Tuesday, November 6, 2007

think big

Symphony No. 9
Gustav Mahler

I don't think I've been explicit here about my feelings surrounding orchestral music. It's an odd thing, which maybe has its roots in going to too many classical-music concerts, but on average I find chamber music about 100 times more compelling than music for orchestra. Yes, there are lots and lots of exceptions to this rule, but generally I'd buy a ticket for a string quartet concert before I'd pay to see the symphony. This is true for music of any era and any style.

There's just such an immediacy to chamber playing, for one thing. The interaction among the performers, the drama between "characters," the more intimate connection between players and audience. Plus, chamber music generally takes as its subjects things that are human-scale. And even when the ideas are big ones, they are by necessity taken on in a way that mimics the way we think and live and struggle and triumph as individual beings.

But sometimes I get in the mood for something big and monumental, it's true. Something that speaks to us as communities, cities, societies, civilizations. Something that addresses the history and grand complexities of human endeavor. And usually that's when I turn to Wagner or Mahler.

It's hard to imagine that this kind of project can be done better than how it's done in Mahler 9, really. This is music that reaches for the sublime at every turn - everywhere you feel the composer's anxiety about whether his craft is up to the huge task, and yet everywhere he succeeds. The spirit of the individual is subsumed by the larger picture, or perhaps expanded to map itself onto the larger picture.

It's a sprawling work - the first movement alone is probably longer than all of Beethoven's 9th - with moments of lush beauty, moments of dark introspection, moments of terror, moments of stark despair, and moments of pure light. But though it's a triumph merely as a collection of moments, it's also far more than that. This is a piece of music that rewards deep listening, and having heard it probably 100 or so times in my life, even owning a copy of the score, I can honestly say that there are new mysteries that are opened to me each time I listen.

Nothing is simple here, or rather anything that seems simple is either undercut or reveals itself to be teeming with hidden facets. It's always hard to talk about music without using metaphor, but especially so with pieces like this. I find mind reaching for ways to explain what draws me to the music, and I keep coming up with literary or sociological tropes like those above. That doesn't occur as often with the lean, focused music I listen to more often.

It's a testament to the work's complexity that, after hearing several, I still have no favorite recording or performance. I checked, and I actually own three recordings, oddly enough. Here's the one I listen to most often.

get it on itunes:

Bruno Walter & Wiener Philharmoniker - Great Artists of the Century - Bruno Walter - Mahler: Symphony No. 9

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Charlie Haden and the vinyl mindset

Charlie Haden
Quartet West, 1987

After a long break, I'm back blogging again. Among a million other changes to my life, I recently moved into a new place, with room for a real stereo. And that means being able to play actual records for the first time in a number of years. Funny how listening to something I haven't heard in a while can instantly forge connections to my past, and funny how having all this "new" music around mutes my consumer impulse to go out and buy new stuff.

[On a side note - I really wish I could go back in time and spend just a little more money in the Greenwich Village Tower Records in 2002. Basement chock full of vinyl that was being liquidated. Von Karajan's complete Beethoven symphonies: $3. Pristine copy of Ornette's Free Jazz: $1.50. Die Walküre: $4. White Album: $2. Obscure King Sunny Ade recording: $1. It was kind of crazy and unreal to browse down there, where Adam Smith's invisible hand created a record-collector's paradise.]

Anyway, I'm quite enjoying all the rituals of the vinyl record - carefully lifting and lowering the needle, listening to the hiss and pop (which adds texture and constantly reminds your ears that it's a recording), appreciating or cringing at the big cover art, reading the lyrics sometimes written on sleeves, smiling at the duality in the structure of a two-sided album, which some exploited and some didn't. It's a load of fun.

Which brings me to this album by Charlie Haden. One of my favorites, bought when I was a senior in high school, I believe. An avid jazz fan at that point, I really didn't listen to any other style of music for a couple of years. And since I was a bassist, this was a natural record to want. But even if I didn't, there's a serious selling point here: "Hermitage."

This track is, simply put, radiant. The tune is by Pat Metheny, about whom I can be hot and cold, but this recording really makes a case for "Hermitage" as a jazz standard. As played by the quartet (including Haden on bass and the great Billy Higgins on drums), it's atmospheric, sweet-and-sour, seemingly in constant motion yet standing still at the same time. The players explore emotional places that you wouldn't think the tune could go, especially true in Ernie Watts' sax solo, pushing at the seams of a composition that wants to be understated, and dragging the rest of the ensemble with him. It's hard to put my finger on just what makes it so memorable and great, so I suggest you listen to it yourself, and let the mood of the piece settle over you and pull you along, maybe break your heart just a tiny bit and rescue it again right after.

Other great stuff on the album - a version of "Body and Soul" wherein the main melody is never quite played, but hinted at. "Taney County" is one of Haden's countryfied jazz compositions, ridiculously simple yet so compelling, and it's just him alone with his bass. There's quite a range of approaches in this album that is nominally a mainstream straight-ahead jazz disc. There's warmth and heart in the more "out" playing, as if the players are remembering a moment in time together, or having a conversation about a shared emotional experience.

