Recordings generally take the shape from collaborations, in which Greenberger selects and reads texts, and diverse contributors provide tracks that complement them. You don’t have to listen Greenberger long to hear the voices of people who are more knowing, more innocent, or farther out than you. Living 80+ years can do that to a person, and having some guy ask you your thoughts about child-rearing, vampires, or some jazz record can bring it out of you. 

Which brings us to Today! It is the product of years of intermittent effort. Greenberger could have collected his material anytime between 1979 and the last time he sat down with a person of age. And the music went through an episodic construction process. It began about a decade ago when Greenberg joined his old friend, drummer Michael Evans (God Is My Co-Pilot, Robert Wyatt, Eleven Twenty-Nine and a million gigs you might have attended on a random NY night), and Evans’ friend and fellow percussionist, Jeff Arnal, for some spontaneous studio jamming. Then, the two improvisers got their friends (including Jeremiah Cymerman, James Ilgenfritz, Dan Peck, and many more) to contribute. After that, Greenberger and multi-instrumentalist Sam Kulik re-arranged the music to create 40 voice-and-music miniatures, which were still idling in Greenberger’s archive when Evans unexpectedly died in 2021. There’s nothing like tragedy to make a project change course, or in this case, find one. So, Greenberger finally put it out, even though his musical sales infrastructure is currently in disrepair. If you decide to track this disc down, your best bet is emailing him at [email protected]. 

While their generative process was circuitous, the album’s pieces are quite immediate. Greenberger is a skilled selector and raconteur; one line and you’re in, whether the piece addresses memories of old jobs, declining health, the risks of injury while playing baseball, Texan geology and the nation’s need of sand, or Greenberger’s dubious own qualifications as an artist. Particularly amusing are the several discussions of vampires, which pinpoint one of the pleasures of these recitations; it’s hard to tell if they are the product of some confabulatory process or impressively creative leg-pulling. And the music is right there with him. Despite its mostly improvised origins, the music has been tailored into tightly structured and richly varied settings for Greenberger’s voice. That latter point is important, since you wouldn’t want to hear anything too similar sounding 40 times in a row. The musical shifts from boogie-woogie piano to handclaps to ribald faux-Dixieland not only avert boredom, their dry wit and subtle details repay make this a record worth revisiting on an ongoing basis.