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Touzle Your Kurchy

Frank London

Label: Adhyâropa Records
Released: 2026
Duration: 00:44:00
Views: 319

Tracks

Loisaida Quickstep; Empty Pockets; My Babe; Frog in de Well; I’ll Touzle Your Kurchy; Waiting For; On the Road; Farewell to Whiskey

Personnel

Album Description

Adhyâropa Records is thrilled to announce Touzle Your Kurchy (ÂR00194), the extraordinary new album by Grammy-winning trumpeter and composer Frank London featuring the Loisaida Fife and Drum Corps, a motley assemblage of New York’s most astounding and revolutionary musical veterans. Using traditional American fife and drum music as its source material, Touzle Your Kurchy is music born in a time of strife, returning now to a nation facing new struggles. Timed to release during the 250th anniversary of American Independence, it is a joyous reminder of the disunion we’ve overcome aimed directly at those who would fracture us once again; both a balm and a bomb.

Frank London is a musician familiar with both celebrations and crucibles. The winner of the 2007 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music Album, he is the co-founder of the renowned klezmer ensemble The Klezmatics and a composer whose music straddles genres and settings imperturbably. His Yiddish-Cuban opera Hatuey Memory of Fire premiered in Havana and at Montclair’s Peak Performances. He composed the multimedia works Salomé: Woman of Valor and 1001 Voices - A Symphony for a New America. His album Spirit Stronger Than Blood was named a Top Ten Jazz Recordings of 2024 by The New York Times. He has worked with David Byrne, John Zorn, Itzhak Perlman, Pink Floyd, LL Cool J, Karen O, Mel Tormé, Lester Bowie, LaMonte Young, and They Might Be Giants, among many, many others. He was knighted Sir Frank London for his work promoting multi-cultural music in Hungary.

“I introduced this project during The Revolutionary Voices Festival in Boston, and upon researching American fife and drum music I was amazed at its richness and revolutionary spirit as well as the panorama of influences that helped to create it,” London says. “It’s not only a window into history. Played in a new way, it’s something people can listen to on its own terms. But beyond that, it's a refutation of the way ‘Americana’ has been categorized in racial terms. This music wears its genealogy on its outer layer. On one hand you have the English, Irish, and Scottish influences, and on the other you have the clear influence of African music. The Loisaida Fife & Drum Corps’ interpretations make this music and New Orleans-style collective improvisation branches of the same tree; the meeting place where European folk melodies and African polyphony become one.”

For such a crucial and heartfelt project, London called on a breathtaking cadre of collaborators. Their individual credits read like a map of American music over the past half-century, and perhaps it’s more instructive just to single out the triumvirate rhythm section: Newman Taylor Baker (washboards) played with Joe Henderson and McCoy Tyner, Kenny Wollesen (bass drum) performed with Bill Frisell, Laurie Anderson, and John Zorn, and Brian Chase (snare drum) is the drummer of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

“Choosing a cast of characters was really the essential first step in the project,” London says. “Many of them I’ve known for decades – Newman Baker and Charles Burnham (violin) I’ve known for 40 years, Kenny Wolleson for 30. Individually, they’re all extraordinary musicians, and all come with these incredible lists of accomplishments. Fife music is military music, so you would think it would subsume the individuality of the players. But our interpretations foreground the individual voices. It’s what makes the music so special and timely to me. So in a way, we’re performing military music with an anti-military aesthetic,” London says, with a glint of mischief.

The album opener and first single ‘Loisaida Quickstep’ establishes that aesthetic perfectly within a few notes. Wolleson’s bass drum, bolstered by Chase’s snare, pounds in the marching rhythm to set the stage for the sprightly dotted melody, Elijah Thomas’s agile piccolo “fife” lines adding sparkle and vigor. A brief spotlight on the drums leads directly to an improvised feature for Burnham, a veteran of the bands of Cassandra Wilson, James Blood Ulmer, and Henry Threadgill. London’s trumpet locks with the trombone of Reut Regev (R* Time, Hazmat Modine) to drive the track to its conclusion, a wild melodic restatement full of the spirit of collective improvisation, the virtuosic muscle of a Salvation Army band, and the keen humor of Preservation Hall.

The album’s second track and single ‘Empty Pockets’ makes fife and drum’s adjacence to New Orleans and the early melting pot of American music even more explicit. Chase opens the proceedings with a Second Line snare beat; unadorned, it could just as easily be used in the context of a Bo Diddly rock rhythm (also distinctively heard in ‘Not Fade Away’ by Buddy Holly and ‘Willie and the Hand Jive’ by Johnny Otis), but Thomas’ piccolo entrance places the music clearly back in the military band soundworld heavily indebted to Scottish marches. Thomas, the music director of HONK! NYC, handles the acrobatic fills so integral to the sound of fife and drum music with charm and verve throughout the album; if this album showcased a star turn for any individual member it would be Thomas’. Second Line rhythms have its origins in traditional West African dance; the way in which it blends here so seamlessly with European martial music is as clear a portrait of the ingredients of American music – and of America at its best – as can be found anywhere.

“These are musicians who make their living being themselves in different situations, and working with other musicians who do the same thing,” London says. “I’ll give you an example: right after I recorded it, I posted on Facebook a bit of ‘Frog in de Well.’ And Martin Shamoonpour, who's an Iranian exile living in the States, a genius, multidisciplinary artist-musician who I know because he worked with Klezmer clarinetist David Krakauer, wrote to me and said ‘I have an idea for this, I want to put Jew’s harp on it.’ So I said knock yourself out, and of course it’s brilliant, it’s perfect. The idea of an Iranian exile putting Jew’s harp on early American music in 2026 is just so great, such a perfect microcosm of this project.”

London, and indeed most of his collaborators on this project, has made his living being very much himself in a myriad of contexts, with the power of his music contained in the message of inclusiveness and diversity implicit in every note regardless of context or genre. Amidst the dichotomy of a nation celebrating its founding while tearing itself apart, a more timely or welcome musical message is scarcely imaginable. Touzle Your Kurchy is our history, and if we’re lucky, our future

Album uploaded by Adhyâropa Records