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Expert Witness: April 2011
Sonny Rollins
Half a Century of Live Colossus
Friday, April 1, 2011
Sonny Rollins: Road Shows Vol. 1 (Doxy/Emarcy '08)
As definitive as the Silver City comp in a different way, this
decades-spanning live album, which looked like the first of an endless
series of exhumations, remains the most recent release from the
still-active 80-year-old, although a second volume is expected in the
fall. It's living proof of the truism that his Fantasy studio output
didn't do justice to what happened in concert enchanted evening after
enchanted evening, and demonstrates in addition that just like Louis
Armstrong, Rollins was as invaluable in his audience-pleasing mature
period as in his questing youth. Beyond the top-drawer drummers--Al
Foster, Roy Haynes, Steve Jordan--are such serviceable sidemen as
bassist Bob Cranshaw and electric (!) piano player Mark Soskin. But
because the concept foregrounds melody and straight-ahead swing, this
may even be a plus, because it leaves the focus on the star of the
show. His tenor sound grown huge and warm without a hint of corn
syrup, Rollins is more inventive and risk-prone than the older
Armstrong. But since his audience expects nothing less, his
astonishing cadenzas and unaccompanied improvs are the most generous
kind of high shtick. Seven tracks, the shortest 7:50 and the longest
12:26, make you feel that he could do this forever. He can't, of
course. But that's where he wants to leave you. A PLUS
Sonny Rollins: A Night at the Village Vanguard (Blue Note '99)
This 1957 date is the Rollins virtuoso fanciers fancy: two-plus hours
on the Sunday of Sputnik 2, the tenor colossus braving the harmonic
void in the closest thing to free jazz a bebop saxophonist essaying
Porter, Gershwin, Arlen, and his beloved Hammerstein can rev
into. Backed by retro-rocketing Monk bassist Wilbur Ware and a young
Elvin Jones testing his launching capacity, Rollins is charged with
venturing far out from these tunes without severing the harmonic
moorings normally secured by a piano. He does it again and again--but
not without a certain cost in ebullience, texture, and fullness of
breath. Impressive always, fun in passing, his improvisations are what
avant-garde jazz is for. The drum solos are a club convention that let
him idle his engines a little. A MINUS
Generation Bass/Yuck
Cultural Imperialism
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Generation Bass Presents: Transnational Dubstep (Six Degrees)
In 1994 Wax Trax' Ethnotechno proved a politely polyrhythmic
techno reachout to straightforward international dance musics it
secretly found quaint. It listened well and stuck poorly, the
"ethnotechno" tag itself its main contribution to international
understanding. Conceived, assigned, and sequenced by DJ Umb, the
London-born son of Kashmiri exiles who promotes such all-embracing
terms as "transnational bass" at his Generation Bass blog, this array
of whomping exotica reflects its creator's appetite for any Third
World dance movement he can get his ears on, including such new ones
on me as kuduro, barefoot, and--from the mysterious depths of the
District of Columbia--Moombahton! Plus, of course, the bassy evolution
of techno beatmaking since 1994. Speaking as someone who will never
enter a barefoot club (my doctor prescribed those orthotics,
dammit), I hereby extend my thanks to whoever invented that shuddering
synth low end that turns background music into foreground fun without
requiring you to kiss your ass goodbye. And I also testify that not a
damn thing here sounds quaint. Which is to make no predictions as to
how any of them will sound 17 years from now. A MINUS
Yuck: Yuck (Fat Possum)
These four Brits are compared to so many '80s-'90s bands you should
figure they don't sound much like any of them--and that they recall
every one more than they do such modern tunemongers as Best Coast or
Sleigh Bells. But in the end modern tunemongers is how they sort out,
Amerindie-style because guitars stopped being indie over there before
Oasis broke. Adding a wistful variation on Best Coast's forlorn
romanticism to a sunstruck variation on Sleigh Bells' principled
distortion, they seem like nice kids with talent who may have the
spiritual wherewithal to stop vaguing out and go
somewhere. A MINUS
Saigon/Ski Beatz
Give the Beatmakerz Some
Friday, April 8, 2011
Saigon: The Greatest Story Never Told (Suburban Noize
After mixtapes I liked, mixtapes I heard, and mixtapes that passed me
by, this is the Saigon and Just Blaze album I've been waiting for
since a student tipped me to them five years ago--heroic
post-gangstaism, with the conscious ex-con forthright as rhymer and
rapper and the Jay-Z sideman bigging him up with soul singers and
cinematic beats (and also with Jay-Z). Saigon don't play. He's a
social realist and a realist moralist who makes his seriousness work
for him. Behind Blaze's say-so, he sounds like the kind of person it's
always interesting to get to know. A MINUS
Ski Beatz: 24 Hour Karate School (DD172 New York)
North Carolinan David Willis is a journeyman beatmaker-producer--big
credit: no-big-deal Camp Lo--who's spent the major chunks of his
two-decade career in New York. Recently he oversaw two official
