Bass CDs
New Album: Michael Feinberg, Blues Variant
Bassist Michael Feinberg Releases “Blues Variant,” featuring Noah Preminger, Nasheet Waits, Leo Genovese and Dave Liebman.
An intriguing element of Michael Feinberg’s superb Criss Cross debut is that the leader could easily have titled it “Bassist In The Background” (Fans of Duke Ellington’s wonderful 1960 LP Pianist In The Background will know what I mean.) Throughout the ten selections that comprise Blues Variant (which include six tunefully percolating originals by Feinberg, one by tenor saxophonist Noah Preminger, one by pianist Leo Genovese, and an ingenious Feinberg arrangement of Herbie Hancock’s “Eye Of The Hurricane”), the 35-year-old bass maestro hews to the mantra, “If you want to hear me solo, come to a gig, where I often play a solo on every tune.”
“I’m serving the music,” Feinberg continues. “What I appreciate about a bass player is how they make the other people in the band sound. I love hearing the soloistic abilities of Christian McBride, John Patitucci, Dave Holland and the people I idolize, but they’re amazing because, when they play, it feels incredible and they push their bandmates to be the best versions of themselves or go beyond what they think they can do.” As another example, Feinberg mentions Jimmy Garrison, who triangulated between McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones with the “spiritually transcendent” John Coltrane Quartet between 1961 and 1965. “He rarely plays a solo, but you don’t get the Coltrane quartet with anyone else. So I don’t care about the solos, or being on top of the mix to indicate ‘this is a bass player’s record.’ I play a ton of notes. I’m playing the whole time. Can’t miss it.”
Feinberg’s remarks on the Garrison effect carry a certain gravitas; since the early 2010s, when he did The Elvin Jones Project, he’s delved into Coltrane’s repertoire on its own terms of engagement on numerous gigs, most of them featuring Preminger playing tenor saxophone and Ian Frohman on drums. On the pan-stylistic Blues Variant, he connects with the spirit of the great drum griot via the presence on three intense selections of Elvin alumnus Dave Liebman, Preminger’s teacher during student years who has often employed Frohman. Feinberg’s introduction to Liebman’s singular sound was Earth Jones, a 1982 Elvin-led release with Liebman, trumpeter Terumaso Hino, pianist Kenny Kirkland and bassist George Mraz. “I know every note of it,” Feinberg says. “I’ve been a fan of Dave’s playing for a long time.”
An earlier Liebman-Preminger pairing is on Feinberg’s 2020 Steeplechase date, From Where We Came, which transpired not long after they met. The occasion was a Manhattan restaurant gig, where the septuagenarian saxophonist was dining with his daughter, rising-star publicist Lydia Liebman, who introduced them at set break. “I got his contact info, told him I was playing at Smalls the next month, and said, ‘If you want to play, there’s a gig for you,” Feinberg recounts. “Dave accepted. That began a beautiful relationship.”
In seizing the moment to align with Liebman, Feinberg was following a life-long predisposition to “create opportunities for myself – my hustler’s spirit; I’m always getting the wheels going, busy and active, trying to keep new, exciting things going on.” It’s an attribute he shares with Preminger, himself a two-time Criss Cross leader, a close friend since both moved to New York towards the end of 2000s. “I often have Noah in my mind’s ear because I know he’ll bring the right energy and treat the music with the proper respect,” Feinberg says. “He looks at music differently than most people. He’s one of the most technically virtuosic saxophonists – and that’s the least impressive thing about what he does. What really makes me feel his presence is the way he uses rhythm as a melody instrument in his playing, his long, slow phrases – and how he weaves theme and variation throughout a solo.”
The Feinberg-Genovese relationship is similarly long-standing. “Leo is one my favorite musicians, a real artist, no ego,” Feinberg says. “He’s incredibly well-versed – he travels everywhere, soaks up cultural musical language, and performs with some of the best musicians from all over the world, playing regional ethnic music in their bands. He grew up in the countryside of Argentina and now he plays with Wayne Shorter. He’s like a shaman. He’s free, effortless in expressing himself in all times, in all situations.”
The corollary of Feinberg’s functional, groove-centric approach is a long-standing desire to play and record with such expansive drummers as Frohman, Billy Hart, Jeff “Tain” Watts, and – on Blues Variant – Nasheet Waits. “The drummer makes the band, always and forever, and picking the drummer is what the music is going to sound like,” he says. “With Nasheet, I appreciate the timbre, the sound he gets from the drums. He can bring out heavy and bring out light, and plays all my really hard music in ways that make it sound effortless.
“I’ve always been chasing Elvin – and Jack DeJohnette – sonically,” he adds. “Their ability to keep the foundational groove is always present, but also free, floating, melodic, compositional. You might think of Elvin as more like a bruiser than an artiste, but he brought forth to a magic feeling in the music like no else before or since – brushes, ballad; Afro-Latin, 12/8; swing, medium; down, up. However much he pushes and pulls the time, where it’s not really metric, BAM, he’s going to give you the one, which locks the whole thing. That’s what allows the ambiguity and contrast.”
Asked about his own time feel, Feinberg responds: “The music is alive, so it’s always changing. As long as the drummer and I are locked in, I can play on top of the beat or behind the beat – I know it won’t go to a bad place. But I don’t ever want to sit always in one place. The groove dictates the approach.”
