In 2019, Dave Harrington, lifelong New Yorker and stalwart of the city’s avant-garde jazz and improv scene, moved to Los Angeles with his partner. But before he left, the guitarist gathered some of the city’s best players, both contemporaries like bassist Spencer Zahn and longtime heroes like Steven Bernstein, and made one last New York record. Fittingly, Skull Dream is an album of patient, wistful explorations that seem unable to keep from casting their eyes California’s way, even as they celebrate a lifetime of rich musical relationships. The album is at times funereal and at times shot through with optimism; its generosity of spirit shines so brightly, its desire to be in two places at once so palpable that it blots out all boundaries—between places, between jazz and noise and Americana, but also between the songs themselves. If that means it gets a little same-y, well, so does a cross-country move.
Harrington first came to prominence in Darkside, his collaboration with electronic producer Nicolás Jaar, where the hard slink of his stippling phrases—part soukous, part erotic murmur—dug creases in the otherwise placid surface of Jaar’s productions. Listening to his playing on their instant-classic 2013 album Psychic sometimes feels like watching someone run their tongue over black velvet. A regular at eclectic Lower East Side club Nublu, he quickly installed himself at L.A.’s ETA after the move, becoming a regular player in the surging local jazz scene. He also joined up with Real Estate’s Alex Bleeker and Vampire Weekend’s Chris Tomson, as well as keyboardist Zach Tenorio-Miller, to form the instantly beloved jam band Taper’s Choice, turning their mostly straightforward choogle inside out with effects-heavy leads that sometimes sound like they’re beamed in via choppy satellite.
On Skull Dream, Harrington’s guitar tone is a little hoarse and a little spacey, and he often uses it to tangle notes into tumbleweeds, sounding like the 1980s version of Jerry Garcia trying his hand at some Duane Eddy and Link Wray. His last major release, 2019’s Pure Imagination, No Country, was credited to the Dave Harrington Group, and while Skull Dream’s solo billing might suggest a showcase for the guitarist’s grandest riffs and flashiest licks, he brings the same cooperation and composure to these songs as to his other projects, a collaborator in his own music.
In opener “Dust String Peaks,” Harrington laces his patient lead through a sighing choir of saxophones and clarinets. It’s the kind of plaintive and plainly beautiful melodic line that sometimes made the Band sound like they were imagining their own funerals. The guitar and horns stroll over the patient strike of the drums with so much dignity, it feels valedictory, like the ensemble wants to sum up decades of accrued wisdom while it still has the time. Harrington occasionally allows himself a showy moment, as when the juicy horns of “Acid Western” give way to a guitar that sounds like a soprano sax, then an overdriven harmonica, and finally a wordless vocalist. But his instrument is largely beside the point, just one ray among many in the shifting light that shines and fades in what one track dubs a “Box of Sun.”
Skull Dream’s songs have a similar relationship to the album as a whole. As with any prolonged goodbye, everything here is colored by a bittersweet vibe. Even the skronkiest tunes—like “Vistavision,” where the heat shimmers of guitar and battering horns jam the knotted percussion down into a grainy mash—seem to be playing out under a long shadow. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: Consider the power of your best friend’s going-away party. Harrington has said that his priorities when mixing the album were to keep melody as prominent as possible, avoid needless obfuscation, and above all focus on allowing himself to pursue the sounds he likes, rather than something that might sound “right.” That freedom is key to Skull Dream’s thematic consistency, and to the largeness of its heart. But allowing those amber lights to shine so brightly without changing the colors flattens some of the ensemble’s dynamism over time and nearly edges the album into melodrama.
The trade-off, though, is that Skull Dream is intimate and emotionally present in a way that this kind of music frequently is not; you can sense the affection coming off each of the players. In the same way that grainy clips of future Olympians carry a strange affective charge when juxtaposed with their present selves on the podium, Skull Dream is an encounter with both the romance and the tragedy of time—a portrait of how we got here, and a promise that there’s no going back.