On the liner notes for one of the Quartet West albums (not sure if it's this one or "Haunted Heart"), Haden talks about evoking the spirit of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. Some of that spirit really does come through - the feeling that everyone is widespread and disconnected for the most part, and human attachments form on the basis of unexpected things, leading to unforseen places. Quite remarkable to be able to say things like that with sound.

Get it on itunes:
Charlie Haden - Quartet West

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

l'Histoire du soldat

The Soldier's Tale
Igor Stravinsky, 1918

This is one of my favorite Stravinsky works, probably the first piece of chamber music of his that I'd ever heard. I remember studying it as an undergrad and getting so caught up in its rhythmic world. It's a piece of music that combines several of my favorite things: a drama expressed in musical rhetoric, a non-standard instrumental ensemble, integration of the spoken word into music, meticulously crafted overlapping ostinati, interpretations of popular music styles, etc. There's the sense of a finely-wrought mathematical jigsaw puzzle, and simultaneously a very organic instinctual feeling for cadence and rhythm which is uniquely beautiful to me. Stravinsky's sense of pacing, both on the small scale and the large, are so precisely right that it makes my hair stand on end.

So there's a story (hence the word "Tale" in the title). It's a little parable about a soldier matching wits with the Devil. The three voices (the soldier, the devil, and a narrator) don't sing, but speak their words, sometimes in an exacting rhythm, and sometimes in ordinary speech, always over musical accompaniment. With good actors who also have a fairly sophisticated musical sense, it can be very compelling. There are long stretches of purely instrumental music as well, some of it angular and deliberate, some of it lush and fluid, all of it engaging. Stravinsky writes idiosyncratically for the instruments in the ensemble (2 brass instruments, 2 woodwinds, 2 strings, plus 1 percussionist = brilliant concept), teasing out combinations and sonorities that seem ludicrous in theory, yet are beautiful in actuality.

The recording that I enjoy is one that has big-name actors preforming the spoken roles: Ian McKellen as the narrator, Sting (yep, that one) as the soldier, and Vanessa Redgrave in a bit of excellent casting, as the devil. They all chew up the auditory scenery, overacting and emoting up a storm. Redgrave in particular seems to be having a ball. But this is a melodrama after all, and for me it's infectious - I have fun right along with them. But despite the star-power of the actors, to me the real gem is the conductor, Kent Nagano. He's one of my favorite conductors overall, and probably my all-time favorite conductor of Stravinsky's works. Not many can make the adjustments necessary to direct a smaller ensemble like this, but he is right there in it, making the music breathe and sparkle and meditate and gallop. It's quite an accomplishment in itself, and of course it helps that he's got some amazing instrumentalists too.

So this recording is a treat, and the piece of music an essential one. You really feel like you've been brought into a special universe of musical and dramatic relationships that can only exist in this defined space - perfect for what is after all an allegorical tale.

Sadly, itunes doesn't have this recording!
but here's a link to another that looks good:


Rolf Schulte - Stravinsky: Histoire du Soldat Suite, Renard (Vol. 7)

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Youssou N'Dour

The Lion
Youssou N'Dour, 1989

Ah the late-1980s. The "World Beat" trend had pretty much run its course, and it would be another half-decade or so before NPR began bestowing its Oprah-like blessings upon third-world flavor-of-the-month albums. This was the age of top-40 superstars exploring other musical cultures in order to grow as artists, man.

I'm being too sarcastic, because actually there was a lot of great music from that pocket of time, and because once you get past the colonial aspect of it all, really being exposed to music from around the world is a net positive for everyone listening. I wonder if Bush et al. would have a different understanding of America's place in world works if they'd been the right age to own, say, that one Ladysmith Black Mambazo album that was in every college dorm-room tape-deck right after Paul Simon's Graceland came out.

I'm also being too hard on myself, because like many others I got my introduction to the music of the great Senegalese singer Youssou N'Dour from a Peter Gabriel album.

The Lion was the N'Dour album marketed to cash in on the duet "Shaking the Tree" which appeared on Gabriel's iconic So. And I bought it. And I liked it. And getting on 20 years later I still like it.

I'm no expert in the music called mbalax, but I do have a lot of appreciation for it. The music, whether in fast or slow tempo, has a percolating energy that derives from the overlapping polyrhythmic textures (the same kind of dynamic that you might find in Afrocuban musics or funk, for example, but of course with different kinds of rhythms). The instrumentation usually includes the kind of percussion I associate with Malian griot tradition, layered with a standard drum kit, and then the electric guitars, keyboards, and horn section one might find in afropop. The bass lines in particular are delightfully syncopated and keep the music pushing forward. N'Dour's voice often just sails above it all, winding and stretching and expanding. But just as often he dips down into a growl or a declamatory cadence.

