CD reviews
This is everything you want in soukous music: propulsive rhythms, sweet soaring vocal harmonies, and of course that driving, ringing soukous guitar sound. Not too slow, not too fast...just right.
Masters of Jazz Vol. 3:
Big Bands of the
‘30s and ‘40s
(Rhino 1996)Growing up, I was exposed to big band music by Dad, who is a major Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman fan. But coming of age as a jazz fan in the 1970s, my tastes turned to the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and to the emerging post-free syntheses of David Murray and Arthur Blythe. When I turned my attention toward the past, it was to the virtuosos of bebop, or the various incarnations of Miles Davis. Big band music seemed too composed, both musically and temperamentally. This year, perhaps not coincidentally as I have entered middle-agedom, I’ve started listening to the big-band stuff seriously for the first time. This recording is a best-of the big bands, compiled by Billy Vera, and there isn’t a weak track on it. The CD emphasizes the great African-American bands— Fletcher Henderson, Ellington, Basie, Earl Hines— but Goodman is here too, along with Jimmy Dorsey. Of course, you’ve heard some of these tunes many, many times ("Sing, Sing, Sing" and "Don’t Be That Way"), but chances are good you don’t have them on a CD. For me, the biggest revelation is Henderson’s band: funky, clever, artful, danceable, all at the same time. The compilation ends in the late 1940s, and by then "swing" was already foreshadowing what Ted Gioia refers to as the "fragmentation of jazz styles." Billy Eckstine’s "Cool Breeze" and Dizzy Gillespie’s "Manteca" look forward to bebop, Latin, and cool jazz; Lionel Hampton’s propulsive "Flying Home" rejuvenates the stompin’ rhythms of the early thirties, looking ahead toward Louis Jordan and jump-blues, and from there on to rock and roll. Progressive though it may have been, this was music made to be enjoyed in the present moment, and it still can be.
McKinney’s Cotton
Pickers
The Band Don Redman Built
(BMG 1990)This jaunty, stompin’ party music provides a bridge between Louis Armstrong and the big band swing of the thirties. The banjo and tuba rhythm section gives the music an old-timey feel, but the arrangements of John Nesbitt and Don Redman rely on the more sophisticated voicings of the brass and reed sections that would become the hallmark of the great big bands. Star soloists include Benny Carter, Colman Hawkins, and even Fats Waller playing the celeste. The singing will make you smile while you’re tapping your toes. This is what the Squirrel Nut Zippers would sound like if they had the chops.
Jesus Alemany's
Cubanismo! Featuring
Alfredo Rodriguez
(Rykodisc 1996)Trumpeter Alemany assembled an all-star Cuban dance band, including the masterful pianist Alfredo Rodriguez, for this 1995 recording session in Havana. This album sounds so great I didn't play anything else for several days. It also makes me wish I knew how to rumba and cha-cha-cha.
Cassandra Wilson
Blue Light 'Til Dawn
(Blue Note 1993)
New Moon Daughter
(Blue Note 1995)There's no denying she has a super voice, and I really wanted to like these dreadful exercises in pretentious folksy-jazz. It's hard to say which is more embarrassing: the Hank Williams cover or the Monkees cover. Even at their best, these songs sound like warmed-over late-seventies Joni Mitchell. Only not half as good.
Los Lobos
Colossal Head
(Warner Bros. 1996)
Latin Playboys
(Warner Bros. 1994)Hip-hop informed, as much Louisiana swamp as Los Angeles barrio, they sound like nobody else, and they sound better than ever. On Colossal Head, the odd, experimental electronic distortions and horn riffs that Hidalgo, Perez, and Froom played with on the Latin Playboys CD meet up with a sort of acidified ZZ Top blues boogie. The Los Lobos you first learned to love sang the poetry of the immigrant and second-generation experience in modern America, backed by the world’s best bar band (apologies to NRBQ fans). Somewhere along the line they fell in love with the exploration of pure sound, and how the joy of pure sound finds expression in the full range of American (North and Central) popular music. Their musical journey is at once both universal and sui generis; it’s well worth going along for the ride.
