DisAgreement Online

Coming a little more than two years after her last album Meow Meow Band, Amanda Chaudhary is back with her new longplayer January Suborbital Denomination. She still keeps around the rhythm section of G Calvin Weston and Jamaaladeen Tacuma, who used to play in Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time Band. Other luminaries to be found on the new album are Myles Boisen (Tom Waits, John Zorn) and Chris Grady (Residents, Grassy Knoll), plus a whole bunch of other musicians. Vocal duties are performed this time only by one singer: Sami Stevens offers her talents on four songs, displaying an incredible wide range of emotions.

The first half of the album is close to perfection. After a short jazzy intro, the funky Rambutan with its repetitive lyrics instructs us of said fruit’s nature, and otherwise leaves much room to the musicians’ soloing endeavours. The first part introduces the catchy chorus, before the instrumental part takes up most of the middle part, before the vocals join back in towards the end. National Chocolate Oat Milk Day takes a step away from the jazz genre and digs instead into psychedelic pop music that I would not have expected from this artist. It’s a nod to late sixties pop music whose Britishness reminds of the Beatles. Ghanaplasticity is the complete reverse, full of free form electronic and free jazz adventures that show that this short album is open for any and all genres. Like Kislev, a truly wondrous soul ballad that in the hands of better-known stars would be a mega-hit. Taconic Parkway Bridge and Endorheic Basin are a longer and a shorter instrumental that show that Amanda Chaudhary is not only an exception band leader, but also adept at creating her own synth sound galaxies. Marlon Brando is another more traditional jazz piece, instrumental in nature, before the album ends too soon with the somewhat silly Mister Brushies, a short piece that might as well be on the Boardwalk Empire soundtrack.

If you know one AC/DC song, you know them all. With January Suborbital Denomination it is the exact opposite. There are most genres to be discovered on this thirty-five-minute short album that other artist can perform in a lifetime. What I admire apart from that is the honest production that is never sounding too glossy, and Amanda Chaudhary’s mastering of the electric piano that transports you back to the seventies. Combining jazz, funk, soul, pop with a strong dose of avantgarde, January Suborbital Denomination is quite the wonderful discovery that should appeal to people looking for something beyond the mainstream.