releases by Young Money second-stringer Curren$y, the kind of thug
lite who's admired by Rick Ross's real-fake claque. Those who prefer
those albums bemoan the loss here of two Mos Def raps I crashed my
search engine seeking out. They're probably good--Mos Def has it all
over mos of the nonentities who provide the vocal sounds on this
beats-first showcase. Not Jean Grae, though--here's hoping Willis
lures her out of her apartment. And note that the Mos Def songs in
question, "Cream of the Planet" and "Taxi," finish this off on the
upswing as sayonora instrumentals. I listen to hip-hop for the
rapping. But I've spent a lot of time dwelling on the music here,
which combines beats per se with grandiosities like the dramatic intro
to "Nothing but Us," the guitar hook of "Scaling the Building," and
the full-on movie theme that carries "Cream of the Planet." Sayonora
instrumentals fit right in. B PLUS
Paul Simon/TV on the Radio
And God Said, Let There Be Light: And There Was Light
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Paul Simon: So Beautiful or So What (Hear Music)
A good bet to turn 70 before year's end, the patient craftsman
surrounds a 96-second acoustic guitar moment with nine four-minute
songs about eternity. The mood is melancholy. yet suffused with
gratitude--for his wife's love first of all, but even more for God's
gifts, with the Divinity Himself an actor in several lyrics and close
by in most of the others. Fundamentally general and speculative
language is always pinned down by a specific or two--a blizzard near
Chicago, Jay-Z hawking Roc-a-Wear, a banker's pockets, a CAT scan and
the Montauk Highway, gumbo in the pot and Dr. King shot, the form you
have to fill out before you get into heaven. The music is the mild,
irregular folk-rock he's explored for decades, graced with global
colors that sound as natural as that guitar. I've had many
disagreements with my homeboy Paulie, plus I'm an atheist. But here my
main quarrel is the identity of the "fragment of song" whose title you
can't quite recall as the Divinity Himself sets you "swimming in an
ocean of love." Simon seems to think it's "Be-Bop-a-Lula." I vote for
the competing "Ooh Poo Pah Doo," in part because I want God to keep
creating a disturbance in my mind. A
TV on the Radio: Nine Types of Light (Interscope)
The rumor that this is their love album will come as news to the woman
who let him go and the woman who thinks they're incompatible and maybe
even the woman whose heart he's gonna keep when the world falls
apart. Not to mention the mother robbed blind and the fish washed up
on the shore and the blues that keeps him on the shelf and the
megaquake that's a force of nature and maybe even the killer crane
that's not a piece of malfunctioning construction equipment. Because
these guys were lovers before this war, a ceaselessly shifting
conflict that has dominated their entire artistic life, love has
always been part of their coping mechanism. But it'll obviously never
be as big for them as music. In this iteration, that music is a trifle
gentler and several times encourages dancing on the floor you've been
knocked to. But it remains set on complexity, contemplation, and the
interactions of art-rock texture, pan-rock rhythm, and African
falsetto. Beautiful, especially if you like your beauty grand. And
beauty is good. But how about some jokes? Jokes help people get
through wars too. A MINUS
Rainbow Arabia/Britney Spears
Girly Women
Friday, April 15, 2011
Rainbow Arabia: Boys and Diamonds (Kompakt)
Arabia? What Arabia? Euro synth duo, tuneful and sometimes haunting,
always droney fun--textured, beaty lines under an unnaturally
high-voiced girly-woman singing lyrics of no importance when you can
make them out, which isn't often. Then I learned:
L.A. husband-and-wife duo, latter named Tiffany, her accented English
one affectation among many. They hit upon their sound after purchasing
a Casio preprogrammed with microtonal scales and Middle Eastern rhythm
bits, both of which loom larger on their two mildly enjoyable
EPs. Hence a hopefully intentioned band name unlikely to further the
cause of peace in a war-torn world where those scales and rhythms have
been adopted as silly pop staples already. Think Fever Ray sans dark
side. Better still, don't think at all. A MINUS
Britney Spears: Femme Fatale (Deluxe Edition) (Jive)
The pitch-corrected giggle "I think I like you" and the
straightforward proposition "You can be my fuck tonight" pack an amyl
nitrite charge it would be pretentious to deny, and the poppers keep
on coming right through the bonus tracks of porn-lite funk-lite that's
quirky and clever front to back. Moreover, it's possible the stupidity
of the sex symbol up front is an illusion exploited by her legal
guardians and maybe even the symbol herself. But it's such a
convincing illusion that any guy who goes all the way with it has too
much libido invested in the bimbo fantasy. She's just too
straight-faced with the botched Bellamy Brothers joke, the nauseous
"Your body look so sick I think I got the flu," the abstemious
"Steaming like a pot full of vegetables," the concupiscent "I'm a
little selfish" become the childish "I'm a little sailfish." As for
her female fans, let's call the attraction the bimbo strategy--the
