High Pulp Share 'Unified Dakotas' Feat. Jeff Parker of Tortoise

Los Angeles-based experimental jazz collective High Pulp will release their new album ’Days in the Desert' in peak sweltering summer heat next month on July 28. The titular desert is both literal and metaphorical: it’s the Mojave Desert that the band powers through on their many DIY tours around the country, but they perceive the desert as a spiritual quest as well.

Today they are sharing the album track “Unified Dakotas” feat. Jeff Parker.

The song “Unified Dakotas” aligns High Pulp with the kind of adventurous music that defined the alternative ‘90s, a mix of post-rock guitars, head-nodding drums, bright horns, and electronics. It made perfect sense to reach out to Jeff Parker of Tortoise and have his guitar ring through the song as it transforms from shimmering jazz-funk to dreamy ambience and back.

“ ”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,’” explains the band’s drummer Bobby Granfelt. ”If you listen to the trumpet writing you can hear explicit choices and tones inspired by ’Sketches of Spain’; we felt this song called for that color palette: playful, tense, and slightly indignant.”

On working with Jeff Parker on the track, he added: “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.”

During a tour right before the recording of ’Desert‘, the band became enamored by Tortoise’s ’TNT’ and Stereolab’s ’Dots and Loops. “Those albums were a guiding light for our process,” Granfelt says. As a result, individual solos gave way to group interplay: “It became simpler and more accessible, choosing a vibe, an ecosystem to have the listener hang out in.”

High Pulp’s Days in the Desert makes this vision come true, finding the West Coast band fully emerging into their own sound. Rooted in the jazz tradition while also smitten by indie-rock and electronic music, High Pulp was willing to grab from all these sounds at once to pursue something truly their own. Their third full-length album (following 2022’s promising Anti- debut Pursuit of Ends), Days in the Desert reveals the band realizing their strengths, deepening their own bonds, and pushing all these skills into a thrilling new sonic vista all but unimaginable just a few years before.

And this record is a party, with an array of all-star guests that push the sounds even further out into the ether. They range from Impulse! harpist Brandee Younger and Madlib collaborator/ Brainfeeder OG Daedelus to rising tenor saxophonist (and fellow Anti- labelmate) James Brandon Lewis as well as Parker. But despite the disparate genres represented, it all sounds precisely like High Pulp in the end.

“The word jazz is going to follow our band around forever, which is fine, we love jazz, we are inspired by jazz,” Granfelt explains. “But our influences are much wider than that.” In embracing the likes of Gil Evans-Miles Davis jazz collaborations in the 1950s as well as ‘90s lo-fi indie-rock, High Pulp found a middle ground. As the vision for ’Days in the Desert’ became clearer, the message was evident. “We embraced more imperfections in terms of our executions, but as a result our compositions got stronger, more solid,” Morrill says. “The album started to get simpler. And also a little more human.”

TOUR DATES

8/27 - Port Townsend, WA @ THING Festival

Photo Credit: London Van Rooy & Jon Christopherson

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