Let’s get personal. Intimate.
For so long, in what felt like another lifetime, I was always booked to DJ, mostly on Friday and Saturday nights. Then, the Sunday-afternoon-into-evening shift. Then there was the once-a-month Wednesday happy hour and invites to play Thursday nights with friends. Basically, DJing took up all my time outside of whatever 9-5 was in my world.
So the window to see ANY live concert shows was zilch. But I made a silent deal with myself that if the opportunity came, I would really go out and see a wide range of shows. All types of shows. Even artists I didn’t like—just to have the experience, I would go. Checking out shows was one of the things I loved about SF when I first moved here. It literally was like a Red, Pinks, and Purples (shoutout to Glen Donaldson) song… One moment somebody is blowing up on the underground; three months later they are gone, with only rumors and unpaid rent twisting in the wind.
You never know WTF is going to happen at a live show. It’s the one thing in this world that remains unpredictable. Whether it’s seeing an outpouring of love in the form of sunflowers adorning the entire stage at a Mae Powell record release one night, or anticipating the performance of a classic hip-hop album, the DJ starts the soundcheck in front of the audience at 11:30pm (as a DJ, standing with other DJ’s on that night, we knew immediately this was an expressway to poop). The emcee, a legend, mind you, gets on stage at 12:30am only to yell “turn my shit up” at the sound guy all night.
You neva know with shows. But you keep going, because there is beauty in the world.
So you take in an opportunity to attend New York City Winter Jazzfest, at Avenue C in the East Village, on a Thursday night, no less. There is a line around the corner in this Arctic air to see Makaya McCraven,the Chicago-based drummer, composer, and producer, with horn connoisseur and fellow International Anthem labelmate Ben LaMar Gay and musician and UK composer Theon Cross—a tuba player who crafts basslines reserved for drill, drum and bass, and other forms of low-end music. And they collectively burn down the house.
And then 11 months later, that performance you witnessed in person pops up on the Techno Logic EP, one of four that were birthed from the wide-stretching double-album release Off The Record, simultaneously released by McCraven. The track “Gnu Blue,” created from those performances that night, is a rewording of the club name, Nublu, and it takes those Mampi Swift tuba patterns and lines them up in a bass music presentation.
That slight woodblock clickety-clack, that pressure on your neck, ringing in the beat? It all connects, a bit too close for comfort. It’s like the George Clinton quote “funk ain’t nuthin’ but the blues sped up.” You feel the ancestors whispering in your head.
And who would have guessed that a February 27 show at SFJAZZ’s Joe Henderson Lab, presented by Noise Pop and featuring synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, percussionist Booker Stardrum, and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann, would be a portal to Chiu’s new release, Edge Conditions.
Mind you, there was no Anna Butters, the bassist and anchorperson of the group, who you can always rely on just when things are about to get a bit too light in the frequency. Chiu did double-duty, gurgling up percolating synth waves, sliding into some proto-Detroit electronic segments that had many folks head-nodding, shouting out a bit, and feeling a certain type of way.
But as I gazed upon the intense liner notes for Edge Conditions (which is on sale at both Bay Area locations of Amoeba Records), it was made clear that the record was “mostly written and recorded during February and March of 2026, with the composer operating both in isolation and with a select team of musical comrades, while also incorporating live collaborations, field recordings, and audio sketches going back years.” \
So yes, credit the Joe Henderson Lab at SF Jazz as a contributor to this project’s birth. Which brings me back to why you should keep going to live shows; you never know when you’ll become part of the performance.
But hey?
We are Under The Stars, people. You know the drill, lovers of music and culture. This weekly column stays on message with strong-ass opinions, presenting new music releases and upcoming shows, hustling with the changes, and thinking outside the margins. Are we going to make you post-language indie rock famous?
