LADOS B by DANIEL VILLARREAL

On October 15th & 16th 2020, drummer Daniel Villarreal was joined by guitarist Jeff Parker and bassist Anna Butterss for two afternoons of recording in the backyard of Chicali Outpost in Los Angeles.

For all three musicians, it was the first ensemble recording session they’d done in-person since the pandemic locked the world down just seven months prior. Some choice moments from the sessions made it onto Villarreal’s critically-acclaimed 2022 album Panamá 77, bust most of the music remained unreleased.

Lados B is a deep dive into the high-level spontaneous music made by Villarreal, Parker and Butterss across those two days in 2020. Villarreal is heard leading the group through various rhythmic modes and structures for improvisation - flow as informed by the Latin soul of Fania Records as it is by the otherworldly trance of Brain Records - while Parker and Butterss draw on their extensive experience playing free together (as heard on Parker’s recently-released Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, and the LA side of Makaya McCraven’s 2018 LP Universal Beings) to build harmonic buoys for their spontaneous melodicism. The result is a beautifully vivid illustration of context, creativity, and collective composition from a particularly rich moment in history.