So what does this eclectic octet play when they all get together? The Harry Belafonte songbook.

Not to say that The Harry Bells are calypso, either, though that Afro-Caribbean style is the one most associated with Belafonte’s 50-year career.

“I’ve never claimed that we play calypso, per se, because we don’t necessarily play the rhythms associated with that,” says Rippetoe, the band’s founder and leader. “I don’t know how to categorize it — except that it’s an instrumental tribute to Harry Belafonte and the music he made famous.”

It could also be categorized as boisterous. The five tracks on The Harry Bells’ fifth release, The Roosevelt Island EP — which they fête Thursday at Boundary Stone — comprise Trinidadian calypso and Jamaican mento rhythms, and each one threatens to dance right out of the speakers. That sense of rhythmic fun is ultimately the link that binds its eight players.

Rippetoe fell in love with Belafonte’s music as a kid, when he first heard it in the 1988 Tim Burton movie Beetlejuice. (A pounding rendition of “Jump in the Line,” which concluded the movie, now concludes The Roosevelt Island EP.) He grew up with it and even passed on to his now 4-year-old son, born when Rippetoe was living in Brooklyn, via a ritual the saxophonist called “Belafonte Bath Time.”

“Joe Herrera was visiting me in Brooklyn one of those bath nights,” Rippetoe recalls, “and we both agreed that this stuff was too good not to do something with it on the bandstand.” From there it was just a matter of rounding up the right people — the ones, says Rippetoe, who could handle the rhythms and were fun to play with.

Their Belafonte book is about three dozen songs deep and is growing all the time. So far, The Harry Bells have recorded around 20 of the tunes on their four EPs. (They’ve also recorded a full-length CD, last winter’s Holidays with the Harry Bells, featuring Christmas songs performed in Afro-Caribbean arrangements.)

Does Belafonte himself, now retired from music, know about The Harry Bells?

“He has heard about us,” Rippetoe confirms. “He and his wife apparently gave us the thumbs-up. And I hope to send him some of this stuff soon.”

The Harry Bells play an EP release show April 14 at Boundary Stone.

These days, however, everyone has unfettered access to music, which if anything makes investigations more difficult and intimidating. Ratliff’s fourth book, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty (read an excerpt here), explores not the possibilities of what we hear, but of how we hear it — and how that can open doors to new musical experiences.

New York Times critic Ben Ratliff

Bandwidth: You know, Every Song Ever strikes me as a sort of 21st century update of Aaron Copland’s What To Listen For in Music.

Ben Ratliff: Well, you hit it right on the head. I can’t even remember whether I cited that book explicitly, but yes. That was part of the genesis — just thinking about that book and what it was trying to do in its time, and other books like it. There was a whole musical appreciation movement in the first half of the 20th century, of which that was a great example. The idea is, “So you want to enjoy music more. You want to be a reasonably educated listener. What do you need to know? What are the ways in?”

And I thought, boy, if a book like that were to be written now, first of all there would be no assumption that classical music above all was the most important. It would just be one of many different kinds. And then it would have to take into account the fact that we have access to everything. Canons are looking more and more endangered, because of access. Access changes the whole equation. Access is power, it’s knowledge; we’re less powerful in a lot of ways, but we’re more powerful in terms of cultural choice.

So yeah, it’s basically Aaron Copland plus Spotify. [What To Listen For in Music] in an era when you could reach into your phone and find what seems, at least, like every song in the world.

“I think the streaming services would rather you be passive, rather you give them the reins and let them decide what you like, and who you are, and what kind of listener you are.”

Who is your ideal reader? Somebody who just wants help sorting out all of the possibilities that are out there?

Well, I wanted to just suggest the spirit of listening that would go against the idea of genre — that’s part of the goal. And I wanted to write — this is a set of 20 essays exploring different kinds of listening experiences and making connections between seemingly far apart examples of music. And saying, “Look, you’ve been taught otherwise, but late Shostakovich does have something in common with DJ Screw.” That’s what this book is.