I find that the transitions between these vocal "states" form some of the most compelling moments in the music. It's as if he's hinting at a path between the base guttural body and the soaring unlimited spirit. This is very dramatic in the title track, a rocking number that has one of those little pre-chorus "ramp up" sections that's so perfectly suited to its function it should be used as a model in songwriting classes. "Bamako" has a slithery chord progression over lots of talking drum - N'Dour sings on this one with a presence that's somehow bombastic and intimate at once (still trying to figure out how he manages that). I think my favorite of all the songs is "Bes," which is a beautiful minor-key 12/8 soundscape for a while. Then when the female back-up vocalists come in with their gently rising "oooh"s and the bass starts to pop a little, it transforms into something hauntingly gorgeous. There's even a real bridge section that keeps you on the edge of your seat waiting for the return of the chorus - but when we get there the backup vocalists launch into this little counterpoint on the words "don't forget me," which is somehow all the more intense for its control and reserve.

I'd be remiss not to mention lyrics here. N'Dour sings in Wolof (a Senegalese language), French, and English, often blending all three in a single song. Liner notes have translations of the lyrics into both English and French, and that's where I discovered that the song "My Daughter/Sama Doom" is basically a reworking of Yeats' "A Prayer for My Daughter," with a refrain that is achingly full of parental anxiety: "My daughter, do not follow your heart."

get it on itunes:

Youssou N'dour - The Lion

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Miles Davis Tribute

Traveling Miles
Cassandra Wilson, 1999

So this is one of those albums that sort of creates a world unto itself. Something like how a good novel can pull you into its universe, a place that's textured and deep. Actually, maybe more like a collection of connected short stories by the same storyteller - Cassandra Wilson as Sheherazade, perhaps?

Not that these are narrative songs, really, but they all generally travel through emotional spaces over time. If you've heard Cassandra Wilson before, you know about her expressive smoky alto, her understated and studied interpretations of songs. The arrangements are stars right alongside her voice, and they are quite varied on this album, though all growing from a soil that I tend to think of as an "M-Base sound." Tempos are generally slow, as befits her voice.

The album is conceived as a tribute to Miles Davis, and I think it's far and away the best such tribute I've heard. It works well because she chooses songs that she likes from the Davis canon, without trying to be particularly comprehensive or trying to provide a profile of one of his stylistic periods. She freely adds her own lyrics to instrumental tunes; in fact, a number of the songs are her originals.

My favorite of the original songs is "Right Here, Right Now," which is expansive, meditative, and groovy all at once. "Run the Voodoo Down" is a great funk workout for the band (much shorter than Miles' original), anchored by Dave Holland's inhumanly in-the-pocket bass and her lyrics are a perfect homage to the spirit of the tune - there's even a second version of this song at the end of the album, with Anjelique Kidjo guesting. When the two singers hold those tight major seconds, letting them stretch out over the contrapuntal percolating rhythm section, it's one of the most intensely sexy things. Makes the corners of my eyes scrunch up.

"Seven Steps to Heaven" is just a bebop party, plain and simple. "Never Broken," her interpretation of "E.S.P.," retains that off-kilter unease of the original, in a very different context, which is an amazing achievement in itself.

"Time After Time" is in many ways my favorite on the album. Yep, it's that Cyndi Lauper song, covered by lots of people in the last 20 years (including Miles Davis, which is why it's here). This is the best one, hands down. I rarely essentialize, but there ya go - the best. Heartbreaking. Adding about 60 layers of meaning that you didn't think the song could possibly carry. I caught Cassandra Wilson on tour in NY once and she brought Ms. Lauper out to sing it as a duet with her- it's one of my top concert memories. Wish the song could have been twice as long, if not three times.

One of the gems in my vocal jazz collection, for sure.

itunes link:

Cassandra Wilson - Traveling Miles

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Spillane

Spillane
John Zorn, 1986

Well this was the first John Zorn music I ever heard - think I bought the album my first year in college. Definitely a great one for me to start with, I have to say, for lots of reasons. The album has three pieces of music on it, but I'm just going to talk about the title track.

First and foremost, Spillane is a musical exploration of the milieu, dynamics, and themes of Mickey Spillane's hardboiled detective stories. I have to say that I've never been a big fan of Spillane's writing, but obviously Zorn is. He takes what's basically tawdry derivative prose and uses it as a jumping off point for his prodigious sonic imagination.

It's one of Zorn's pastiche-style pieces, made up of a few dozen small vignettes, stitched together. Some bits are purely atmospheric soundscapes, setting a scene (rain and windshield wipers, footsteps echoing in an alley). Some are genre music of one kind or another (roadhouse blues, 50s West Coast jazz). Some are soundtrack cues in the 70s-80s Hollywood style (think synthesizer arpeggios). There are also a handful of recitations of lines from Spillane novels. More often than not, several of these things are happening simultaneously.

There seems to be an overall direction to the piece that I can only describe as dramatic. Trying to find a plot in it doesn't seem fruitful, but as a representation of fluid emotional states, or perhaps memories of emotional states, it really works for me. There are a number of musical elements that help it hang together as a whole as well, which is one reason that I think it's more successful (for me) than alot of Zorn's other work in this vein.

