Measure for Measure 04

"Ode to Love" - Tour-Maubourg

"Jazz2 Fish" - Olive oil

"Mr Mystery" - Skeletons

"Activo" - Daniel Villarreal

"The Funk (Hip-Hop Instrumental)" - Tastepaste 

"Sweet Lorraine" - Sidney Bechet

"Nova" - Nomo

"Wheel Within A Wheel" - The Cinematic Orchestra

"After 4AM" - Long Arm 

"Feel It" - The Jazzment

"Flowers For Carol" - Dr. Dundiff

"Bye Tamika" - African-American Sound Recordings

"Breath of Life" - Khan Jamal Creative Arts Ensemble

"The Righteous Wrath Of An Honorable Man" - Colin Stetson

“Ode to Love” - Tour-Maubourg

Tour-Maubourg is Pierre d’Estienne d’Orves, Brussels-born and schooled in music after moving to Paris, by way of YouTube and club nights. “Ode to Love” was the first single from Paradis Artificiels, his 2020 debut for Pont Neuf Records, the Paris label Thomas Prunier started in 2016 after two years of throwing parties. The album borrows its title from Baudelaire’s 1860 essay on opium and hashish, and the press measured it against St Germain, Massive Attack, and Nicolas Jaar. It became the label’s biggest seller and is now on its third pressing. The label’s copy calls the track acid jazz in a melancholic mood, and the description holds. Tinnitus, which d’Estienne d’Orves has lived with since 2018, later sent him back to Brussels to record in his grandparents’ house. His live band, the Tour-Maubourg Ensemble, with saxophonist Ismael Ndir, recut “Ode to Love” as a Panorama Version in 2024.

“Jazz2 Fish” - Olive oil

Olive Oil is Norifumi Morita, raised on Tokunoshima in the Amami Islands and based in Fukuoka, where he and his brother Mohiro, who paints and designs as Popy Oil, founded Oilworks in 2002 at the age of 22. The outfit is a label, a design studio, and an apparel line in one, with a third member, DJ Zorzi, running distribution. Morita’s beats run jazz and soul samples through hard, broken drum programming, and his 2008 single “Pianity” earned Gilles Peterson’s praise and BBC Radio 1 airplay. He has since worked with Hudson Mohawke, Flying Lotus, and Pete Rock. “Jazz2 Fish” sits at the center of The Others, his sixth album, issued digitally in 2024 and expanded to fifteen tracks for the 2025 deluxe cassette and CD, with guest verses from Jambo Lacquer and Shuto and piano from Channy D. The sleeve, naturally, is by his brother.

“Mr Mystery” - Skeletons

Skeletons never existed. The band is a work of fiction by Benedic Lamdin, the Brighton producer behind Nostalgia 77, who assembled Smile between paying jobs from musicians passing through his house and sounds left over from other sessions. By his account, the players never stood in a studio together. Some of the tracks began as pastiches commissioned by a library music company that wanted a particular African jazz flavor, and Lamdin kept making them for pleasure until he had enough for a full album. “Mr Mystery” is the sound of that commission: a tune cut in the manner of Mulatu Astatke, whose Ethio-jazz was then enjoying its second life through the Éthiopiques reissues and Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers. The album was recorded at Lamdin’s Fish Factory studio between 2007 and 2009 and released on his own Impossible Ark in 2010, with Alice Russell singing the closer. Toronto’s Do Right! Music pressed the Canadian LP.

“Activo” - Daniel Villarreal

Daniel Villarreal played punk and hardcore and studied as a teenager with Freddy Sobers, the drummer behind reggae en español pioneers El General and Nando Boom. He spent his first decade in the US as a social worker with migrant laborers in rural Illinois before moving to Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood to drum full time and co-lead Dos Santos. Panamá 77, his 2022 debut for International Anthem, is named for his birth place and year. “Activo” is the oldest track on the album, taped on February 7, 2019 at the Freehand Hotel in Los Angeles with Jeff Parker of Tortoise on guitar, Bardo Martinez of Chicano Batman on bass, and Elliot Bergman of NOMO on electric kalimba. It is an improvisation on Bergman’s repeating kalimba figure, with percussion layered on later in post. The rest of the album was cut outdoors in a Los Angeles garden during the pandemic.

