Bass CDs
New Album: Mulberry Street Symphony, With Bassist Scott Colley
Mulberry Street Symphony…
Prolific Danish composer Anders Koppel, whose distinguished career includes music for theatre, film, ballet and over 150 scores for various classical ensembles, pays homage to his fellow countryman, the famed photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis, on Mulberry Street Symphony. Riis, who emigrated from his native Denmark to America in 1870, exposed the poor living conditions of impoverished immigrants in his groundbreaking photojournalism book, “How the Other Half Lives.” Inspired by Riis’ compelling photographs, Koppel created Mulberry Street Symphony, an epic work in seven movements, each one based on a different Riis photo depicting tenement life in New York City during the 1880s. “The work is a eulogy to the life and dreams of these people,” said the composer.
Koppel’s symphony for jazz trio and orchestra (the Odense Symphony Orchestra conducted by Martin Yates) showcases the composer’s son, alto saxophonist Benjamin Koppel, as the main voice through all seven movements. The work is underscored by the world-class rhythm tandem of bassist Scott Colley, whose sideman credits include work with Herbie Hancock, Jim Hall, Pat Metheny, Carmen McRae and Andrew Hill, and drumming great Brian Blade, a longtime member of the Wayne Shorter Quintet who has also toured and recorded with Bill Frisell, Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. As Koppel noted of the flexible trio of Colley, Blade and his son Benjamin, “With their profound understanding of the music and their capacity for catching the moment, they melt effortlessly into the symphony orchestra and move the work to where the border between notation and improvising disappears.”
In capturing the essence of Riis’ striking photos in music, Koppel deftly integrates symphonic elements with jazz improvisation while also conjuring up a wide palette of colors and moods along the way. “The whole symphonic score is completely developed and notated, but I didn’t write that much for the trio,” he explained. “Great musicians have fantastic ears. And I wanted to take advantage of that by giving Brian, Scott and Benjamin the freedom that I knew that they could fill. And they interpreted my vision completely.”
Each of the seven movements of Mulberry Street Symphony is a dramatic piece that tells a story in sound. The cinematic opening track, “Stranded in the City,” conveys the sights and sensations of an immigrant’s arrival into New York City during the latter part of the 19th century. Benjamin Koppel commented on his father’s gift for capturing the extra-musical in his scores. “The way that he uses his music to describe feelings and stories and emotions and even actions is more like an abstract painter would paint a feeling. And because we know him so well, we know his intentions and we can hear his stories and we can relate to it all the way. And so that made this collaboration very easy and open for us to just go into exploring mode.”
As the expansive “Stranded in the City” develops, Benjamin’s alto sax alternately darts and soars to convey its shifting moods, from pensive apprehension to giddy optimism. Anders described the newly-arrived immigrant in Riis’ photo this way: “He’s a 19-year old boy in his best, maybe only suit, stranded on a staircase, in the corner, outside closed doors, hoping for food and lodging. Something happened to his eye. The pulsating sounds of the big city resound from the streets. The wondering, curious and shy look of his eye tell a story of arrival, isolation and will to survive.”
Equally cinematic, while also deftly straddling the through-composed and improvisational divide, are the gentle lullaby “Minding the Baby” and the frantic 20-minute “Tommy the Shoeshine Boy,” the latter featuring facile, Bird-like flights by Benjamin throughout, along with some ecstatic blowing over the more turbulent sections. The poignant and moody tone poem “Blind Man” is meant to portray the lonely figure in Riis’ compelling photo. As Koppel noted: “Always standing on the same spot, leaning slightly agains the lamppost at the corner, peddling his rubber-tipped pencils. The darkness in his gaze, the dignity of his posture.” The composer added, “I tried to convey a special character, a man who is very much himself, apart from society, in a sense. But then again, the music took on its own way.”
A dramatic “The Last Mulberry” is trudging, blues-tinged requiem for the last mulberry tree in Little Italy. As Koppel wrote: “A blues for the tree and for the time closing in. Still blooming every spring, its leaves became more and more sparse. In the end it was cut down.” The conversational playing between Benjamin Koppel, Scott Colley and Brian Blade enlivens this track as the orchestra swirls around the interactive trio.
