Well, it’s evil, but as necessary, in the historical inevitable; we have to gather together what we think is best in a cultural community, to represent, like Roman archons, and to preserve, like gewgaws in a time capsule. I have been cobbling together lists of my favorite musicians since I was 13, when Pink Floyd topped my one hundred rock bands, followed by Yes and The Who. The Beatles had broken up six years before, and even the great solo work of the members was waning. Anyway, I like to make lists, and six is a good number I have found.

Can we be objective in such an endeavor? No, of course. Even Einstein said the mass of objects is never stable; that said, some things are heavier than other, and there are six musicians in the Boston area who have made more of an impression on my mind than the others. The list may change, to be sure, and in some ways I hope it does, and expect it will, at other points of time. But here are my six favorites, today.

Kate Lee & Arkm Foam

Adam, as I call Arkm in the vocative, is the president of JP, mature beyond his years, having already organized a benchmark cultural event last summer in Woodstock, which I will never forget. He and Kate Lee are one mind, like The Beatles. And like The Beatles they are visionaries. Their human presence is so great it can eclipse their musical contributions, but check out Illusion of Porpoise, their inside/out trip band as heavy as The Holy Modal Rounders. Adam is an electronics whiz, and Kate is a singer/songwriter as touching as Carole King; but to really experience them you have to be tuned in to how much they help their friends with their musical projects. Music for them is cosmic, the lines between musicians are fictive like changing state borders; and even we as listeners are part of what they do.

Andrea Pensado

Argentina Bred, Pensado is a fiery Latina, with a puritan streak that agrees with New England. Think of baked Alaska, hot and cold. Her music is like hot and cold medicine, homeopathic, like primal scream therapy. It is intense. It took me four months to understand what she was doing when I met her a few years ago. She does in music what a cryptic writer like Jorge Luis Borges or Kafka do in fiction – and, as I have said to her, Borges is a mirror and Kafka is a hammer. She is the mirror after it has been smashed by the hammer.

Peter Negroponte

Peter has a keen, cerebral mind, which he uses in demolition and slash-and-burn artistic endeavors. Guerilla Toss, which he leads, plays the most exciting shows on the house scene, here, and, from what I’ve heard, in the underground world across the country.

Dave Gross

Dave has a soul like Coltrane’s – ever searching, no matter how much pain it brings him. His solo work is unnerving and exhilarating, sensitive and surprising. And like Coltrane, in his group projects, other musicians play above themselves, finding new inner dimensions. He performed an open composition of the late great Lou Cohen’s at the latter’s funeral, and it turned an occasion of mourning into something light and happy.

Yoko Miwa

Yoko Miwa plays beautiful music, which is loyal to tradition, but in such a way that her prodigious innovation can be missed like the forest for her trees. I follow Miwa regularly, when she plays her regular dates at Ryles, and I spent a whole spring as her exclusive listener in the late afternoon solo performances she did on Tuesdays at Les Zygomates in downtown Boston, dedicating a book of poetry to her inspired by her music. Other new pianists have started working modern pop and rock into their repertoires, but few, if any, with her passion and depth.

Forbes Graham

Forbes is dark and mysterious, and deep. Though my knowledge of Coltrane is broader, having listened to him since ’78, when I was fourteen, his is deeper. At a wedding, we speculated what Coltrane would be playing if he had lived. I mentioned Indian music, and Forbes extrapolated that into a conjecture of the master spinning new sounds from other, organized non-Western traditions. Forbes has exquisite, classical timbre, but he uses it to take music into other galaxies.

Connie Crothers – A New Jazz Language

New York pianist Connie Crothers is pedigreed, having attended Berkeley in the 1960s: though she has spent her jazz career extrapolating from unsung heroes. Her odyssey started with her study under early modern jazz piano icon Lennie Tristano, and culminated in her long-term love and creative partnership with Max Roach, who revolutionized jazz drumming—and world culture itself—beginning in the late 1940s, stretching up well into the end of last century.

Crothers is a pianist who works best in the foreground, with a dominant strain, and many fine solo efforts. Effective collaborations include Swish, with Max Roach (New Artists, 1982); Primal Elegance, with guitarist Bud Tristano (New Artists, 2001); Hippin’, with singer Alexis Parsons (New Artists, 2012); and her masterpiece, Spontaneous Suites (Rogue Art, 2011), a two-piano duet with David Arner that lasts four hours. She has a romantic, eccentric style, like she’s teasing wool, or pulling snarls out of long, curly hair. It can be as funky as Thelonious Monk, or spacier than Sun Ra. In a very real way, she has extracted a new tongue out of an ancient language, jazz, in the way the poets of Dante’s time brought Italian out of Latin.

