“Hey baby, I hear the blues a-calling, tossed salads and scrambled eggs”. Jazz – love it or hate it, it just won’t go away. I dedicated much of my early 20s to it and found it to be a great form of contraception. Turning up at parties with CD-R’s of newly unearthed bootlegs of skronking horror and referring to musicians by the mononymic “Duke, Diz and Monk” didn’t do me any favours.
But I still consider it to be amongst the most rapturous, sophisticated and democratic forms of expression that we have. From the celestial doo wop of the Mills Brothers to the levitational prayers of Albert Ayler, this is a music that engages the lips, hips and hippocampus. Jarrett Gilgore and Anthony Pirog’s new album is a fine tributary to this great river of human achievement.
Gilgore (saxophone) and Pirog (guitar) cut their teeth on the experimental music scene of Washington, D.C – painting the White House red with their fiery improvisations. For Between The Earth and Where, they’ve stripped away the blood and thunder to create a work that’s compelling in its subtle warmth and discreet lyricism. Or as Pirog describes it, “a musical hug… a reflection of our relationship”.
Opening track Soft Eyes certainly embodies that ethos. Pirog’s guitar forms finely latticed patterns for Gilgore’s sensuous blowing, as dreamy saxophone flutters and spirals at the edge of consciousness. The delicate tremolo on Pirog’s guitar lends a romance to For Now, which is reminiscent of Dirty 3’s Ocean Songs with its periods of drift before suddenly ascending with poignant, star-crossed lead lines.
On Life Lines the pair act like sculptors of negative space – allowing the things unsaid to give shape to the conversation. While Aster is a dream-vision of softly swelling feedback, incubating us in a warm, enveloping synth-bath like William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops trimmed down from four hours to a tidy minute. Lead single, Golden Hour, is a giddy mix of arpeggiated organ, rhythmic guitar and droney sax in a tunnelling fantasia like the wedding band performing the first dance between Brian Eno and Steve Reich.
I’m name-dropping a lot of heavy hitters here, but ultimately Gilgore and Pirog are at their best when they sound like themselves – two empathetic and exploratory young men playing a delicate, nocturnal blues. Their combination of emotional candour and musical mastery feels precious at a time when nuance and eloquence are under direct attack from the highest offices of their native city. Meet them instead in the utopia that they’ve created between the earth and where.
Between The Earth and Where (September 18th, 2026) Unheard of Hope