we're working with, and the kind of artists we're supporting, the more people we can get together around this thing, working together, the better it's going to be for everybody.
In some ways, I think it's kind of a Chicago thing, man. It's like, Chicago is a coalition building city. People who have mutual beliefs and needs have to work together there to make things happen, because you don't have the kind of resources that you have in other places.
[End of part 1 — I’ll post part 2 in a bonus newsletter on Sunday.]
thanks for this ❤️🔥✌️