But I think underlying it is a sense of, maybe it’s a good idea to start thinking about the possibilities of listening now, while the streaming services are still figuring out ways to get a hold of us. Streaming services seem to be the future of listening; that’s the way it is, and there isn’t anything that someone like me can do to change that. And if I were to change it, I’m not sure what I’d want to change it to. It’s all about efficiency. Listening in an efficient way is authentic — pulling out your phone and listening to a song through a crappy speaker hole is an authentic way to listen in 2016.

But I’m a little worried about the fact that the streaming services might have a lot of say in what new music you might be encountering from here on in. So what I’m doing is, I’m not suggesting a canon — these are the works you ought to know — I’m just suggesting a spirit of listening such that any old listener might feel that they can encounter something new, that they don’t recognize and comes from a tradition they’ve never heard before, and think, “Maybe this isn’t so alien. Maybe this is about me, too. Maybe this is something I can claim, because some aspect of it reminds me of something that I do know.”

I wonder, since you talk about streaming services, if you have a feeling that your book goes against the grain of services like Pandora or Apple Radio — the curated experience, which suggests more of a narrowcasting trend. Do you think your book serves as an antidote to that?

Theoretically, yes. Practically, I have no idea. My understanding, from what I have seen of algorithmic listening — which could mean Pandora feeding you an endless chain of songs somehow related to your favorite artist or Spotify giving you a very sophisticated playlist every week tailored to things you have looked up and to a profile it has built of you — is that in all of these cases, you are being reduced. And you are being reduced by a force that is probably not even human.

As clever as these algorithms can be, I think that listening is really a creative activity, and it’s not just passive. Listening makes you grow; it informs your emotional intelligence, it makes you become a bigger person. Your being able to luck into something you’ve never heard before and figure out what you’re going to do with it, figure out, “What is the way into this piece of music?” in a creative way, I think is crucial. I think the streaming services would rather you be passive, rather you give them the reins and let them decide what you like, and who you are, and what kind of listener you are.

I know that’s efficient; I think their main priority is how quickly they can bring satisfaction to you. From a business standpoint, that makes a lot of sense. But I also think, “Wait a minute. We’re talking about listening here, listening to music. It’s so important. It helps shape our identities.” And I’m concerned about leaving that up to robots.

“A lot of us live within half an hour of a place where you hear a completely different kind of music on the street, and a lot of us block it out. ‘That’s alien to me, I don’t know anything about it; I’m not gonna take it in.'”

Do you have kids?

Yeah.

Do you notice different ways that they find new music, or find new ways to appreciate the music they already know?

I would say that a lot of what they’ve learned about music has come through YouTube, probably more than any other single source. And I think like anybody else, they follow links — maybe less so now, because they’re getting into the higher teenage years — but when they started doing a lot of listening on their own, they followed a trail that YouTube, especially, laid for them.

Now, if you listen to a song on YouTube, you don’t even have to press a button: Another one is going to start in 10 seconds, and it’ll be related in some way to the one you just saw. So there’s very little that you have to do, and we know where to look to encounter new things — we look on the right side of our YouTube screen.

The big question that I’ve been encountering is, Fine. Very well. You’re saying that it’s good to go against reductive ideas about genre and about listener profiles, and to listen across genre and retrain yourself to take in different kinds of music. That’s all very well, but how do you find the stuff? If you decide you like loudness as a listening experience, where do you go? You know what you know; how do you get outside of that? If you’re rooted in metal, how do you get outside of that and find loud music that comes from a completely other tradition than metal?

And really, that’s where listeners are more on their own. And that’s where I’m encouraging them to basically do anything other than be passive around algorithms. To talk to people, ask people questions. To read. To keep their ears open when they’re entering a neighborhood where music other than what they’re familiar with is played. A lot of us live within half an hour of a place where you hear a completely different kind of music on the street, and a lot of us block it out. “That’s alien to me, I don’t know anything about it; I’m not gonna take it in.”

