When Sam Amidon flew to Los Angeles late in the winter of 2024 to collaborate with Sam Gendel, he had a deceptively complex plan for their session: That is, he had no real plan at all. Amidon and Gendel had long been two members of a mutual admiration society. When Amidon first saw Gendel play at his now-fabled residency at the Hollywood Italian restaurant Pace years earlier, he was wowed by Gendel’s open-ended enthusiasm and stylistic vim, plus charmed by his invitation to sit in on violin, though he didn’t know much about making “jazz.” Gendel, too, had been an ardent fan of Amidon’s voice and flexibility since seeing him on YouTube nearly two decades ago. Gendel even joined Amidon and the great Milford Graves for the 12-minute finale of 2017’s The Following Mountain. But what, exactly, were the New England folk musician now living in England and the pedal-hopping polyglot saxophonist going to do for the better part of a week in Gendel’s Venice home, in his ad hoc dining room studio? Neither exactly knew.

Amidon offered up two ideas. First, they could simply play, pursuing whatever ideas felt good as they jammed. Or, perhaps, they could tinker with a batch of interpretations Amidon had been building, a loose set of somewhat familiar tunes—Yoko Ono’s “Ask the Elephant,” Lou Reed’s “Big Sky,” the rapturous hymn “Old Churchyard,” the standard English shanty “Golden Willow Tree.” Gendel’s eyes and imagination lit up with the latter idea, or at the chance to help Amidon in his decades-long quest to recontextualize what it means to sing a folk song or make folk music. When Amidon left Los Angeles just days later, the bulk of Salt River—his Gendel-produced debut for River Lea Recordings / Rough Trade and a radical reintroduction to the possibilities of Sam Amidon’s music—was done.

Since his earliest days of releasing records, Amidon has been interested in the idea of submission, of working closely with collaborators who could take his skills as an interpreter, singer, guitarist, and fiddler somewhere unexpected. Thomas Bartlett and Nico Muhly once helped lead him to those unknowns, as did producer and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily. His confidence as a bandleader and arranger have, of course, increased over decades on stages and in studios; his self-titled 2020 album, full of idiosyncratic and imaginative new renditions of sometimes-ancient songs, was the result of a touring unit, working as one. The submission had been subsumed. But he longed to be a beginner again, to submit to a process that was unfamiliar and even exotic with someone he knew he could trust—namely, someone like Gendel, whose understanding of how electronics might be applied to material often rendered with acoustic instruments intrigued Amidon. They invited drummer Philippe Melanson, a frequent collaborator of both, to join.

Taken together, these 10 songs feel like a shared playground of discovery, Amidon finding new ways for old songs to exist in the company of two unfettered collaborators. They imbue Reed’s “Big Sky,” for instance, with the cool aplomb of Arthur Russell. Fluorescent stretches of synthesizer and slowly shuddering electronic drums interlock with Amidon’s acoustic guitar, together holding up his voice like the sky itself. They treat the shape-note great “On My Journey Home” like an emotional seesaw, giving its story of heavenward ascent hints of both gothic dread and New Age grace. The trio’s transformation of “Old Churchyard,” a classic hymn with deep roots in England and the United States,” is stunning. Here titled “Three Five,” it uses tessellated rhythms and a half-dozen electronic layers to suggest the clouds breaking, redemption arriving as darkness yields to whatever comes after. The fun they have with the fiddle tune “Salt River” during “Tavern,” the wonder they embody during Ono’s play on perspective “Ask the Elephant,” the way they dance in unison during Grey Larsen’s coruscant “Oldenfjord”: Amidon has never seemed to delight so much in warping source material so much as he has here, surrounded by this very good company.

Salt River is credited to Amidon—a solo record, with Gendel producing and Melanson contributing assorted drums. But he’ll be the first to tell you that’s not quite right, that this is instead a group effort, made by three people who submitted not only to one another’s impulses but also to trying something new together. There in Gendel’s home, they built a little short-lived community, playing together beneath headphones until they would walk to the market together to buy ingredients for dinner that night. Amidon, after all, has always been drawn to music from communities, from groups of people sharing shape-note songs or hymns or drinking songs, groups of people sharing a moment.

You can hear that essence so well on the trio’s joyful rendition of Ornette Coleman’s “Friends and Neighbors,” dishes and glasses clinking as Amidon first finds the melody and the lick. Melanson and Gendel slowly join in, playful bells and electronics and drums slipping around the recording of their dinnertime conversation. At the end, they all sing together, chanting out Coleman’s credo—“Friends and neighbors, that’s where it’s at,” and so on—like they’re gathered around a digital campfire. It’s a beautiful snapshot from a record of astounding possibility, where past and future brush side by side in a present of friendship and exploration.

Madness

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