Kate Olson’s So It Goes

Cracks first. Light later.

So It Goes doesn’t announce itself; it seeps in. A low-lit entrance, silhouettes before faces. This is your second reel of Deadwax Noir: the camera closer now, the room smaller, the air thicker. A chordless quartet moving like figures in half-shadow—soprano sax, trombone, bass, and drums—no safety net, no harmonic glow. Just edges. Just contact.

Kate Olson leads without calling attention to it. Her soprano doesn’t dominate; it threads. It glints, disappears, and comes back with a different angle. Around her, Conner Eisenmenger smears the frame—brass as vapor, then as blade. Tim Carey lays down electric lines that hum like streetlights, occasionally switching to guitar like a flicker in the grid. Evan Woodle works the negative space—brush, pulse, interruption—more as editor than timekeeper.

No chords means no cushion. Every note lands exposed. The groove isn’t declared; it’s implied, assembled from fragments, from glances. Bebop ghosts move through it. Gospel breath sneaks in through the cracks. Contemporary experimental language keeps pulling the floor out from under you. It’s tension as architecture.

There’s a film running behind the music. Kurt Vonnegut shows up as a kind of fatalist narration—scenes that shrug and continue, motifs that recur like refrains you can’t quite name. Then a refracted hymn to Alice Coltrane—not imitation, but atmosphere: a dim glow in a back room, spiritual without sermon, searching without spectacle. 

"The record breathes like a city at night—uneven, alive, a little dangerous."

When Wayne Horvitz and Geoff Harper step in, the lens shifts. The piano arrives like a sudden interior—walls, corners, a sense of depth—but the band resists settling. It keeps the door ajar. The double bass thickens the plot but doesn’t resolve it. The quartet’s identity holds: conversation over comfort and risk over polish.

This is Pacific Northwest noir. Not rain for mood—for method. Space isn’t absence; it’s material. Silence has grain. You can hear the room, the distance between players, the decision to wait one beat longer than expected. The record breathes like a city at night—uneven, alive, a little dangerous.

Deadwax Noir has always been about what records reveal when the lights go down, and the surface noise comes up. So It Goes leans into that thesis hard. It trusts the listener to follow the shadows, to read the negative, to find the groove where it almost isn’t.

New jazz, no alibi.  Drop the needle and stay in the dark.

It can be purchased here and is available on vinyl: So It Goes | Kate Olson

4/5 Notes