And you know, music is all around us, more and more, with TV and radio and online and movies. And I think there’s a greater and greater possibility of the dumb luck of encountering something we’ve never encountered before, and asking, “What does this have to do with me?”

“I think a lot of music criticism today is done through the eyes. It’s done with reference to a video, or things the artist has been doing on social media recently… there’s less consideration of the music as sound.”

I think that ties into your approach to this book, in that you don’t spend a lot of time on musical or cultural history, or authorial intent — all the tropes we expect an informed music critic to hit.

Especially these days, and especially dealing with popular music. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. That’s partly the conceit of the book, but it’s also partly what I like to do, and what I have found useful.

I feel like I’ve been really lucky to have this job for 20 years, where I can write about anything that isn’t labeled classical music, because there’s a whole bunch of other critics doing that job. So that’s a really, really wide spectrum, and it feels good to be able to review completely different kinds of music on different nights of the week. But I need a way into all of it. And for me that’s with sound. Because I’m dealing with a wide variety of things, I deal with sound first. What is the information in this sound? What is this song attempting to do through music? What is the experience of listening to it all about?

So that’s where I start, and all of the other considerations come later for me. What’s the political angle of this song, what’s the messaging, what’s the coding, what kind of statement is being made here in relation to this artist’s last album, or whatever.

So to that degree, I’m sort of writing an autobiography of how I have come to listen. I guess I am slightly making an argument for hearing music as music — with whatever tools you have. You don’t have to be a composer, you don’t have to have harmonic theory or any of that stuff. You just need ears, and need to use them.

I think a lot of music criticism today is done through the eyes. It’s done with reference to a video, or things the artist has been doing on social media recently. And there’s not so much  there’s less consideration of the music as sound. I’m not convinced that this is a bad thing, but I’m just trying to write about music in a way that feels real to me.

Ben Ratliff discusses his book Feb. 23 at Politics & Prose. 7 p.m.

The music on “Clarity,” a recording that Leppin’s eight-piece Ensemble Volcanic Ash made at the 2013 Sonic Circuits Festival, is as nebulous in category as the duo’s: elements of jazz, electronica, ambient, avant-garde and chamber classical music (or at least chamber instruments, like harp and bassoon) all interact within the mix.

If none of these musical strands quite defines the ensemble’s sound on “Clarity,” jazz comes the closest — between Leppin’s stark rhythmic figure and Sarah Hughes’ dark and mysterious alto sax solo, the jazz feeling is unmistakable. Perhaps that’s what landed Ensemble Volcanic Ash a prime spot in the lineup of 2015’s Washington Women in Jazz Festival, taking place throughout the month of March.

Watch Janel Leppin perform live with Marissa Nadler at Bandwidth’s Wilderness Bureau.

Ensemble Volcanic Ash performs tonight at 8 p.m. at Union Arts.

For rock fans, “jam” generally has two meanings, neither of them necessarily attractive. It’s either a self-indulgent, just-for-fun musical hang that musicians have in their garage when nobody else is around, or a kind of music (and band) that bros and stoners love, featuring songs that go on for 45 minutes of aimless, shapeless wankery.

In jazz, though, a jam session is a bit of a different beast. It’s a hang, sure, but it’s also a creative workout. Everyone’s there to hone their craft: Older musicians go to keep their chops in fighting shape, bat around new ideas and interact with associates old and new; younger ones go to get much needed bandstand seasoning, learn the repertoire, work on form and technique and see what they can pick up from the veterans. The whole point is not to encourage self-indulgence, but to cultivate discipline.

It’s also an amazing thing to watch. Like any workout, it increases the participants’ energy flow, then feeds on that flow so the music just gets more intense and exciting as it goes on. (That’s why jam sessions are so often late-night occurrences: so musicians can release the energy they’ve built up in their gigs from earlier in the evening.)

