Why didn't someone tell me that video of this existed? I didn't discovered the early (1990) Bjork album Gling Glo until 2001, over a decade after its release, but when I finally did I fell in love with it. To this day, not a month goes by where I don't listen to at least one track or another off the album, and listening to any one track usually leads me to playing the whole album.
I don't mean to diss Bjork's significant discography or artistic output, but the album doesn't sound anything like her other releases. It's a jazz album - a vocal jazz album - and jazz singing is far from my favorite genre. But Bjork, years before Human Behavior or the Debut LP, was already able to infuse the material with her own unique energy and personality.
Gling Glo was recorded when the 25-year-old Björk was in the psychedelic Icelandic band, The Sugarcubes, and in just a few days with few overdubs. Apparently, and this part is news to me, she and the band promoted the album with appearances on Icelandic television, and just last night, I stumbled across video of those appearances. Imagine listening to an album for 25 years, picturing the performance in your mind, and then suddenly finding video of it. That was my experience last night.
It doesn't sound like her other albums, but it's unmistakably Bjork. Listen to how her voice bends and twists the songs, how she leaps from purr to growl, and how she leans into some passages with her characteristic fierce energy, holding nothing back, and then snaps back to sweet melodic mode almost instantly. These are really remarkable performances.
The songs are in Icelandic, and I understand they're mostly based on local folk and children's songs ("gling glo" is "ding dong" in Icelandic). The album includes two songs in English, a rip-roaring cover of The Platters' Ruby Baby and Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man by Kern and Hammerstein from the musical, Show Boat. It's not on the album, but apparently she also performed a cover of Frank Sinatra's I Fall In Love Too Easily, famously covered by Miles Davis.
If you're having a hard time envisioning Bjork as a jazz singer, you might want to think back to Post, the second album under her name, and its cover of It's All So Quiet, as performed here on The Tonight Show.
For reasons unknown (at least to me), Secretly Canadian has decided to re-release Yoko One's 1981 album, Season of Glass, today.
Yoko has long been my favorite Beatle. My personal opinion is that The Beatles' music became much more interesting after her relationship with John Lennon began in 1966. The conventional story (that is, told by conventional people to defend their conventional, bourgeoise tastes) is that she ruined the band and caused them to break up, but The Beatles would have eventually broken up anyway or else become boring and predictable like so many other bands. Impermanence is swift, man, and nothing lasts forever. But if you want to subject yourself to scorn and abuse, try saying something positive bout Yoko to the Beatles gatekeepers on Reddit or Facebook. For the boomer Beatles fans, she's the very definition of "unlistenable" and is to be despised and derided at all times.
It's also been said that meeting John Lennon was the worst thing that could have happened to the artist, Yoko. She was a conceptual artist, part of the Fluxus movement (George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Henry Flynt, La Monte Young, John Cage, etc), with gallery shows and conceptual-art performances, and Lennon attended a preopening viewing in London of one of her gallery shows, titled Unfinished Paintings. One of her pieces was called Painting To Hammer A Nail In, with a hammer attached to a block inviting people to drive nails into a blank canvas. Lennon asked if he could hammer in a nail before the public opening, and Yoko told him, sure, but for five shillings. When Lennon replied, "Well, I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in," that was it - the perfect conceptual response to conceptual art and they fell in love and were together for the rest of Lennon's life.
I was in my early teens at the time and didn't understand the attraction at all. She wasn't conventionally pretty like I imagined a Beatles' wife to be and when I saw the cover photo of John and Yoko's Two Virgins album with the two of the them stark naked - full-frontal nudity - I thought they had both lost their minds. And when I heard her manic, screaming vocals, I thought it was the worst possible sound in the world rather than understanding it as the appropriate Fluxus/conceptual response to popular music.
But after they met, the Beatles went on to release albums that redefined rock music, landmark records like Sgt. Peppers, The White Album, and Abbey Road. To be sure, their trajectory toward experimentalism and new forms of expression had already begun, but it took off like a rocket after John drove in that nail.
By 1970, though, my taste in music was changing and The Beatles started to sound passe and cliched to me, especially after the release of the ballad-heavy Let It Be. By that time, I had heard Jimi Hendrix and The Doors, and there was no going back to McCartney's Mom-friendly pop songs. But Lennon, especially his solo stuff and the Plastic One Band, still had an edge.
