Sodium-vapor dusk. Via satellite, transmuting from northeast Los Angeles — the Aquarium Drunkard Show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35. 7pm California time, Wednesdays.
34.1090° N, 118.2334° W . . .
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From Birdland broadcasts and bridge-side practice sessions to late-night television, Leonard Cohen collaborations, and a final summit meeting with Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins spent nearly seven decades treating improvisation as a form of spiritual inquiry. In the wake of his passing at 95, we revisit a handful of essential films, broadcasts, and performances that capture the humor, velocity, deep concentration, and eternal forward motion of a musician who never stopped searching for the unknown . . .
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On the heels of the majestic Sunflower and a carefully managed image rehabilitation campaign, The Beach Boys’ appearance at 1970’s Big Sur Folk Festival was a calculated effort to align themselves with the counterculture. Sans Dennis Wilson, off filming Two-Lane Blacktop, California’s native sons delivered an excellent set drawn largely from Pet Sounds onward — a quiet corrective to their infamous withdrawal from 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival. Despite years of archival excavations from the band’s vaults, the performance remains officially unreleased . . .
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We have got a doozy of a Neil Young song to talk about today — “Ambulance Blues." First appearing as the closing track on Neil’s 1974 masterpiece On the Beach, this is one of the man’s major works, a long, dark dirge that surveys the surreal mid-1970s landscape, from Patty Hearst to Richard Nixon, all accompanied by a brilliantly skeletal musical backdrop. Here to help us decode the mysteries and metaphors of “Ambulance Blues” today is NYC-based singer-songwriter Zachary Cale . . .
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Shot for French television in Saint-Tropez during the summer of 1970, this broadcast captures Pink Floyd before the lore and iconography fully set in: no inflatable pigs, no circular screens, no stadium-scale spectacle, just four guys on a small stage dragging enormous sound through the Riviera night . . .
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For the past two decades, Chris Forsyth has quietly built one of the most distinctive catalogs in contemporary underground music, balancing technical precision with deep feel, repetition, and exploratory instinct. On two new releases — Basic’s self-titled LP with Douglas McCombs and Mikel Patrick Avery, and the sprawling improvisational debut from WHAT IS NOW — Forsyth stretches outward in different directions, moving from hypnotic groove and motorik interplay to thornier, open-ended collective improvisation that rewards patience, curiosity, and total immersion . . .
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Set against the poisoned beauty of South Carolina’s Savannah River watershed, Heavy Water finds Magic Tuber Stringband threading old-time Appalachian forms through drone, field recordings, ecological ruin and Southern psychic residue. Inspired by Courtney Werner’s research into radioactive birdlife near the abandoned nuclear zone of “Atomic City,” the trio’s ninth full-length moves between haunted fiddle laments, free-form string dissonance and environmental unease . . .
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Outside. South London, early 1983. On For a Reason, Charles Bullen and Julius Cornelius Samuel pull away from the tightly wound scaffolding of This Heat into something slower, heavier, and more open-ended. Basslines circulate, rhythms drift, and dub space begins to overtake the frame. Forty years later, the record still feels uncannily present after dark . . .
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Benin-born songwriter Antoine Dougbé fused Cuban rumba, son, Congolese guitar music, and Vodún ceremonial rhythms into a singular strain of trance-inducing West African funk. Backed by the mighty Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou, the late ’70s and early ’80s recordings collected by Analog Africa move with hypnotic force: phased guitars, rolling percussion, wiry synth lines, and call-and-response vocals locked deep inside ecstatic grooves . . .
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Norwegian songwriter Juni Habel drifts through haunted folk terrain on Evergreen In Your Mind, her third album and perhaps her most transportive yet. Built from trembling vocals, sparse guitar, room tone, and gently destabilized atmospherics, the record moves with a hushed intensity — intimate songs suspended somewhere between pastoral melancholy and dream-state solitude. Evoking the stark emotional clarity of Sybille Baier and the fragile chamber-folk textures of Department of Eagles, Habel creates music that lingers like fog rolling in off a dark coastline . . .
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Jerry David DeCicca looks back on the making of Ed Askew’s 2013 late-period masterpiece For the World — a record assembled through borrowed rooms, broke musicians, chance encounters, and the quiet force of Askew’s songs themselves. What began in a sweltering West Harlem warehouse with Jay Pluck, Tyler Evans, and engineer Keith Hanlon gradually expanded through contributions from Mary Lattimore, Sharon Van Etten, and Marc Ribot, all orbiting Askew’s singular presence. DeCicca’s recollection captures an artist who had moved far beyond the “psych-folk” tag attached to his ESP-Disk years . . .
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If The Way Out of Easy marked the emergence of the ETA IVtet as an entity separate from the site of the band's origins, Happy Today serves as another milestone: It's the first ETA IVtet record taped somewhere other than Enfield Tennis Academy. Capturing a 2025 set at the much-larger Lodge Room, the third album from guitarist Jeff Parker, saxophonist Josh Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss and drummer Jay Bellerose shows a band with more room to move and more space to listen. Over two meditative, grooving and restless long improvisations, Parker and the ETA IVtet hone their . . .
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As a member of The Crusaders, drummer Nesbert "Stix" Hooper's life in music is a testament to the power of the groove. With his rhythms at the foundation, the band blended R&B, jazz, rock, funk, and eventually fusion, and his playing would go onto provide crucial samples for beats utilized by artists like J Dilla, Madlib, Three Six Mafia, and many more, making him, according to his label, "arguably the most sampled drummer of all-time." He joins Aquarium Drunkard to discuss his new album and storied history—and one necessary ingredient that should be in every pot . . .
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Long framed abroad as a translator of Brazilian music for international audiences, Luiz Bonfá reveals a far stranger and more intimate dimension on Introspection (1972), a hushed solo-acoustic meditation built from layered guitar lines, drifting counterpoint, and weightless melodic fragments. Tracing Bonfá’s unlikely path from Black Orpheus and CTI Records to hip-hop sampling and accidental pop immortality, this set repositions him not as an ambassador, but as a singular architect of suspended, dreamlike atmosphere . . .
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The new collaboration between UK/Melbourne musicians William Murray and Winter McGuinn, Midtown Downtime is a warmly worn folk-rock set built on intoxicating harmonies and beautifully crisp production. Bound together by a shared lineage of touchstones, the duo channel a loose, rootsy sway that occasionally recalls the unhurried ease of J.J. Cale. Arriving at the onset of summer, Midtown Downtime carries an understated breeze that feels equally suited to late afternoons, long drives, or slow evenings with the windows open . . .
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