D.C. has been building quite a jam-session scene recently. Not all of them have proved durable: HR-57, which hosted the city’s best-known jam session, is currently searching for a new home. The beloved U Street Jazz Jam recently fizzled out after trying out several locations. But there are still enough going on around town that you could see a jam session five nights a week—sometimes more than one in a night. And none charges a cover. Here’s our guide to D.C.’s best jazz jam sessions:

Tuesdays: A low-key jam at Takoma Station

Once one of the city’s most popular jazz venues, Takoma Station (in guess which neighborhood) now mostly hosts smooth jazz and go-go. But on Tuesday nights from 7 to 10 p.m., the venue hosts a low-key jazz jam. “Low-key,” that is, in the sense that there tend not to be many people in attendance on a Tuesday night (mainly neighborhood folks out to grab a burger and beer at the bar), and the musicians tend to be a small coterie of regulars, usually led by guitarist Glenn Wiser. Nevertheless, drop in to this dimly lit joint and it’ll be swinging.

Thursdays: An unofficial jam at Dukem

Dukem Jazz, the name that U Street’s Dukem Ethiopian Restaurant adopts on Thursday nights, isn’t advertised as a jam session per se. It’s a basic jazz gig, a small band playing two sets while customers eat, drink and groove, and it’s proven quite a successful format. But a tradition has arisen from the weekly performances: The second set, which starts at 10:30 p.m., brings in instrument-packing musicians and, as if spontaneously, a jam session develops. (Dukem Jazz promoter even advertises the evenings with the tag “second set turns into a jam.”)

Fridays: Late sessions at Twins Jazz

Naturally, the weekends are where the late-night stuff gets going. Twins Jazz, the U Street staple, is the newest outpost on the jam-session scene with its Late Session, which goes down on both Friday and Saturday nights. Like Dukem, Twins starts its programming with two sets (9 p.m. and 11 p.m.) by a headline act. When the second set wraps, usually ‘round midnight, a local musician or group—Twins tries to get a different booking each week—takes the bandstand, gets started on some standards, and invites all comers to sit in (or sit down and watch) until 2 a.m.

Saturdays: Early sessions at Columbia Station

There’s a lot of edge and energy moving in the late night jams, but you need not wait until late to catch one. Columbia Station, an Adams Morgan bar that’s also an underappreciated jazz venue, kicks off a Saturday jam session in the late afternoon at 4 p.m. Led by pianist Peter Edelman (and whoever he brings with him each week), it’s another one that attracts a small group of regulars, with other musicians drifting in and out irregularly. Sometimes there are long stretches where it’s nobody but the house band; in that case, they just keep it going like it was a regular club set.

Sunday: All the jam sessions you could ever want

Interestingly, Sunday is the busiest day for jazz jams. Columbia Station gets started at 4:30 on Sundays, but this time goes all the way to midnight—the District’s only seven-plus-hour jam session. At 5 p.m., over at Dupont Circle’s Black Fox Lounge, begins the city’s most unique session: The DC Jazz Singers’ Jam, a forum for sharpening vocal improvisations (a craft that’s far too little seen or heard, in D.C. or anywhere else), usually hosted by vocalist Sharón Clark. Then at 6:30 p.m., back in Adams Morgan, Dahlak Eritrean Restaurant hosts the D.C. Jazz Jam, a weekly three-hour session with rotating house trios and, most weeks, a special guest artist.

Photo by Flickr user Evonne used under a Creative Commons license.

Spacelab is a trio featuring pianist/organist Nikolaj “The Champ’ Hess—one of Denmark’s busiest and most acclaimed musicians, and an NJF veteran—and his drummer brother, Mikkel, along with their childhood friend Anders “AC” Christensen on bass. The music is often lyrical, but with an eclectic stylistic palette that includes an endless combination of grooves and an experimental edge.

