*Announcing* Josh Johnson - Animative /// LP, CD, DD out October 23rd
Josh Johnson
Animative
LP, CD, Digital album
out October 23rd
Today, composer, producer, saxophonist and synthesist Josh Johnson (SML, Jeff Parker ETA IVtet, Flea and The Honora Band) announces a new solo album Animative, his third album under his own name and his first as a solo lead artist for International Anthem / Nonesuch, out October 23, 2026 on LP, CD, and digital download (the streaming release follows on November 10).
The ten track album – co-produced by Johnson and Paul Bryan, featuring contributions from Meshell Ndegeocello, Macie Stewart, Marquis Hill, Ben Lumsdaine, and more – is a marvel of electro-acoustic innovation that combines compositional brilliance and technological ambition into a mesmerizing blend of skeletal soul-jazz, post-bop, electronic minimalism, and dreamy ambience.
Last weekend, The New York Times included Animative in their fall preview 33 Albums and Shows We’re Looking Forward to This Fall. Hank Shteamer wrote of Johnson: "The genre-bridging saxophonist has led the West Coast charge [and] has advanced an inviting brand of experimentalism … His upcoming solo effort, Animative, offers vibrant electroacoustic music well-suited to dancing or daydreaming."
Listen to the lead track “Reece” and preorder Animative here.
(Animative album cover photo by Anna Powell Denton)
About Animative
Throughout the 2020s, the Chicago-raised and Los Angeles-based saxophonist, keyboardist, synthesist, producer, and composer Josh Johnson has emerged as a vital and innovative force in various realms of progressive music. He has thrived as a sideman and collaborator, helping to shape the sound of Jeff Parker’s renowned ETA IVtet; he co-leads all-star creative ensembles like SML, the Openness Trio, and his collective with Sam Wilkes and Gregory Uhlmann; and he served as producer for Meshell Ndegeocello’s GRAMMY-winning 2023 album The Omnichord Real Book as well as Flea’s acclaimed 2026 album Honora.
Animative embodies a culmination of the harmonically rich, loops-inflected sound that first germinated on Johnson’s 2020 full band release Freedom Exercise and on his immersive 2024 solo album Unusual Object. Throughout the album, Johnson puts sophisticated technologies to work, often using the saxophone to control a sampler or a drum machine, triggering changes in a loop or an effect. But it’s always in service of a feeling — working to escape the trap of mastery. “I'm looking to make it feel more human,” Johnson says. In particular, he cites fellow Chicagoan, saxophonist, and 360-degree artistic thinker Eddie Harris and the brilliant piano eccentric Mal Waldron as influences on his approach to breaking form and emphasizing the corporeal elements of performance.
Johnson’s thoughtful and reserved nature made Animative’s title something of a puzzler to his friends. “I said the name to a few people, and they were like, ‘Animated is not how I would describe you,’” Johnson laughs. “But I'm really thinking about it from the perspective of causing animation, giving spirit, or connecting with spirit.” He thinks often of the lessons of Wayne Shorter, one of his teachers, who instilled in him a sense of reverence for the mystical, and emphasized the musician’s duty to “conjure and transport.” Johnson also found inspiration in the West African philosopher Malidoma Somé’s writings, and the “non-Western ways of thinking about time and being” that they propose, as well as Italo Calvino’s inventive, often-dreamlike short fiction.
The spectrum of influence, clarity of intention, and confidence in craft present in Johnson’s approach yields stunning results on Animative. Whether it’s spiritual and wandering works augmented by the idiosyncratic overloads of hardware technology (as on the stirring “Aughts Hymnal”), stumbling funk that pulsates with the glow of otherworldly deep sea life (“High Step”), surrealist dancefloor cuts (“Jazz Chord Possession”) or cloudy collages of shoegaze saxophone (“Upstairs 2021”), Animative coheres into a strange and beautiful whole — a generous and spellbinding reflection of its auteurist creator.
Listen to lead track “Reece” and pre-order / pre-save Animative here.
Live Dates
Also today, Johnson announces Animative album release shows in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Brooklyn this fall, with more TBA. His live ensemble for the shows will be a trio with bassist Anna Butterss and drummer Ben Lumsdaine. Details and links:
Los Angeles, CA — October 27 @ Zebulon — tickets
Minneapolis, MN — November 3 @ The Cedar — tickets
Brooklyn, NY — December 10 @ Public Records — tickets
There will also be an Animative preview party in Los Angeles at 2220 Arts + Archives on Monday September 21st. At the event, the album will be played in full, between DJ sets from International Anthem’s King Hippo and Jocelyn Brown. The event is free with RSVP, more info here.
Deluxe Vinyl Package
Animative comes on 140 gram vinyl inside a heavyweight matte jacket, with IARC obi strip & poly-lined inner-sleeve. Lacquers cut by Daniel K at SST, pressed at Pallas in Germany.