The unabashedly swinging “Bandit’s Roost” is perhaps the most dynamic and freewheeling track of the set. With Colley and Blade setting the kinetic pulse, Benjamin wails with rare abandon and authority over the top of this up-tempo burner. Koppel described the Riis photo that inspired the invigorating music: “Young Italian mobsters posing underneath their mothers’ laundry hanging out to dry. Fragments of a popular song echo between the walls while plans are being made and energies collected, ready to burst.”
Mulberry Street Symphony closes on a comforting note with the hopeful hymn, “The New House,” based on a 1894 Riis photo of a new home for orphans and homeless children that he helped build on a green hill in the countryside. As Koppel noted: “The simplicity of the hymn reflects the hope and knowledge that lies behind this photo: things will change – and it matters what you do.”
In the process of putting the music together for Mulberry Street Symphony, Koppel said, “I was inspired by
the Riis photos but my aim was not to make a sort of programmatic piece. The music has its freedom always, as it should have. The music often has its own will. So my point of departure was the photographs, but then the music sometimes sort of took over.”
The significance of Koppel, born into a musical family in Copenhagen in 1947, now honoring the legacy of the Danish-American immigrant Riis at a time of increasing debate over the growing wave of refugees and immigrants around the world was not lost on the Danish composer. “In my family’s history there are these two immigrant stories: Firstly, my grandparents coming to Denmark in the beginning of the 20th century as Jewish immigrants from Poland. At that time, Poland was occupied by Russia and there were always pogroms on the Jews, so they fled to Denmark and made a living there. And secondly, my parents and my sisters were refugees from Hitler during World War II. When Germany occupied Denmark in 1940, they fled to Sweden. So the idea of being an immigrant has always been very present in my thinking. And these days, in this time of history, the whole issue of refugees that have no home and immigrants desperately trying to come into other countries is ever present. It’s a mess and it’s a tragedy. So that was another line of thinking in this new work.”
The son of classical composer and pianist Herman D. Koppel, Anders Koppel was a child singer in the Copenhagen Boys Choir and studied piano with his sister and father from the age of five. He also played the recorder and later clarinet and made several television and concert appearances as a youngster, including the first performance of his father’s Variations in 1962 at age 15. He took up the Hammond organ in 1966 and the following year founded with his brother Thomas the legendary Danish rock group The Savage Rose. The band toured Europe extensively from 1967 to 1974 and even made a Stateside appearance in 1969 at the Newport Jazz Festival while also recording eight albums in studios located in London, New York, Los Angeles, Rome and Copenhagen. Koppel left the group in 1974 to make his first solo recordings, Valmuevejen with singer Otto Brandenburg, and Aftenlandet, a progressive instrumental album. In 1976 he cofounded with bassoonist-clarinetist Peter Bastian and percussionist Flemming Quist Møller the trendsetting world music trio Bazaar. The band played together for 37 years until 2013.
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Koppel wrote music for 50 plays, eight modern large-scale ballets and more than 100 movies. Since 1997, he has devoted himself to composing for classical ensembles and has completed 150 scores to date — solo pieces, chamber music, orchestral and vocal works, an opera and 33 concertos for solo instrument with orchestra. His saxophonist son Benjamin has been a featured player in six of his concertos. Father and son have also been playing together in recent years in a highly interactive quartet setting with Colley and Blade.
In the process of composing Mulberry Street Symphony, Koppel said, “I thought about the relationships between America and my country, and all the fantastic music that has been brought to us from America that has in many ways changed our lives and inspired us endlessy. And then Jacob Riis ran through my mind because I knew his story. I had just seen an exhibition in Copenhagen of his photographs, which impressed me very deeply. And so there was another link between Denmark and America.”
As a fully-realized work seeking to bridge the worlds of classical and modern jazz, Anders Koppel’s Mulberry Street Symphony is in the lineage of such successful orchestral works as Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown & Beige (1943), Miles Davis-Gil Evans’ Sketches of Spain (1960), Stan Getz’s Focus (1961) and the Claus Ogerman-Michael Brecker collaboration on Cityscape (1982). And like many of his past works, it brings together Koppel’s love of symphonic music and jazz improvisation in organic fashion. “I think that has been my language ever since I started writing scores,” he said. “I believe that the musical language that you have as a composer is a result of the life you have lived and the music you have studied and loved. My music has traces of all the music that I have been occupied with in my fairly long life —
classical, jazz, Cuban music, Italian folk songs, Turkish music. There’s so much fantastic music that influenced me during my life and all of that is in the music too. It’s all combined in my language, I believe.”
