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The Howard Hughes Suite is a modern-day cosmic cowboy. He stoically keeps a low profile and hunkers down in his home studio in the South West of England with his faithful instruments, away from the noise of crowded gig venues or the idle chatter between takes during session work, once his mainstay. From this isolated musical outpost he surveys Americana landscapes with a reassuringly classic, but distinctly widescreen, psychedelic pioneering spirit. 

On Smoke from a Future Fire, over the course of several seasons, solitary but not lonesome, surrounded by his trusty instruments, The Howard Hughes Suite had no particular place to go. Feeling restless he saddled up his digital workstation, unholstered his pedal steel and ambled beyond the acoustic flatlands, through cinematic ravines & across electronic streams just to see what was out there. 

Whilst roaming he flashed back to the pylon-free, buffalo-rich plains of Western lore, but also had visions to a future of rusting pickup trucks slowly succumbing to time and nature, which had long since adapted to the man-made climatic change that finally rid earth of its most disruptive species. Through sun-pinned eyes he looked beyond the dust to see the majesty of the southern deserts. Rising out of his saddle he looked over snow-capped distant mountain ranges to gaze at the tiniest creatures and smallest stones. He looked around and saw what was, what is and what could be. He saw no horrors, just the mind-blowing Interconnectedness of all things. Neither happy nor sad, but just content with being, he hit stop on the tape machine and decided to share his thoughts. 

This LP was originally released through The Howard Hughes Suite's personal Bandcamp page in 2020. Despite getting solid support from Americana diehards who had tracked it down, we couldn't help thinking it needed introducing to a wider audience. What you hear before you is a slightly re-edited version that has been lovingly remastered by none other than Ian Hawgood for increased aural pleasure. 

CreditsEquipment and instruments: 
(Ancient) Mac Pro (Running: OS X Snow Leopard). 
Pro Tools LE 8. 
Propellerhead Reason 4.0. 
Toontrack EZDrummer 2. 
Various iOS music apps. 
All music recording in the box. No outboard gear used apart from: Mbox Audio 2 and Boss GT5. 
MXL V67GS large-diaphragm solid-state condenser microphone. 
(Temperamental) Sho-Bud Maverick Pedal Steel. 
Tanglewood Electro Acoustic. TF2CE Series. 
Fender Stratocaster (Mexican). 
Fender Telecaster (Mexican). 
Martin Backpacker Steel String Acoustic. 
Tanglewood Electric Fretless Bass. 
Mandolin. 
No-name Spanish/classical acoustics. 
EBow. 

Artwork: 
Not only does The Howard Hughes Suite's passion run deep for the art and craft of music, he's also an avid photographer, with an idiosyncratic eye, and designs his own cover artwork. An exhibition of his photography, film and music is expected later in the year. 

About The Howard Hughes Suite: 
The Howard Hughes Suite grew up in a musical household and needed no encouragement to teach himself several musical instruments. With a drummer as a father, a love for the guitar greats, a fascination with the electronic pioneers, a history of playing live, years spent as a session musician, a love of the visual arts though photography and experience with soundtrack work, it was only a matter of time before all these musical ley lines converged into the rather special musical project you have before you. 

All music © The Howard Hughes Suite. 
Except for 'Opening Aunt Dora's Box in 6/8'. Composed by Rainer Ptacek. 

Mastering: Ian Hawgood (www.homenormal.com)

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Across eight tracks that mesh jazz-laced, emotive, and spacious composition with fourth-world and adult-contemporary tonality, Toronto saxophonist Joseph Shabason sketches an auditory map of the transcendence, unity, conditioning, and eventual renunciation of his upbringing in an Islamic and Jewish dual-faith household. The resulting album The Fellowship bears the name of the insular Islamic community Shabason’s traditionally Jewish parents belonged to from a time before he was even born; a mental and spiritual push-pull which continued shaping, even controlling, his outlook well into his adulthood. As a listening experience The Fellowship follows a chronological arc that spans three generations covering his parents’ early lives, his own spiritual and physical adolescence, and his subsequent struggle to eschew the problematic habituations of such a conflicted past. 

“Life With My Grandparents” commences The Fellowship in overcast hues. A cassette recording of a child’s voice pops in and out of a murmuring brass tone as both elements drift like memories receding forever into the past. “My parents grew up in really difficult households. Both of my father’s parents had just survived the Holocaust only six years before he was born.” Shabason explains, cutting right to the root of what might have led his parents to diverge from their inherited spiritual conventions. "My grandparents were deeply traumatized from having lost so many friends and family members, and even if the war hadn’t happened I don’t think they would have been particularly emotionally available.” Exchanging the gloom for tension, the anxiously experimental “Escape From North York” jolts the cadence forwards and backwards by way of skittering jazz percussion as a nauseated synth melody balloons into full-on terror, all while the melodic elements are ambushed from below by a flash flood of air-rending texture. The title (a play on John Carpenter’s Escape From New York) refers to the area of Toronto where Shabason’s parents were raised, and rebelliously fled in their twenties against their own parents’ wishes. The title track of The Fellowship swings toward relief and reflection, and buoys the mood up to something childlike. It is suffused with saxophone, upright bass, chorus-drenched guitar, and digitized pan flute; the kinds of 90’s jazz timbres that mark a time in Shabason’s adolescence when the dilemmas of his family’s faith were still obscured by comfort, community, and a dash of the forgivable naivete of early youth. At the same time, the piece shows Shabason at his most melodically athletic, darting around chord changes with fervor for the subject at hand. 

