Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This edition features jazz by Paul Vornhagen, art-pop by Bekka Madeleine, ambient by Martin Babl and Othercast, and RPG soundtracks by Jack de Quidt.

Paul Vornhagen, Live at the Blue LLama
If you're a jazz fan in the Ann Arbor area, you know Paul Vornhagen. The saxophonist-flutist-pianist-singer has been a mainstay in the area for 40 years as the leader of his own bands as well as Tumbao Bravo while also playing with The Lunar Quartet, Kozora Quartet, and a few world-music-leaning ensembles. But despite his long legacy—plus, he's taught so many budding music students in our area—Vornhagen doesn't have a huge discography, which makes the latest live recording in Blue LLama's ongoing series so special for longtime fans. The 11 songs, including five Vornhagen originals, capture Vornhagen's quintet in a straight swinging set at the Ann Arbor jazz club, featuring Pat Cronley (piano), Patrick Prouty (bass), and Larry Ochiltree (drums). While Vornhagen's Dexter Gordon-like tenor sax is the main attraction here, he applies his dreamy Chet Baker-inspired vocals to Kern and Gershwin's "Long Ago and Far Away," Cole Porter's "Night and Day," and Duke Ellington's "Do Nothin' Til You Hear From Me."

If you can't tell from the names I've dropped in reference to this album—Gordon, Baker, songs by Ellington, including "Caravan," his standard co-written by Juan Tizol—this is a mainstream jazz record, so you'll have to get your skronks elsewhere. But if you want sweetly swinging tunes played by terrific musicians, you should snap up this release by an Ann Arbor stalwart. In fact, you can celebrate it on March 9 at Blue LLama at the official CD release show. (I'm not sure if this album was recorded at the quartet's November 1, 2023, concert or the more recent November 24, 2024, show—or a combination of the two—but the videos below are from the former.)

Bekka Madeleine, It Still Snows After December EP
After a series of singles, Bekka Madeleine makes her extended-play debut with five songs of piano-driven art-pop in the lineage of Kate Bush, Fiona Apple, and Tori Amos. Unlike Madeleine's previous singles, which had some guitars, strings, and percussion, the music on It Still Snows After December is stripped to just piano and voice—with some audience chatter sound effects. The 16-year-old Huron High junior writes the music and her sister, Hannah Elisabeth Port, provides the lyrics; together they create these melodramatic miniatures that take you on a journey. If you love the dramatic way Kate Bush sings, you'll appreciate Madeleine's theatrical approach to crooning: It's bold and uncommon in the best possible way.

Martin Babl, Chalklands
Fans of 1970s kosmische musik in the style of Cluster and early Tangerine Dream will love the latest record by Ypsi's Martin Babl. Chalklands is filled with vintage analog keyboards that swirl and buzz alongside just the right layer of what sounds like recording hiss to create a blissful head-in-the-clouds soundtrack over the first three tracks. The title song and closer, "Chalklands," transforms that dreamworld into a slight nightmare for more than half of its 21 minutes thanks to loads of distortion and discordance, but things settle down toward the end, righting your trip to something a little less frightening.

 

Othercast, In Grey Space
Ann Arbor's Kelman Wolfkostin is a one-man sci-fi soundtrack as Othercast. Actually, his latest album, In Grey Space, is a sci-fi soundtrack, it's just that the movie/play/TV show hasn't been made yet. The liner notes are written in binary with this spooky declaration: "absence of narrative, an infinite haze, static landscapes of a dying world, a digital brain building itself out of nothing, memory sludge, searching for meaning where there is none, relentless opacity, wildlife adapting to a changing biosphere." The nine tracks creep and crawl through alien atmospheres that will take over your brain like a parasite from Venus. Speed the process of turning yourself into a host body by listening on headphones.

Jack de Quidt, "Realis"
Friends at the Table is a popular "actual play podcast focused on critical worldbuilding, smart characterization, and fun interaction between good friends"—as is stated at the start of every episode—but the conversations during the RPG come across like a loosely scripted drama. And what does a drama need to up the drama to make it even more drama-ery? A soundtrack, which Friends at the Table has courtesy of Ann Arbor composer Jack de Quidt. His Bandcamp page is full of music for the show, which has been produced since 2014, and his latest work is "Realis," a jaunty little number that makes me think of elves walking through the countryside with their destination village in the near distance.

Christopher Porter is a library technician and the editor of Pulp.