Muhal Richard Abrams
Orchestra
The Hearinga Suite
(Black Saint 1989)
Blu Blu Blu
(Black Saint 1991)Here are two outstanding big band albums by a great unsung hero of modern jazz. Abrams is an experimentalist who came up out of the free jazz circles, but his big-band pieces are heavily composed and beautifully structured. The extended pieces on these albums draw ambitiously from a wide range of jazz and other African-American music forms; in that regard they have something in common with some of Wynton Marsalis’s recent work, but are far more adventurous and challenging. In addition to being a first-rate composer and pianist, Abrams uses the synthesizer to great but understated effect here. Joel Brandon’s whistling on Blu Blu Blu is, quite simply, mindboggling.
Ella Fitzgerald
The Best of the Song Books
(Verve 1993)
Love Songs:
Best of the Song Books
(Verve 1996)They’re all love songs, really...the love of great singing and of great songs. "The Best" says it all.
David S. Ware
Flight of i
(DIW Columbia 1992)The remarkable title track begins with pianist Matthew Shipp blocking out ominous chords. After a while Ware's tenor enters, sounding like a fax transmission coming in over the wire from afar. The tension simply builds from there. "There Will never Be Another You" is played with only limited improvisation. The soloists repeat the theme over and over, threatening to descend into chaos but returning from the brink to restate the melody. Ware's exaggerated vibrato pays homage to Wayne Shorter's approach to the tune. A most remarkable piece, it stays in your head.
Charles Gayle
Consecration
(Black Saint, 1993)Whereas Ware's is noise of a highly ordered kind, Gayle foregoes structure in favor of pure texture. The result is strangely soothing, perhaps in the fashion of a well-performed lobotomy. Gayle's quartet refuses to cut the listener any slack, the pieces often launching right into collective improvisation without the perfunctory melodic or thematic statement. William Parker's violin and cello provide the fingernails-on-the-chalkboard that nicely complement Gayle's wild-animal-in-ecstacy-or-agony. The Anti-Kenny G.
Charles Spearman
Double Trio
Mystery Project
(Black Saint, 1993)
Smokehouse
(Black Saint, 1994)There's more beauty and intensity in one minute randomly selected from either of these albums than you'll find in most whole CDs. Both albums feature extended pieces that play off the tensions between composition and improvisation, structure and chaos, individual and collectivity. The double trio format, with two saxophones, bass, piano, and two drummers, allows for an endlessly fascinating weaving of different voicings. The compositions, most by Spearman, keep it interesting, with continual shifts in tempo and instrumentation. Spearman and fellow saxophonist Larry Ochs produce the full range of post-Coltrane saxophone sounds, from fluid and sometimes even gentle, to fragile and tense, to overblowing cacophony. The degree of sympathy achieved between the musicians during the collective improvisations is extraordinary, and when the ensemble cranks into a full-tilt screaming session with both drums pounding out a meterless pulse, well, it's the berries!
Marilyn Crispell Trio
Highlights from the Summer
of 1992 Tour
(Music & Arts 1993)Marilyn Crispell plays with the brawn and brains of Cecil Taylor, and maybe a little more soul. This album features lots of rollicking, pounding attacks, punctuated with moments of quiet crystalline beauty. Once in a while the chaos breaks, and the band even swings a little...briefly. Reggie Workman on bass and Gerry Hemingway on drums are in perfect sync with Crispell.
Kenny Barron
Wanton Spirit
(Verve 1994)This is a near-perfect jazz album. Barron has mastered all the elements of mainstream jazz piano, from pounding block chords to impossible-sounding runs up and down the keyboard. Backed up by Roy Haynes and Charlie Haden...what more could you want?
Don Pullen
Random Thoughts
(Blue Note, 1990)Reviewers often characterize the late Pullen's style as "percussive," but on this trio album he exhibits his talents for melody and composition, as well as his instantly recognizable whipping glissandos during the improvisations. Every tune on this album is so beautiful and hooky that you will swear you've heard it before, even when you haven't. And if you're like me and like your piano a little on the percussive side anyway, well, not to worry, there's plenty of pounding. Pullen can also be heard on the wonderful Mingus Changes albums, and on David Murray's Shakill's Warrior.
Don Pullen
New Beginnings
(Blue Note 1989)Not quite as fantastic in my view as the follow-up, Random Thoughts, this Pullen piano trio recording is fantastic nonetheless. Accompanied by Gary Peacock on bass and Tony Williams on drums, all the Pullen drive and virtuosity are on display here. The best track, however, is unaccompanied: the "bonus" CD track, "Silence=Death," a 10-minute tour-de-force. The melody is lovely, and the improvisations range from growling clusters to spare tinkling glissandi over gentle chords. That such a pretty tune should have such a somber title is a bit of a mystery... perhaps just a habit Pullen picked up from his old mentor, Charles Mingus.