The Hess brothers spoke to Bandwidth about the band’s lifetime friendship, the musical formulas behind Spacelab and the contrasts between Danish and American jazz.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Bandwidth: Is there a particular concept behind Spacelab?

Nikolaj Hess: Just the fact that we’ve known each other since we were kids, grew up and always played together, shared so many experiences. So we’re drawing from that common background when we’re playing. It’s really not a conceptual band, but I guess you could say there’s a love of melody and good groove, and an open attitude to the moment of the music.

I would also say that we grew up with a lot of jazz music, and improvised music, so that’s a solid foundation for the band. But we also have many other musical backgrounds, like folk music from Scandinavia, classical music, a lot of different pop, electronica, world.

Where did the name “Spacelab” come from?

NH: I was in Africa for half a year, and when I came back we had a little jam session where I played violin, Mikkel played the African drum I brought home and AC played the piano. It was a real “spaced out” jam but it had a very special vibe. And that’s how we came up with the name: “Oh, it’s like a laboratory for spaced out music.” The name stuck, and seems to fit because we also like to explore different spaces.

Mikkel Hess: The record we just made gives it a new meaning, because there is a lot of space between notes. That wasn’t a part of the original meaning necessarily, but when we heard it we thought, “Wait a second, there’s a lot of pauses.” I know Nikolaj has a favorite quote, which is from Miles Davis: “It’s not just what you play, it’s what you don’t play.” So that gave a new meaning, again, because we ended up not playing a lot of things on the new record.

You talked about how you both grew up with lots of jazz. How much of that was American jazz, versus European?

MH: Nikolaj and our oldest brother are eight and nine years older than me, and were very much into music. So I had a very easy choice: I just copied everything they did. As I remember, there were a lot of American records. But I think the first bridging, when I started to say, “Oh wait, people also play jazz music over here!” was the Keith Jarrett [European] Quartet.

NH: There was also Jan Johansson, a [Swedish] piano player who was a very big influence. It has differences, the Scandinavian and American jazz, and I find it interesting to be both places and try to take the things I really love from both worlds into the music we play.

Are there specifics you can point to and say, “This is a characteristic of Scandinavian jazz”?

NH: It has a beautiful simplicity to it. It’s very hard to generalize because you can examples of everything, everywhere—as soon as you say “this is a specific to Danish music,” you find it in another camp—but it’s part of the Danish nature, the Danish architecture, to use this simplicity in a very beautiful way.

Of course it draws from the European classical tradition, which American jazz does, too. But then the New York jazz scene has incredible rhythmic energy, which combines music from the whole world. It kind of has everything in it.

Mikkel, as a drummer, is there less rhythmic emphasis in the way jazz is played in Scandinavia?

MH: [Long pause] Maybe? The tradition is so heavily founded in America, and I think it has a different shape in the consciousness of the American musician—a different idea of what jazz music is. Europeans feel a little more like we’re visitors, in a culture that’s not necessarily ours.

There was a documentary about Beethoven, where another composer said about him, “He took the classical form of writing, and exhausted the subject because he did it so well. We’re forced to start off in a new direction after him.” I think the same is true with a lot of American jazz music—it was so incredible that it also marked an ending and new beginning. So to the question of whether Scandinavian jazz is less rhythmically advanced, it couldn’t get more rhythmically advanced anywhere than Elvin Jones. He exhausted the subject of extremely creatively playing African rhythms in European structures and blues. So what are you gonna do?

NH: And I would add that the American culture is very young compared to European culture. So maybe it’s about not having so heavy a burden of tradition in America. Improvisation is an integrated part of American culture; it is in European, too, but there are also all these sort of old, old, heavy structures that people have a hard time breaking away from.

Nikolaj, how did you come to be “The Champ”?

NH: Ha! Well…

MH: Do you want the real story, or do you want to let Nikolaj invent something?

NH: It’s just a fun nickname. We had this Danish TV series where there was a character called “The Champ,” so all of a sudden everybody was called “The Champ,” and for some reason I got stuck with it.

