As a music writer, I feel it is my responsibility to be on top of pop music as much as possible, though it’s an impossible task to hear everything. However, this is complicated by a confession I have to make: I don't like most of what I hear.
I don’t think it’s a question of me turning into my parents and only liking the music I grew up with, or that I’ve become the old man yelling at clouds. So much of the pop music I hear is just...ugh, music by committee, forgettable. I try, I really do, but most of the time I can’t even get to the chorus of a Top 40 song. If it even has one.
So, I have a simple solution. Listen to something else. Especially when there are bands and artists out there like Courtney Barnett, Ghost, Lorraine Desmarais, Samara Joy, and others who may never be on the pop charts, deserving though they may be. And there’s still newly-discovered or rediscovered historical material to be brought to the light of day (often curated by some very savvy record company and PR people). Like these new releases:
Roni Eytan: Melody People
PKmusik
Microtonal harmonica? I hadn’t heard of it either, until listening to Melody People, the first album as a leader from Roni Eytan, who plays the instrument, as well as standard harmonica. The microtonal harmonica can play notes that are in between the 12 tones of the conventional Western chromatic scale. It was invented by Eytan, in collaboration with Brendan Power, and is made by Suzuki.
When many of us think of harmonica, we think of that whiny “hwah-hwah” folk music sound. Nothing could be farther from what Roni Eytan draws from it – a warm, horn-like jazz tonality, and in fact, the harmonica, like a saxophone or clarinet, is a reed instrument. Eytan is a masterful player, as showcased on this album of 11 originals and a cover of Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas” (“If You Go Away” is the English-language version). He is remarkably expressive, with seemingly infinite nuances of breathing, dynamics, and note shaping. Melody People was recorded mostly st Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, France by Gérard de Haro with Matteo Fontaine assisting, along with some additional outside recording. The album was mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio.
Roni Eytan is joined by Shai Maestro on piano, who also produced the album, Nitzan Bar on guitar, Barak Mori playing bass, Daniel Dor on drums, and Mayu Shivro guesting on cello. As Eytan states, “Every single piece I composed for this album started from a melodic idea…When I was a teenager I picked up the harmonica, an instrument that can be so close to the human voice. I was dreaming of playing far from home. Today when I play, I am trying to get back to that place.”
He grew up in Jerusalem and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. By 23, after a stint at the Berklee College of Music, he was playing internationally and performing with artists like Danilo Pérez, John Pattitucci, Brian Blade and Gilad Hekselman. His music is influenced by jazz, the traditional folk music of his birthplace, Middle Eastern melodies, and maqam microtonal instruments, which led him to collaborate on the creation of a microtonal harmonica. Yet the music doesn’t sound stereotypically “exotic” – Eytan uses his microtonal instrument to simply serve the beauty of the compositions. At times, as on “Like a River” and the reprise, “Melody People (Holding/Letting Go)” his harmonica sounds remarkably like a muted trumpet.
Melody People has an open, airy sound, with each instrument having space to breathe. It’s clear and uncluttered. The opening track, “Winter Dance (A Call to Gather”), is almost a mission statement of what’s to be heard, with Eytan’s solo opening passage sounding rich and palpable, with that wonderful expressiveness that characterizes every note of his playing. The harmonica has body. “Hopeful” is filled with rich chord voicings on piano and nylon-string guitar, in an inviting soundspace. When the drums come in, you realize the recording has great dynamic range. For me the title track is of demonstration-quality, with each instrument having excellent tonality – the dexterous interplay between the piano, guitar and harmonica is delightful – and each brush hit on the drums is distinct and plain to hear.
I suppose it might be stating the obvious that the musicianship is superb. On “A Modern Folk Tale” there is fantastic unison playing between Eytan’s harmonica and Nitzan Bar’s guitar navigating some tricky intervallic leaps. Barak Mori’s acoustic bass gets to shine on “Tears (A Mother’s Lament),” where the bass carries the opening melody. “Before it Begins” features Mayu Shivro playing cello, and her sound and touch are as gorgeous as you might imagine. The album closer, “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” is played with exquisite delicacy, the perfect closer to an album that surprises and delights throughout.
Jane Ira Bloom: Light from a Person
Outline (released in stereo and immersive audio)
Ever since Copper’s John Seetoo introduced me to the music of Jane Ira Bloom in an article he wrote in 2023, I’ve been following her music. (Talk about me being late to the party; she’s been recording since 1980.) It’s categorized as jazz, but to my ears such pigeonholing is too narrow, if not meaningless. I find her soprano saxophone playing captivating. So do others: she won the 2026 DownBeat critics poll for her instrument.
Whether she’s navigating complex melodies or drawing out a single note, she’s a musician who can capture the listener’s attention simply by the beauty of her playing, let alone her seemingly boundless inventiveness. It doesn’t hurt that she’s been recorded lately by Jim Anderson and Ulrike Schwarz, names that are not unfamiliar to the audiophile community.
Since Light from a Person was just released (on October 22, 2026) I haven’t had a chance to listen to the immersive mix yet, but I feel no sense of loss in hearing the stereo versions (on hi-res streaming and CD). Bloom is accompanied by David Friedman on vibraphone and Ken Filiano on bass, so the sound is sparse and open, with plenty of sonic space for each instrument, and the tonal balance is right on.
