After a summer overstuffed with seven-day work weeks, I am now trying to catch up on my listening. To speed things along, I’m limiting myself to short reviews. So here are reviews of new albums from the Tyshawn Sorey Trio, Dafnis Prieto (featuring Luciana Souza), and Steven Bernstein and the Millennial Territory Orchestra—plus a new single from Isaac Aragon.
Singer/songwriter Isaac Aragon has two pieces of good news for music listeners: First, he is releasing his new single, “Love Bless America,” on February 19 via the familiar online outlets. Second, he has recently made the decision to flip his work schedule, going from full- to part-time at his physical therapy gig (he’s got a doctorate in that discipline) and from part- to full-time in his music career. That means you’ll be seeing the Peñasco native/Los Lunas resident playing out a much more often than in the past, and you’ll be hearing a lot of new music from him this year. If the rest is anything like “Love Bless America”—oh, baby.
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I’ve been writing about New Mexican singer/songwriters going on 15 years now, and I can tell you there’s no end of them in this place, and good ones, too, from all over the musical spectrum. In recent weeks, I’ve made the acquaintance of Lara Manzanares, whose terrific album Land Baby won Best Of at the 2018 NM Music Awards, and the soulful Isaac Aragon, who’s forthcoming single, scheduled for early 2019, is going to open up some ears. Meanwhile, two guys whose work I’ve enjoyed for a while, Gato Malo (aka Felix Peralta) and Julian Wild (aka Julian Singer-Corbin), frontman for Wild Humans, have recently released new work worthy of your ears. The two albums come at you from completely different musical points of the compass, but what they share is deep insight delivered with honest feeling.
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