The Tonearm

Today, we’re putting The Tonearm's needle on composer and chief conductor of the Danish Radio Big Band, Miho Hazama.

Miho grew up inside the Yamaha music education system in her native Japan. She moved to New York to study jazz composition at the Manhattan School of Music under Jim McNeely and has spent her career as one of the most distinctive voices in large-ensemble writing. Her work includes her own chamber jazz group m_unit, co...

Today, The Tonearm’s needle drops on cellist and composer Tomeka Reid.

Tomeka Reid has spent the last decade building one of the most distinctive voices in creative music. The New York Times called her a "New Jazz Power Source." She's a MacArthur Fellow, a founder of the Chicago Jazz String Summit, and a key collaborator with Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, and Craig Taborn, among many others.

Her quartet with guitarist Mary Halvor...

Today we put The Tonearm's needle on Ben Wendel.

Ben is a Grammy-nominated saxophonist, composer, and co-founder of Kneebody, with a discography that covers post-bop, chamber jazz, and electronic music. He's worked with Bill Frisell, Tigran Hamasyan, Terence Blanchard, and yes, Prince.

His new album BaRcoDe just dropped on Edition Records. It's built around a concept that's hard to pull off: four of the most in-demand vibraphonists w...

Today, we’re putting The Tonearm's needle on Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore.

Julianna is a composer, vocalist, and producer whose music is built almost entirely from layered, looped human voices. Mary is a harpist who has spent years pushing that instrument into a vast, exploratory realm.

In January 2025, the two flew to Paris just days after the LA wildfires tore through their community. There, they spent nine days recording wi...

Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on the Montreal jazz collective Bellbird.

Bellbird formed during pandemic park jams and has since become one of the more compelling voices in Canada's avant-garde jazz scene. The quartet consists of Claire Devlin on tenor sax, Allison Burik on alto sax and bass clarinet, Eli Davidovici on bass, and Mili Hong on drums. No guitar, no piano, just three mostly single-note instruments and a drum ...

Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on guitarist and composer Sam Wenc.

Wenc is a Philadelphia-based artist who has spent nearly a decade building one of the more distinctive bodies of work in American experimental music, mostly under the name Post Moves.

Now he's released his first album under his own name. It's called Language at an Angle, and it came out on Lobby Art Editions in January. The record grew out of a year of live...

Today we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Zeena Parkins, composer, improviser, and one of the most singular forces in experimental music.

Zeena has spent four decades dismantling what the harp can do: through electronics, object preparations, and a series of custom electric instruments she built herself, she's turned a concert hall fixture into something alive and unpredictable.

Her collaborators range from Björk to John Zorn to Pa...

Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Michael Graves, a five-time Grammy-winning mastering engineer and the founder of Osiris Studio in Los Angeles.

Michael's work is restoration as archaeology—pulling performances off deteriorating tapes, damaged acetates, and obsolete formats, then deciding how much intervention is too much. He's done this for recordings by Hank Williams, Aretha Franklin, Stax songwriters, and field recordi...

Today we’re putting The Tonearm's needle on musician and composer Erik Hall.

Based in Michigan, Erik Hall has spent the last five years doing something that sounds simple but definitely is not: recording landmark works of contemporary classical music entirely on his own.

Erik’s 2020 solo reconstruction of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians won the Libera Award for Best Classical Record. Reich wrote to tell him he'd reinvented the p...

Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Toronto saxophonist Patrick Smith.

Patrick has become a key player in the city's creative music scene. His new album, Words Underlined, came out in December on Lit Soc Records. It's the first release from the new label started by Sellers & Newell, a Toronto bookstore that moonlights as a music venue. Patrick recorded there with guitarist Dan Pitt and drummer Lowell Whitty. The trio pl...

Today, we’re putting The Tonearm's needle on Stephen Vitiello.

Stephen is an electronic musician and media artist. His sound installations are in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon. He's worked with Pauline Oliveros, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Joan Jonas. By day, he teaches Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Stephen’s latest project is Trinity, a collaborative album...

Show Notes

Australian composer Lawrence English has spent over two decades treating sound as something that occupies your body, not just your ears. Putting The Tonearm's needle on Lawrence English means entering a sonic world where you're never quite sure what you're hearing or where it's coming from, and if you are a listener like our host, that will suit you just fine.

Lawrence’s recent album Trinity pairs him with Stephen...

Today we're putting The Tonearm's needle on pianist and composer Noah Franche-Nolan.

Noah's latest album, Rose-Anna, is named after his Acadian great-grandmother, a church organist from Grand Falls, New Brunswick. The Acadians are French-speaking people with deep roots in Canada's Maritime provinces. The Acadians were expelled from their land by the British in the late 1700s and many of them migrated south to Louisiana where they be...

Today we’re putting The Tonearm's needle on author and behavioral scientist Michael Hallsworth.

Michel has spent the last two decades applying behavioral science to real-world problems at the Behavioural Insights Team. He's held positions at Princeton, Columbia, Imperial College London, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael's new book, The Hypocrisy Trap, takes on something we all recognize instantly but rarely understand: why ...

We're putting The Tonearm's needle on John Mlynczak, President and CEO of the National Association of Music Merchants.

NAMM is the trade association for the music, sound, and event industries. Basically, NAMM represents the companies that make the tools your favorite music artists use to create their work.

John has spent years at Hal Leonard and PreSonus Audio, where music education meets technology. He built curricula, managed ...

Today we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Patricia Brennan, a vibraphonist and composer who grew up in Veracruz, Mexico, playing salsa with her dad while listening to Hendrix and Zeppelin with her mom. She studied classical percussion at the Curtis Institute, performed with Yo-Yo Ma and the Philadelphia Orchestra, then found her voice and career in jazz and improvisation.

Patricia’s latest album, Of The Near And Far, takes constel...

Today we're putting The Tonearm's needle on drummer Phil Haynes.

Since moving to New York from Oregon in 1983, Phil's played on scores of recordings with artists like Anthony Braxton and David Liebman. Phil has joined me once already, in March 2024, to discuss his memoir, Chasing the Masters: First Takes of a Modernist Drumming Artist.

Phil’s with me today to discuss his band Free Country, which takes American roots mu...

Today we're putting The Tonearm's needle on violinist and composer Bryan Senti.

Bryan Senti won a BAFTA for scoring the BBC series Mood. He's composed for films since 2015 and worked with artists like Regina Spektor and Mark Ronson. But his new album La Marea tells a different story—his father's story.

La Marea takes Cuban migration and turns it into sound. His previous album, Manu, honored his Colombian...

Our recent episode featuring Wilco and creative music guitarist Nels Cline has proven to be a listener-favorite. This holiday season, we thought it might be fun to give you even more of what we know you love. So … we are excited to bring you another conversation with Nels, this one from the Wilco Will Love You Podcast.

Wilco Will Love You is hosted by two fans who cover the music and influence of the Chicago band. The podcast is co-...