Really fun and beautiful piece of work, with top-notch downtown NY players, I might add. It's something to listen to with no other distractions, to let it pull you into its world for a little while. Like film that way.

itunes link:
John Zorn - Spillane

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Pithecanthropus Erectus

Pithecanthropus Erectus
Charles Mingus, 1956

I've been a Mingus fan since I was a teenager. Partly it's because I'm a bassist and composer, so really your choices are Mingus or Bottesini if you want to idolize someone. But beyond that, Mingus is a looming inescapable figure because he travelled his own path (to put it mildly) in his life and in his art. I won't get into biographical details here - got to save something for when I write about the other records I own, right? - but suffice it to say that he was known for being a difficult personality, and he had his own set of musical priorities that didn't always coincide with the "mainstream" of the jazz world.

Mingus wrote and played music that spoke quite directly about how he lived in the world, and that is a pretty extraordinary thing. He found innovative and startling ways to express ideas/themes from sociology, politics, and psychology through music. Not to say that there's a secret hidden message in everything, but he was someone who wasn't afraid to imbue extramusical meaning in his work, overtly or covertly. I really dig that.

And really there's no better example than the title track of this album. "Pithecanthropus Erectus" is about the evolution and the self-destruction of our species, according to Mingus' own liner notes, but it's so much more than that too - a musical essay on race, on hubris, on xenophobia. I know it sounds ridiculous to assign that much connotation to 10 minutes of music played by a jazz quintet, but I swear to you it's all in there. The opening of the piece has sudden changes of dynamics from soft to loud and back again, and these relentless repeated tones in the bass. Always makes me feel like Mingus is trying to foment revolution (or at least thumb his nose at the establishment) in those repeated notes: "Oh, did you want me to play a slick, polished walking bass line for you? Well fuck you, I'm sitting here pounding away on this one pitch till I'm good and ready to switch to the next one!" The musical ideas get opened up and turned inside out by the players. The pianist Mal Waldron, a brilliant player, is in fine form on this tune, in no small way responsible for the overall tone of the piece.

The version of "A Foggy Day" is lovely, emerging out of "street noise" re-created by the players, and subsumed by the sounds again at the end. Really nicely done, especially when you hear the main melody of the tune and bits and pieces will remind you of the foghorns, sirens, and car horns that opened the track.

And I want to talk about "Love Chant" just a little, though maybe I should put this into another separate post. This piece has always been mysterious to me. It's big and sprawling, covering a lot of ideas, and in many ways it seems the most loosely constructed of the pieces on the record. I can't say that I have a real handle on what it's up to, but one thing that comes across pretty strongly is that it really is about love. In particular, the two saxophonists (Jackie McLean on alto and J.R. Monterose on tenor) play lines that slither and slide around each other quite frequently. The mood changes on a dime, the harmony becoming very diffuse for long stretches, then starting to coalesce for a while, then dispersing again. It's really amazing stuff, sometimes keeping me on the edge of my seat with tension and anticipation, and sometimes beguiling me with pure beauty (beauty of the groove or of the moment). There is some really incredible playing on this tune, and even if I don't always know quite what they're up to, the sense that the players are all in the same headspace, working together to communicate some concept or dynamic through shared improvisation, is evident in every note. Even when only one instrument is playing for a while, I feel like the whole ensemble is part of what's happening.

There is wisdom and grace and humor and pain here. Music to listen to deeply, to enjoy on its surface, and to reflect upon in quiet moments afterward.

itunes link:
Charles Mingus - Passions of a Man - The Complete Atlantic Recordings

Monday, June 4, 2007

Ten Song Demo

Ten Song Demo
Rosanne Cash, 1996

So this is just a real nice album, full of well-crafted tunes in the Nashville songwriting tradition, but in sparse stripped-down arrangements, mostly very downtempo. The lyrics are personal, emotional, often political, and unabashedly, beautifully feminist throughout.

The story of the album (though who knows if it's made up or true, or some combination?) is that Cash wrote a set of songs for her next album, and did the usual next step of recording a "demo" version of the songs with just the bare-bones instrumentation. And the A&R person at the record company, either moved by the artistry or moved by the bottom line, decided to release a cleaned-up version of the demos, rather than bring in a full band and big-name engineers to record a mainstream album. So what you get is Cash's expressive voice, accompanied most of the time by just acoustic guitar or piano (on a couple tracks another instrument is added, or maybe a contrapuntal guitar line overdubbed or something).

However it came about, thank goodness. The songs stand on their own, clean, bright, raw, vulnerable, and quirky - with no string sections or studio wizardry to get between singer and listener. Personally, I can't imagine enjoying an overproduced studio album half as much as I enjoy this.

The highlight for me is a song called "Child of Steel," which is one of those "advice for children" songs, but decidedly unsaccharine, outlining the relationship between parent and child by means of the shifting melodic profile as much as by the lyrics themselves. "If I Were a Man" is a breezy country-shuffling waltz that pokes fun at the absurdity of power relationships. Odd how the lyrics here remind me much more of a band like R.E.M. than any contemporary country act.

She fumbles on a couple songs: "Bells and Roses" sounds forced to me, like the words were calling for a different melody. And oops, the message in "The Summer I Read Colette" is excellently wrought, but I guess nobody recognized that the melody was (accidentally I'm sure) lifted from a song that couldn't be more inappropriate: Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf."