Tommy Flanagan
Thelonica
(Enja 1987)Tommy Flanagan is not a flashy pianist, but his subtle and beautiful improvisational style is instantly recognizable. Here he offers glorious interpretations of eight Monk tunes, plus one original in a decidedly Monkish mode. When I'm in the mood to hear some Monk, this is the one I usually go for.
Arthur Blythe
Lenox Avenue Breakdown
(CBS 1979)
Elaborations
(CBS 1982)Breakdown is finally available again on CD--I don't know about Elaborations. I have one on vinyl and the other on a cassette I made of a library copy (shame on me). Someone should release both again before mine wear out, because they are truly two of the most wonderful jazz albums of the last 20 years. Both albums make brilliant use of unconventional instrumentation. For Lenox Avenue Breakdown, Blythe assembled a group of all-star proportions, including James Newton on flute, James Blood Ulmer on guitar, Cecil McBee on bass, Bob Stewart on tuba, Guillermo Franco and Jack DeJohnette on percussion, and of course Blythe's distinctively piercing, quavering alto sax. The result is four swinging, Latin-tinged pieces that evoke the urban landscape as richly as Ellington's "Harlem Air Shaft." I like Elaborations even better, in particular Blythe's stunning duets with cellist Abdul Wadud, and Stewart's chugging bass lines on the tuba.
Gal singers Lucinda Williams
Lucinda Williams
(Rough Trade 1988)
Sweet Old World
(Chameleon 1992)Liz Phair
Exile in Guyville
(Matador 1993)Here are five outstanding country albums for those of you who can't stand Mary Chapin Carpenter (sorry, Mom). Well, Liz Phair ain't exactly country, but she does have a song about D-I-V-O-R-C-E, in addition to charming ditties like "Fuck and Run." There's not much mysterious about what makes these CDs so good: great songs, well-sung. Lucinda's 1988 album is my favorite of the five. If you've only heard the covers of "The Night's Too Long" and "Passionate Kisses," you know they're good, but you don't know how good until you hear Lucinda sing them. In "The Night's Too Long," empathy and ironic distance are held in perfect balance, as intimate and oppressive as a shirt soaked in sweat, as chilling as holding a bottle of Corona, "cold against your hand." Sweet Old World is just about as good. On My Life, Iris DeMent's beautiful hillbilly voice delivers a set of songs that are deeply personal and almost unrelentingly sad, softened only now and again by the consolations of family, faith, and personal pride. Amy Rigby's urban country pop shares the same sense of resignation to life's everyday sadnesses, but appeals to sarcasm as the best remedy. Favorite line: "I've got twenty questions: I'm gonna ask, and you're gonna tell" (to her philandering husband).
James Carter JC on the Set
(DIW Columbia 1993)
Jurassic Classics
(DIW Columbia 1994)
The Real Quietstorm
(Atlantic 1995)The best pure saxophone player to come along since, say, Sonny Rollins? The man's style is so confident, so arrogant, so macho, you want to dislike him, but he's just too damn good. Each of these albums starts with an audacious entry. Jurassic Classics hurtles out of the speakers at full speed, with a cliched but delightful warning blast on "Take the A Train." In a mellower tone, Carter begins The Real Quietstorm on baritone with a hoarse chromatic slide into "'Round Midnight." But my favorite is the yackety sax squawking that kicks off his first album, JC on the Set. Of the three CDs, the best overall is probably The Real Quietstorm. In addition to having a wonderfully arrogant title, it is simply a great album of jazz ballads and blues, showcasing Carter's talents as a multi-instrumentalist: he plays soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone saxes as well as bass flute and bass clarinet. Of course the tenor is his meat and potatoes, but there's no denying that he sounds impressive on all the other horns as well. I especially like the bass clarinet on "Deep Throat Blues" and the baritone sax on "'Round Midnight," which includes some nifty circular breathing. Buy all three of these in the same trip to your local record store: you'll save yourself the time and trouble of returning to the store after you listen to one of them. And while you're at it you may as well pick up last year's Conversin' With the Elders (Atlantic 1996). It doesn't always work as well for me as the first three, but by now you'll be a fan.
