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- Prestige Format Picks 🏴 4 July 2025
Prestige Format Picks 🏴 4 July 2025
Americana: weird jazz, classic hip-hop, bluegrass, Gospel, and an edit of ID4
Ryan Ruppe
July 04, 2025 • Read this in about: 7 minutes
tired of living in survival mode
so, so tired. hell of a week, it was particularly out of pocket for me personally besides all of the, you know, everything going on with everything
no you’re right, it’s a blurry picture
Chris Schlarb - Psychic Temple II
Jazz is an amazingly malleable genre. It’s uniquely American, and, like most American-born music genres, came from the mixing of different cultures and people. Jazz continues to evolve and change as it continues to be played by different artists with different backgrounds and traditions.
Chris Schlarb’s Psychic Temple project is a jazz project. It arose from a desire to get different musicians in a room and see what comes out. The first album was bordered on free jazz and ambient music, and the subsequent albums shifted focus as Schlarb grew as a songwriter and as a collaborator. The Psychic Temple project is one of my favorite “artists”. I might own it all on vinyl.
Psychic Temple II is a perfectly weird transitional record for Chris Schlarb/Psychic Temple. It’s the last Psychic Temple album not credited as a band, but as a solo artist. And, it’s a collection of smooth, jazzy songs, a handful of covers (Zappa!), some incredible collaborators. The instrumentation prominently features a violin (from Philip Glenn) alongside a killer horn section. There’s an absolutely devastating cover of The Beach Boys’ Til I Die, featuring a bunch of great people including Sufjan Stevens. Then, towards the end of side 2, there’s this a ten-minute jazz-drone odyssey (NO TSURAI) that calls back to the first Psychic Temple album, while borrowing the sonic textures of the nine tracks the precede it on this album. Sometimes I just want to live inside the bubble of calm this track creates.
Rap music is an unquestionably American invention, and Public Enemy have been a part of rap music since very close to the beginning. They’re among the ones who first started to talk about racism and politics in their music and they still have a lot to say. This album is delightfully old school, and though their voices have aged a bit, Chuck D and Flavor Flav have not lost their bite.
Chris Thile & Michael Daves - Sleep with One Eye Open
Mandolin player Chris Thile (from Nickel Creek, among other things) partnered with bluegrass guitarist Michael Daves for this album, and recorded this album at Jack White’s Third Man Studios in Nashville. It’s a pretty stripped down and really showcases these two virtuosos playing all over these bluegrass classics. Some great Americana that’s also in a genre that only exists because of the tradeoff of musical cultures from places like Africa and Ireland.
I actually have this on CD but could not find it
The Word
I first hit play on this album, after the music director at KCPR handed it to me for our Christian music radio show in 2002, I thought it sounded like boring, vaguely inoffensive jazzy rock played as the bed music for some business presentation or dinner event. But Robert Randolph’s steel guitar kept jumping out of pocket and getting so much closer to shredding than I would expect from some Gospel instrumentals. Then I hit track 2, and was convinced that someone was singing (on an album I’d read was instrumental) until I realized, oh, this is that steel guitar again. While there are certainly some jam-band tendencies on here (it’s John Medeski from Medeski Martin Wood and the North Mississippi All-Stars as the backing band to Randolph’s undeniable lead), the Gospel soul shines through. Yeah there are just some jammy Gospel tunes, but something about it makes me feel good and helps restore my hope for the future.
it’s the Fourth of July
hell yeah
My main tradition, besides the Lake Forest Fourth of July Parade, is watching the 1996 alien-invasion blockbuster Independence Day. The original is great and one of my favorites, but the Racer Trash version truly is mind-blowing. If you’re considering watching ID4 today and you feel like you’ve seen it a zillion times, watch ID4.MP4 instead. Here’s a couple of tracks from that film edit that would absolutely end up on a July 4 playlist, if I was making one today (I’m not but I did consider it).
I made this
This was part of my entry into last week’s Disquiet Junto assignment. You can listen to the whole track here:
this is an ad:
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