MH: Yes. It has absolutely nothing to do with the competitive nature of Nikolaj’s personality. That’s for sure.

Spacelab performs Saturday, June 28 at Twins Jazz as part of the Nordic Jazz Festival.

Due to a reporting error, the original version of this post quoted Nikolaj Hess as citing Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson as an influence. In fact, he was referring to Swedish pianist Jan Johansson. The post has been corrected.

These events—including concerts, films and academic lectures—grew out of GHI’s Immigrant Entrepreneurship project, which in 2012 featured Blue Note Records founder (and German-born immigrant) Alfred Lion. GHI collaborated with the Goethe-Institut to present an exhibition of stirring art photographs from Blue Note recording sessions of the label’s 1940s to ’60s golden age, taken by Lion’s partner and fellow immigrant Francis Wolff, who died in 1971. The exhibition is the centerpiece of both institutes’ Blue Note events.

Michael Cuscuna, a record producer and executive who’s served as Blue Note’s archival gatekeeper since 1975, curates the exhibition along with former Blue Note executive Tom Evered. He spoke to Bandwidth about the importance of Wolff’s photography, as well as that of its subjects in (and out of) the exhibition.

Bandwidth: How did you get involved with the photo exhibit at the Goethe-Institut?

Michael Cuscuna: Well, I own the Francis Wolff photo archive. The Goethe-Institut contacted me about curating a show there, and so Tom Evered and I—Tom used to be general manager of Blue Note—we selected the photos, wrote all the captions and so forth, to really capture a definitive swath of the classic Blue Note era.

Of course, the Francis Wolff photography only captures from the ‘40s to 1967, when Alfred Lion left the label. Then Francis Wolff went from taking photographs to producing records. So it doesn’t obviously cover the whole 75 years of Blue Note, but covers a very important chunk of it.

B: Were you given any particular criteria for photos to use?

MC: Just that they wanted about 30 photographs. So we picked about 40, and let them choose from that. But when we chose the 40, I purposely picked great photographs of more obscure artists. If they had to shave it down, those would be the first to go.

B: Who were the more obscure artists?

MC: Oh, geez. I know [tenor saxophonist] Tina Brooks was one of them. There were a couple of great [guitarist] Kenny Burrell shots, I think I chose one of those. I don’t really remember the others; you know, we did this about a year ago. All the selecting, writing, and scanning was all done last June or July.

B: I don’t know if you counted him as an obscurity, but I was surprised to notice that [pianist] Herbie Nichols made it in.

MC: Yes—that’s one of my more passionate obscurities [laughs]. I think I had to pitch the German Historical Institute that he was really important. And he was. I think one of the great accomplishments of Blue Note was that Alfred Lion loved these idiosyncratic pianist-slash-composers, beginning with Thelonious Monk, and then Herbie Nichols and Andrew Hill. I think the fact that he documented so many and so much of them is why Blue Note’s profile is so large in the history of jazz. So I definitely wanted to have him represented there.

B: And you chose 40 photographs out of how many?

MC: Oh, God, about 2,000? [Laughs] I don’t know—it’s a lot! There’s more than that—2,000 is what we’ve developed from the negatives and scanned. There are maybe 20,000 to 30,000 images, and every three or four years my wife and I just camp out on a weekend and go through them, and find gems that we had never seen before or noticed before. It’s an incredible font of photographic art.

B: How did you whittle it down to such a degree?

MC: Well, the first Blue Note anniversary that I did was the 40th, in 1979. I wrote a history of the label then, and I’ve been writing histories of the label ever since! [Laughs] But at a certain point it’s easy to target the 30 or 40 most glaringly important and influential people in the history of Blue Note, and the impact of Blue Note. So it’s really not hard anymore.

And luckily there are some people—like [guitarist] Grant Green, and [saxophonist] Hank Mobley, and [drummer] Art Blakey—who are just amazingly photogenic.

B: Has there been a public exhibition of Francis’ photographs before?

