International Anthem Profiled

Source: Pitchfork.

Ever since Scottie McNiece and David Allen co-founded International Anthem in 2014, they’ve pushed back against easy categorization and joined a proud hometown tradition in the process. The Chicago label documents a community that is greatly informed by the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the influential jazz nonprofit whose members’ relationship to genre is so uneasy, they’ve opted for terms like “jazz and its offshoots,” “jazz-identified music,” and “post-jazz” instead. “Everyone always calls us a jazz label,” McNiece says. “We’ve never exclusively been a jazz label, and we’ve always been trying to blur those lines. ‘Boundary-defying music,’ that’s maybe a better genre name for us.”