Well, hello lovers of music and culture. We are Under the Stars, a quasi-weekly column that stays on message with strong-ass opinions, presenting new music releases, upcoming shows, and other adjacent items. We keep it moving, hustling with the changes, thinking outside the margins. We’ve been doing this for five years… Spend some time with us… oh hey, looks like Castro Theatre is now “The Castro” and opening back up in February with a Sam Smith residency …
AMELIA RAY SOULVEILLANCE TOUR, SUN/5 AT THE BACK ROOM IN BERKELEY
Sometimes, when the world keeps moving so fast, you catch whiplash from each breaking news alert, you need music—more importantly, a singer-songwriter that’s going to tell the truth, but also slow it down so the sentiment can sink in, as opposed to bouncing from one topic to another. Enter Amelia Ray.
The San Francisco native, writer, and composer, nicknamed the Beatles’ long-lost soul sister, has performed with pianist Adrienne Torf, Chinese dulcimer instrumentalist Chao Tian, and trumpeter and composer Michael Sarian. Ray’s 2025 festival appearances have included the National Women’s Music Festival and Silicon Valley Pride.
As I’ve said previously, but hear me now on this: She will make you feel something in performance. Albeit a chuckle—she’s a character—or a heartstring pull that comes out of the blue. According to her site, “Ray’s 31-year career has spanned the fields of music, literature, performance art, film, and humanitarianism,” but hey, that’s what storytellers of the highest regard do: relate experiences that connect us all.
I suggest anyone seeking connectedness these days should attend, check in with your inner human.
Grab tix here.
SML, HOW YOU BEEN (INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM)
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Fela on acid—that’s still what the ears communicate to the brain when SML leans into a track. This Los Angeles-based experimental jazz supergroup, featuring bassist Anna Butterss, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, percussionist Booker Stardrum, and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann, has a new album titled How You Been scheduled for release on November 7. It’s a follow-up to 2024’s “Small Medium Large,” which was featured on numerous end-of-the-year Best Jazz Albums lists along with Anna Butterss’ Mighty Vertebrate. They will also be performing at SF JAZZ in the very appropriate alternative space that is the ultra-hip Joe Henderson Lab, February 26 + 27 of next year, right in the middle of Noise Pop.
You can pre-order the album here.
And purchase tickets for the shows here.
MAL WALDRON, CANDY GIRL (STRUT RECORDS)
John Lennon, the Beatle who once cheekily said the band was more popular than Jesus, once shared some real wisdom with his timeless quote: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Enter jazz pianist Mal Waldron. In 1975, he was a decade into his self-imposed exile from the United States, hanging out in and around the studio of French producer Pierre Jaubert, whose Paris HQ had become the workshop for both avant-garde jazz (Archie Shepp, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Steve Lacy) and psychedelic funk (Lafayette Afro Rock Band AKA Ice).
Career-wise, Waldron was already tearing down everything to its modal core and constructing compositions with experimental methods, so while he had the chance, he recorded with the psychedelic funk band from Roosevelt, Long Island (also the birthplace of Public Enemy’s Chuck D), Lafayette Afro Rock Band.
These sessions, the Candy Girl sessions, proved to be foundational for both parties. In 1973, that Afro Rock band recorded and released the track “Hihache, ” which decades later became one of the foundational backbeats to fuel the early wave of Hip-Hop.
So in ’75, a renowned jazz pianist played with, listened to, and took cues from an emerging cross-cultural ensemble, learning what was musically relevant in a younger context than he was used to. The opener, “Home Again,” sets the tone with its steady walk-up arch and wonderful clavinet and Moog atmosphere, adding wah-wah grit to each muddy layer. “Red Match Box” depicts a chase scene at the start of a Blaxploitation film to be made later, but the soul of this piece is “Candy Girl,” a mellow solo journey on the keyboard telling a story of somebody somewhere, with righteous cymbal work delivering the less-is-more blessings.
Candy Girl captures life moving in different directions, just when Waldrom might have thought it had stopped.
Pick it up here.
NIGHTMARES ON WAX, “BANG BIEN” FEAT. YASIIN BEY
I’m gonna share my thoughts on this topic. It’s the UK jazz artists—Theon Cross, Nubya Garcia, and others in that vein—who have drawn significantly from their heritage of sound system culture and woven it into the jazz genre, helping to bring this tradition back into the mainstream. We have Floating Points here, constructing the Mighty Sunflower Soundsystem for the culture. It’s exciting to see English DJ and producer George Evelyn, also known as DJ E.A.S.E. and the founder of the Nightmares on Wax project, dedicating his latest endeavor, “Echo45 Sound System,” to celebrating soul, roots, hip-hop, dub, and electronic textures featuring guest collaborators such as Yasiin Bey, Greentea Peng, Sadie Walker, Liam Bailey, and more. This aligns with the moment culturally, we’re experiencing.