MC: Yes, there were a couple of gallery shows in New York, at the Morrison Hotel gallery. Before that, at a bookstore—I can’t think of the name of it—but when we put out our first photo book, The Blue Note Photography of Francis Wolff, we had an exhibition at a bookstore then.

The only other public exhibition was for the 70th anniversary; we had it at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. That was quite a moving experience, especially with Francis having barely escaped with his life—and then to be honored back in his hometown at this point was very touching for all of us. But we’re really excited about this one. I hope everyone interested in Blue Note comes to see it.

“Search For a New Sound: The Blue Note Photographs of Francis Wolff” shows to July 3 at Goethe-Institut.

Images, top to bottom: Art Blakey, 1960; Dexter Gordon, 1962; Herbie Nichols, 1955; John Coltrane, 1957; Hank Mobley and Alfred Lion, 1960. All photos by Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images LLC.

The Claudia Quintet +1 with Kurt Elling & Theo Bleckmann, “What Is the Beautiful?”
Drummer-composer John Hollenbeck uses his cutting-edge small ensemble (augmented by pianist Matt Mitchell) to create layered, spectral backdrops for the poetry of American writer Kenneth Patchen. The latter is delivered by vocalists Theo Bleckmann and Kurt Elling; Bleckmann delivers with his clear haunting voice, but Elling abandons his usual croon for a gruff spoken-word delivery. It’s as beautiful as it is head-scratching.

Fred Frith & Henry Kaiser, “Friends & Enemies”
Frith is English, Kaiser American; both are experimental and idiosyncratic guitarists known for never making their music easy to digest. Even for each other. And yet, in this compilation of material from across 20 years (1979 to 1999) and styles from rock to jazz to contemporary classical to plain-old-noise, they repeatedly find ways to groove together. “Groove” is not an incidental descriptor, either: The never-conventional rhythms nonetheless make for a good entry point into the music (even though sometimes, as in the wonderfully titled “Twisted Memories Give Way to the Angry Present,” you have to search them out).

Gutbucket, “Flock”
“Flock” actually should be judged by its cover: the jazz-punk therein is as weird, goofy, and ultimately pleasurable as the cartoon that adorns it. Gutbucket channels funk, free jazz, Eastern European music and heavy metal pyrotechnics into the play-freaking-loud ethos. True, it’s always too melodic and thought-through to truly get the DIY feel happening, but it is as danceable (and mosh-able) as they come.

Janel and Anthony, “Where Is Home”
D.C.’s most eclectic and experimental duo brings together cello and guitar. If that suggests a kind of folk-psychedelia, you’ve got the right idea, but filter it through spooky, electronic ambient textures and free-floating improvisational structures that nonetheless shape themselves into logical forms. More importantly it’s soaked in otherworldly (almost, but not quite, familiar in its sources) beauty. In fact, it took me an extra 10 minutes to write this description, because I once again got mesmerized by it.

Microscopic Septet, “Lobster Leaps In”
Breezy and gregarious, the Micros’ 2008 reunion album (after a 16-year hiatus) picks up where they left off: a glorious mash-up of every jazz style they could find. The emphasis is heavy on the swing era, though, with slippery horn riffs, bluesy piano licks, and pounding, danceable rhythms oozing out of every corner. Still, most tunes would be equally at home in some squealing avant-garde loft or upscale jazz club as out on the dance floor.

Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet, “Tabligh”
“Ten Freedom Summers,” Smith’s acclaimed magnum opus, is also a Cuneiform release—but don’t go perusing its 4.5-hour program unless you really know what you’re doing. An excerpt from it, however, opens “Tabligh”—a 2008 release by trumpeter-composer Smith and his Golden Quartet (featuring Vijay Iyer, the poster boy of the jazz zeitgeist, on keyboards). The music is difficult and abstruse, but a wash of moody soundscapes, a la fusion-era Miles (one of Smith’s heroes), makes it go down easier.