Like most interesting places, Los Angeles lives in contradiction of itself. The things that make it seem superficial also make it seem happy and industrious, a place where people are always freewheeling from one rad thing to the next. Los Angeles challenges you to take it seriously and wonders—in wounded earnestness—why you can't. It is one of the least believable places I've ever been and a place I consequently never want to leave.
Flutes, Echoes, It's All Happening!, by Carlos Niño & Friends, is a very Los Angeles album. Niño is a hub of the city's musical subculture, one of those people whose primary contribution seems to be his ability to connect other people. Over the past 20 years, he has hosted three radio shows and worked on over 50 albums, charting an invisible continent where hippy jazz meets new age music and underground hip-hop meets airy, Laurel Canyon-style folk. (Lately his shows have been focused on the perennially great Dublab.) Along with the vocalist Dwight Trible, he leads a big band called Build an Ark, whose loose, ever-shifting roster of players—inspired by groups like the Sun Ra Arkestra—turns the model of the 1930s jazz orchestra into a metaphor for equality and collectivity. He has helped arrange the music of J Dilla for chamber orchestra and participated in an album-length tribute to tea. Though many of the projects he's worked on credit him as an artist, I'm still not sure what he plays. At the time of writing, he is 39.
Flutes is the fourth of Niño's "and friends" series. Pieced together using fragments and sketches Niño had worked on over the past few years, it's a loose, comfortable and often deliberately comforting experience, the kind of music that makes room for the listener rather than reaching out to be heard. As with Niño's other archive-related releases, the range is wide but the journey is easy. “Metamaravilla," with its bird sounds and untamed cascades of violin, follows a line from the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel through to the postwar exotica of Les Baxter, music designed to transform familiar rooms into wilds of which the listener had only dreamed. "Alice's Chord" is presumably a reference to the pianist, harpist and composer Alice Coltrane, whose loose rhapsodies turned jazz into a metaphor for inner space. (Her husband, John, hovers over the Kamasi Washington–featuring “Joyous Gratitude," as does his collaborator Pharoah Sanders). You can see why guys like Madlib belong here, and where Niño's interest in hip-hop stems from in general: Not as a party-ready extension of funk and disco, but as music that uses groove and repetition as a way to leverage meditative states.
Like any good curator, Niño is proposing an alternative history, one where the sound of a style isn't as important as the spirit behind it, where black and white have more in common than they might otherwise realize, where you can hear the new-age pioneer Iasos digress about the benefits of hanging out near waterfalls alongside a little free jazz. (Negative ions. It's negative ions.) In that sense, the diversity of Flutes often ends up being more interesting than the material itself. I like it best when I listen to it less as music than as a blueprint to how music might be made, a map of Niño's place in the universe. “I don't feel like I'm a citizen of the United States," he told the L.A. Weekly in 2009. “But I do relate to California." California seems to relate back.
