Some years bear a strange significance in music history. Single calendars that compress massive explosions of musical ingenuity within their pages.
In 1967, it was psychedelic and progressive rock. In 1977, it was punk. 1991 brought multiple waves of noisy guitar bands, from grunge to shoegaze to post-hardcore to the massive umbrella of alternative rock.
For jazz, that year was 1959, which saw several seminal releases: Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Brubeck’s Time Out, Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, which is arguably the greatest jazz record of all time by every metric.
But even among such legendary peers, Charles Mingus’ masterpiece, Mingus Ah Um, stands unwavering on its own two feet and swings mightily at all challengers.
Last year, I said that An Autumn for Crippled Children’s 
Years ago, I purchased 
Last week, while recording an episode on experimental music for my new podcast (oh yeah, 
In the liner notes for We Can Create Our Own World, Deadhorse offers an inspiring, yet grave missive: we can create a new world, we can create new selves—but. We can only do that reconstruction after we have torn down the existing structures.
Few musical movements are as weird, wonderful, and influential as Krautrock, a collection of West German bands in the 1970s that pushed the boundaries of what music could actually do to its extremes. The movement had an incredible influence on post punk, progressive rock, new age, shoegaze, and the birth of post rock. The shape of modern, electronic leaning pop music can be traced back to Krautrock, specifically the synthpop pioneers