Chip Wickham Transports Listeners Into ‘The Eternal Now’; 9:30 Club Employees Push to Unionize and More

Discologist

Nov 4

This week on Discologist, guest-host Philip Basnight (Broke Royals / DC Rock History Podcast) and Kevin are catching a vibe with Chip Wickham’s The Eternal Now, 9:30 Club employees (finally) push to unionize, and more.

Featured Album

The Eternal Now
Chip Wickham

Chip Wickham may be a late bloomer in terms of a solo career — he didn’t release his first album under his own name until 2017 at the age of 42 — but a lifetime of making music with groups like The New Mastersounds and Nightmares On Wax has ensured that the vibes he’s putting down are consistently immaculate.

The Eternal Now continues in that tradition, expanding the saxophonist-flutist’s palate into the realm of spiritual jazz (the track “Lost Souls” evokes the sublime beauty of Promises, the 2021 collaboration between Pharoah Sanders and Floating Points), library music, and other eclectic influences. The triumph of Now, though, is that over the course of its 39 minutes, it has an uncanny ability to provide exactly the vibe that the listener expects at every turn, yet it still manages to remain unpredictable in its presentation.

Is it the best dinner-party album ever made, a supremely heavy exploration of classic British jazz of the ’60s, or something in the indefinable space between? Figuring that out will keep listeners returning to The Eternal Now again and again. At least until Wickham drops his next masterpiece of chill.

— Kevin

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