The Tonearm

This week we’re putting The Tonearm's needle on trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Steven Bernstein.

Amongst his many activities, Steven leads Sexmob and the Millennial Territory Orchestra and serves as Laurie Anderson's musical director.

He's out now with an entwined set of albums. ResoNation Trio pares him down to valve trumpet, bass, and drums with Scott Colley and Nasheet Waits. Ultra Resonance is producer Scotty Hard's ...

This week, we’re putting The Tonearm's needle on saxophonist and composer Alden Hellmuth. Alden grew up in Hartford, studying in the Jackie McLean tradition, and now works out of New York City.

Her new album is called Tether, and it features a band centered on two bass players, rounded out by drums, piano, and trumpet. Alden wrote music for the ensemble that keeps them all tied together, no matter how loud or free it gets.

We t...

This week, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas.

Douglas’s latest album, Transcend, came out in April. It's the second record from GIFTS, his band with Rafiq Bhatia, James Brandon Lewis, Tomeka Reid, and Ian Chang. His last several records were openly political. This one turns toward the sacred, though we explore where that either/or framing falls short.

We also talk about painter and sculpt...

Today, we’re putting The Tonearm’s needle on singer and songwriter Ora Cogan.

Ora Cogan’s music pulls from folk, country, psychedelia, and gothic rock. She holds all of it without flinching, as heard on the fantastic album Hard Hearted Woman, her latest release on Sacred Bones.

Ora has worked as a photojournalist and human rights advocate, and those experiences feed directly into how she thinks about art, resistance...

Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Billy Polo, in-house audio and mastering engineer, at iconic Jamaican music label VP Records. Billy has spent years restoring and remastering some of the most important recordings in reggae and dancehall history. Works from Peter Tosh, Dennis Brown, King Jammy, Sly and Robbie, and dozens more. Billy works with the original analog tapes, often in rough shape, and brings them back for toda...

Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Stephen Emmer, a Dutch composer and musician based in Amsterdam. Stephen came up in the late 70s post-punk underground, and his band Minny Pops was the first international act signed to Factory Records. He is a curious genre-explorer who has worked with Lou Reed, Chaka Khan, Tony Visconti, Trevor Horn, Flood, and many others.

His latest album, Asymmetrical Dot, is a chamber work rooted in...

Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on George Grella, one of the sharpest music critics working today.

George is the music editor of The Brooklyn Rail and has written for The Wire, the New York Times, and, luckily for us, The Tonearm.

George just published Minimalist Music, part of Bloomsbury's 33⅓ Genre series. His central argument is that minimalism isn't defined by sparse materials or specific harmonies; it's defined by how ...

Today we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Meredith Bates, a JUNO Award-winning violinist and composer based on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia.

Meredith’s recent double album, The Observer Effect, spans roughly 140 minutes of electroacoustic music built from violin, viola, field recordings, and electronics, composed and recorded live in the studio, with very few edits. It's grounded in the physics principle that observa...

Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Toronto drummer and composer Nick Fraser.

Nick Fraser is one of the most distinctive voices in Canadian improvised music. He has played with Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, and William Parker, and has led projects that range from raw free jazz to something much harder to name.

His latest record, Areas, just dropped on Elastic Recordings. It's a trio date with saxophonist Tony Malaby and ...

Today, The Tonearm’s needle lands on composer and avid birdwatcher Maria Schneider.

Few composers working today have Maria Schneider's range. She holds seven Grammy Awards, was named an NEA Jazz Master, and this year took home the Rolf Schock Prize in Musical Arts, one of the most prestigious honors in the field.

Maria Schneider joins the podcast to talk about American Crow, her recent EP that uses jazz to make a case for somet...

Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Caroline Davis, a saxophonist and composer based in New York.

Her new album, Fallows, just came out on Ropeadope Records. Caroline made it alone during a residency in Ucross, Wyoming - improvising and recording in a cabin, using prepared saxophone techniques and a unique little instrument called an Organelle to process and build sounds she'd never put to tape before. The result is twelve ...

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_un...

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 ...

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 record...

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 r...