Check it out: when you are indie, nobody is checking for you. Your come-up hustle is grimy, lo-fi, and inventive. Your budget is a combo of couch change and whatever is left over from rent. You give album descriptions on Bandcamp pages that cut the junk, à la: “Fake Fruit distills Pink Flag era Wire, Pylon, and Mazzy Star to expound on the absurdity of modern life. Frontwoman Hannah D’Amato leads the group through three-minute clapbacks of minimal, moody post-punk.”
No bullshit.
You’re so streamlined in your presentation you can’t even afford an album title—your band’s first release is self-titled in hopes that it will further stamp its name of onto peoples’ consciousness. It’s on a dare from your girlfriend-partner, who gifted you a four-track PortaStudio—the archetype delivery system of analog warmth— that a solo career would emerge from your love of melodic, classic guitar pop.
Let’s go back to 2021. The Bay Area was kind of left for dead creatively. It was a grim outlook; people, families, and businesses… tens of thousands of people fleeing the once top-dog city of tech. Fires happened with regularity. Between 2019 and 2021, San Francisco lost nearly $7 billion in household income. Tenants said a three-year ban on evictions was the only thing that kept them housed.
Concerts, all around town, every weekend, and night markets?
Not happening.
But from all of this… stuff, two indie releases, debuts with that self-titled gumption, emerged. Releases that nobody was anticipating.
Oakland’s Fake Fruit arrived on March 5, 2021, and San Francisco’s Chime School was released on November 5 of the same year. Both projects took the city, Bay Area, the country, and other parts of the world by surprise. Hailed by mainstream and underground platforms alike, probably taking those outlets by surprise. But their success spoke to not just the diversity of the indie hustle that the SF Bay Area can produce; it also signaled yet another wave of up-and-comers, new creatives, hearing different things.
Both Chime School and Fake Fruit are releasing their sophomore albums next week on August 23; they’ve even saved up enough money to have album titles: Fake Fruit’s Mucho Mistrust on Carpark Records and Chime School’s The Boy Who Ran The Paisley Hotel on the mighty Slumberland Records imprint.
I’ve heard both and let’s just say these projects have doubled down on their respective sound while still improving on those original ideas. Platforms will be writing about these records in December.
But we are not here for that. 48hills is here in complete Homer mode. We just want to salute both of these projects, which are garnering national and international pre-release press and have made music lovers from all over the world want to flock BACK to The Bay Area. An action that wasn’t so in vogue three years ago.
Support these Bay Area bands… they elevated that SF-Oakland creative ethos during a time when survival was paramount. Both have already proven how inspiring art can truly be.
Run the damn title.
It’s Under The Stars, babe: a quasi-weekly column that presents new music releases, upcoming shows, opinions, and other adjacent items.
We keep moving with the changes and thinking outside the margins.
Believe in your artists…
Let’s hit it:
SHIGETO, “THE PUNCH” (GHOSTLY INTERNATIONAL)
LISTEN! I’ve been a fan of Zach Saginaw aka Shigeto since The New Monday blew heads and minds back in 2017. He’s back with a bit of boogie sauce on his new track “The Punch” from his upcoming long player Cherry Blossom Baby, which is marked for a late October release. It seems to be a fam, crew, folks, and friends affair with Zelooperz, KESSWA, Ahya Simone, Tammy Lakkis, and more guests filling out that electronic, jazz, R&B, and hip-hop jacket for which he’s known so famously.
Speaking on that lead track sauce: “It’s the first time I’m writing this stuff myself and getting these players to make it even better… it’s impossible to have made it at this level without them,” says Saginaw. “This track for KESSWA and I represents the old and the new. Some classic roller rink, Detroit hustle vibes but with a modern twist. Impossible without all the incredible players involved. Hope y’all dig!”
Get cha head right, Shigeto is back. Good times await.
Pre-order here.
CANDIDO, DANCIN’ & PRANCIN’ (REAL GONE MUSIC)
Jazz musician Cándido Camero Guerra, also known as Candido, a former member of Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Kenton’s bands, decided to cut a disco record for the Salsoul imprint in 1979 at the age of 58.
As the innovator who essentially brought the conga into the modern age with his ingenious multi-percussion set-ups and tunable congas, he figured, “What do I have to lose?” He thought, this disco thing couldn’t be more difficult than a Diz arrangement with Charlie Parker on the stand to boot, right?
Welp, Cándido was hip to something—1979’s Dancin’ and Prancin’ introduced Latin conga beats to disco hustled-up syncopated rhythms. This combo proved irresistible and modernized the genre’s underground, eventually pointing toward its evolution: House music.
This is a genre-defining album on which Candido’s version of Babatunde Olatunji’s “Jingo” and his own “Thousand Finger Man” became building blocks for dance music classification.
But for my money, it’s the single named after the album, “Dancin’ and Prancin’,” that has just a bit of that Roy Ayers laid-back disco cool. The right chord progressions, singled-out stretches where you feel that 4/4 syncopated thump surging throughout the song and that good recording studio juju that persists: Cándido captured something so special with this.
Order it here.