There are some other really nice songs, including "Western Wall," which is obviously a favorite of hers, as she's recorded it on at least two other albums that I know of. "List of Burdens" would have been the rocking radio-friendly lead single in the alternate universe of a major studio album, and "Take My Body" is such a heartbreaking performance as to be almost unlistenable (I often wonder what a Mary J. Blige cover of that song might sound like, though).

It's surely a melancholy album, but I find that it fits more of my moods than just that. It's a set of songs which remind me that one pop-music ideal hasn't died: that of the singer-songwriter who can make the personal universal and vice-versa.

itunes link:
Roseanne Cash - 10 Song Demo

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Ravel Quartet

String Quartet in F
Maurice Ravel, 1904
peformed by the Daedalus String Quartet on "Sibelius, Stravinsky, Ravel"

So this is the first time I've reviewed something on this blog that's been released very recently, but I had to make an exception for this marvellous disc. The Daedalus String Quartet are just phenomenal - I've heard them in concert several times, and often wondered how their energetic, deeply studied, passionate, dramatic playing would come across on disc. Well now I know - and it's a wonderful transition for them into the world of recordings.

I've said here before that I prefer live performances to recordings for a thousand reasons, but it's great to hear a disc like this one, in which (1) the personality of the group really comes out, (2) the pieces of music are represented with scintillating performances that you want to listen to over and over, and (3) the recording serves as a "calling card" to get you out to the next live show. I don't think there are many chamber groups that can rival this one, and that's not praise I dish out lightly. So while listening to this CD doesn't bring me to the verge of tears (I'm not ashamed to admit more than one concert of theirs has done just that), there's no doubt that this is playing at the highest level, interpreting some great music.

I hadn't heard the Sibelius quartet before this, and it's a beautiful piece that I want to hear more of. The Stravinsky "Three Pieces" is a classic, and is stunningly played. But I really want to talk about the Ravel quartet here.

Quite simply, this is one of my favorite string quartets ever. I dream of writing music like this. Deep, gorgeous, playful, balancing the raw and the calculated. This is music that sweeps you along, and pauses to reflect at just the right moments, music that has a humanity that is so personal as to be near-harrowing, and a rhetorical brilliance that serves to show it off.

And this performance. Well I don't even know how if I can find words, when it comes down to it (it's like dancing about architecture, after all). Listening to this recording showed me things about the music that I never knew were there. And not just little things, but tremendous things that make the whole quartet mean something different to me than it ever did. They play with a propulsion and grace that floors me, and the fluid, ever-shifting relationships among the players is part of what's genius here. There are these big overarching connections among the movements that come across so clearly (yet not emphasized in an "obvious" way). I think that this piece is a perfect match for the ensemble, frankly. I can't think of it being done better.

Yes I am waxing rhapsodic, but this deserves it. Give a listen.

Friday, May 25, 2007

J-pop don't stop

Family Dancing
Coaltar, 1996

This album is just really fun, and part of the fun is that it's pretty hard to describe. Like a lot of my favorite Japanese bands, these kids (and they definitely act like kids) mix and match styles to their hearts' content, forging cross-genre connections and making no attempt to be true to any perceived "tradition." After all, we're talking about top-40 pop music here, not indiginous folk cultures, right?

I guess a good hip-alt-weekly description of the band's sound might be "what if Pennywise had a horn section?" but that really doesn't do it justice. The two lead vocalists play trumpet and sax, so they'll add some interesting flourishes to what's essentially uptempo punk.

Or is it? The band will break down into disco-hued funk now and then as well (often showing off the bassist's chops), or throw in a kazoo solo, or sing an unadulterated U2-style anthemic chorus that will dissolve back into choppy, spitty, punk exasperation again. As I said above, it really has the flavor of kids who don't know any better just messing around, playing the stuff they like to play. The youthful energy is really infectious.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the transcendent little pop track on the album, called "Mr. Sunshine." I don't think I could ever get enough of this song - one of the few tunes I can think of that repeats the chorus just the correct number of times, not too many nor too few. This song is quite clearly what mid-90s Shibuya-denizens thought the Summer of Love sounded like, and the fact that it's a lens trained on an imaginary musical past doesn't make it any less groovy. A little slightly-out-of-tune acousting guitar strumming, a tight bongo beat, a simpering falsetto teenager belting out "hey hey hey hey, Mister Sunshiiiine! hey hey hey hey, Mister Freeeedom!" I'm not sure phony nostalgia gets any better than that, unless it's when the drums and bass kick in and the slightly-flat back-up vocals begin to wail "I'm free." You really want to believe in this alternative universe, and that's the magic of this song.

No itunes link for this one, I'm afraid, and good luck finding it anywhere. If anyone knows of a website or some other locus of information, hope you'll let me know (and as a side note, this is not the same group as another Japanese band called "Coaltar of the Deepers," though with a name like that I'm quite interested in listening to them as well!)

Friday, May 11, 2007

Maiden Voyage

Maiden Voyage
Herbie Hancock, 1965

One of the nicer things about this project of listening to all my records is that I get to do some deep listening to music that I know quite well already. That's certainly the case with this classic album, which I listened to incessantly about 20 years ago, to the point of having it almost memorized note for note. I tried to listen with a "blank slate" mentality as much as possible, and found it very rewarding.