“The Funk Hip-Hop Instrumental” - Tastepaste

Tastepaste is Alex Bliss, a Brooklyn producer who uploaded a handful of sample-based instrumentals to SoundCloud between late 2012 and early 2016 and then went quiet. “The Funk” was one of the first, posted December 6, 2012. There is no label, no credit, no sample listed, and no release anywhere else. The profile’s other tracks give few hints: one is called “Virtual Crate Diver,” another is tagged “creme fraiche.” This mystery groove and producer earns their place here on the strength of the loop and beats.

“Sweet Lorraine” - Sidney Bechet

In the spring of 1940 Sidney Bechet, the New Orleans Creole who made the soprano saxophone a jazz instrument, cut eight sides with cornetist Muggsy Spanier across two New York dates, March 28 and April 6. The quartet, billed as the Bechet-Spanier Big Four, had no piano or drums, only Carmen Mastren’s guitar and Wellman Braud’s bass under the two horns. It was recorded for the Hot Record Society, a collectors’ club Steve Smith started in 1937 to auction rare 78s before it began cutting its own. By 1938 it was making its own records, and in 1939 Smith opened the HRS Record Shop in midtown Manhattan, selling discs alongside Jazzmen and the society’s own Rag.  “Sweet Lorraine” was a 1928 Cliff Burwell and Mitchell Parish song that Nat King Cole turned into his first hit the same year. Here only the last fifteen seconds of Bechet’s horn appears as a reverential segue, soaked in reverb from a distant past.

“Nova” - Nomo

NOMO began as a party band at the University of Michigan playing Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, eight musicians in one van, with Elliot Bergman composing, leading, and usually driving. The band builds its own kalimbas, sells the plain ones at shows, and keeps the odd ones to play. Ghost Rock, released by Ubiquity in 2008, was produced by Warn Defever of His Name Is Alive, with Chicago heavyweights Hamid Drake, Joshua Abrams, and Adam Rudolph in the rhythm section. From that batch of sessions came two records: the aggressive, electronic tunes went here, the gentler ones to Invisible Cities. “Nova” is the closer, three minutes of release that gently rock the album out. Bergman went on to form Wild Belle with his sister Natalie, and his electric kalimba drives Daniel Villarreal’s “Activo” earlier in this mix.

“Wheel Within A Wheel” - The Cinematic Orchestra

Jason Swinscoe formed the band in 1999 and released Motion on Ninja Tune that September; its reception got them a slot at a Directors Guild tribute to Kubrick. He studied art, cites 60s and 70s conceptual art, and describes his process as a painter’s: ground layer first, detail after. His band of live players improvises over samples he supplies, which he then re-edits until the line between improvisation and production disappears. Their reputation grew from scoring Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera live from a sunken orchestra pit in Porto in 2000, a one-off that became two albums. “Wheel Within A Wheel” is a Bobby Watson tune, written while he was musical director of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and recorded by that band with Wynton and Branford Marsalis in 1980. The Blakey version with both Marsalis brothers is hard bop at full tilt; Swinscoe’s is the same structure slowed into chamber music, which is why Peterson put it first on Worldwide Exclusives, the 2004 Talkin’ Loud compilation  otherwise focused on broken beat. Beyond a ten-inch promo shared with Nicola Conte, the track never got a vinyl release of its own.

“After 4AM” - Long Arm

Long Arm is Georgy Kotunov, a Russian producer who grew up improvising on the family piano while his older sister took the formal lessons. Gordon Gieseking, who founded Project: Mooncircle in Berlin in 2002 on the motto that the sky is the limit and the moon the goal, found his tracks on SoundCloud in 2010 and calls it one of the strangest signings of his career. “After 4AM” was the first thing Kotunov released, on the label’s compilation The Moon Comes Closer that year, a slow jam of muted trumpet, vibes, and piano that sounds pulled from a shelf of Bill Evans and early swing records. It reappeared on his 2011 debut The Branches, an album built as a story about a world where feelings and weather are the same thing. The 2012 clear-vinyl gatefold is the one collectors chase.