Crothers has been a friend of mine for three years now. When I first saw her perform at The Stone in November 2010, with upright bass legend Henry Grimes, she told me that playing a good solo is like “finding a wormhole in space.” She is continuously searching, from a long sojourn in the shadows of recognition in the United States, to the love and celebration she now receives here, and all over Europe. She never stopped believing in her art, anymore than the men who inspired her – or in the men who inspired her, for in her new jazz language, the past is as palpable as the present.

Spontaneous Suites

for two pianos (Connie Crothers and David Arner)

A hard surface cracks like dry mud

the cracks become water, flowing

like music through a desiccated

valley

Now the beat is warm and strong

a singer strutting her stuff in New Orleans

riding up the river and hopping

a train to Chicago, spilling the history

of jazz into Lake Michigan

The wind is rough on the waters

the skies metallic gray

propellers are soft and fast on moving boats

the party boats with the dances

The night is soft and the clouds

are like pillows, starlight sending

seesaw symbols riding and crashing

like the ships on the water

The tone is cool and even now

with a bounce in the step then a stop

and a zombie beat down the sidewalk

as the ghostly town reflects

the funhouse miracle of the night

Now descending a staircase

into the fray of the ball

the step hard and heavy

breaking into freedom

Mad rush of people

popping down the street

Stopping and going in slow motion

Succumbing to the shock of the shady night

Gentle and soft again, trinkling

and tinkling, thin lava flowing

Modal vamps brief, and new

ornate flurries baroque and benign

flourishing like purple flowers on a bush

Tense pleasures under the sun

beach weather on the porch

the shade eases its way

into the secret heart

Cracked stained glass

shattering on the cathedral floor

low hum of the organ

leading to silence

the glass settling into the soil

shattered kingdom

washed over by the river

until the mud cakes again

in the dry bed,

and the ruins rise again

soft and gooey under the spade

viscous sounds

to salve the skin down to the soul

for another century’s children

breathing down the hole

Whitehaus, September 16

Lucy killing on vocals in sexy sequins and black she’s so romantic with the flowers on her arm and in her hair the beat funky and bluesy Heather ‘s twangs straight from Deep South Ada happy baby so cute bobbing in mommy ‘s arms bright blue eyes little hands reaching for keys best front lady I’ve seen in a long time Sydney floats like a moonwalker on the fretboard of her bass Adam so slow on drums he’s like stop and go traffic and the sound is hippy and hazy long slow afternoons fading into evening like a plane landing in Indian Jungle

Teens of July is a beautifully packaged EP with a red and white picture of a kind of angel/butterfly on the paper pullout cover. The music has that kind of charm; natural spark and splendor with a touch of fantasy pulling it through the flowery skies of its chamber of lo-fi space. Cult & Leper draw from all kinds of bright and shiny sources. 

The band has bizarre symmetry and balance to it, with nodes that threaten to break it apart, except for the spring of Jeff Balter’s zingy drums, bouncing them into new, propulsive places. 

Patrick Kuehn sings like a spaced-out teen idol from ’60s pop, and he also plays a driving, hypnotic bass. The group has great dynamics, bubbling like a spring, then bursting into anthemic grandeur.

“Brand, Chances” has a salsa/calypso feel, with Cale Israel’s keyboards ringing like steel drums. Sam Lisabeth’s guitar has the keen desperation of a man making a prisoner’s cut, and he sparkles on “Bunkbed Uncle” like kids shooting fireworks on the beach on the Fourth of July. This song bleeds with angst, with a melody that has the feel of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart Again”. “Whoa God” has a Bruce Springsteen summer circus feel, alternating it with incandescent prog guitar. It keeps gathering together its loose ends, splicing them into tighter wholes. 

The heavy twang of the bass strings gives “My Favorite Thing About Her”, the final number, a Western feel crossed with a mellow ’70s style love song. It burns, as it fades, like the tones of a Farfisa organ, drawing a last breath of summer into drum and guitar sparring, sputtering into the waves with the grace of a teenage diver off a high dive into the September sea.

