The new album from Carlos Niño & Friends, “(I’m just) Chillin’, on Fire,” is a monumental work—it’s a big album with big sounds, and it’s got a ton of incredibly talented folks playing on it. This album has so much: so much richness of sound, so many zigs and zags, so many excursions into different genres of music that sit together here in surprising ways. There’s jazz, and examinations of different types of jazz; post-rock, both the rockier kind (like Explosions in the Sky, for instance) and the more avant-garde kind (noisier or more drawn-out crashing moments on this album bring to mind Black Dice’s “Beaches and Canyons” or “Miles of Smiles”); a kind of rough-hewn new age jam music; and something like experimental collage. This is the kind of album you can get lost in.
A few highlights for me: “Venice 100720, Hands in Soil,” which leads off the album, shimmers and pulses in its initial phases, chimes erupting. Josh Johnson (who’s played on so many good albums, including Jeff Parker’s massive “Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy”) and his sax are a big feature on this track, which rolls and tumbles in a way that feels like it could fall apart or go off-road, but never does. “Flutestargate” has a pretty drone at the start, with punctuating cymbal crashes and percussive rattles. This one has such a nice programmed beat, big and easy to hold onto. It’s such a pleasant groove, you just want to spend time with it. “Etheric Windsurfing, flips and twirls” is a perfect representation of this album: it starts quietly, chimes and percussion, some synth opening up in the background—placid, cycling—and then a propulsive beat drops in and the track shifts. But then the beat drops out and you have only the synth there momentarily, until the beat returns along with someone’s occasional yelps and hollers. You think it’s one thing and then it’s something else, and something else again.
“Boom Bap Spiritual” has incredible keyboard and piano playing by Surya Botofasina, totally gorgeous, easy to live inside this track. “One for Derf” is a huge track, great sax playing from Aaron Shaw and keys from Surya Botofasina again, this one starts with keys, washes of cymbals, sax, drums, keys. Noise and calm, alternating throughout the track, quiet and turbulence. Electric piano later on, sax lying low in the background, someone shouts “Derf” at 6:03 (the song is dedicated to Derf Reklaw), the end of the track features vocals, cymbals, something frying (?), so many other little fragments tucked in. “Essence, The Mermaids Call,” features a middle section that is mind-blowingly pretty. And “Eightspace 082222,” gotta be the best jam on the album. Kamasi Washington playing sax, Surya Botofasina and Diego Gaeta on keyboards and piano, a slow dark pulse in the background menacing every other element of the track. Lyrical sax playing from Washington. Percussion comes in more clearly at the tail end of the track, then it all dissipates into seagulls and waves. Amazing.