I doubt it. But hop in anyway. Take the time to understand why uncle Neil Young loves the Tom Cruise and Alejandro González Iñárritu film Digger—and thanks for spending some time with us. Let’s go…
JUNE MCDOOM, FOLLOW THE LIGHT (JAGJAGUWAR)
This New York-based artist, who grew up in a Jamaican household in South Florida, has found the magical connection. Packing a cross-hitched album of progressive Americana roots music, June McDoom ushers in the 2026 amalgam of quiet freak folk, sometimes accompanied by the dubwise rhythm jacket of drums and bass, spaced-way-out, so these opulent instrumentation boulevards and causeways will linger just a bit longer and hit a bit more statelier.
MC Doom’s voice is just that ethereal, and we hang on for every breath we don’t take. But once that low-end bassline covers the ground floor, the timpani hits, rushing background voices, and piano tinkles remind us that MC Doom’s beguiling folk-ballad-meets-dub-reggae combo is the perfect fit for such a heaven-sent idea.
Get Follow The Light here. Grab tickets for the show at Four Star Theater in December here.
ecad, “SO DEAR TO US” AND “BROKEN PIECES” (COOP PRESENTS)
Musicians and producers’ IG Culture and Alex Phountzi launched CoOp Presents in 2018 to create a platform for new bruk talent in London and beyond. The label continues in the spirit of the original West London broken beat movement to support forward-thinking music and artists. Those two mavericks are the right people to gauge who is next and has the correct type of swag and production grit, coming out the gate.
You can add the artist ecad to their ever-growing list.
Song “So Dear To Us” comes to us on a two-track single package with “Broken Pieces.” Both are dancefloor disruptors, one doing real smooth, while the other causes mass destruction—which, if I may say so, is how you are supposed to deliver a two-tracker.
“Broken Pieces” is built off a dodgy kick that just won’t stop, accompanied by a shuffle with an assortment of atmospheric elements such as bubbling, shimmering synths, delicious, smoldering vocal stabs, and a melodic upward-rising bassline. Mental.
Track two “So Dear To Us” gets into a heady, grand space, building on a 4/4 rhythm track with warm dissonant piano chords and those Rhodes and vibes completing the top side of the production. It’s one of those arrangements to keep you two-stepping, swaying, swinging, and grooving until the DJ plays it again.
New tracks such as these are the reason that CoOp Presents STILL ‘runs dem tings’ when it comes to what or whom is bubbling up in UK Bruk.
Grab it here.
MARLA KETHER, LUSO (STRUT RECORDS)
Give the bassist for Little Simz just a moment of your time, and soon you’ll find out just how vast a musical world Marla Kether inhabits. Work on her second EP Luso started during lockdown, and it has such a strong grip on the music of the African diaspora that your head will spin completely off. Over five tracks, she blends, augments, and maneuvers through Brazilian musical traditions, broken beat, Afro-Portuguese batida, Afrobeat, and jazz-adjacent charts like she’s running some scales on her bass. The project was designed to be a celebration of community, and I believe it completes its mission, but it’s the accessibility… When you have an artist who’s teaching, but it doesn’t feel like a lesson—more like love—you’ve hit something so special that it excels beyond words. That’s what’s up.
Grab LUSO here.
FARSIGHT, SITUATIONS 002 EP
In three very gelatinous tracks, with proper bass pressure and off-tempo high-hat kick, Marshall Smith, aka Farsight, the former San Francisco DJ-producer-painter, gets comfortable connecting the dots of 21st-century dance music.
The EP Situations 002 is not necessarily doing something completely different from his release that came earlier this year. He’s still refining the mechanism, enhancing a style that takes trap, Jersey club, reggaeton-meets-UK funky, and tribal house and making it his own. It’s with the ease, confidence, and overall sleek, smooth production that’s now turning heads a bit quicker.
“Come In,” the third track on the new EP, has all the juice, the swag, the sway, that specific bassline grumble, and those little incidental in-between ephemera noises that make it just a 3 am dancefloor burner. With yardy chat talk snippets amidst the tuffness, mash-out vibe.
Is it garage, UK funky, or dubstep? I can’t call it. But play it for a packed floor, and there will be NO confusion.
Farsight has dialed it in, once again.
Pick up the EP here.