Added Benjamin Koppel, “I think all his music is very much his own music. He has his totally own voice and his own direction, which is this borderland between classical and jazz or rhythmical music. And because he was a performer himself, he has always been able to write music that all the members of the symphony orchestra love to play. He was a clarinet wunderkind when he was a child and performed of a lot of my grandfather’s clarinet pieces when he was 10, 12, 14 years old. So he knows what it’s like to be a wind player, but he’s also an extraordinary Hammond organ player and pianist as well. So he knows the instruments and he knows the importance of having fun while playing but also being challenged by the music. So he makes sure that every voice in the symphony orchestra is swinging and melodic and important. That is very much a part of his sound and his personal approach. And I think that’s a line going through all this orchestral works.”
Mulberry Street Symphony is scheduled to be released on February 18, 2022 via Unit Records.
Bass CDs
New Album: Zev Feldman’s Time Traveler Recordings’ Buster Williams ‘Pinnacle’ Muse Catalog Reissue
A precious, but previously elusive gem by the brilliant bass player Buster Williams will re-enter the jazz firmament with Time Traveler Recordings’ April 18 reissue of Pinnacle, the NEA Jazz Master’s celebrated 1975 debut album as a leader.
The package, an exclusive RSD release on LP, is being reissued for the very first time since its original release. It is the latest installment in TTR’s Muse Master Edition Series, unearthing the long-lost masterworks from the catalog of the historic Muse Records. The series is a collaboration with Virgin Music Group and Craft Recordings, spearheaded by TTR co-founder, producer and “Jazz Detective” Zev Feldman.
Remastered AAA directly from the original analog tapes by Matthew Lutthans at the Mastering Lab in Salina, Kansas, Pinnacle is pressed on 180-gram vinyl by Optimal. It will be issued in a hand-numbered, high-gloss tip-on sleeve, featuring a new liner essay by journalist Mike Flynn and a rare period photograph of Williams by Raymond Ross. The package also includes the original 1975 notes by Elliot Meadow who produced the original session which was recorded at Blue Rock Studios in NYC.
Thirty-three years old at the time of these August 1975 sessions, Camden, New Jersey native Charles Anthony “Buster” Williams was already an acclaimed and in-demand jazz bassist. He’d spent most of the 1960s touring and recording with Nancy Wilson, also freelancing for the likes of the Jazz Crusaders, Harold Land, and the Miles Davis Quintet—substituting for Ron Carter for several months in 1967—where he met and worked with Herbie Hancock. Williams joined Hancock’s Mwandishi band in 1971, placing him on the cutting edge of the new jazz fusion movement.
Pinnacle, recorded after Mwandishi’s breakup, finds Williams still very much informed by that idiom of funky, experimental jazz. The band includes fellow Mwandishi alum Billy Hart on drums and fellow Miles veteran Sonny Fortune on soprano saxophone and flute, along with legendary trumpeter Woody Shaw and a venturesome crew including saxophonist Earl Turbinton, keyboardist Onaje Allan Gumbs and percussionist Guilherme Franco. (Vocalists Suzanne Klewan and Marcus also join on two tracks.)
Williams blazed new trails in the use of electric bass in jazz: “A pioneer among jazz doublers—musicians equally adept on upright and electric bass,” notes Flynn in his new essay. But, while he features his Fender electric bass on the thumping opener “The Hump,” on most of the album Williams plays the acoustic upright bass that had always been his first love. It anchors the darker, funkier journeys the band takes on “Pinnacle” and “Batuki” and sets the swinging tone for the acoustic numbers, the deep spiritual jazz “Noble Eagle” and the breezy, playful “Tayamisha.”
“What I love about the acoustic bass is what I have to do to get music out of it,” Williams muses. “The sound I get depends all on me, not the help of an amp. The instrument relates to my heart; it’s alive, it has emotion, it’s not just a piece of wood.”
“Bass players are often described—perhaps unfairly—as the anchor of the band,” writes Flynn. “But in the hands of a master like Buster Williams, the bass becomes something much more: the engine, the heartbeat, the mellifluous core driving the music forward.”
Williams composed four of the album’s five tracks, making Pinnacle a brilliant first showcase for his writing as well as his playing and bandleading. “Buster’s writing abilities have not gone unnoticed in the past,” observes Meadows in his original liner notes for the album. “The writing for this date is fresh and varied. ‘The Hump,’ which should make you get up and do something, contrasts with the haunting serenity of the title song. Then ‘Tayamisha’ (named for Buster’s daughter) is light and airy as opposed to the intensity of ‘Noble Ego.’”
