How Chicago Label International Anthem Is Rewriting the Rules of Jazz

Ever since Scottie McNiece and David Allen co-founded International Anthem in 2014, they’ve pushed back against easy categorization and joined a proud hometown tradition in the process. The Chicago label documents a community that is greatly informed by the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the influential jazz nonprofit whose members’ relationship to genre is so uneasy, they’ve opted for terms like “jazz and its offshoots,” “jazz-identified music,” and “post-jazz” instead. “Everyone always calls us a jazz label,” McNiece says. “We’ve never exclusively been a jazz label, and we’ve always been trying to blur those lines. ‘Boundary-defying music,’ that’s maybe a better genre name for us.”

Two friends from the Midwest DIY-punk scene, McNiece and Allen remember what an epiphany it was to find their way into Chicago’s improvised music world. They aim to share that feeling with others, via adventurous yet curiously accessible releases by locally rooted artists like Makaya McCraven, jaimie branch, Damon Locks, Junius Paul, and Angel Bat Dawid. “Jazz can so often spiral into this scholarly debate,” McNiece says. “It was very important to us to create a more inviting entry point.”

The label’s radicalism—again recalling AACM—extends to the fiercely political, whether that means releasing an album celebrating Juneteenth or working with a collective that formed at an anti-police-brutality demonstration. At the same time, the founders acknowledge the potentially tokenizing nature of releasing protest songs by artists of color as a label owned by white men. “We don’t really know what the answer is,” McNiece says, “other than we’re trying to stay checked in with the artists to make sure that the work that we’re doing feels positive for them, and it’s making them feel fulfilled.”

The label recently gained a more formal studio space, in a warehouse on Chicago’s South Side, and remains committed to its homegrown network of musicians. “We get to make second albums with artists now,” Allen enthuses (next up: Jeff Parker’s Suite for Max Brown). International Anthem also recently kicked off a distribution partnership with Nonesuch Records, combining major-label muscle with a like-minded resistance to genre conventions. This year is shaping up to be the label’s busiest yet. “Part of the idea behind being prolific right now is that 2020 is an important year for culture,” McNiece says. “There’s going to be a lot of energy and emotions and people trying to topple over the fucking fascists running our country. We want to be putting out music that’s fueling the fire.”

Here are seven tracks that show how International Anthem conjured up the sound of a future without borders.

The Debut: Rob Mazurek’s “Waxing Crescent #2” (2014)

In December 2012, almost two years before International Anthem’s launch, cornetist Rob Mazurek played a residency booked by McNiece in the basement of a downtown Chicago bar. McNiece invited his old pal Allen, an audio engineer then living in southern Illinois, to record Mazurek’s set. With sparse accompaniment on bass and drums, the resulting album, Alternate Moon Cycles, consists of two side-long tracks that set lonesome peals of horn over oceanic ambient drone. “That’s the perfect tone-setter for the label,” McNiece says. “It’s like a Rothko painting, where it’s nothing and everything at the same time.”

The Early Breakthrough: Makaya McCraven’s “The Jaunt” (2015)

In 2013 and 2014, McNiece booked the Chicago drummer, producer, and bandleader Makaya McCraven for an extended residency at another small Chicago venue, the Bedford. McCraven sculpted the ensuing 48 hours of live recordings into In the Moment, which exists in a liminal space between dusty hip-hop loops and free-jazz spontaneity. Standout track “The Jaunt” doesn’t so much jaunt as lope and simmer, occasionally bursting into improvisatory flickers. The widespread favorable response to In the Moment, Allen says, “changed our whole perspective about what’s possible”—and made McCraven a star outside of Chicago. He’ll return next month with We’re New Again, a reimagining of Gil Scott-Heron’s 2010 album I’m New Here, via XL.

The West Coast Postcard: Jeff Parker’s “Cliche” (2016)

Tortoise multi-instrumentalist Jeff Parker was a longtime staple of Chicago experimental music, but he relocated to Los Angeles around the time he played guitar on In the Moment. Fittingly, Parker’s International Anthem debut as lead artist, 2016’s The New Breed, builds out a decade’s worth of beat sketches into a R&B-jazz set with a slight California tint. “Cliche,” featuring a suave lead vocal from his daughter Ruby Parker, is so wonderfully breezy, you may want to head west yourself. “That was probably our ‘commercially successful’ record,” McNiece says. Parker and his ensemble will follow it up with Suite for Max Brown, out January 24.

The Label Founders’ Favorite: jaimie branch, “the storm” (2017)

McNiece and Allen are reluctant to play favorites with any particular release, but they both agree that New York-via-Chicago trumpeter Jaimie Branch’s Fly or Die stands out, in part, because of its backstory. After Branch helped put together a New York show for an International Anthem artist, the label founders were so impressed that they asked Branch if she would make an album with them. Fly or Die takes some big risks, shifting from relatively conventional Latin jazz to free jazz and ambient noise. “The Storm,” with label mainstay Ben LaMar Gay on cornet, is a vivid glimpse into the maelstrom, all churning cello and rumbling drums. In October 2019, Branch returned with FLY or DIE II: bird dogs of paradise, where she steps out on lead vocals for the first time.

The Latin-Rock Sleeper: Dos Santos’ “Caminante” (2018)

A release not as widely noticed but no less worthwhile was Logos by Dos Santos, a Chicago quintet whose Spanish-language songs stretch an array of Latin styles in a psychedelic rock direction. Check out the strutting keyboard intro to “Caminante,” another International Anthem track that boasts a cameo from Ben LaMar Gay. Logos may have slipped through the cracks for label fans expecting jazz, but as Allen notes, “it’s coming from a similar spirit as everything [they] do.”

The Lo-Fi Cosmic Prayer: Angel Bat Dawid’s “We Are Starzz” (2019)

International Anthem leveled up in 2019 like never before. Along with Branch’s FLY or DIE II, there was the righteous psych-soul of Damon Locks and Black Monument Ensemble’s Where Future Unfolds, the cerebral soul-jazz of the self-titled album by the Resavoir collective, and the all-around impressive versatility of Junius Paul’s Ism. But the label’s most singular release last year was easily The Oracle, the debut from composer/clarinetist Angel Elmore, the Black Monument Ensemble member who performs as Angel Bat Dawid.

The Oracle was recorded mainly on Elmore’s cell phone and released five years after she cashed out her 401(k) at age 34 to pursue her musical dreams. One song on the album, “What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black,” layers gospel-tinged harmonies for a gut-wrenching meditation on generations of injustice. “We Are Starzz” is similarly prayerful and built around layered vocals, but it offers an overwhelming flash of hope. “I believe in the power of sound, and I really do believe that if I put this intention out sonically, it really will change stuff,” Elmore said.

The Most Recent Release: Irreversible Entanglements’ “Homeless/Global” (2019)

In 2017, International Anthem and New Jersey punk label Don Giovanni jointly released the self-titled debut album by Irreversible Entanglements, a free-jazz outfit underpinned by MC/poet Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother. Ayewa’s husky declamations are as cutting and visceral as the splashy drums, limber bass, and ear-catching horns are loose and exploratory. In advance of a follow-up due out this spring, Irreversible Entanglements recently shared this 23-minute outtake as a standalone single. Against a simmering backdrop, Ayewa holds forth rivetingly on border violence and forgotten black history. “When you listen to what Camae is saying,” McNiece says, “it speaks for itself.”

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork