Welcome to the New York Times Popcast, your Tootsie role of music news and criticism I am your host, John

Karen Monica. You are zoning out, you are vibing out to movement 6, a very tiny part of a very long

song. Movement 6, this is on promises, which is the collaborative album of pharaoh sanders and

floating points. This is a big critical darling record of 2021. Today on Popcast, it's the last year

and even though we're already in January, it's the last year in wrap up, it's the jazz cast. We're

going to talk about everything that went down in jazz last year from the intimate to the astral

and everything in between with us, Giovanni Rusanello, who writes about jazz in the New York Times. Hello,

Gio, welcome, hi. Hey John, how you doing, man? Good, happy you're here and Marcus J. Moore is

here who also writes about jazz for the New York Times. Hello, man, what's good? What's going on?

Happy to have you guys here. We have a lot of ground to cover, but we're going to start here. It's

Gio's number one album of 2021. It's kind of a consensus record, although a mark is not 100% sure

if you write for it as hard, but I'd love to hear for those folks who have not heard this record.

Gio, can you talk us through what the conceit of it is? It feels like you're kind of came out of

nowhere. It kind of landed a little bit out of nowhere. Can you tell us how it arrived into the scene?

This album, you're right, was a total critics darling and it did arrive with something of a concerted

kind of marketing effort. And so for that reason, I sort of sat down and as it was end of your time,

I was thinking to myself, though, am I really going to single this one out? Is this really going

to be the number one? And ultimately, it just came together and it just continuously resonated

on every listen and it was captivating. And the way that it really came together was that actually

sort of a indie label guy, Eric Wiles-Nistrom, I think with the walk-about actually got the

opportunity to introduce Ferro Sanders, this going on 80 jazz legends saxophone player to the music

of floating points, which is Sam Shepard, this brilliant young musician in Britain, whose stuff is

...