David Murray round-up
I was annoyed to see that a couple of jazz critics recently placed saxophonist Murray on their list of most overrated musicians. It may be that he has stretched himself a little thin--he puts out a lot of albums. But it seems preposterous to deny his talents as an improviser on tenor sax and bass clarinet, and as composer and band leader. I can't claim to have conducted a scientific survey of the many Murray CDs, but I like all the ones I own. Here are a few I've been playing lately. David Murray Big Band,
conducted by Lawrence
"Butch" Morris
(DIW Columbia 1991)
Shakill's Warrior
(DIW Columbia 1991)These two 1991 releases place Murray in two very different settings--a raucous modern jazz big band and a jump-blues quartet. The big band generates plenty of excitement; highlights include Joel Brandon's otherworldly whistling and Craig Harris's sputtering, high-energy trombone solos. Shakill's Warrior is the best Murray album of this bunch, with Don Pullen churning it up on the organ and Murray's blues-inflected tenor in top form. Ming's Samba
(CBS 1989)Here is a top-notch jazz quartet, featuring John Hicks on piano, Ray Drummond on the bass, and the great Ed Blackwell on drums. Murray's work on the title track and his bass clarinet solo on "Walter's Waltz" are especially fine. Dark Star [The Music of
the Grateful Dead]
(Astor Place 1996)The Grateful Dead must be right up there with the Doors in the pantheon of overrated bands, but there's no denying that they had good taste in jazz, and attracted a following of great jazz musicians. Bob Weir's presence doesn't add any more to this album than Jerry's did on Ornette Coleman's, but the Murray octet has some fun with these covers, especially the lengthy title track. Octet Plays Trane
(Justin Time 2000)Another fantastic album from the prolific Murray. The arrangements are intricate and striking, reflecting Murray's ongoing and deepening conversation with world music as well as the entire jazz tradition. Murray's playing is as compelling as ever, although even a fan will have to admit that you have heard similar solos from him before. The unsung hero is his longtime sideman Craig Harris on trombone. No one would accuse Harris of subtlety or beautiful tone: most of the time he is moaning, shouting, or growling. But no other horn player I know of blows with more energy or expressiveness.
Gwotet
(Justin Time 2004)There are lots of David Murray recordings out there, but many of the recent ones can be located along a continuum. At one end are the highly structured, carefully crafted ensemble recordings, following up on his work with the World Saxophone Quartet, such as his magnificent Octet Plays Trane. At the other, the high-energy sessions where a tight rhythm section gets a groove going, and David blows and blows and blows. Here's one of the latter, with help from Pharoah Sanders and the Guadaloupean percussionist Klod Kiavue. Relentless. Fantastic.
Twenty-four years later, it's still the prettiest rock music ever recorded. It seems odd to apply this adjective to an edgy punk-new wave band with a singer who can't quite carry a tune. But the ringing guitars and off-kilter melodies and rhythms, coupled with Tom Verlaine's naively poetic lyrics, are enthralling, and sound like nothing else before, or since. Don't ask me what the songs mean. Just cue up the title track, turn up the volume, sit back, and escape, as the band builds tension with repeated variations on a straightforward major scale, then releases it in a burst of aural fireworks.
John Scofield
A Go Go
(Verve 1998)This anemic album features Scofield’s guitar work over the cheesy rhythm-section stylings of Medeski, Martin, and Wood. There are some moments, but if you want to hear it done right, go to the source— say, Booker T, or Vol. 3 of Star Time, the James Brown boxed set. Scofield’s "Chank" is close enough to JB’s "Funky Drummer" that it must be considered homage rather than theft, but it’s much inferior nonetheless. A vastly more enjoyable rip-off of 70s soul-funk is The Beastie Boys’ The In Sound from Way Out! (1996). A comparison of the two albums is further confirmation that superior virtuosity is no guarantee of superior music.
The perfect music for the 11-year-old boy in all of us. I was beginning to wonder whether I would be able to tolerate any of Aidan's favorites, including the repulsive Limp Bizkit and the stupidly morose Papa Roach. But along come these guys: loud, fast, funny, and tuneful, and generally good-natured. Their current drummer, named Travis, is unbelievable. Good news for Dads and Moms everywhere. Remember Joey!
