Enter the Dark Horse

As Listmas rapidly approaches, many recordings vie for position. There is much jockeying and shifting and trading of spots. And though I had previously posted, with great confidence, my nearly final picks for the best creative/improvised/jazz/whatever records of 2007, suddenly a new contender has emerged, and it changes everything.

If I said to you, "Remember His Name is Alive? Well, they're still around, and they have a new record, only it's free jazz," you'd say to me, "You're six different kinds of crazy." Hell, if you'd said to me "Remember His Name is Alive? Yada yada new album yada jazz etc." a few weeks ago, I'd have thought you were nuts. But they do (or HNIA founder Warren Defever does, anyway, using the HNIA name, and with help from a bunch of jazzheads, most of them from NOMO), and it is flat out good. Like, maybe Best of the Year good. And it's not on some wrinkly- t-shirt-wearing hipster-run basement label, either; it's on AUM Fidelity.

For real.

It doesn't sound like indie rockers faking it. It sounds like improvisers feeling it. It's called Sweet Earth Flower, and it's a tribute to Marion Brown. What's great is that it focuses on Brown's lesser-known '70s material instead of the higher profile (and I use that term very loosely) Impulse! music of the 1960s.

The jazz guys blow both sweet and fiery, and Defever's guitar contributions are riveting. There are grooves, and there is dissonance, in proportions suited to a band wishing to pay tribute to the free music of the era in question.

In short, I guess what I’m saying is that Groundtruther’s been bumped to number 2, Dave Douglas to 3, etc. And nobody’s more surprised than I am.