It’s time for my regular December round-up of favourite cultural highlights from the year, broken up into different topics, the first of which is music. Much of the music I listened, or saw live, over 2024 was old favourites, but there was some exploring among favoured genres: jazz, experimental, guitar music. Here, then, are some highlights from my musical year.
The artist of the year for me was Fred Frith. I have been following the totally free-spirited guitarist since the 1970s, but in this his 75th year there was extra reason to do so as he released an updated and reissue of his classic album Guitar Solos, a double-set featuring the original 1974 album and Fifty, a fresh set of radical instrumentals to leave the guitar thinking ‘I had no idea I had such sounds in me’. I also got to see the man play live, at the Cafe Oto in London, though I heard more than I saw (well-built friends and family members occupying the front row somewhat spoiled things for those of us just behind), and chatted to him briefly. Anyway, my most listened-to piece of music in 2024 (thank you Spotify for the statistics) was ‘Jack’s Neap Tide’ from Fifty. It’s so quiet it requires your complete concentration, and that’s such a good thing.
My favourite album of the year has to be a tie between two well-established favourites. The American jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas has never produced an uninteresting track and regularly delights with his imagination, tone and astute choice of musicians with which to collaborate. I saw him play in London (on my birthday), accompanied by British saxophonist Trish Clowes and her trio, and again got to chat to both of them. His latest album GIFTS where he is joined by Rafiq Bhatia, Ian Chang and James Brandon Lewis, in inspired by the music of Duke Ellington’s great collaborator Billy Strayhorn. It has everything I want to hear from a jazz album.
Second in the album of the year tie is T-Bone Burnett’s The Other Side. Having produced some quite challenging albums of late, in which dark electronic predominated and melody was stripped away, He clearly felt it was time to return to simple songs. The album is a stripped-back delight, often little more than Burnett singing with acoustic guitar, with tunes that immediately grab the ear and words to haunt. If I’m to have a song of the year, ‘He Came Down’ is it.
High among new discoveries this year, for me, were Get the Blessing, a jazz rock quartet from Bristol. It’s gutsy, toe-tapping stuff with a touch of theatre about, well-exemplified by ‘That Ain’t It’ from their garlanded 2008 album All is Yes.
My old song of the year is Jonathan Richman’s ‘Velvet Underground’ from his 1992 album I, Jonathan, which I’d not heard before. I find Richman’s music intermittently charming, but has there ever been a better tribute by one artist to another than this?
They were wild like the USA
A mystery band in a New York way
Rock and roll, but not like the rest
And to me, America at its best
How in the world were they making that sound?
Velvet Underground
Richman was a fervent follower of the Velvet Underground from when they were first active as a band, and with his band The Modern Lovers came close at times to that elusive Underground sound. ‘Velvet Underground’ itself is jaunty rockabilly with a middle section that picks up on ‘Sister Ray’, as illustration rather than imitation. It captures not so much the band as what they meant. America at its best, indeed.
Well, after that, what can I do but let the band themselves play? How in the world were they making that sound?
What about Bob Dylan? Well, he keeps going, touring endlessly to promote the album Rough and Rowdy Ways, though you can’t believe there are many left who follow the man who do not already have it and revere it. Maybe he’ll move on one day; maybe he simply keeps on believing in it. I saw the man play live – no chance of a chat, of course. I only had a distant view of the top of his head, while the performance I found to be a bit of a trial. His reverent followers believed otherwise, however. Anyway, the Bob Dylan machine continues to churn out archive recordings, of which the latest is The 1974 Recordings, performed with The Band. This was the American tour which was supposed to be promoting his album Planet Waves, but instead turned into a triumphant review of his musical excellence to date. Some of the live interpretations are performed with such startling urgency. I think ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ is how Dylan thinks he is still singing, even though he no longer can.
Staying at the Royal Albert Hall, as it were, my live concert of the year was a classical one. We picked a programme of French music, A French Fantasy, more or less at random, and were entranced. Amid the Fauré and Ravel pieces there were two songs by Lili Boulanger, of whom I knew nothing before now. She died in 1918, aged just 24. But she left us with the rhapsodic ‘Pie Jesu’ (her sung by soprano Karin Ott though on the night it was Golda Schultz).
I knew a little of the music of Tim Buckley, and thought that there was someone with a somewhat mannered delivery and the occasional song of great feeling. Only this year did I get round to listening to 1970 album Starsailor, when he shook off the shackles of musical conventionality and embraced the avant garde – and perhaps at last the true expression of his musical thoughts. ‘Song to the Siren’ is the famous song from the album, but it is uncharacteristic of the rest of it. ‘Healing Festival’ is just so excitingly confrontational.
Boulanger, Buckley, Brach – an alliterative trio of artist who died too young. American jazz trumpeter Jamie Branch died in 2022 and I discovered her music this year. It is such amazing, free-ranging, exuberant music, each piece an adventure into some place your ears weren’t expecting to go. The gentle, exploratory ‘birds of paradise’ has been a much-played favourite.
Sometimes you forget entirely about a song until you stumble across on some list somewhere, and that Proustian rush hits you. In this case, it was a reissue of some niche highlights from Brian Eno’s career, containing his wacky 1974 single ‘Seven Deadly Finns’. It’s from that pre-ambient era when Eno sung absurdist lyrics to catchy accompaniments, which were like other people’s music and yet completely no so at the same time. Anyway, it makes me smile.
I try to follow African music, but I am permanently ten years behind the times. So it was that only now have I come across Cameroonian singer Blick Bassy, whose 2015 album Akö is a witty. catchy treat. His later recording are over-produced, to my taste, as pop stardom beckoned. I much prefer the freshness, the sheer joy of something like ‘Wap Do Wap’.
I’m always on the lookout for fine guitarists, and this year discovered Gwenifer Raymond, Rüdiger Krause, Gyan Riley, Kinloch Nelson, Barry Walker Jr. and Jessica Ackerley, amongst others. Ackerley describes herself on her website as being a “Canadian sound and visual artist, experimental jazz guitarist, composer, improvisor and painter”. Absolutely she paints pictures in sound throughout her 2024 album All of the Colours Are Singing, as the title track makes radiantly clear.
Finally, one of my desert island songs finally arrived on Spotify and YouTube (in official form) this year. I first heard Poco’s 1976 song ‘Rose of Cimarron’ on the John Peel Show, forty or more years ago. It was like a song that came out of nowhere, or rather a song that stood entirely alone. Poco was an indifferent American country rock band who seemed (to my ears) never to have come with anything memorable throughout their career, except here. Just the one time, what they wanted to be and what they were able to be came magically together in this epic tribute to the romance of the American West. Peel adored it. Any romantic would have to.
For what’s worth, here is my favourite listening from 2024, at least according to Spotify.
