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Sighing on the Inside feels the way a thought can, or a fragile mood, clattering around inside your head

Brahja Waldman – Sighing on the Inside (2016)

Lyrical, modern jazz from a New York/Montreal outfit led by sax player Devin Brahja Waldman. I love the feeling of reflection in this music – not just the thoughtfulness of the melody lines, the sense of dawning upon, but the sense of actual physical reflections, like glints off mirrors. It's in the answers of keys and the click of drumsticks, the touches of cymbals, saxophone notes that may or may not be echoes, reverberations. Sighing on the Inside feels the way a thought can, or a fragile mood, clattering around inside your head. Not the anxiety of it – just the ping and pong, glint and glance, breath building before it's released.

Recently, a successful musician friend confessed that all he wanted to listen to these days was Waldman's new record, Wisdomatic. He said it kept melting his brain. Amid all the world's turmoil, these were the things restoring his mind: kindly ruminations on Waldman's alto and Adam Kinner's tenor sax; D Shadrach Hankoff's piano playing – a little bit melancholy and a little bit apprehensive; the wry expeditions of Martin Heslop's bass; and drummer Daniel Gelinas, extending the borders, broadening the landscape, sending sorties just out of bounds. That's a lot of doing, and a lot of mixed metaphor, from a single instrumental quintet. One of the marvels of music is the way an assortment of brass, woodwind, strings and/or percussion can seem to reorder the world – whether setting it straightly right or setting it rightly scrambled.

Low – Stay (2013)


I haven't any affection for the ironical indie/acoustic cover song. In fact, I am its adversary. I will boo the troubadour who sets out to "redeem" Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe or Rae Sremmurd's Black Beatles. If you are paying tribute to a song, pay full-voiced tribute. If you are transfiguring a song, leave the old one behind – we don't need to see its reflection in your eyes.

In 2013, the Duluth, Minn., band Low – who play a tense, cantorial genre known as "slowcore" – covered Stay, first released by the pop star Rihanna. I've never been able to work out whether their version is more tribute or transfiguration. Whereas the original is a loveless duet, here it is a discourse between Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, married since 1995. Still, the Minnesotans' delivery isn't particularly different, and the instrumentation is mostly unchanged – it's the same ringing piano chords, part promise and part goodbye. Yet the weight of Low's version seems of a different order than that of the original. Perhaps it's a matter of conviction, or of delivery; perhaps it's my bias; perhaps it's a trick of tempo, or that single cymbal roll. But to me, if Rihanna's Stay is a piece of coal, Low's is a furnace full of them. When you're in hard times, keep it lit.

Sean Michaels received the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Us Conductors. He is the editor of the music blog Said the Gramophone.