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:

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:

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!)

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:

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:

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: