AIMS Marketing Program/ Featured Titles Promoted This Week:
Matt Andersen – The Big Bottle Of Joy CD/2xLP (Sonic)
The Big Bottle Of Joy is about celebration – hard-won, overflowing, exuberant celebration. Matt Andersen’s latest long-player lives up to the grand title from its opening song, “Let It Slide”; a muscular, organ-drenched urge for people to chill out and be good to each other – to its understated, romantic curtain-closer, “Shoes”. Andersen finds reason to sustain this celebration of the life we share together everywhere – on the road, missing a lover; between the sheets in a southern Ontario motel room; from Montreal “all the way to New Orleans”; in a “little kitchen ballroom” on a quiet night at home. Over a dozen songs infused with raw blues-rock, rollicking Americana, thoughtful folk, and ecstatic gospel, he testifies to something we could all do well to remember: the time we have together is special, so let’s spend it the right way.
Jane Bunett and Maqueque – Playing With Fire CD (Linus Entertainment)
By now the international jazz community knows the story that Maqueque came out of a jam session at the Cohiba Hotel in Havana that introduced renowned jazz musician Jane Bunnett with young women musicians and composers who had recently graduated from the Cuban conservatory. Over ten years the band has created opportunities for composing and performing extraordinary jazz that has taken this all-female ensemble around the world and has expanded to include not only women players from Cuba, but also brilliant vocalist Joanna Majoko (from Zimbabwe) and has had musicians from the Dominican Republic, Latin America, Spain and Lebanon.
Shana Cleveland – Manzanita CD/LP/Cassette (Hardly Art)
Manzanita is the common name for a kind of small evergreen tree endemic to California which has strong medicinal properties. It’s also the name of the brand-new full length by songwriter, musician, visual artist, and writer Shana Cleveland. Subtle, powerful, and unafraid, it’s her strongest and most personal album to date. These songs are as strong as the bricks in the Brill building and seem destined to be covered by others in years to come. Where her previous record, 2019’s Night Of The Worm Moon functions as a collection of speculative fictions equally inspired by Afro-futurist pioneers Herman “Sun Ra” Blount and Octavia Butler, Manzanita concerns the love that loves to love. “This is a supernatural love album set in the California wilderness,” Cleveland explains. [A limited-edition maroon color vinyl pressing is available.]