A prophetic release, Pinnacle forecasts the subsequent 50 years that Williams has spent balancing forward-looking musical adventures with the bounty and rigor of the tradition. “The title says it all,” writes Flynn. “Pinnacle wasn’t just a debut. It was a statement of arrival—an artist stepping forward from a prolific past into a fearless, unbounded future.” And, under the curation of Time Traveler’s Muse Master Edition Series, it now sounds better than ever.
Monk con Clave is the new album from the Carlos Henriquez Big Band, out now! Therein, bassist and bandleader Carlos Henriquez roots the large-ensemble recording in his long relationship with the work of Thelonious Monk and the cultural history of San Juan Hill.
He brings together a multigenerational band drawn from members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and its extended community, including percussionist Pedrito Martínez, trumpeter Mike Rodriguez, pianists Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Osmany Paredes, and Robert Rodriguez, vocalist Anthony Almonte, flutist and vocalist Jeremy Bosch. The project places Monk’s compositions beside original works shaped by Bronx memory and Nuyorican identity.
Few figures in modern art carry the singular presence of Thelonious Monk. His unmistakable melodic contours, harmonic tensions, and rhythmic logic continue to define the jazz repertoire, with musicians reinterpreting his work across generations. Monk lived in Manhattan’s San Juan Hill neighborhood before its disappearance during the construction of Lincoln Center, and his sound still carries the imprint of that vanished New York community.
Henriquez’s work as a bassist, composer, and bandleader has drawn sustained critical recognition across the jazz world. JazzTimes has praised his playing as “clean, crisp and to-the-point…jet fuel for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra,” while noting that “anyone surprised by the depth and breadth of Henriquez’s talents simply hasn’t been paying attention.” DownBeat has described him as “an emerging master in the Latin jazz idiom,” and WRTI has called his Grammy-nominated album The South Bronx Story “a terrific album,” highlighting his rare ability to unite Afro-Latin clave and jazz swing with few peers.
Henriquez built his artistic life through decades at Jazz at Lincoln Center. He joined the organization in the late 1990s as a teenager performing with Wynton Marsalis, became a full-time orchestra member, and spent years touring, recording, arranging, curating, and directing performances. “It’s almost like a mini Wynton Marsalis throughout those 30 years,” he says. “My participation there has been basically my whole life. It’s my home and a place where I’m gonna continue to develop and to lead.”
Monk’s voice has remained central to that life. “Something stood out,” Henriquez says. “It made me feel comfortable. It made me feel like I also had a voice in this music.” He hears Monk’s rhythmic language through his own identity as “a Nuyorican — somebody born in New York City whose parents are from Puerto Rico.” The music on Monk con Clave grew from that connection because he “was already listening to his music and very attracted to his uniqueness and him being himself.”
Henriquez assembled the band for what he calls “a great moment for me, especially for this project.” The session carried humor and familiarity. “Everybody’s on point. If you mess up a note, everybody starts jumping on you. That’s the fun part… all the talking amongst friends to keep our spirits and our attention span as high as possible.” During one solo, Rubalcaba stunned the room so completely that the musicians looked around “like they saw a ghost, like they saw an alien.”
The album opens with “Round Midnight,” where, Henriquez says, Rubalcaba’s playing “becomes water and takes the shape of whatever he wants to do.” “I Mean You” captures what Henriquez calls “the vibe of Afro-Cuban music at its best.”
“El Son De Teo” unfolds through a slow Son atmosphere connecting the homage to Teo Macero, creating “a real Son vibe.” His original composition “San Juan Hill” reflects “the ups and downs of being Black American and Puerto Rican Latino during the transition period, with Robert Moses having to move people out of their locations.” On “Ugly Beauty,” Henriquez shifts Monk’s triple meter into four and draws on the ballad language of Beny Moré, while a vocal performance by Anthony Almonte delivers what he describes as “luscious sounds.”
“Evidence of Four and One” references Monk’s classic compositions “Evidence,” first recorded in 1948, and “Four in One,” a formally unusual work from 1951. Here Henriquez manages to combine both tunes as if it were one. Built on rapid sixteenth-note with both melodic lines overlapping. “Raise Four” follows the lineage of Machito and Chico O’Farrill through a six-eight pulse and the explosion of Pedro Martinez & Jesus Ricardo.
