New Jersey’s multifaceted world of underground music features a healthy amount of experimental jazz, mutating into various new and unique directions. In the same land that spawned Wayne Shorter, Sarah Vaughan and the famed Van Gelder studios, there seems to be an endless amount of artists pushing the boundaries on the genre today, from the hallucinatory prog-funk fusion of New Brunswick’s Guesstimate and Asbury Park’s We Used to Cut the Grass, to the improvisatory adventurousness of Paterson’s Thieves in Paris. Yet one name that always seems to appear while discussing the current state of Jersey jazz, and that is Mike Noordzy. From projects like El Noordzo, Mothguts and the Mike Noordzy Quintet, the Middlesex County-dwelling multi-instrumentalist never ceases to wow and amaze with his genre-defying sounds and unorthodox approaches.
One of my favorite of his many albums was the shadowy avant-jazz soundscape that is Shark Funeral Songbook, released under his Noordzo moniker back in 2017. Nearly ten years later, he’s released a follow up, Shark Funeral Songbook Vol. 2, and it defied the odds and outshines the original.
The album squirms and throbs with murky life, as it swings from percussion and string-based tracks that echo the works of Moondog, to surreal noir drifts and cataclysmic jazz-metal sludge and beyond. The album is a deep and varied collage of all kinds of styles and flavors, often blending and clashing together within a single track. The end result may offer hints of the likes of Tom Waits, Peter Brötzmann and, in the case of the harder tracks, Noordzy’s own Mothguts project, yet there is really no other album quite like this one. Between the collision of disparate genres, greasy textures, gritty atmospherics and unhinged rhythms all bleeding together within a very musique concrète-styled mix, this is a truly one-of-a-kind musical experience.
The more you listen to this spooky record, the more you get pulled into its vastly immersive sonic world, and the more you feel like you’re getting a glimpse into the busy mind of a multifaceted artist who can channel their creativity into a thousand different directions at a moment’s notice. Boundless, unpredicatble and endlessly entertaining, Shark Funeral Songbook vol. 2 is a must have for fans of Sonny Sharrock, Colin Stetson and Moor Mother. Click here to get your copy today for Bandcamp Friday!
-KH
