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...

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....

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: fou...

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. T...

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 mostl...

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 Januar...

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 collaborat...

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 Frankli...

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...

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...

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 pr...

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 T...

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 mi...

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 recogni...

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...

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 albu...

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  Fr...

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 pre...

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...

Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Graham St John , a cultural anthropologist and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield in the UK. Graham has spent decades studying transformational events, psychedelic culture, and electronic dance music scenes. He's written ten books, and his latest is Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna , published by MIT Pre...

Today, we’re putting The Tonearm’s needle on guitarist Nels Cline . Most people know Nels Cline as Wilco 's guitarist for the past two decades. But his range goes far beyond indie rock. He's spent forty-plus years moving between jazz clubs, punk venues, and studios where the rules get bent or thrown out entirely. Rolling Stone put him on their list of the top 100 guitarists of all time, but that t...

Today, we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on pianist Marcus Roberts . Roberts plays jazz piano like he's lived through its entire history. His style pulls from Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Waller as much as it does from bebop. He spent years in Wynton Marsalis's band, has performed piano concertos with Seiji Ozawa, and today leads The Modern Jazz Generation, a 12-piece ensemble encompassing three d...

Show Notes Ned Rothenberg just released his first solo album in thirteen years, Looms & Legends , and it shows why he's been called America's most intimate composer and improviser. Ned’s improvisations and compositions display his use of extended techniques like circular breathing and multiphonics, while others tell stories through melody. He calls it music for an imaginary culture - sounds th...

Today, we're putting  The Tonearm 's needle on saxophonist and composer  Miguel Zenón . A MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim recipient, and Grammy winner, Miguel has spent over two decades creating music that connects jazz tradition with Puerto Rican rhythms and modern composition. He's here to talk about his latest release,  Vanguardia Subterránea  - his quartet's first live album,...

Today we're putting  The Tonearm 's needle on bassist and composer  Linda May Han Oh . Linda's a Grammy winner who's recorded with Pat Metheny, Kenny Barron, and Joe Lovano. She was even the model for the bassist character in Pixar's 'Soul.' But it's her own work that brings us together. Her latest album,  Strange Heaven , explores why we choose familiar hells over strange heavens—w...