Feinberg wrote most of the music contained herein during the pandemic with this personnel in mind, around the unifying concept of interrogating “the idea of what is the blues and presenting it in diverse, unique ways.” He first assimilated blues expression in his hometown, Atlanta, Georgia, where, by age 16, was playing professionally with such world-class practitioners as Russell Gunn and Bryan Hogans. His compositional endeavors began during freshman year at Frost Conservatory of Music in Miami, Florida, where – inspired by bassist-composer Ben Allison, and other contemporaneous New York “downtown” figures like Jim Black, Chris Speed, Chris Cheek, Andrew D’Angelo, Skuli Sverisson and the members of the Bad Plus – he organized Miami Creative Music Collective, which played original music by its members in monthly concerts.
“The idea of being a composer and having a band was popular amongst my peer group,” Feinberg says. “But I also played a lot of gigs – a blues band called Juke, Frank Sinatra night on South Beach with a crooner, different Latin gigs, endless jam sessions. I take the relationship with the audience seriously, not in a showman-performative way, but connecting with the general audience so they understand what you’re doing. Melodies, the feeling of blues and swing. A lot of great music is simple. What really inspires me artistically is contrast, and that comes across in all my music – contrast in styles, in instruments, in textures. Playing funk versus playing swing. Playing odd meters that feel like common time meters.”
As an instance of that last-stated juxtaposition, Feinberg cites the surging title track, which proceeds to an ostinato bassline in 13 that briefly transitions to swing at the end of the form. “The title ‘Blues Variant’ relates to the mutations of COVID-19, but also references theme-and-variations on the blues,” he says. “There’s a tonic, a subdominant and a dominant, and utilization of the blues scale and blues dominant chords, but it doesn’t sound like that to me – which is also part of the idea.” Genovese’s opening solo postulates fleet right-hand lines in counterpoint to a rollicking left-hand vamp with enviable independence.
On “Saqqara,” named for an ancient, historically important Egyptian village, Feinberg – whose maternal grandparents are Israeli – channels Middle Eastern roots. After a rubato intro, the flow transitions into an “exotic” refrain in 5/4, inspiring another scintillating Genovese solo. Waits seamlessly metric-modulates to brisk swing, propelling Preminger through a few choruses that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the Hollywood epic Exodus, directed by Otto Preminger, his distant relative.
Genovese plugs in on Preminger’s “High or Booze” (rhymes with “minor blues”) which the saxophonist performed on his own 2022 Criss Cross release, Sky Continuous. “I got the idea for the project – non-traditional blues-based music – playing this tune on a gig with Noah and Nasheet,” Feinberg says. “It’s not an easy song.” Perhaps so, but the degree of difficulty isn’t discernible on this kinetic, elegant track, highlighted by the composer’s far-flung solo, Genovese’s texturally acute percussive comping; the leader’s angular bassline; and Waits’s force-of-nature drumming.
Waits’ funky backbeat underpins Feinberg’s “Healing Power of GRITS,” signifying not only the soul food staple grain, but also “Girls Raised In The South,” of whom his wife is one. “I wanted to do something in the spirit of Cannonball Adderley’s Mercy, Mercy, Mercy session or Ramsey Lewis – a groovy, ’60s-’70s soul jazz vibe,” Feinberg says. Again plugged in, Genovese elicits dark, kaleidoscopic Rhodes colors when soloing and when complementing Preminger’s declamation.
“I love playing the music of the tradition, but why play it the same way all the time?” says Feinberg of his metrically modulated treatment of “Eye Of The Hurricane,” provoking Liebman to uncork an effervescent, swinging soprano solo on the first of his three tracks. Genovese and Preminger follow suit.
Feinberg cites such ’70s-’80s Liebman waltz tunes as “Is Seeing Believing?’ as inspiration the ritualistic “The Water Spirit Brought Us, The Water Spirit Will Take Us Home.” After Feinberg’s well-wrought solo prelude, the ceremony continues with Liebman’s soaring soprano, Genovese’s mystically coruscating turn, and Preminger’s ascendant tenor statement, which channels Coltrane’s fire-in-stillness sound circa 1965-1966.
In response to Feinberg’s request for an unconventional blues, Genovese contributes the stately, spiky “Gather Power.” That sentiment seems to guide the solos – first Liebman, channeling Steve Lacy and Coltrane in his own argot; Genovese atonal, like Bley-meets McCoy, with crystalline touch; Preminger resolutely soulful; Waits incantationally Elvinistic.
After Feinberg’s spontaneously generated a cappella blues improvisation, poignant and honest, the recital continues with “vibey palate cleanser” – “Cycle Song,” a lovely melody based on a 4-bar loop. “This one really lets the musicians speak,” Feinberg says. “Again, it’s making something seemingly complex as simple as possible, making it easy to understand what we’re doing and feel the music.” Preminger’s tenor statement is a master class in melodic interpretation; Feinberg showcases his guitaristic electric bass conception; Genovese dances via on the Rhodes.
For dessert, Feinberg presents the set-closing “Year Of The Ox,” “a hyperactive, topsy-turvy explosion” that he wrote on Chinese New Year’s Day in 2020. Waits’s fresh, surging cascaras fuel apropos solos from each protagonist.
It’s a fitting wrap to a well-integrated musical banquet that fulfills Feinberg’s self-descriptive aesthetic mantra: “There’s a place for everything. But a lot of the greatest music – Kind of Blue, Weather Report, Oscar Peterson – is simple while also being incredibly sophisticated. It all comes down to authenticity.
— Blues Variant liner notes by Ted Panken
Visit online at mfbass.com
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.
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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
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