This is just a lovely album in a thousand ways. Sort of a "concept album," but in the loosest way, the titles of the five cuts all related to a sea voyage. There is amazing playing from everyone throughout (and what a line-up it is, too), but this is Herbie's album and he is definitely the most sublime, whether soloing or ensemble playing or comping. Just the different harmonizations that he gives "Little One" each time the main tune comes back are brilliant.

Herbie Hancock shows himself to be a really great composer here. People talk alot about the "sustained chords" in the music on this album, and it's true that they contribute a lot to the mood, but there's so much more going on as well. For one thing, the counterpoint is so smartly and beautifully worked out - obviously this was something which was talked about among the players too, because the rhythmic relationships unravel and restitch effortlessly during solos.

There are masterful shifts of mood in "Eye of the Hurricane" and "Survival of the Fittest," again showing what makes jazz composition different from what we normally think of as a classical composition process. It's not just writing a head and playing through the changes - there's a certain amount of control over just how the group improvises together as well. This isn't so easy to put into words or notate on paper, but when you listen for it, it's definitely there.

There are dozens of beautiful moments scattered throughout the album ... the melting of Herbie's solo into Tony Williams' on "Survival of the Fittest," the opening flourish of George Coleman's solo on "Maiden Voyage," and that rock-solid rhythm-section groove on "Dolphin Dance," just for starters. Gems all the way through.

itunes link:
Herbie Hancock - Maiden Voyage

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Half and Half

Soul Disguise
Cesar Rosas, 1999

I'm not sure exactlywhy I picked this album to review instead of one of the many Los Lobos records I have. For one thing, I suppose it gives me the opportunity to talk about some of my favorite kinds of music-group dynamics: the tense duality. You see, Los Lobos derive quite a bit of their greatness from the balancing of opposites, or so it seems to me. I'm oversimplifying to a very large degree here, but in the band, David Hidalgo (and to a lesser extent Louis Perez) represents restrained pristine beauty and devotion to folk tradition, while Cesar Rosas is wearing dark shades and rocking out, loud and dirty. There are plenty of other examples of dualities like this in popular music, another recent example being the fiercely intellectual Chuck D and the trickster-clown Flava Flav.

In any case, with that in mind, I picked this disc up from a Tower Records in Greenwich Village, not sure exactly what to expect when Rosas was let out on his own. I mildly enjoyed the Hidalgo/Perez outings, but this record I really dig. Rosas shows a broad spectrum of stylistic interests, and everything is deep, like he's digging down to claw at the roots of things while still having a party.

There's a very "big" sound to the production, even on the tunes where the instrumentation is stripped down and mostly acoustic. It's not exactly slick-sounding, but certainly very professional. That's the sort of thing that doesn't usually stand out on an album for me, save for a few, this being one of them.

I've got some favorites in the set, of course. The Ike Turner tune "You've Got to Lose" is a slamming blues tricked out as a vehicle for some blazing guitar licks. "Better Way" is an affecting simple mid-tempo ballad delivered in heartfelt gravel baritone, made extra-special by an obbligato on a Veracruzano harp. "Adios Mi Vida"is pure corrido, with a guest appearance by the inimitable Flaco Jimenez. And Rosas pays homage to Stax/Volt soul with a sly 6/8 churner he calls "E. Los Ballad #13."

Really wonderful tunes here, played with maturity, zeal, and great love for the music (do you get the impression sometimes, especially from big pop stars, that they aren't even really enjoying what they are doing and just have their eyes on the afterparty?). In listening to it all through carefully, I noticed that really everything is connected to the blues spirit in some way or other, so it's as if he took his "half" of the Los Lobos duality and nurtured it till it could stand on its own. Really enjoyable.

itunes link:
Cesar Rosas - Soul Disguise

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Just one of over a hundred albums

Royal T
Tito Puente, 1993

Ah Tito Puente ... where to even start? The man gave James Brown a run for his money as "hardest working man in show business," and the number of albums he recorded is the stuff of legend (I'm sure there's an exact count somewhere online, but that's one thing I'd rather keep a mystery). On two different occasions, I was lucky enough to hear him and his band perform live - even got splashed with some of his sweat, a.k.a. "agua de Puente," while dancing.

This album was the first of his that I bought, and probably for sentimental reasons it's still my favorite to listen to. This was the one I listened to over and over until I figured out and internalized the tumbao rhythm of the bass, something that has fascinated me for a long time. I dissected several of the arrangements, and learned so much from them.

The album starts off with a kick-ass screaming-fast version of "Donna Lee," the lead melody carried by a piccolo, and it just smokes from beginning to end. The arrangement of Mingus' "Moanin'" is a favorite of mine too - starts off with a baritone sax line that's begging to be sampled into a hip hop track. I knew the Mingus version of this tune fairly well before I ever heard this one, but the Puente version is definitely the one that's taken over my aural imagination now. The album is really all gems, with graet soloing and ensemble work. Another stand-out for me is "Mambo Gallego," which fuses flamenco harmonies and melodic ideas with the Afro-cuban rhythmic drive. I used to use that one to teach music students to take rhythmic dictation.