Frank Sinatra
Only the Lonely
(Capitol 1998, 1958)The reasons he remains the greatest popular vocalist of all time are amply demonstrated here. The intimate, conversational delivery of each song sometimes lulls you into believing you really could be sitting at the bar listening to his sad story. But the art snaps you out if it; every nuance of every note perfectly controlled, every vocal gesture intended to dig deeply into the melody and lyric for the most moving and beautiful effect. My only quibble is with the CD bonus track, "Where or When." Frank's interpretation is gorgeous until the last few measures, a good fit with the album's concept of understated melancholy. But for some reason Nelson Riddle chose to end this one on a false note, a stirring crescendo that breaks the album's unrelentingly solemn mood. Perhaps there's a good reason this one never found its way onto the original vinyl. You may want to reprogram for optimal listening pleasure.
Herbie Hancock
The Complete Blue Note
Sixties Sessions
(Blue Note 1998)Dancing somewhere between chamber jazz and proto-funk, this box set (6 CDs) captures some of the most beautiful jazz ever created. Like many box sets, it offers way more alternate takes than you probably want. But what amazing music, featuring Hancock's subtle, disarmingly melodic compositions and some of the great musicians of the period, including Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter, Joe Henderson, and the ever-astonishing Tony Williams on drums. The collection includes two versions of "Maiden Voyage," the one from the album of the same title being quite possibly the most gorgeous jazz recording ever made.
Herbie Hancock
Headhunters
(Columbia 1973)Like many jazz snobs, I dissed this back in the 70s: cheesy sell-out, where's the noise, where's the freedom, yada yada yada. Now all I can say is, surrender to the force. No, it's not in the same league as electric Miles, nor Herbie circa 1965, the tunes are indeed cheesy and go on a good bit longer than they ought, but it's still irresistible; that sound echoes and bounces through hip hop all the way into the 21st century, and presumably beyond.
Orlando Cachaito Lopez
(World Circuit 2001)Latin roots seem to lie deep within American funk, and in this great album funk returns the favor to this Buena Vista Social Club bassist. Where turntable scratching or samples might easily have sounded like a marketing afterthought tacked onto a Buena Vista album, Cachaito sucks them into his Afro-Cuban bass groove like iron filings to a magnet. The result is perfectly natural, relaxed but forward driven. A glimpse into one possible future of popular music in America... may it come to pass.
His scraggly voice sounds more like a sick bullfrog than ever (at the risk of insulting bullfrogs everywhere), but isn't that just what you want from Bob? The music ranges from tin-pan-alley style novelty tunes to ZZ-Top blues boogie. The lyrics are as poetic and funny as ever, and the band is fantastic. Who does he think he is, pop music's all-time greatest singer-songwriter? Oh yeah...
Gal Costa
Mina D'Agua Do Meu Canto
(BMG 1995)This most wonderful Brazilian singer offers renditions of 17 songs by two of pop music's greatest songwriters, Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso. I say this as someone who knows about four words of Portuguese, three of them food terms. My Brazilian friends used to tell me the lyrics are poetic and profound, and I take their word for it. Certainly the melodies are irresistable, and for Gal this is clearly a labor of love. Brazilian popular music takes much better to complex chord changes and rhythms than recent American pop, and the arrangements with strings don't cause you to cringe. There is an unfortunate attempt at samba-rap here, but otherwise this one is hard to beat.
If you don't love every song on this collection of Punjab-by-way-of-London beat music, check for a pulse. Favorites around my household include Bombay Talkie's "Chargiye" and Malkit Singh's "Boliyan," highly danceable numbers for which my kids have made up nonsense lyrics in English. My personal pick is the Safri Boys' "Par Linghade," with its snake-charmer saxophone riff and pulsing bassline. 72 minutes of folk-based music that seems to have been made to go with synthesized drum and bass.
New Age Music
for People Who Hate
New Age MusicYes, I count myself among those people, but even noise-lovers like me need something mellow and beautiful every now and then, if only to keep the spouse and kiddies from bouncing off the walls. Think of it as the Un-Yanni...
Hypnotic, simple grooves sung and played on acoustic guitar by two masterful Senegalese musicians. It qualifies as New Age because they throw in a few bird calls.
