Consumer Guide: March, 2025

A centenarian's big band experiment, catchy pop-rock making a big romantic leap, varied songwriting suffused with darkness and detail, and desert guitar in search of justice.

Marshall Allen: New Dawn (Mexican Summer) Kentucky-born World War II Buffalo Soldier, 17th Division Special Service Band member, and postwar Paris Conservatory student Allen joined Sun Ra’s band and collective on saxophone in 1958 while also occasionally backing pioneer Afropopularizer Babatunde Olatunje on a kora he built himself. A few years after Sun Ra died at 79 in 1993, Allen took over the band while residing in the Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra in Philadelphia. And eventually, on May 25, 2024, he just flat-out turned 100, whereupon Cologne-based arts acivist Jan Lankisch thought it only proper for him to celebrate by making an album that was hardly his first. Cute, right? Who could cavil about that? Only this isn’t just a birthday present. It’s a lively, varied, congenial big band experiment of the first order, the kind