From here the perspective moves from third to first person as Shabason unpacks his teenage years across a three song suite, the titles of which mark the exact years they are meant to sonically illustrate. Where the previous track floated ever upward on innocence and clarity, “0-13” dispenses with both by its final third at which point things have unraveled into aleatoric unease representing “the first chink in the armour,” as Joseph admits, “and the first time I really started to question everything I’d been taught.” By “13-15” the pendulum is fully back on the side of apprehension as galloping percussion, an unrelenting synthetic marimba, an off-key wood flute, and jittering electric guitar tell a story of doubt and anger, dressed in fourth-world atonality. “By that time,” says Shabason, referring to the age denoted in the track name, “I was smoking weed and really getting into my head. According to my religion, smoking weed was gonna land me in hell, and all my friends who drank were also on the path to hell. The whole thing seemed totally absurd. The idea of a God that was that petty and vengeful made no sense. Those thoughts just swirled and created this background dissonance that existed all throughout my early teens. Middle school was fucked.” 

“15-19” is the sadness that follows outrage, when the dust settles and the pieces need putting back together, yet they simply won’t fit in light of a new found perspective. As such, this final movement is bathed in tragic, futile optimism. Under a bed of half-tempo RnB, muted trumpets glow like dying embers catching the wind. Shabason elucidates, “at that point, I’d discovered punk and hardcore and decided to be straight edge. It provided me with a community and a great cover for why I didn’t drink or do drugs. It felt like this really cool disguise. It kept me from questioning why I was doing it in the first place, but underlying it all was sadness. Why were my gay friends going to hell? Why did women have to be modest and not men? Why did God want to punish me for so many things? Was I going to hell because I had sex with my girlfriend? None of it made sense, but I was so completely brainwashed that I never thought to seriously question it. Instead, I just slipped up more and more, did drugs, fooled around, and tried to put the divine ramifications of my actions out of my head.” 

“Comparative World Religions” is a caffeinated gamelan named for the college course that caused Joseph-- and so many other young people engrossed in inherited repressive ideologies-- to see the irreconcilable nature of his beliefs from the outside in. Like the class itself, it stands apart from the backdrop of The Fellowship by replacing the seesaw of religious ecstasy and uncertainty with the type of transcendence that can only be arrived at through factual illumination. Using mournful brass and glassy keys, the aptly titled “So Long” represents the slow walking away that Shabason had to do mentally and emotionally, even long after the illusion had been cracked open. “It took me at least another twelve to fifteen years to fully deprogram myself from all the guilt and shame that was bred into me by religion, but I think that I’m finally free from it,” says Shabason of his present-day outlook. “This song is a final goodbye to that life… an exhale and deep inhale before I start a new chapter.” On The Fellowship, as on prior albums that bear his name, Joseph Shabason does what only the best instrumental music makers can: tell a story with emotional clarity that conveys even the subtlest of feelings, all without singing a single word. As wordless as ever-- with as complex a theme as ever-- this album may be his most emotionally articulate yet. Most importantly, those lost in the woods of repression and self-doubt that organized religion can be at its worst now have The Fellowship to help guide them into a softer light. 
 
CreditsJoseph Shabason: Saxophones, Flutes, Synth, EWI, Field Recordings, Percussion Kieran Adams: Programming, Percussion, Synth 
Thom Gill: Guitar, Piano 
Bram Gielen: Electric Bass, Fretless Bass, Upright Bass 
Hugh Marsh: Violin 
Phil Melanson: Drums, Electronic Drums, Percussion 
Naomi McCarroll-Butler: Clarinet, Bass Clarinet 
Michael Davidson: Vibraphone 
Nicole Rampersaud: Trumpet 
Christine Bougie: Guitar 
Vince Spilchuk: Trumpet on “The Fellowship” 
Robin Deane: Vocals​

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Aged’s latest album 'You Are Protected By Silent Love' follows his recent self-titled LP and 'Bass Improvisations EP' and takes the luminous head music into even deeper waters, filled with kosmische Americana, microfunk daydreams, liquid mercury gospel, Red-era Fripp dark matter riffing, and delicate polyrhythms that subtly recall the percussive drive of footwork and jungle. So expressive is Aged’s instrumentation that it’s easy to forget that this is an all- instrumental affair, anchored largely by his keening pedal steel textures and inquisitive bass playing. Rarely are such complex emotions and radical musical touches rendered with so much heart and directness-- in under an hour Aged invokes the urbane pastoralism of Jim O’Rourke and Ralph Towner as much as the sweetly crushing passing chords of Thomas Whitfield’s band at their peak or D’Angelo’s Voodoo reduced to only morning mist and tumbleweeds. While musicians often speak of aspiring to make healing music, Aged’s album arrives truly as a balm, with room for every shade of emotion but guided by a tender, unafraid hand. 

- Dr. Brian Rogers

Credits:
All songs written and performed by Daniel Aged 
Additional Synthesizer on 'Home_Lost' by John Keek 
Drums on 'Not a Dream' by Craig Weinrib 
Mixed by Kenneth Gilmore 
Mastered by Bernie Grundman 
Cover art by Justin Sloane 
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