Harps, bagpipes, fiddles, jigs— it sure sorta sounds like Irish music. But since you know it comes from Spain, you imagine something Moorish in the drone of the pipes, the Middle-Eastern twang in the guitar line, the sinuous oboe. Maybe it’s even there.
Now here’s one that’s actually put out by a subsidiary of Windham Hill, so it must be New Age. At first, I thought Kane’s guttural, trembling vocal style just got in the way of the of the sweet Hawaiian guitar, but now I wish he sang on every track. The three times I’ve been to the islands I spent most of the time sightseeing, snorkeling, and hiking— not listening to local music— but nevertheless this music evokes Hawaii instantly. Even if it is transplanted California cowboy music.
Bill Evans Trio
Waltz for Debby
(Riverside 1987)Marilyn Crispell,
Gary Peacock,
and Paul Motian
Nothing ever was,
anyway.
(ECM 1997)Recorded 35 years apart, these albums have a couple of things in common: subtle, cerebral piano by two modern jazz masters, as well as the same drummer. Nothing on the Evans album ever gets much above the sound level of friendly conversation, but his angular phrasings betray an underlying nervous tension— the thinking-person’s lounge music. On the other hand, no one would hire Crispell as a lounge pianist, even if this is Crispell at her most contemplative. The Tayloresque hammering attack is almost entirely absent here— instead, she employs spare, single lines of notes with the pedal held down, so that the tones accumulate and fill up the music’s empty space. Motian, present on both albums, maintains an unobtrusive swirling pulse, punctuated by snare-drum volleys and cymbal taps.
From the stately, haunting guitar chords that open the first track, "Chan Chan," to the rousing vocal harmony that closes the last, "La Bayamesa," this album is a musical and historical adventure of unsurpassed beauty. The extraordinary Cuban musicians Ry Cooder assembled for these sessions, several in their 70s and 80s, exhibit more energy than most teenagers, but energy that is tempered by the wisdom of experience and a certain relaxed confidence. There is also a sense of exuberance and adventure, as if these musicians, only now being discovered and recognized by the larger world, are rediscovering themselves.
If you worry that it might "all sound the same," you're in for a shock. This is one of the most varied CDs of popular music I have heard. The songs range from proto-salsa sons to graceful boleros to U.S.-style novelty tunes. It is wonderful to find that while such American musicians as Dizzy Gillespie were absorbing Cuban rhythms and song forms, Cuban popular musicians were adapting American blues, gospel, and Tin Pan Alley to their own purposes, as in the jaunty "Orgullecida," sung by the 89-year-old Compay Segundo.
If pressed, I would tell you that my favorite musicians on the album are also the "stars" of Wim Wenders's wonderful film about the group, the singer Ibrahim Ferrer and pianist Rubén González. The story goes that González (in his late 70s) had given up the piano ten years earlier, due to arthritis. If so, we should all be so arthritic. As for Ferrer, see if "Dos Gardenias" doesn't bring a tear to your eye. On the screen, this vibrant, deeply religious, and (materially!) very poor man is simply riveting.
Finally, there are the songs themselves--rhythmically and harmonically intriguing, with lyrics that are poetic, romantic, bittersweet, and wistful. That these songs and the musicians who performed them have languished in obscurity in Havana is a crime; that they have been rediscovered is a blessing.
Chip Taylor &
Carrie Rodriguez
The Trouble with Humans
(Lone Star Records 2003)Yonkers meets Amarillo in this rootsy country duo. Chip Taylor's biggest claims to fame seem to be having written "Wild Thing" back in the 60s, along with being Jon Voight's brother. He deserves to be better known. At his best, Taylor will remind you of John Prine, who earns a mention in the first track on the album. The songs are wistful, sometimes funny, and Chip's voice is at least marginally better than Prine's. But the best thing he has going for him is Carrie Rodriguez, with her twangy vocals and clean, understated fiddle playing. I can't say the lyrics of every song work for me, but most of them do, and the album sounds terrific. They sound even better in person.
Jason Moran
Facing Left
(Blue Note 2000)
Black Stars
(Blue Note 2001)
Modernistic
(Blue Note 2002)Jason Moran is justly praised as one of the great jazz pianists playing these days. Facing Left and Black Stars feature his trio, with Tarus Mateen on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums, and with the wonderful Sam Rivers joining them on sax and flute on Black Stars. Moran's compositions and playing style reflect a wide array of influences, including especially Ellington and Jaki Byard, but also classical music, hip-hop, and soundtracks. I love both of these trio albums.