“Green Chimneys” carries a Mozambique feel that features piccolo flute and bass on the melody. “Who Knows” stands as “a reflection of people I look up to — Tito Puente, Machito, Chico O’Farrill — Afro-Cuban and Afro-Puerto Rican.” The closing “Plena Azul Blue Monk” draws on Puerto Rican plena tradition, where “the trombone just playing the melody” evokes figures such as Papa Vázquez, William Cepeda, and Rafael Hernández.
For Henriquez, the music returns to the place that shaped him.
Well-respected roots rock/Americana sidemen; drummer JIMMY LESTER (Billy Joe Shaver, Webb Wilder, Los Straitjackets), bass player/songwriter/singer/bandleader MARK W. WINCHESTER (Planet Rockers, EmmyLou Harris, Brian Setzer), and keyboard player KEVIN MCKENDREE (Lee Roy Parnell, Delbert McClinton, Brian Setzer) form super-groove-group LESTER WINCHESTER MCKENDREE to go it alone, together, on their debut collaborative release, THEY GOT IT ALL (Times Three Records/MAY 29, 2026).
The drum, bass and piano (with vocal) trio recorded over two “live” days at McKendree’s Rock House studio in Franklin, TN early this year, focusing on a collection of Winchester’s original songs the three had been performing together on local club dates, brand new material (the unique origins of which we’ll get to), as well as two instrumentals collaboratively conjured in the studio.
Originally feeling the power of their locked-in, feel-based natural groove while backing E. Street Band bassist Garry Tallent on his solo album and brief tour in 2017, Winchester says he wanted to feel that again. “On that tour, Garry would let his musicians do an original song or two of their own, and I never forgot how great it felt and sounded to sing my songs with Kevin and Jimmy, or how Jimmy and I backed Kevin’s instrumental piano romps.”
In recent years, as Lester Winchester McKendree began performing live, an evolution began taking place with regard to Winchester’s instrument of choice. “I was changing strings one day and started thinking about the band Morphine, and how their frontman Mark Sandman, rest in peace, played a 2-string bass. So I took a YouTube deep dive, got inspired, and only put two strings back on my own bass”, Winchester explains. The sonically unique, melodically interesting result made the decision for the band to record an album a no-brainer.
Songwriters will often say a guitar new to them will “have songs in it”, or that writing on an instrument one is not totally familiar with can open up new creative possibilities. Winchester described it this way: “Songs just started falling out of that thing. Sandman played with a slide, but I just used my long fingers. The 2-String is tuned in fifths, and I started finding melodies and riffs, and for the first time ever, really, wrote all the music to pieces before any lyrics came.”
About a year after stringing his own bass with only two, Eastwood Guitars serendipitously (for Winchester) brought to market a replica “Sandman Model” 2-String bass. Winchester immediately ordered one. “When I got it, it was tuned in a different key than my Silvertone, but sure enough, songs started falling outta that thing too.” The songs that ‘fell out’ of that Sandman Model 2-String bass, by way of Winchester’s creative mind, make up the bulk of THEY GOT IT ALL, and the sparse fire and crisp energy that McKendree’s piano and Lester’s drumming bring to these tunes infuses them with, well, ‘cool’. The 2-String bass running separately, but simultaneously through bass and guitar amps, gives the trio a guitarish crunchiness you wouldn’t expect with no 6-stringer in the fold.
All three of these accomplished musicians’ careers started commingling in Nashville in the late 1980s.
JIMMY LESTER, a Nashville, TN native, moved from Billy Joe Shaver’s band to the original drum chair for Webb Wilder and the Beatnecks. Lester also established himself as a master of surf-rock drum style as a founding member of Los Straightjackets, which coincided with the
formation of roots rock cult hero band The Planet Rockers, of which Winchester was a founding member on upright bass.
Originally from Monroe, NC, MARK W. WINCHESTER moved to Nashville in 1988. He went on to join Emmylou Harris’ Nash Ramblers, before a stint as a Music Row staff songwriter, where he penned a hit for Randy Travis (‘Would I?’). He later joined the Brian Setzer Orchestra, and has had several of his songs recorded by Setzer, including ‘Rooster Rock’ on which Setzer had Winchester sing lead vocal.