It’s the kind of recording that makes for an audiophile dream. As the late Art Dudley once said, if a system can’t make a stand-up acoustic bass sound good, that system has a serious problem. I’d add that the same can be said for the vibraphone. Well, on my system these instruments sound fabulous. (Excuse the humble brag.) This recording captures them with heavenly grace. The bass has articulation, weight and depth, and the vibes are strikingly – pun intended – captured with superb clarity, from the hits of the mallets to the distinctive clank of the bars and the character of the resonator tubes. Humble brag: on my system these instruments sound fabulous. Jane Ira Bloom’s soprano sax has warmth and body and nuance – you can hear every variation in her playing dynamics, and to evoke the old audiophile cliché, it really does sound almost startlingly close to her being right in front of you.
The musicians lock into each other’s playing, whether in the tight ensemble passages of “Skydini” – how the heck did they follow each other here? – to the many spots where they improvise off on another. The recording’s excellent dynamic range captures the ebb and flow of the players. At the risk of being Captain Obvious, in a musical setting like this, I think the job of the engineer is to capture the sound of the performance as faithfully as possible. But let me turn that around by restating that idea: with music like this, the engineer’s job is to interfere as little as possible. When listening to Light from a Person, you really do feel like there’s nothing in the way of you and the music, and I can think of no higher compliment.
The musical highlights are many and varied. “Bright Bars” opens the set with an up-tempo swing feel. “Skydini” has that telepathic interplay. “White Tower” is relaxed and pensive. “Airspace” showcases Ken Filiano’s fast eighth-note bass playing, which never gets blurred. And oh boy does that bass sound good. “Desert” featured him in an entirely different way, with beautiful bowed bass notes complementing Bloom’s drawn-out legato playing. “Miro” has some abstract, playful interplay (appropriate, given the title) between Bloom and Friedman, who is masterful here. The closing title track, “Light from a Person,” almost doesn’t seem to have a tempo – it just flows. A duet between Bloom and Friedman, the musical communication between the two of them is extraordinary. As is the rest of the album.
The Mothers of Invention: Freak Out (60th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition)
Zappa Records/UMe
Zappa freaks rejoice! I first heard about the 60th anniversary edition of Freak Out by the Mothers of Invention from social media, and, since this is one of the formative albums of my youth, I freaked out upon getting the news about this massive set, which comprises more than five hours of the 1966 album remastered, plus mono mixes, pre-master mixes, live concerts, rehearsal recordings, demos, and the usual booklets and extras – a 6-CD/Blu-ray audio or 5-LP package with 89 tracks in all via streaming, and 105 via the Super Deluxe physical media! A lot to absorb. I confess, as of this writing I’m still poking through it all.
If you’re a Zappa fan like me, this is very exciting news. I can’t tell you what an effect Freak Out had on our innocent teenage minds. It was a musical shock to the system after growing up on the safe-as-milk AM radio of the time, revealing an unimagined world of exotic counterculture, musical weirdness, and irreverence.
For those of you who are not Zappa fans, Freak Out is a rock record that can truly be called groundbreaking. It was only the second pop music double album ever – Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde beat it by a week. It was the first the world at large heard of Frank Zappa and his scathing social satire and boundary-breaking musical structures. It was one of the first rock concept albums. Freak Out combines elements as diverse as doo-wop, 1960s pop song structures, R&B, and avant-garde classical composition along with…well, how would you categorize a piece like “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet,” 12 minutes-plus of bizarre dialogue, weird vocalizing, shifting time signatures, and pre-synthesizer sound effects?
From the first cut, “Hungry Freaks, Daddy,” Zappa skewers the pop culture of the day with lyrics like, “Mr. America, walk on by, your schools that do not teach/Mr. America walk on by, the minds that won’t be reached.” Or “Trouble Every Day”: “Well I'm about to get upset from watchin' my TV/Checkin' out the news until my eyeballs fail to see/I mean to say that every day is just another rotten mess/And when it's gonna change, my friend, is anybody's guess.” All couched in standard rock band instrumentation (with a cast of 22 extras to fill out the sound in some sections) and pop song structures to fool the casual listener. Well, until Side Three and “Help, I’m a Rock” anyway…
Zappa hadn't fully developed the angular, “air sculpture" guitar playing style that would come to full bloom on albums like Weasels Ripped My Flesh and Apostrophe, so it's fascinating to hear his playing here, with a clean, trebly tone and a more conventional rock guitar approach, yet with hints of what was to come.
Freak Out didn’t exactly set the world on fire upon release, only reaching number 130 on the Billboard 200 chart, and panned by many critics, though it received a warmer reception in Europe as a cut-down single album. Freak Out has since been acknowledged with a 1999 Grammy Hall of Fame award and other accolades, and critical acclaim as a rock music landmark.
As you might guess, the sound quality is vastly improved from the flat, dynamically compressed, wimpy-sounding original LP. Now, individual instruments and sounds are much easier to hear and pick out, from the vibraphone in “Hungry Freaks, Daddy” to the echo on the drum set in “Return of the Son of Monster Magnet” and the piano and 12-string acoustic guitar in “Any Way the Wind Blows.” Vocals are more prominent, and in fact can be individually distinguished as being Zappa, and everyone else, as opposed to the sonic haze of the original. There still isn’t much dynamic range, and there’s a lot of left-right stereo panning at the expense of spatial depth. (The mono version solves this, and in fact, I'm really liking the alternate sonic presentation it provides.) The live cuts and rehearsal recordings…well, consider them more as historical documents than finished productions. But the improved clarity of the original album recordings is, literally, a revelation. Essential listening, and not just for Zappa freaks.
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