Kamasi Washington - Heaven and Earth (Young Turks, 2018)

I'm glad Kamasi Washington is out here doing his thing and making jazz cool again and in the hip hop world and making these massive huge albums, but I'm just not wild for him. I liked his last album The Epic more because it was a little more out there, a little more psychedelic. While both are masterfully composed and performed, Heaven and Earth is a little more soul jazz, which is less interesting to me. And it's a 3-disc album, like The Epic, so at a certain point I end up tuning out. Not my bag but like I said I respect the man.

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Playboi Carti - Die Lit (AWGE/Interscope, 2018)

Playboi Carti has never really been on my radar too much, but then Pfork gave this one a rave review, and I figured I was sleeping...but man, this album didn't do anything for me. Barely any song made any kind of impact. The production is interesting at times but Carti himself gets lost in both that and the whole mass of features all over the album. Nothing gelled for me, so I guess for me I wasn't missing much after all. Oh well.

Ami Shavit - Neural Oscillations and Alpha Rhythms (Finders Keepers, r. 2018)

Another one I wasn't expecting much from but Finders Keepers always gets a fair shake, this turned out to be surprisingly legit. Influenced by Philip Glass and Tangerine Dream in the 70's, "Ami embarked on an experiment with what he coined Alpha Mood – a state in which the brain is working in relaxation and in which he used music as a means of helping induce his own meditative state". These aren't the droney, spacey, meditative synth pieces you'd expect - they're hypnotic in an active sense, very stimulating and dynamic. Seems not much is left of Shavit's recorded legacy but I'm glad I gave these a shot, very neat.

Sun Ra - The Cymbals/Symbols Sessions: New York City 1973 (Modern Harmonic, 2018)

This is a genuine "lost album" (unlike the Coltrane "ehhh kinda not really" lost album) recorded by Sun Ra and members of the Arkestra in 1973 for Impulse!. Seems the relationship between Ra and Impulse! soured quickly and a couple albums that were scheduled got shelved - Cymbals/Symbols and another one due for a reissue later this year called Crystal Spears. This one is an oddity in a discography of oddities - the Arkestra here is only an 8 piece and they perform mostly in smaller configurations like quartets throughout the album. Stalwart Marshall Allen is completely absent, and John Gilmore only plays on one piece. Strange. The first disc is the actual Cymbal/Symbols album remastered, and the second disc is from an unnamed tape recorded at the same sessions. Given we're looking at a smaller lineup without many mainstays, Cymbals/Symbols is a little flat. It opens with an awkward, stuttering "The World of the Invisible" and then torpedoes into the 1...

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