Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt – “Some Tennesse Jar”

Both the names on this one have been busy since their last outing, which was only in 2018, but seems like forever at this pint. Its good to hear them back in company again and finding new crevices of sound to burrow into. There’s immediately a looser feel to “Some Tennessee Jar” than when these two last met in the recorded groove. Brace Up! was brittle and blunt — not to say it wasn’t nuanced — but it was a wrecking ball of an album that hit from all sides. Here Orcutt and Corsano are picking at a dizzying blues of sorts. Blues in the sense that Mingus used to pick them apart and put them back together into complex patterns that still beat with the same heart of the lone back porch picker looking to tangle emotions through the steel strings. There’s not a stomp of groove on the track — Corsano has never been so direct — but the circular nature of the song swims through a delta of some sort, swelling itself with ghosts of Sharrock thrown into the stark Mapplethorpe relief of Verlaine’s iced riffs. The record arrives on Bill’s label Palilalia on March 26th and from this early taste, it feels like an essential one.