Anyway, it's just a blast, stem to stern. If you like Latin Jazz, it's an excellent one to have.

itunes doesn't have it, but they have this nice greatest hits:
Tito Puente, Tito Puente & His Orchestra, Tito Puente & His Orchestra/vocal by Santos Colon & Tito Puente and His Orchestra - The Essential Tito Puente

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Tehillim

Tehillim
Steve Reich, 1981

So I've described this piece as "stunning" before, and really there's no better term. I really am just stunned by its beauty and its rhetorical power every time I listen to it.

This is a piece of music for a large chamber ensemble and small chorus of amplified singers. My first encounter with it was at a student concert, where there was the ensemble had some trouble with the score, but its wonderfulness still shined through.I bought the CD soon after, and it quickly became a favorite.

I can't get into everything that makes it so great, but I can review a few of the aspects that stand out for me. Certainly the rhythmic structures really draw me in ... all these overlapping tiny cells, most of them derived from the rhythms of the text, drawing focus down on the motion of each pulsing eighth note, and at the same time opening up larger vistas - timespans that mimic on a larger scale what's going on at the microscopic level. It's one of those pieces of music that lets you experience multiple timescales unfolding at once, which is at once invigorating and meditative.

There's the counterpoint, too, which is just gorgeous in places. Strict vocal canons skitter and swerve as the winds and strings hold long sustained tones. And some of the melodic contours have that brilliant mathematical gorgeousness that's such a rare treat in contemporary composers' work.

There are quite a few stand-out moments for me, one of them being the change end of part 2 and the opening of part 3. That change in tempo and pitch and intrumentation just is so right. I could write a whole essay on just that change (I'm sure you'd all just adore reading that). And there's the ending, which is laserbeam tight to the point of being shrill, but at the same time is precisely what is needed there. The word "alleluia" is sung over and over (did I mention that these are settings of psalms in Hebrew?), in different melodic shapes, finally resolving to a relentlessly repeated tone. Great stuff.

Besides, you gotta love any music that features the tambourine in a heroic starring role in the ensemble.

itunes link:

Arnold Schoenberg Chor & Schoenberg Ensemble - Reich: Tehillim - Three Movements

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

The Miracle that is Zoe Ellis

Full Cleveland
Cleveland Lounge, 1996

So while I'm technically talking about this one album by the band Cleveland Lounge, I'm really talking about the sublime singer Zoe Ellis. I've been listening to her sing all my adult life (and, as I believe I'm mentioned before on here, I'm kinda old), and she's never been anything less than a pure unalloyed wonder. Her tone is raw silk dragging over your forearm, her delivery full of passion and depth, her singing style just always right - somehow more divine by being so rooted to the earth.

I never got to see her perform with this band Cleveland Lounge - apparently they weren't together all that long. I have heard her perform a couple of the songs in other settings, though, and the album does a very nice job of featuring her voice. There's a certain sameness to a few of the tunes; they have that "quiet storm" radio-ready feel. Great musicianship, well thought-out arrangements, just nothing too raw or exposed here. "Drowning" (the only song available now, as a single on itunes) is the signature song, full of all the operatic grace and emotional realness I associate with Zoe Ellis - really nice vocal counterpoint at the end too. "Mood Swing," another favorite, has a stripped-down minimalist arrangement, and her voice is hushed, warm, and sort of clipped in places - perfect evocation of the lyrics, which are about the ease of slipping from love to obsession. "Someday" has a more upbeat, hopeful sound (almost, but not quite, ruined by the lame keyboard stabs on the verses), with the beautiful ascending lines you don't find often in pop music. And "Need to Know" is the closest to purely rocking out that can be found on this album.

Really amazing stuff. If you live in the Bay Area, you simply must listen to this singer live at every opportunity. If you don't, and you can get your hands on this album, at least you'll get a taste.

itunes link:


Cleveland Lounge - Drowning - EP - Drowning (Original)

Friday, April 6, 2007

Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie

Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie!
Ella Fitzgerald, 1961

I could spend weeks just reviewing the Ella Fitzgerald albums I have, but why not start with my all-time favorite? What a gorgeous and well-conceived album, not a clunker in the whole bunch of songs.

Just jazz standards here, tending towards the ballads and downtempo numbers, which suits me well most of the time. It's just a small jazz quartet as the backing band, too, including Herb Ellis on guitar. Every song is just a gem, her voice soars and floats and dips effortlessly.

"Night in Tunisia" grooves along, forgoing the Afrocuban feel for some alternating 6/8 and 4/4 meters. "You're My Thrill" is perhaps the most purely emotive track - an interpretation that gets me every time. She takes "Born to Be Blue" from a rich deep blues to angelsong and back again. On "Spring Can Really Hang You up the Most," she delivers a performance so wantonly gorgeous that it is the closest thing to a proof of the existence of god. And "This Could Be the Start of Something Big," Steve Allen's novelty theme song, just swings like fuck.