Moran's solo piano album, Modernistic, got some attention in part for his clever rendition of Afrika Bambaataa's influential hip-hop hit, "Planet Rock," in which Moran succeeds in making an acoustic piano buzz and clunk as though synthesized. This cut is good fun, but it confirmed my feeling that jazz has a lot more to offer hip-hop than vice versa. Rhythmically, jazz has got to swing, or at least flow, and it has proven nearly impossible to square this imperative with hip-hop's mechanical groove. But turning it around, hip-hop musicians have had no trouble at all sampling and assembling fragments of jazz into a compelling groove. If the rhythm is too loose or free, just chop it up and play it over and over.
The best piece on this album moves forward by looking backward a few decades: an up-dated interpretation of the old James P. Johnson stride piano piece, "You've Got to Be Modernistic." It shows off Moran's real strength, the cerebral re-working of great material drawn from the full span of jazz tradition.
Bach, J.S.
6 Suiten fur Violoncello solo
Pierre Fournier, cello
(Polydor, 1961; Deutsche
Grammophon 1996)The mystery of Bach is that music that appears on the face of it so mechanical in design can achieve so much beauty and emotional depth. Nowhere is this more evident than in the music for solo violin and solo cello. Between the two, you have the violin music soaring toward the heavens, and the cello growling and moaning down here on earth. I give the nod to the cello, but I'm thankful we have both.
Drive-by Truckers
Decoration Day
(New West 2003)Poetic, heart-felt, depressing, whiskey-swilling, kick-ass southern rock. A little bit of Flannery O'Connor, a lot of Lynyrd Skynyrd, and it sounds great. The sympathetic portrayal of sibling incest in the opening song segues beautifully into a grinding rant against farm repossession. The very next song opens with the sound of a pull-top, and when they sing "Hell no, I ain't happy, but I ain't too crappy at all," who are you to question it?
From the first note, the rhythm section transports you back to that classic 1970s Al Green Memphis groove. Al sounds great, and if age has made it just a little harder for him to hit the top end of his squeal, he still has everything else, from the come-hither falsetto on down to the basement growls and moans. Maybe the songs are not quite as great as his best, but close enough that nobody else can touch him.
I have some trouble getting past the first of this album's two tracks, because after the 27 minutes of "Right Off" I am usually inclined either to play it over again or just sit in awed silence. Jazz-rock hardly seems like an apt term for music so intense and exhilerating. "Right Off" is really a suite in four or five movements, based on a drum and bass groove that rocks more than it swings.
Miles is fantastic, dodging and weaving like the boxer for whose story this soundtrack was created, but the album belongs to John McLaughlin. Mixing Hendrix with jazz chords and a mindboggling repetitive discipline, there is no other guitar performance I can think of that comes close. It's no wonder the leader gives him the last solo. On top of all that you get Herbie Hancock with an organ solo that sounds like a saw tearing through metal (in a beautiful way), and Billie Cobham pounding away in time with your heart racing.
Miles clearly identified with Jack Johnson as a kind of proto-black nationalist hero/outlaw, and the anger and pride is all there in the music. Ironic that it was produced by a decidedly interracial band using musical motifs that draw as much from the white rock bands of the 60s as the African-American tradition in which Miles played such a seminal role.
An essential album.
Count Basie:
Ken Burns Jazz
(Verve 2000)Way back when, I left the turntable running and nearly carved a big hole through one of Dad's Basie LPs. Dad preferred Ellington and Goodman, but can music possibly get any better than this?
An essential album if you don't have these tunes somewhere else.
The Bad Plus
These Are the Vistas
(Columbia 2002)This is very clever chamber music masquerading as a jazz piano trio. The cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is especially clever, the cover of Aphex Twin sounds amazingly like Aphex Twin, and the playing throughout is damn good.
An inessential album.
Girl Group Greats
(Rhino 2001)Of the 20 songs here, all but two are simply fantastic. You know "Heat Wave" and "Chapel of Love" by heart, and you can can never get sick of them, but if you're like me you may never have heard the selections by the Exciters or the mysterious Jaynetts, beautiful and thrilling both. And where else but in America could a girl band named the Toys convert a Bach minuet to 4/4 time and create a little pop gem worthy of the old man's melody?