Gold

I don’t want gold
I’m just sick of being
Alone, so I go out
Tonight, throw

The stone a couple
Miles up the road,
Out west to Lower
Allston, ‘cross

The t-pike, Cult & Leper
And Crank, the crazy sturgeon
With black caviar
In her soul

Rocking in a chair
Like old granddad
Sipping on a bottle of the stuff
Out on the porch of Smokey’s

Yoko Miwa is The Beatles of Boston Jazz, dark and heavy, but with a light touch which gives her effervescent appeal. Live at Scullers, her last effort, saw her in Rubber Soul mode, exploring new territories, but still with a retro feel. Her new CD, Act Naturally, like Revolver, is revolutionary.

She opens with a McCoy Tyner number, “Inner Glimpse”. She gives us an inner glimpse of her soul here, which is light and mellow, and slightly sad on the surface, like her hero Bill Evans, but seethes with magma underneath. I always love it best when she does these dark modal workouts, but here even I was challenged. She made me search my soul, just like Coltrane.

The next song, “Me Deixa Em Paz”, is a light Latin palate cleanser, before the next number, John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy”, which starts like a simple Japanese child’s tune, a single note rendition of the melody. It proceeds to strip of layer after layer of a love relationship, like she is cleaning a wound, which she finally dresses with soft gauze, and it’s as lovely in the end as if she were putting you to bed, and covering you with blankets and a duvet.

Elsewhere, she dips into standards, like Cole Porter’s “You Do Something to Me”, but the other sexy, revolutionary number is Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”.  She’s as gentle as Emmy Lou Harris here, and you can here a country lilt in her touch, just like a soft female voice.

Miwa’s drummer is Scott Goulding, who is like a gentle version of Max Roach. Her bassist is Will Slater, elastic and cool. She is so invested in the trio format it is like a contemplative devotion. Recently she did a film score, with more instrumentation, and it makes you wonder what she could do if she expanded her palette. But there is such minimalist charm in her trio, you could be happy if she just stayed there, as happy as if The Beatles stayed together

Weirdo Records, September 9

Fujii performed tonight at The Lily Pad in Cambridge, with quartet Kaze, behind their new CD, Tornado, kicking off a US tour. Kaze (“wind” in Japanese) is different from Fujii’s other projects (she has recorded about 60 albums), because there is no leader. All four musicians compose and improvise collectively. Natsuki Tamura, her husband, plays dark and plaintive trumpet, sputtering and dipping and looping, then spitting forth with grand sonorities. Peter Orins, French, is the drummer, who ekes powerful statements out of sharp, abrupt onslaughts, sometimes as simple as tapping a rim. Christian Pruvost, also French, of Madagascar origins, plays trumpet as well, with a funkier feel, very percussive – and is sometimes outright funny, as when he picked up a child’s noisemaker in the last number and made sounds like a baby bawling.

Smokey Bear’s Cave, August 31

I’ve never quite understood it, and duo partner Joe Mygan is to humble to say more than it’s a lot of fun, but LSDV (Language Sex Drugs Violence), with Pat Chaney, spits sound out on the same tape as video, onscreen into the Smokey Bear’s Cave basement wall. The two man levers at a desk like fighter pilots, and tonight’s show had a military theme, with camouflaged foot soldiers sharing space with adult film actresses. Indeed, there’s your sex and violence! Here are some notes:

Battlefield blitz the psycho soldiers slide in camouflage through the jungle the sound says here I am the sound stays and does its thing tire track x’s like gatorade logos ice storm making your stomach turn like the wheel on a Porsche through sovereign fields confusion of tv looks like a woman getting her pussy licked I’ve seen that before probably this afternoon people waving hands purple shadows grand organ warps 

Grizzler Big Band
Open Sound, Somerville, August 24
Swansong for Lou Cohen

Coleman cupping his fist at his theremin he puts magic into Cohen smiling down harmonious free improv done right to his strict standards there is a rocking of tones like seagulls among boats at the salty pier at summer’s end the second Lou sweetly plying fiddle it is so peaceful makes death a dream Shoe tempering the violence of primal passions with puffs in the flute and the violin creaks like someone walking up the stairs as so often one feels in Lou’s music the haunted corners of an old manse tickling and rattling hums and buzzes electronics as organic as granola it is a cumulus cloud blustering and rolling apart in afternoon sky Forbes and his grand trumpet like the final sun and it’s brassy as jazz now theremin blundering wild Dave beating the hell out of a bari a complex structure of inter-communication whoops and cheers and raspberries at the burlesque but sedate as a girl on quaaludes now a military bent like taps or reveille as the sun rolls over the hill caught like gold string in the trees with their last summer growth