You ever have a stretch of days where everything — every task, every responsibility, every obligation whether big or small — just feels way harder, way more fraught with obstacles and landmines than it ought to?
Where what should take two seconds takes two hours? Where every item on your personal checklist becomes a total tangle of mess and frustration? Where you feel so powerless against a machine that knows only to reflect your own limitations back to you that the only thing you can think to do is throw your hands towards the sky and direct a primal, barbaric yawp towards whatever supernatural force you suppose might be keeping score of up there?
"What do you want from me!" you scream inside your car, mistaking the solitude of the physically enclosed space for a sound-proof one and looking (to say nothing of sounding) very much indeed like a certifiable lunatic to the family of four in the car next to yours in the McDonald’s drive-thru line.
It’s at times like these that I fire up A Serious Man, the brilliant Coen Brothers movie, whose main character, Larry Gopnik, is feeling very much as I’ve described above. A workaday mathematician at a local university, he strives to be conscientious, a good father and husband, respected in his field. A mensch. In one scene, he’s in the throes of his personal frustrations, and he’s lecturing to his students about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which, aided by enough formulas to fill an entire blackboard, proves, as he says, that “we can’t ever really know what’s going on."
"But,” he continues, after the bell signalling the end of class has rung and the entire lecture hall begins to empty out, “even though you can’t figure anything out, you will be responsible for it on the midterm.”
The point is, I think, we’re all held to impossible standards. And the greatest hostage takers, the most ruthless tyrants, are ourselves. And I was reminded of this when, in the midst of a rather trying day, I found myself putting together this week's "Breaking Jazz," and I came across a new album from drummer Curtis Nowosad at the exact moment I needed to.
The musicianship is of virtuoso quality, and joined by his frequent musical co-conspirator, the great young guitarist Andrew Renfroe, the ideas are both elegant and transgressive, humble yet chesty. Gracious, yet not to be trifled with. The music communicates what its album title spells out right on the cover: I Am Doing My Best. And it communicates this message not as apology and not as explanation but as forceful, self-affirming declaration.
So, with that, I hereby declare Nowosad's I Am Doing My Best, released last month (June 2025) on La Reserve Records and featuring the aforementioned Renfroe as well as guest vocals from Joey Landreth and Joanna Majoko, the inaugural "Breaking Jazz" pick of the week.