Limited Edition Exospheric Blue Color Vinyl — $32
Classic Black Vinyl — $27
Summer '26 Bundle
Animative is the last of three new IARC releases announced in summer 2026. And, per our norm, the LPs are available to purchase together, as part of the Summer ‘26 Bundle.
A purchase of the Summer ‘26 Bundle (on either classic black vinyl or color vinyl) comes with a bundle-exclusive discount of 10% off the LP prices + a discounted shipping cost.
The LPs included are:
IARC0114 megiapa — Intentions
IARC0115 Jeremiah Chiu — Edge Conditions
IARC0116 Josh Johnson — Animative
Bundles will ship from warehouses in the US, EU and UK, but don't sleep.. the quantity available in each warehouse is limited! Early purchase is recommended to ensure the lowest possible shipping and tax costs.
All items will ship around October 16th. Download codes will be sent via email for all the releases by, or before, the ship date.
(photo by Atiba Jefferson)
About Josh Johnson
Josh Johnson spent his earliest years in Maryland before his family moved to the Chicago suburbs when he was young. He didn’t take to his piano lessons, finding that he was happier teaching himself. It was only after starting to play the saxophone at age eleven that he fell completely in love with music. Soon after, his parents bought him a stack of jazz records; the sound that caught his attention most was the saxophone of Lester Young. “I was like, ‘This dude is talking to me,’” Johnson says. “That's what it felt like.” He was as fascinated by the intellect and swagger he heard inside Young’s playing as he was by the “vocal qualities” of the saxophone. “It can whisper, it can scream, it can be really textured. I was still playing piano and keyboards, but the saxophone was what captured me,” he says.
Johnson went on to earn a bachelor’s in music from Indiana University, making the nearly eight-hour round trip from Bloomington to Chicago on the weekends to participate in his hometown jazz scene. After graduating, he spent a couple of years living and working in Chicago before attending grad school at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (now the Herbie Hancock Institute) in Los Angeles, studying under Shorter and Hancock.
He found himself surrounded by an L.A. jazz scene that was in bloom creatively and culturally. While Kamasi Washington and Terrace Martin’s careers filled the foreground, a vast network of musicians was intermingling jazz, ambient, dance music, hip-hop, minimalism, and more at venues around town. Before long, Johnson was near the center of nearly all of it. He was energized by the exchange between different music scenes and artistic disciplines in those years, particularly on gigs he played with Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Mark de Clive-Lowe, and Jamire Williams. “There was a lot going on, and a lot of places to play, and a lot of cross-pollination all coming about very organically,” he remembered. “I think that really encouraged me, because there were all these people just finding different ways to combine a lot of their interests. There was room to make a path.”
Originally expecting to return to Chicago or head to New York after the Monk Institute, Johnson chose to stay put. “Part of what kept me in L.A. is that I felt like, ‘I'm interested in all these different things. If I was to move to New York right now, I might need to spend a long time just following this one path of the saxophone lineage.’”
One of L.A.’s headiest spaces in those years was ETA, the Highland Park bar where Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet—which includes Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss, and drummer Jay Bellerose—played weekly. “I guess it's like any sort of long-running gig in that it sort of takes on a life of its own,” Johnson says. “In those early days, there were a lot of different people who would come in there: other musicians, but also visual artists and painters, dancers, skateboarders from the various tributaries of Jeff’s world, stuff like that. There was a beautiful kind of overlap.”
In the past decade-plus, Johnson has become an essential collaborator to Carlos Niño, Nate Mercereau, Louis Cole, aja monet, Gregory Uhlmann, Anna Butterss, Matthew Stevens, and Sam Wilkes, among others. When not playing in a group led by someone else, Johnson has often gravitated toward co-led ensembles like SML (with Butterss, Uhlmann, Jeremiah Chiu, and Booker Stardrum), the Openness Trio (with Mercereau and Niño), or his collaborative trio with Uhlmann and Wilkes. Meanwhile, he also maintains a connection to the leading Chicago musicians of his generation, continuing to play in bands led by Marquis Hill, Makaya McCraven, and Joel Ross.
In addition to his jazz bona fides, Johnson’s musical versatility has been informed by an impressive resume of pop music work, including with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Harry Styles, Miley Cyrus and Ezra Furman. Johnson served as musical director for Leon Bridges from 2018 to 2022, in which time he directed a performance with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, for which he arranged fourteen of Bridges’ songs.
For Johnson, every collaboration is a chance to connect and extend his practice. Much of the spirit of his latest album Animative has been informed by lessons he gleaned from recent work with Ndegeocello in particular. “We all have certain assumptions that we come into writing or making music with. Working with her, some of those things were broken down for me immediately,” Johnson says. “It opened me up to not just consider more of what’s coming in externally, but to also let more of the variety that's inside of me come out.”
