I'm Recommending These 10 New Albums

Here are some highlights from my recent listening

I listen to new music every morning, and again late at night. It’s a blissful adventure, because I never know what I’m going to find.

I don’t always get a chance to tell you what I’m hearing—because there’s so much new music out there. And there are many other things happening at The Honest Broker.

But today I’m alerting you to ten new albums of exceptional merit (and there’s a little extra at the end).

Happy listening!

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Nils Frahm: Night
Late Night Piano Meditations Performed on the Klavins M450—a One-Ton Upright Piano

I really should tell you about the music, and not the piano. But I love the sound of this instrument.

That’s because it’s a special piano:

• For a start, it looks ridiculous. It’s 4.5 meters tall—by comparison the top of basketball backboard (backboard, not the rim) is less than 4 meters from the ground. So nobody can jump high enough to touch the top of this piano.

• The piano strings are three times as long as those in a Steinway upright and almost twice as long as those in a 9-foot grand.

• The weight is 980 kilograms. That’s more than twice as heavy as a 9-foot concert hall Steinway

• The pianist performs from a platform ten feet above the ground.

It looks like a circus act, except that there’s no net.

Maybe all that sounds like a stunt to you, but the sound of this instrument is a force of nature.

It’s the wind in the trees. A fox in the brush. A knot in the wood, The song of a thrush…and a few other things too.

When I first heard it, I wanted to own an instrument just like it. I started scheming.

But my floor would collapse from the weight. The structural engineer already warned me about all my books. So I will never have a Klavins 450 at my home.

[Sigh!]

But that doesn’t matter Because Nils Frahm shows what this instrument can do, and he doesn’t need any help from me—except maybe to spread the news.

This kind of piano invites a very different process of music-making and listening. Just sit back and enjoy the resonance and slow decay of individual notes. There’s pathos in every phrase and harmonies float like aural clouds in a sunset sky.

I could imagine composers reinventing their sound palettes in order to take advantage of this new vista. I’d do it myself—if I could just find a way of getting this bad boy into my music room.

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Art Pepper: An Afternoon in Norway: The Kongsberg Concert
Previously Unreleased Live Jazz Recording from 1980

Any new music from Art Pepper is a cause for celebration—this alto sax legend died 43 years ago. After a while, you assume the legacy is complete and the cupboard is bare. And then something like this falls into our laps.

Even better, this recording has a personal connection for me. I saw Art Pepper at Ronnie Scott’s in London in 1980—where he played immediately before this Norway gig. “We haven’t slept or eaten since last night in London,” he tells the audience.

“This is the first time I’ve been in Europe since 1944,” he adds—and back then he was fighting a war, not blowing his horn.

Hearing this quartet again is like reliving that initial encounter when I was a young, bright-eyed Oxford philosophy student who had traveled into London (with my friend and bandmate John O’Neill) to hear one of my heroes.

Some of this music has circulated previously in video form, and I’m sharing a clip below that will show you how brightly Art could burn in live performance.