Trippers & Askers

“The music of Trippers and Askers deftly evades easy comparisons. This has been true since my friend Jay Hammond named his collective of musical collaborators when living in Brooklyn in 2008, but it has never been truer than on Acorn, his new album, which contains the group’s finest recording and songwriting to date. Hammond’s melodies and playing subtly draw on folk traditions from all over the world, sounding more like synthesis than fusion. His lyrics are often in sharper focus on this record than in previous work, and are evocative of the strangeness and turbulence of these times, but full of a sense of hard-earned wonder. Unlike most folk music (at least in its strictest definition), the care and attention paid to crafting entire worlds of recorded sound feels vital to the heart of this music.

The songs of Sam Amidon, Juana Molina, Jim O’Rourke, and David Grubbs all come to my mind when listening to this album for different reasons. Like Grubbs, Hammond is as at home in academia as in performance, and this most recent album manages a balancing act between the two as gracefully as any I have heard, never labored or precious in its approach. Like Sam Amidon, Jay relishes the experience of improvising with a stylistically diverse and ever-changing cast of musicians, using the framework of traditional music as a setting for improvisation the way that standards might function as a setting in jazz. Like Juana Molina, there is a playfulness and irreverence in Hammond’s approach to sound that runs through these recordings, always present but never the focal point. And like Jim O’Rourke, there is an artfulness to this recording that calls attention to itself, not in terms of showiness or grandiosity but as a kind of examination of the record album as a medium.

The collaborations on this record tell their own stories. On album closer “Making Forests,” there is the lace-like saz playing of Bako Jaf, the Iraqi Kurdish refugee that Jay met in Rome during his partner’s anthropological work there. And the appearances from many stalwarts of the Durham, NC music scene, including the layered saxophone playing of Wye Oak’s Andy Stack on the album opener “Pulsing Place,” add to the album’s oceanic evocation of constant change. Collaborators aside, Hammond’s tenor voice figures more prominently in the mix on this album than in previous work, sardonic and sweet in equal measure. His delivery is more confident than before, and his lyrics are statelier and higher in concept. Jay’s words on Acorn contain a tapestry of worldly concerns, which he attributes partly to his reading of Octavia Butler’s prescient “Parable of the Sower” series, and partly to his experience of the world that we have all inhabited over the last handful of years. Luckily for all of us, there is as much hope in these songs as there is bemusement and darkness.” -Will Stratton, December 2020