Influences: Francis Harris

It’s a difficult task to pick an album out of this era of jazz that is a favorite, but it can’t be understated the feeling the title track has on me every time I listen to it. It’s everything about life that is good wrapped up in just over 6 minutes of musical bliss. The synergy of Alice Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders was never more lucid, as if they had plucked the song out of some cosmic tree. This is a to my grave type of record, one that will never leave the within arms reach part of my record collection.

Released just a few months after the events of September 11, Cold House by Hood was a very personal record for me. Not many bands have captured a sense of melancholy as poignantly as Hood without giving way to corny musical tropes. Lo-fi with sometimes unintelligible lyrical stints, a combination of live instrumentation (most importantly the strings), and glitchy electronics, they were certainly one of the most adventurous bands to blur the lines between genres, with heartbreakingly good melodic progressions.

There are few artists as exceptional as Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie and for my money, this is just about the best triple pack I’ve ever purchased. The simple ease of each composition is awe inspiring and a testament to the virtue of being swept away by musical improvisation. The thing is, you can’t plan music like this. It just happens and my life has been better because of it. Requiem for Dying Mothers is arguably as much of a masterpiece of minimalism as any other in the history of the genre. You have to be dead inside to not be moved by it.

There are few voices in modern music more unique than Will Oldham. Days in the Wake was the quintessential sad country album for emo kids; brutally honest, weird, slightly pitchy, yet hauntingly vivid. The songs never leave you.

I was lucky enough to grow up during an era when the sound of rock music became a really blurry line of experimentation between noise, punk, jazz and art house weirdness. In 1994, my sophomore year in college, my friends and I were hit over the head with Rodan’s now legendary album, Rusty. To this day, nothing really compares to Rodan as a live band and as what I deemed was peak Post Rock, even more than Slint. The thing that was most courageous about that period and that band was that anything was possible, any chord progression, any sound, any key or time change, yet the intensity was always present, never letting go of a hardcore mentality, even with softest of bridges pulling together one of the most intensely beautiful rock albums I’ve heard in my life. RIP Jason. You were a luminary.

When my father died, I must of have listened to this album almost non stop. I was in the middle of the chaos of moving my mother and grandmother to a new place only days after he had passed away. I was in a car going back and forth with a carload of my mom’s things, thinking to myself that nothing would be the same without my dad around and Rachel Grimes inimitable album was the soundtrack. Essentially a requiem to the life of Egon Schiele, it intimately weaves through the course of his life with a stunning beauty that is equally sad and redeeming.

I couldn’t do an influences list without including at least one house record and considering the usual ” life as a dj with too many records in my house’, its hard to pick one, but if forced to make a choice, the only obvious one is Larry Heard, as I wouldn’t be a house producer or DJ if he didn’t exist and pave the way for what I consider to be true deep house. He is the godfather of everything deep that is on the dance floor and What about This Love epitomises his inimitable sound.

There are great records and then there are records that seem like they can’t be humanly possible. This record falls into that category. It’s hard to understate how revolutionary Jarrett was to music and this legendary live recording is a testament to his legacy, especially considering the unique circumstances that surrounded the performance.