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Jun 27, 2023 By Mark Redfern

Los Angeles-based experimental jazz collective High Pulp are releasing a new album, Days in the Desert, on July 28 via ANTI-. Now they have shared another song from it, “Unified Dakotas,” which features Jeff Parker of Tortoise on guitar. Listen below.

“‘Unified Dakotas’ was one of the last songs that we wrote, and it quickly became one of the band’s favorite songs from Days in the Desert,” says the band’s drummer and founder Bobby Granfelt in a press release. ”If you listen to the trumpet writing you can hear explicit choices and tones inspired by [Miles Davis’] Sketches of Spain; we felt this song called for that color palette: playful, tense, and slightly indignant.”

On working with Parker Granfelt says: “We have been fans of Jeff Parker (both solo and his work with Tortoise) for years, and when thinking about who the right person may be to collaborate with on this song it became abundantly clear once I threw his name out. Jeff’s maturity and humility shine throughout this song. It tells a story and feels more like watching someone make a painting than listening to a traditional guitar solo.”
The band got into Tortoise’s album TNT (as well as Stereolab’s Dots and Loops) when on tour just before recording the new album. “Those albums were a guiding light for our process,” Granfelt says.

Previously we posted the album’s “(If You Don’t Leave) The City Will Kill You,” which features Daedelus, was shared via a music video, and was one of our Songs of the Week. The band have also shared the Days in the Desert songs “Dirtmouth” (feat. James Brandon Lewis) and “Never In My Short Sweet Life” (feat. Mononeon).

“The word jazz is going to follow our band around forever, which is fine, we love jazz, we are inspired by jazz,” Granfelt said in a previous press release. “But our influences are much wider than that.”

The press release said that although they may be influenced by the classic Gil Evans-Miles Davis jazz collaborations of the 1950s, High Pulp have also been inspired by ’90s indie rock such as Stereolab’s Dots and Loops and Tortoise’s TNT.

“We embraced more imperfections in terms of our executions, but as a result our compositions got stronger, more solid,” alto saxophonist Andy Morrill said. “The album started to get simpler. And also a little more human.”

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