REBIRTH AT PHONO BAR, AUGUST 15
When you survey what the top jazz musicians are doing in this era, Brandee Younger is performing at SFJAZZ with hip-hop icon DJ and producer Pete Rock. Makaya McCraven and Jeff Parker are standing on the shoulders of avant-garde mavericks Art Ensemble of Chicago while using tools of the trade used in dance music, cutting up soundscapes into new grooves and ideas. You have Nubya Garcia, the splendid sax dynamo, releasing remixes with every album release…
This is where jazz has gone. So if you are having a jazz party, play where the ears are. Rebirth, previously known as Tribe Jazz, has been doing that for a while now at Phono Bar. Founded by TJ Gorton, he also puts out an incredible music platform called Beat Caffeine.
The monthly event is all about getting after it and shaking those asses. The music is uplifting, funky, challenging, and most importantly, danceable. There are no pretentious, beard-stroking, man-bun-delivered critiques happening. Professional dancers come to get their pulse up, feeding off the flow of water and vinyl records. The party feels somewhat Mushroom Jazz-ish for a new set. It’s simply electric.
Thu/15 will be their annual ‘Brazilian Jazz Special’, where MPB (música popular brasileira), samba, bossa nova, Brazilian fusion, and more from today and the past will be on blast, featuring TJ Gorton and Justin Nerstylist, along with special guest Elan Kamesar behind the decks.
Kamesar has been visiting Brazil and collecting records from that region for more than 20 years and is one of the founding members-DJs of the legendary BRAZA! club parties that took place in San Francisco for four years, from 2009-2013. Just a little inside baseball: Kamesar has one of the deepest collections of rare Brazilian music you’ll come across. So if you dig Airto, Flora Purim, João Donato, Marcos Resende, Azymuth, Joyce Moreno, Manfredo Fest, and so on?
This is your night. Even the flyer is a tribute to Marcos Resende & Index’s previously unreleased 2021 album (out on Far Out Recordings), which features material from 1976.
Make it happen.
7pm-1am, free. Phono Bar, SF. More info here.
NOT NOT JAZZ, MEDESKI MARTIN & WOOD DOCUMENTARY
The Bay Area-based Afrofuturists Broun Fellinis had just finished opening for the much-ballyhooed avant-groove keyboardist John Medeski, drummer-percussionist Billy Martin, and bassist Chris Wood aka Medeski Martin and Wood, jazz adjacent power trio, at the Great American Music Hall. It was maybe ’96, and I was standing in the middle of a swelling congregation of wading doggie paddle-dancing nouveau hippie folk clad in denim or corduroy overalls sporting Doc Martens or Birkenstocks with wool socks.
With hacky sacks flying and a brawny rank of sweating patchouli making its way throughout the old barn, MMW went off. They did the damn John Zorn-informed funky modal jazz voodooism for the rock pastiche. As I looked up in the balcony, I saw David Boyce, sax player for the Fellinis, just looking out at the packed house for this band. There was so much in that gaze.
Not Not Jazz, the documentary on the downtown New York early ’90s band that hit paydirt with its improv music—jazz for punk clubs at one point, eventually becoming the phenomenon that it is today—captures the group working on a new album in 2017 someplace amidst the Catskills.
“We were a bunch of hippies in an RV,” states the band’s manager Liz Penta, who took the CB’s Gallery stars out of New York and on the road, playing rock clubs. After the gigs, the band and manager would head back to the RV, find a camping spot, and crash for the night.
The second time viewing this all-gas-no-brakes unit, I was at swanky ol’ Bimbo’s in North Beach circa ’97, maybe, and I recall the waitstaff being ill at ease with this very casual following.
To put it all in perspective, MMW came into popularity at a very specific window of time.
Jerry Garcia of The Dead had died. Charlie Hunter was packing them in every Tuesday at The Elbo Room circa ’94-’97 with his eight-string guitar and funk-groove sets, while bands like Greyboy All-Stars and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion were exploiting-exploring the jazzy hybrid thing.
But MMW had that intense improv approach. Studious musicians, left to absorb all the non-jazz stuff of the time and spit it back through their filter. Maneuvered across jam sessions, live on stage, without having a design on how to land this sucker. That energy can’t be rehearsed—it’s acquired through trying and failing. Any audience can smell that type of cocky power.
It’s all-consuming. With such a Dead-esque “everything goes” attitude, MMW went flying without a net, care, or star-map, every night. They carried that “freak flag,” and Jerry’s kids followed.
In droves.
Not Not Jazz, a term the band heard a fan call them, delivers that window in time, with band therapy stories as well, complete with vivid acumen.
VARIOUS ARTISTS, JOHN GÓMEZ AND NICK THE RECORD PRESENT TANGENT (MR BONGO)
One of the best ways to travel globally is to ride the N Judah into the late-night fog, listening to what parties around the world have established as their go-to tunes. John Gómez and Nick the Record, who have wired up one of London’s most loved underground club nights, Tangent, now at The Pickle Factory, have launched a compilation series with Mr Bongo dedicated to eclecticism and audacious selections.
Known for inclusivity and open-mindedness, Tangent, at least in this collection of tunes, feels like a free-for-all that purposely challenges listeners and dancers alike to redefine what’s going to make those feet move.
From synthy dub disco treats—”Lyriso” by Androo is that tangerine sunset stepper—to cheeky disco-pop rip-offs-(“No Way To Control It” by Mac Thornhill is a delectable cheeky robbery of Pointer Sister’s “Automatic” that plays) Tangent upholds the credo that all top-tier parties are supposed to adhere to, switching up the agenda, and finding out what works in the context of right now.
Grab it here.