Those are just a few of the tracks that are standing out for me at the moment - this is an album to live your life to. Yes it's hard for me to pile up enough superlatives to do this album justice. I've been listening to this one constantly ever since I bought it about 15 years ago, and it's always been there for me when I needed it. I remember listen to "'Round Midnight" in the car as I drove through one of her old neighborhoods in Yonkers (where there was an excellent Salvadoran restaurant at the time), late in a cool autumn evening, and feeling that little frisson that you get when you realize that your life is connected to everyone else's and there's a common rhythm to the world.

Not all music can do that.

itunes link:
Ella Fitzgerald - Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie!

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Talking Book

Talking Book
Stevie Wonder, 1972

So I'm dipping into the more popular vein today. Listened to all of this excellent album today, and I discover new things to enjoy about it all the time. When I listened to it as a kid, I really didn't have time for anything but "Superstition," and of course that song is still the jam, but there's just so much else going on here.

One thing that makes a good singer-songwriter album stand out for me is just simple variety. I don't want a lot of the songs to sound the same, and Stevie definitely delivers on that here, expending a lot of energy and studio time to make every song a unique expression. Maybe the lyrics aren't exactly the most subtle or anything, but the musical ideas are in confluence with them to a great degree.

Some highlights: the near-hypnotic stutter-step funky drone of "Maybe Your Baby," the breezy bright almost-tropicalia arrangement on "Tuesday Heartbreak," the vocal counterpoint and meticulously-crafted melodic contours on "Blame It on the Sun," and can we talk about "I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever)" for a second?

Because that song. Damn. My skin tingles a bit just thinking about it. And here's something that I rarely say about any music at all: I really think a big part of what makes this song great is the tempo. I try to imagine it even just a hair faster or slower, and it seems wrong. In fact, it used to bother me when I listened to it on a walkman (did I mention that I'm kinda old?) and the batteries were a bit old or something. The song is still really great, but there's something about the groove of it that speaks to my biorhythms or something. So nice to have it on CD and mp3, and really hear it in that in-the-pocket tempo every time.

Gorgeous album, definitely something you should own if you're any kind of fan of American popular songwriting.

itunes link:
Stevie Wonder - Talking Book

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Bach Goldberg Variations

J.S. Bach
Goldberg Variations
performed by Christiane Jaccottet

So I figured I should start off with something seminal, a "backbone" recording, and I really what's more fundamental than Bach, right?

This is a 1981 recording on some small German label, and the performer plays a harpsichord. The first time listening, it was a little strange after hearing the piece on piano a lot, but wow it sure has grown on me, and this is the version in my aural imagination whenever I think of the music now.

I think what attracts me to it most is the nice balance struck between the mathematical sublimity and the small human-scale humility. It's so easy to miss that second part sometimes, and it's really present here. The music flows and feels like part of human life, as much as it feels like an expression of the ineffable cosmos or whatever.

Some of my favorite variations (did I mention that it's a theme and variations deal?) are 9,10, and 22, but really it's all really great stuff. I feel grounded, like part of the earth, when I listen to it. We used to play it for my daughter when she was in utero, and then over and over again when she was a baby - probably that's part of why this recording is burned into my brain and why it's special to me.

There are a couple of other pieces thrown in too, including the F major Italian Concerto, also a nice rendition. But the Goldberg is definitely the centerpiece. Great stuff.

itunes link:
Christiane Jaccottet - Classical Highlights - Bach - Goldberg Variations, Air and Variations Nos.1 - 30 BWV 988 - Aria-Variatio 1 a 1 Clav.

Monday, April 2, 2007

let's get this party started

I noticed that I own quite a lot of recorded music. Yes, probably far fewer than some, but even leaving manic collectors aside, it's quite a bit more than I should own.

Thing is, I love listening to records (excuse my use of this as the generic term - I'm old) as much as the next person, but I've got my philosophical problems with them too. In my most optimistic moments, I tend to agree with Miles Davis, that a record best serves as an advertisement for a live concert. Too often, the splendor, magnificence, humanity, charm, and gris-gris essential to music is lost in the move from performance to shink-wrapped commodification.

Ah, but what commodities they are ... artifacts, icons, lingua franca of generations. And what worlds they open up - I can't afford go to the opera every week, but I can get a used CD set of Don Giovanni for 5 or 10 bucks and listen to my heart's content. Musical traditions from far-off places and far-off decades can reach me and thousands of others, a state of affairs which is nothing short of miraculous.

The physical-medium recording is surely singing its swan-song these days. Most likely people won't flip through used bins at record stores much longer, serendipitously coming across something with cover art that's intriguing, taking a chance on the unknown. I have no problem with that at all - think it's leading to generally positive, democratic, live-music-centered changes to the music "industry." But meantime, let's celebrate records before we forget what they are.

Did I mention that I have a lot of records? I also don't sit and listen to them deeply as often as I should. I'm going to fix that now. Once or twice a week, I'm going to listen to some recording or other off my shelves, more or less at random, and I'll post about it here. A couple years down the line, I'll have a catalog of sorts here. I'm not going into this thinking of what I write as reviews or recommendations, exactly. More like reflections. Maybe that will be useful to someone else reading?