David Murray and the
Gwo-Ka Masters
Gwotet
(Justin Time 2004)There are lots of David Murray recordings out there, but many of the recent ones can be located along a continuum. At one end are the highly structured, carefully crafted ensemble recordings, following up on his work with the World Saxophone Quartet, such as his magnificent Octet Plays Trane. At the other, the high-energy sessions where a tight rhythm section gets a groove going, and David blows and blows and blows. Here's one of the latter, with help from Pharoah Sanders and the Guadaloupean percussionist Klod Kiavue. Relentless. Fantastic.
Jenny Scheinman
Shalagaster
(Tzadik 2004)This jazz-klezmer-tango-world-folk mishmash is pleasing, not least because the superb Myra Melford is at the keyboards. But am I being a curmudgeon by complaining that there is something just a little too... too... NPR about the whole thing?
Mahavishnu Orchestra
Birds of Fire
(Sony 1973, 2000)Loud, fast, virtuosic, pretentious, bombastic, trippy. In that generally awful genre known as fusion, they were among the first, and probably the best. Aspiring to transcendence, they sometimes achieved it.
BeBop spoken here
(Proper Records 2000)You are hereby ordered to send $23 to Amazon and acquire this 4-CD box of 97 bebop recordings made during 1943-49. Parker, Gillespie, and Powell are well represented, but there's much much more. Miles and Diz you probably know, but the other trumpeters will blow you away too: Fats Navarro, Howard McGhee, Kenny Dorham. Throughout, the music is searching and bracing: everyone involved seemed to believe they were reinventing American music, which of course they were. And at 25 cents per tune, you are doing better than you could at iTunes.
Albert Ayler
Live in Greenwich Village: The
Complete Impulse Recordings
(GRP 1998)Recorded mostly in 1966 and 1967, these live sessions are stunning. As someone who has always enjoyed Albert Ayler's playing for its indescribably rich tone and sense of high-energy danger, but who hadn't listened to him much in a while, I found many revelations in these tracks. For one thing, the music is far more variable than I remembered it. It's easy to think of Ayler's music as following a single paradigm: the childlike, folksy melodies, played as if by a drunken marching band, leading into chaotic overblown solos and frenzied collective improvisations. But the rhythms, styles, and textures shift a lot from one piece to another: funeral marches, gospel romps, unhinged Latin grooves. Don Ayler's playing on trumpet is every bit as powerful and riveting as Albert's. The music is as fresh and full of possibilities as it was nearly 40 years ago. Maybe most surprising, it is beautiful.
My one complaint about the recording is the terribly unbalanced mix, with the Aylers loud and out front, and the strings– Joel Freedman on cello and Michel Sampson on violin– barely audible at times. This is a shame: it's hard to believe that it sounded this way to the Village audiences, or that Ayler intended the strings to fade into the background on what are clearly collective improvisations, if not solos. Maybe the thought was that the music was challenging enough to most jazz listeners without subjecting them to the hacking and shrieking of the violin at Ayler volume. But I'd love to hear a remix with a proper balance restored. My ears can take it.
Dmitry Shostakovich
24 Preludes and Fugues
Op 87
Konstantin Scherbakov,
piano (Naxos 2000)These 48 little pieces, averaging under 3 minutes each, were inspired by Shostakovich's study of Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier. Introspective and a little mysterious, they are very tonal and almost old-fashioned, yet somehow utterly modern at the same time. Listeners who know Shostakovich for his brash and ironic public orchestral music will be surprised by the reserve and sincerity of these pieces. They are also endlessly fascinating and beautiful. Scherbakov's wonderful touch does them justice in this bargain recording.
Gabriel Fauré
Piano Quartets
Domus (Hyperion 1993)
Ax, Stern, Laredo, Ma
(Sony 1992)August is chamber music month around my house, thanks to the Music@Menlo festival. I'm not an expert by any means, but it seems to me that nothing I have heard exceeds these Fauré quartets in terms of sheer sonic beauty. They combine soaring melodies with rich "impressionist" harmonies and plenty of rhythmic drive. The Ax etal recording obviously features an all-star group, and it's lovely, but for some reason I like the Domus recording even a little better. Maybe the single CD I'd pack in case of shipwreck.