(Part 2) International Anthem's genre-fluid jazz. Weekend links.
André 3000, Phoebe Bridgers and Thom Yorke have worked with artists on this extraordinary Chicago label. Here's why. Plus: the soft launch of our first sub-Substack.
This bonus Sunday edition includes Part 2 of my Q & A with Scottie McNiece of International Anthem Records (click here for Part 1). It’s also the soft launch of Weekend Links, a weekly roundup of music journalism. Let me know what you think in comments! And as always, if you dig this newsletter, please recommend / share on Substack, your socials, and IRL. It helps a lot! Thanks for the support - Will
WILL HERMES: I want to talk about regional music communities, because International Anthem been bringing out records from all over — London, Los Angeles, South Africa. Some of the hottest jazz and jazz-adjacent scenes are coming out of those places. How did these pipelines grow ? And you’ve moved to LA, yeah?
SCOTTIE MCNIECE: Well, my move was pretty unrelated to any of that — I got married to someone I met in Chicago, and she's from here. We needed her family's help; we now have an 18 month year old. Granted, it wasn't the most random place for me to move to, since I already worked with a few artists based here.
It was quickly obvious to us that just beating Chicago to death, telling everyone in Chicago about how great our artists were, was not going to do that much for us. So we started going to New York regularly, putting on showcases and spreading the good word there. We started getting attention and press there. And when we’d come back home to do shows, all of a sudden there's more people showing up. We did a couple of gigs in LA similarly. I mean, we're trying to support the artists we work with.
And people may be based in a place, but these are musicians, man. They're the most nomadic people on earth. They get around. That's what they all do, and what they've done since the dawn of time. So it's never been just about one scene. These are people who move around, and they create relationships and collaborations everywhere they go. That's how music has always evolved.
In some ways, we were just following the artists. Jaimie Branch moved to New York around the same time I wanted to record her. So it became our first New York record. Jaimie, [cellist] Tomeka Reid, [drummer] Chad Taylor, and [bassist] Jason Ajemian were all very Chicago in their roots, but they all lived in New York at the time.
London was the same. All of these artists we work with [were] going to be in Europe at the same time; we said “let's put on a showcase in London.” That was 2017. We did it at this place called Total Refreshment Centre, kind of a hub for a bunch of different artists. Alabaster DePlume lives there. But we didn't even know them before we did it. It just seemed like a cool place to do our show. A DIY space, underground vibe — more our vibe than the other options, like Jazz Cafe or Ronnie Scott's. And it wasn't just Alabaster [that we connected with]. It was Lex, who runs that place. The artists who work out of the place, including the cats from The Comet Is Coming. Theon [Cross] and Nubya [Garcia] played that show with us, and Ashley Henry.
It went really well. All these people were part of the ecosystem around this space, and I think 12 or 16 people from our Chicago crew all came at the same time. And there was this massive vibe. Everyone loved each other, and it was an immediate, perfect mix of scenes. Alabaster DePlume sent us a record not long after that, which was his instrumentals record. We put it out in 2020, and it has done really well. We became close friends.
And we met Tom Skinner, who we've done some stuff with. So now there's a handful of London based artists that we work with, including Ruth Goller, who plays bass with Alabaster. Makaya made a record with a bunch of artists who were based there. Some of those artists became collaborators of ours. So it all kind of grew in that way, the natural movement of people through earth and time. Just because we are from Chicago and our first artists are from Chicago, doesn't mean that we're only ever going to be sitting in Chicago waiting for people to come to us.
The South Africa connection started through Angel Bat Dawid. She went there to visit, she met Asher Gamedze, they played together. He ended up being on her first record that we released; he plays drums in the last track of The Oracle, and ended up being in her band for the live record of hers that we released.
Not long after that, Asher came to the United States to visit Angel, and he needed a place to stay in Chicago. So I gave him my apartment, and stayed at my partner's place. We became friends. His second record, the one we released last year, Turbulence and Pulse, he'd sent to us and was like, “I would like to put this out with you.” And we used that opportunity to do it as a co-release with Mushroom Hour Half Hour, the label that's based out of Johannesburg. We became very close with them.
There’s such a deep jazz tradition in South Africa, going way back.
Definitely. I was just there [in July], Makaya [McCraven] and I went to Cape Town to do a recording session together, which Asher helped us with, and Mushroom Hour. We met Louis Maholo-Maholo. [We met] Kanu Ntshoko, the nephew of Makaya Ntshoko, who was [also] involved in a lot of the early jazz ensembles that were getting big from South Africa in the seventies. [Editor’s note: Makaya Ntshoko died on August 24; he was 84.]
We love Asher. He's an amazing musician and an amazing thinker. And I love not only the way his music sounds, but what it represents. He did a doctorate about revolutionary black radical collectives, including a lot of research about the AACM in Chicago. He’s very interested in some of the same traditions of Chicago music that a lot of the artists that we were working with from the very beginning come from.
This new record is a large ensemble piece that he wrote that involves voices and the compositions are sort of performed around samples of Fred Moten doing spoken word poetry. I guess the concept of the record is “social breath,” with words and singing voices [that] express this idea of solidarity through breath. It's an intense piece. I dunno if you've heard it, but there's a 40 minute song in the middle of the album, like the centerpiece of the record.
So, yeah, we’re just trying to do stuff in as many different places as we can. It's mostly following what the artists are up to, and finding people that we mutually vibe with. Because that's what music does. Music travels, and it connects people.