KEVIN McKENDREE, from the Washington D.C. area, came to Nashville as the piano man for Lee Roy Parnell and quickly established himself as a real-deal roots and blues keyboardist, eventually playing on multiple Grammy-winning albums. McKendree (as well as Winchester) played with blues mastermind Mike Henderson, Brian Setzer’s Rock-A-Billy Riot, and The Brian Setzer Orchestra. McKendree’s 20+ year partnership with Delbert McClinton, as musician/co-writer/producer/engineer, led to the 2020 Grammy-winning McClinton album TALL, DARK, & HANDSOME -recorded by McKendree at his Rock House studio.
It was there at the Rock House, with McKendree on keys and control board, that he, Lester, and Winchester, with no bosses, no agenda, and no pressure, laid down the live, loose, properly boned, expertly fleshed, lyrically interesting, groovy aural document that is THEY GOT IT ALL.
Maybe they do.
Visit online at www.markwwinchester.com
Oteil Burbridge & Lamar Williams Jr. Champion Love Over Hate in New Single “Hush” | New Album ‘The Offering’ Out May 1.
Bassist Oteil Burbridge and vocalist Lamar Williams Jr. continue the rollout of their forthcoming collaborative album The Offering, with the release of its second single, “Hush”. A slow-burning Southern soul meditation rooted in love, peace, and emotional clarity, the track is a centerpiece on the album with a potent, thematic statement, in Williams’ words to “block out all of that nonsense” and “remember that there is more love in the world than hate.” The full-length album arrives May 1 via Flóki Studios, recorded on Iceland’s northern coast and produced by drummer, engineer, and Soulive co-founder Alan Evans.
While much of The Offering grew out of Burbridge’s banjo-based writing, “Hush” emerged from he and Williams’ shaping a deliberate sonic vision. Burbridge says they were “trying to capture a more old school Memphis, Macon, Muscle Shoals vibe,” leaning into a Southern soul feel that fits Williams’s phrasing. The end result is a song that is unhurried with a deep pocket that allows the groove and the song’s message breathe and stand at the forefront.
The album features an all-star lineup of drummer John Morgan Kimock, percussionist Weedie Braimah, organist Melvin Seals of the Jerry Garcia Band, pianist and violinist Jason Crosby, guitarists Tom Guarna and Jaden Lehman — musicians whose overlapping histories connect the Allman Brothers Band, Dead & Company, the Jerry Garcia Band, Soulive, and West African percussion traditions.
CONNECT WITH OTEIL BURBRIDGE
Website // YouTube // Instagram // Facebook
Pops Magellan unveils her debut live EP, DAMAGE (Live at EastWest Studios), a three-track performance project recorded at the legendary EastWest Studios. Captured in Studio One using one-take camera performance, the session offers a raw and intentional introduction to Magellan’s artistic world as a solo artist, bandleader, and producer.
The live EP features three compositions from her DAMAGE era:
“Misunderstood,” featuring Taylor Graves and Robert Sput Searight
“Deep Thoughts,” featuring Noa Kahn
“Drive Complaining,” featuring Robert Sput Searight and Artur Menezes
Originally released as a series of live performance videos on YouTube, the session now lives as a body of work, highlighting Magellan’s ability to merge high-level musicianship with groove-driven, emotionally resonant compositions. Each track unfolds as a conversation between players, balancing technical precision with spontaneity.
Recorded in a single day at EastWest, the session reflects Magellan’s commitment to capturing music in its most honest form. With a focus on raw live interplay, DAMAGE (Live at EastWest Studios) sets a clear tone: this is an artist building her identity in real time.
The session features a handpicked group of collaborators. Robert Searight, founding member of Ghost-Note, brings his signature groove, alongside virtuoso Noa Kahn, acclaimed guitarist Artur Menezes, and Grammy winner Taylor Graves, who co-produced two songs on the original EP.
“It was a way to start a strong foundation for the world I’m building.” says Pops. “I wanted to make something beautiful, strong, and honest, something I’d be proud of looking back.”
Pops leads every aspect of the project, from curating collaborators to shaping the sonic and visual identity. The result is a refined yet powerful debut live statement that positions her at the intersection of musicianship, artistry, and modern performance culture.
With more music on the way and live shows to be announced soon, DAMAGE (Live at EastWest Studios) marks the beginning of a larger vision still unfolding.
Stream DAMAGE (Live at EastWest Studios) HERE
Watch the Live Session HERE