They Called us

Dan Morganstern makes an excellent point in his liner notes when he laments the tendency to refer to Roy Eldridge as a “link between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie.” For one thing, Diz eschewed the kind of brilliant trumpet tone that characterized the work of Eldridge and Armstrong. Considered in this light, if one starts with Armstrong’s early achievements and then looks for anything like that kind of distilled joy in all the subsequent history of the music, one gets no further than the spectacular sides the man they called “Little Jazz” made for Columbia in January 1937. There’s just no one after that to “link” to, ever…

Ezra Furman can feel the future barrelling toward the now. Inside the world of her new album, All of Us Flames, the end of the patriarchal capitalist empire seems both imminent and inevitable, a turn down a path we can't see yet but can't avoid, either. The heat of a different world throbs just behind the skin of this one; all around us, openings to it flicker. They vanish almost as soon as they've appeared. But they keep appearing, as if daring us to hold them open, to widen them until they turn into a way.