I know you’ve got to jump. My last question is about SML — because people have been loving that record — and Anna Butterss, who is part of the group. I know Anna has played with Phoebe Bridgers, and has a new record. Could you talk about them a bit and the LA connection?
Sure. Anna Butterss played on Makaya’s record Universal Beings. They’ve been part of our world for a while. They played on a couple of Daniel Villarreal’s records we released, and they play based on Bex Burch's album, that was recorded here in LA. I've loved Anna's music for a while — they're very talented.
Anna Butterss. Photo by Smanatha Lee
I think of them as one of the artists in LA that come from what I call the School of Jeff. Jeff Parker has been in LA for maybe 10, 12 years now, and he kind of developed this little scene of musicians around himself of people who play with him at ETA here, which is a club not far from where I live, that Jeff had a regular Monday night residency at.
There's a whole new scene of musicians in LA that I feel like are kind of following in Jeff's footsteps musically. Anna is one of them; Josh Johnson, another; Ben Lumsdaine, who co-produced Anna's record, who we put out a tape with a couple years ago, is another. And a lot of that music really cropped up around ETA, which is where SML the band first played. Everything that's on that SML record was recorded at ETA. And that was a club that didn't really exist until Jeff started playing there every Monday. When we recorded part of Universal Beings in Los Angeles, we recorded at Jeff's house. Makaya invited Miguel Ferguson and Carlos Niño to play on the session, and Josh Johnson. And he was trying to figure out who to invite to play bass, and I was like “man, there's this killing bass player named Anna who's been playing with Jeff Parker at ETA.”
That was how we started working with Anna. That was where we met Carlos. That was where we met Miguel. We ended up doing a duo record with those two a few years later, and now we've released a ton of stuff with Carlos. But it was all predicated off of doing a session with them at Jeff's house. So the whole LA wing of the label basically was built off of Jeff deciding to move here at some point from Chicago. And everything kind of grew from there.
Honestly, I think Jeff has made a huge impact on the music scene here in general. Like I was saying, there's a whole wave of music happening here that I call the School of Jeff, because he came out here and he did his thing.
I got turned onto Jeff via his work with Tortoise in Chicago back in the ‘90s, but I didn’t know about his impact on LA. And Carlos connecting with André 3000, and building that band, is another LA story.
Yeah — it doesn't really have anything to do with us, necessarily. We've been working with Carlos for years. And at a certain point he told me, “Hey, I'm producing Andre 3000's next record.” And I was like, “that's crazy!”
[Anna Butterss’ Mighty Vertebrate is out October 4 on International Anthem Records]
Finally, a quick announcement: To reduce clutter in my newsletters, I’ll be starting a separate “section,” called Weekend Links, which you’ll see on the New Music + Old Music homepage toolbar. This sub-Substack will highlight the best music journalism I find, plus with related matters (great singles, great albums, tour announcements, vinyl drops, etc.) It will post semi-regularly, either on Fridays or in Sunday bonus editions like this one. Enjoy it with your weekend coffee, wake-and-bake-ing, whatever your jam is.
As sort of a soft launch, here are links to some essential on- and off-platform reads, including this longread about the nine hour long likely-masterpiece Prince documentary that appears in today’s New York Times Magazine.
It was coincidence that the week I finally weighed in on the 20th century masterpiece that is the Pogues Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, Ireland announced that the band’s late singer and songwriter, Shane MacGowan, would be commemorated on a new postage stamp. What a man. What a band. I saw them twice in New York City during those years; as I write “the revelry, onstage and off, was awesome and scary; Nirvana’s mosh pits were kindergarten recess by comparison.” You can find the full essay at Pitchfork, and the stamp, I presume, at any Dublin post office. Sláinte, my friends.
My early jazz education came from my dad (who loved Ben Webster and was fond of Billie Holiday, who he saw multiple times at the Carnegie Hall Jazz at the Philharmonic series, but even more so from Phil Schaap’s WKCR broadcasts. I hadn’t known the legendary DJ-scholar grew up in Queens walking distance from my childhood home, so I was glad to read this piece about his massive home archives, which are thankfully being preserved.
One more NY Times gift link, this one to a piece today by Bob Mehr (whose authorative book on The Replacements I highly recommend) about Jackson’s Browne enduring song “These Days.” Browne’s original version is on For Everyman, a record I loved dearly as a sensitive teen. An even earlier version is by the late great Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico, his girlfriend and collaborator for a time. Some of you might know it from the great soundtrack to The Royal Tenenbaums,
Here on Substack, you’ll find Peter Margasak, one of my favorite music writers on jazz/jazz-adjacent music for decades, a strong voice at the Chicago Reader who is doing similarly great work here.
My friend Hank Shteamer has been another trusted source. We share similar tastes in sounds, including the Art Ensemble of Chicago LP he writes about here:
That same description also fits my pal Piotr Orlov, a great Brooklyn-based writer-editor-culture worker whose Substack is an absolutely essential read if you want to keep track of mind-expanding live music events in the NYC area, and the artists behind them. (He also caught an error in an early draft of this Q&A — thanks, my fact-checkin’ cuz!)
Finally, my man Nate Chinen is an author and jazz journalist journeyman with a stellar resumé (NY Times, WBGO, etc.) now based in the music-rich city of Philly. I love his work, whatever the medium.
Enjoy! — Will
Excellent work—and love the WKCR reminiscence and regional 23-and-me connection to Phil Schaap.