“Feel It” - The Jazzment

The Jazzment is a Dutch duo, MARWZ and Noire, who in 2011 offered two instrumental albums in three months as free Bandcamp downloads. Lonely Soul came in August; After Soul, with “Feel It” followed in November. The Find Mag, the Dutch blog that championed the early beat scene, called the record jazzy and spacey with a playful neo-soul streak and recommended it for lazy Sundays. A third album, Bipolar Outflows, arrived in May 2012 for the price of a coffee. No label, no photos, no vinyl. 

“Flowers For Carol” - Dr. Dundiff

Dr. Dundiff is Roman Aprile of Louisville, Kentucky, who bought his first MPC on eBay as a high school senior in 2010, studied production at Bellarmine, and by 2018 had more than forty projects released. He records in his apartment on an MPC3000 and a Rhodes, and a reporter once watched him take a single bass note to a near-finished song in two hours. His 2016 Forecastle set with a stage full of Louisville rappers, Jack Harlow and Jim James among them, became Dr. Dundiff & Friends, a marker for the city’s hip-hop scene. The Distance arrived in 2019 on Cold Busted, with a vinyl pressing that July and a Japanese edition through Sweet Soul Records. 

“Bye Tamika” - African-American Sound Recordings

African-American Sound Recordings is the work of Gavin Mays, a Memphis-born artist better known as Cities Aviv, who fronted a hardcore band before rapping and, after a label folded under his debut, decided to own his releases outright. African-American Sound Recordings began in 2019 on the instrumental side: samples, field recordings, hip-hop crossed with noise and ambient. Ten albums in, his warmest cuts come from gospel influences pulled off his own CD shelf. The sleeve text for Tamika’s Lodge, released 2022 on his D.O.T. imprint, describes an interstellar bed and breakfast off Exit 9 of the Gxian Causeway, somewhere between Venus and Jupiter, that left Red Banks, Mississippi in 2002 to escape the gentrification of the spirit. “Bye Tamika” is the last track, nine minutes and the highest-rated track on the record. Mays says the project stands alone from his other work. 

“Breath of Life” - Khan Jamal Creative Arts Ensemble

Khan Jamal was born Warren Cheeseboro in Jacksonville and raised in Philadelphia, where in 1970 he founded Sounds of Liberation with Byard Lancaster. On October 7, 1972 his Creative Arts Ensemble played the Catacombs, a basement coffeehouse in West Philadelphia, with Monnette Sudler on guitar, Billy Mills on bass, and two drummers, Dwight James and Alex Ellison. The sixth member was Mario Falana, who live dubbed the tape through reverb and echo as the band played. That is why this free-jazz cut sounds like King Tubby wandering into a Sun Ra rehearsal. Jamal only pressed 300 copies of Drum Dance to the Motherland on his own Dogtown label in 1973 and barely got them out of the city. Eremite reissued it on CD in 2006 and on vinyl in 2017, with Jamal’s original art. “Breath of Life” closes the album. Jamal died in January 2022, at 75.

“The Righteous Wrath Of An Honorable Man” - Colin Stetson

Colin Stetson grew up in Ann Arbor, settled in Montreal, and has played horns for Tom Waits, Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, and Anthony Braxton. On his own records he often plays a bass saxophone built in 1908, bought from a seller in Illinois. Stetson uses circular breathing on our beautifully haunting closing track to keep phrases going for minutes without gaps. New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges, released by Constellation in February 2011, was cut live in single takes at Hotel2Tango, with microphones taped to the horn and Stetson’s neck and a dozen more around the room. No loops, no overdubs. The album drew on prewar gospel and set Laurie Anderson’s narration against the saxophone. “The Righteous Wrath Of An Honorable Man” also went out as a tour-only seven-inch in late 2010, silkscreened in white and dark red on chipboard.

Listen to: Measure for Measure | 01