PEKI MOMÉS, PEKI MOMÉS (MOCAMBO RECORDS)
There’s this cool standard Boogie Down Productions, led by KRS-One, innovated. They made these minimal-sounding, sparse, bare-bones hip-hop records in the late ’80s and early ’90s that felt a bit unfinished—but that’s what made them so special. Plenty of space for the imagination to go wild, besides KRS delivering his amazing, edutainment, rapid-fire flow. When an arrangement sounds loose, sparse, breezy, if you will, that’s when my ear gets happy, and most times it means something positive, like I need to pay attention to the production value. That’s what’s happening with this Peki Momés project, just gushing with amalgams that on paper?
Naah, unlikely to work. But once those ideas are pieced together, oooh, it’s working.
Peki Momés is a Turkish artist living in Germany, who only started to record music by accident in 2024. That already tells me this artist and vocalist is depending on ear and intuition, not trends or what’s supposed to be hot. I was alerted by the Mocambo Records label boss that this project has that special something, and she was so right. Compacted with, and I’m using somebody else’s words here, “Dirty disco, fuzzy funk, Anatolian rare grooves, experimental synth, library music and Japanese city pop” added to Momés vocals, were amidst another outernational vibe that just goes. These are playful charts, wide open arrangements, that operate colorful chord changes, uptempo meters, soft whispery atmospherics, and jovial polyrhythmic accompaniment.
Make no mistake—my breakbeat head is spinning; there are so many references in this project. It’s easy to see how Peki Momés has become a part of Iggy Pop’s Confidential show on BBC. The fact that it’s sold out on the site indicates that this music resonates beyond critics adulation and connects directly with the streets. This selection of “Turkish disco” is definitely something to look out for in quality record stores worldwide.
Check back here.
DJ-KICKS: ERIS DREW (!K7 RECORDS)
Let me let you in on a little secret: The first time I heard, or rather experienced, Eris Drew’s mixtape “Raving Disco Breaks Vol. 1,” from 2019, with all its body-rocking beats, scratches, drops, and sweet melodies. That ginormous earth-quaking seduction of a feel she calls “Motherbeat”—which packs thunking bass, noisy-ass Hip-House loops, horn snippets, and Diva vocal samples running into the red, nonstop—had me thinking, where the eff are those DJ-Kicks people? Because that vibe, ever so dunking on your millennial minimal mixing, is what that all gas no brakes lock-in after-hours set feels like. Not some cutsey, proper, shiny tune.
Naah. Bass-driving pressure, friend. Pushing as only a skilled DJ can uphold for three, four, or five hours. Well, somebody at !K7 finally heard it, because it’s here. The next instalment in the classic DJ-Kicks series is a selection of rapturous house, blissed-out breaks, and transcendent rave from the high priestess of the Motherbeat.
Or, as I’m saying to myself, finally, we have the no-brainer DJ-Kicks Mix.
Eris’ mix is 79 minutes of, as she puts it, “the funky, emotional, ecstatic house-and-breaks backbone that defines my sound” and includes tracks, remixes, and exclusives by Moby, Calisto, DJ Garth, Onionz, DJ Who, Kair, Hoof, and Toka Project, as well as from Eris herself and partner Octo Octa.
Put together on two turntables and a mixer in her New Hampshire cabin studio, this is more than just a collection of hype tunes: “I recorded it in my cabin with the violent world rolling around me. Being in my refuge in the forest was important; the mix needed to carry the feeling of that place and the inspiration I draw from it.”
If you listen really closely to some tracks, you can hear the vinyl crackle. That’s what a mix is supposed to sound like. Raw and real, moving the people. I suggest you pre-order immediately here; this will sell out.
The tracklist is a who’s who of rave hitters; Motherbeat like a mug. Pre-order here.
01 LFU – Oh Echt (Main Mix)
02 KAIR – Fonk!
03 Zen Experience – People Won’t You Come Along
04 Fingers – Dead End Alley (Bring On The New Mix)
05 Darwin Chamber & DJ Utopia – Tribute (DJ Utopia’s Mix)
06 Eskimos & Egypt – Fall from Grace (Moby Mix – Distressed Version)
07 The New Dance Republic – Take It To The Top (Epstein’s Massive Bongo Mix)
08 Hoof – Detroit
09 DJ Garth & E.T.I. – Twenty Minutes of Disco Glory (The Acid Rock Mix)
10 Direct 2 Disc – Excuse Me (Stab Mix)
11 Calisto – Get House
12 Eris Drew – Momentary Phase Transition
13 DJ Sensé – Digital Spirituality
14 Toka Project – Toka Love Project
15 Dark Globe – Mondo Scuro (Original Mix)
16 The Soundlords – Off The Wall (The Soft Mix)
17 Octo Octa – Cabin Dance
18 Onionz & DJ Who – Unlock Your Heart
19 Eris Drew – Hope In a Smoke Filled Room
20 Motion Blue – Scream