To be honest, I initially weaponized some of her music, playing Yoko records to freak out friends or to clear out a party if I got tired of hosting guests in the house. But with time, I became fond of my weapons ("This one will really get them") and the more I listened, the more I understood Yoko's vocal stylings. Eventually, I even came to like them.
That may have laid the groundwork for my later appreciation of free jazz, but I can't quite connect those dots. However, I apparently wasn't the only one to associate Yoko's in-your-face, atonal vocals to the skronk of free jazz.
Season of Glass was the first album by Yoko after Lennon's death, and is a surprisingly conventional affair. Where one might think the artist's reaction to the murder of her husband would be 90 minutes of unbridled, primal screaming, accompanied by frenzied guitar feedback, instead she used a bunch of accomplished studio musicians, including Tony Levin (pre-King Crimson) and jazz musicians Michael Brecker, Ronnie Cuber, and Howard Johnson, to express herself and her grief. Most of the songs if thrown into a playlist today probably wouldn't raise a single eyebrow.
She's not a great vocalist and has a limited range, but she's no worse than, say, Nico of the Velvet Underground, and if you can accept flat, deadpan vocals from a German blonde fashion model but not a Japanese conceptual artist, you might want to take a self-examination for racism.
Walking on Thin Ice is probably the most outre song on the album and wasn't even included in the 1981 release but later added to the 1997 CD reissue. People who reflexively hate Yoko will find something to object to at about the 2:30 mark and her repeating cries of "ice" (which certainly hits differently now in the age of ICE).
The L.A.-based band SML have finally released an album that captures them doing what they do best, spontaneous music live, which not coincidentally is the title of their new album and also reveals what "SML" actually stands for. Recorded at the club Zebulon in Los Angeles on December 3, 2025, they perform in the round, like they did at Big Ears last March.
While their previous albums have featured either short studio performances or brief excerpts from live shows, Spontaneous Music Live contains two extended live tracks, The Drums and Roundabouts, so one can hear how ideas develop, grow, and change in the course of performance. It's SML finally as the way they should be heard, and how I hope they'll record in the future.
This was actually released a week ago, but I'm just learning about it now.
Chris Forsyth's BASIC, a trio including Douglas McCombs (bass) and Mikel Patrick Avery (percussion and electronics), play guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll with an improvisational, experimental edge. They performed at last March's Big Ears festival and although they made my short list of acts to see, I didn't get the chance (I was at a "secret show" duet of jazz guitarists Julian Lage and Nils Cline at the time of their set).
I don't really have any words here to add to the music. You either get it and dig it or you don't. I do, and am glad that this music exists in my world.
The revered South African jazz musician Abdullah Ibrahim, born as Dollar Brand, died last weekend. Impermanence is swift.
Ibrahim wasn't as well known or famous as, say, the recently departed Sonny Rollins, but the outpouring of sympathy and tributes I've seen on line is a testament to his humanity, to the way his music touched so many listeners. It seems like everyone who ever heard him has some personal experience of the way his music touched them that they want to express, and the outpouring of respect for a relatively obscure jazz musician is impressive.
The hypnotic rhythm of his Ishmael was a personal favorite of mine. I first heard it on late-night radio (WBUR) in Boston back in the 70s and I remember the feeling of elation I felt every time I heard the opening bass lines (Cecil McBee) and the wash of cymbals (Roy Brooks) on air, knowing the voyage it was about to take me on. I had a copy of his 1976 LP, Banyana – Children of Africa, on which the track appears. I still return to the album often and consider it nothing short of a masterpiece.
I never saw him perform live. But I do have a bootleg recording of a performance (March 7, 1976) from the period of Ishmael and Banyana that a friend had taped at Boston's Emmanuel Church and sent to me literally decades later.
Speaking of digital files, fun fact: Ibrahim's Calypso Minor, from his soundtrack to the 1990 Claire Denis film, No Fear, No Die, was the very first track I ever owned on MP3. Back in the mid '90s, I had read something in the old print-media newspaper about some new digital-music format, and an online search (keyword: MP3) led me to a file for the track on an AOL bulletin board, which I immediately downloaded. Every other digital-music file I've ever downloaded or somehow came to own in my life was subsequent to Calypso Minor.