slut who calls the shots. Good luck with that one, ladies. I mean
it. B PLUS
tUnE-yArDs/Ustad Massano Tazi
And the Healing Had Begun
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
tUnE-yArDs: w h o k i l l (4AD)
Leaping and flowing, growling and crooning, exclaiming and explaining,
stopping short for horns and glitches you had no idea were coming,
Merrill Garbus's second album has the tune power and groove appeal
normal music lovers put on repeat. And if too many normal music lovers
think it's abnormal, at least she's hired a bassist, not to mention a
studio into which at least a dozen other living musicians are
suspected to have ventured. I don't suppose it'll help much to venture
that Garbus contains in one person the finest attributes of Captain
Beefheart and Phoebe Snow, not with the former a demigod and the
latter a footnote. But she does reconstitute roots tonalities and
procedures without hermeticism or egomania, and she does roll around
in her enormous voice without bathos or undue expressionism. And
though you won't wonder about the lyrics until you've had your fill of
the music, she tells you what she has to say in the opening "My
Country" and explores its ramifications for 10 songs and 42
minutes. "When they have nothing why do you have something?" she asks,
with the "you" encompassing both herself and her country. "The worst
thing about living a lie is just wondering when they'll find out," she
warns, with the "they" encompassing have-nothings everywhere. That is,
she deploys her superb music to address an issue so pressing few can
stand to think about it: who kills who? A
Ustad Massano Tazi: Musique classique andalouse de Fès (Ocora '88)
Sufi Arab-Andalusian healing music attributed to Ziryab, the legendary
"Black Songbird" from Baghdad who Ned Sublette conjectures became a
prototypical guitar hero in the court of Cordoba circa 800--a fashion
plate and oenophile who supposedly knew 10,000 songs, added a fifth
string to his lute, developed his own compositional system, and
invented toothpaste. No one knows the facts, of course--the notes say
he was based in Granada, for instance--and claims that this is how
compositions we're not even positive he wrote sounded a millennium ago
seem inflated. Some things are clear, however. The gut-stringed and
sometimes hide-backed instruments here haven't been used regularly
since the 18th century. The proportion of bowed violins etc. has been
reduced from the modern norm. Whatever we think of the theories of
humors and elements that underlie Ziryab's system, his cosmology
honored timbre above all. And whatever the performers think of those
theories, they're Sufi mystics who believe in the music
itself. Alternating the vocal and the instrumental, the rhythmic and
the arhythmic, the high and the low, the result is lighter and less
hypnotic than the Sufi healing music of Oruj Guvenc. Some of its more
contemplative sections require dedicated listening, and its timbres
take a while to sink in. But that's what timbres are so good at doing,
and eventually these calmatives make themselves enjoyable and make
themselves felt. A MINUS
No Age/Superchunk
Postpunk as They Wanna Be
Friday, April 22, 2011
No Age: Everything in Between (Sub Pop)
Having disbanded their punk trio to prove they weren't simply or even
primarily punks, Dean Spunt and Randy Randall apply their bag of arty
tricks to a punk album with a punk narrative. "I try to make myself
seem vague/Cause the words get so engraved"--OK, understood, only not
entirely, which is how they want it. Hence 10 of these songs are
directed at a "you" that could be a boss, a colleague, an audience, a
roommate, or, obviously, a girlfriend, but who is only clearly a
female once. There are also three instrumentals, which contextualize
the songful riffage of most of the other tracks with the atmospheres
in which they've specialized. But the decisive atmosphere is provided
by the riffage--hooks and power chords as anthemic as any in punk,
only shot through with their atmospheric chops and innovations. In
other words, it's a punk album with a difference, which at this late
date is the only kind you can count on for a thrill. And what it says
beyond its seeming vagueness is: "we" care about "you." A
Superchunk: Majesty Shredding (Merge)
Don't believe old fans with their collective pre-midlife
crisis. Believe a codger who has ever thought them an honorable band
whose sole great record was damn near their first, the satirically
candid "Slack Motherfucker." Here, 20 years after he started trying if
trying is what that was, Mac McCaughan finally assembles an album that
captures what could be glimpsed in that single and the only live show
I ever saw them give (Lollapalooza '95). Eschewing both the lo-fi murk
that obscured vocal yowl and guitar roar alike on the early albums and
the fruity pop voice he affected as the centuries did their thing,
McCaughan and cohort deliver a bunch of loud guitar songs--not
anthems, songs--whose unkempt tailoring and melodic uplift are worthy
of betters from Nirvana to the Arcade Fire. Providing myth to die for
and money to burn respectively, those two bands made this claim on
history possible. The hoarse, throaty voice knows its consonants, and
the lyrics are full of the everyday breakdowns most of us survive into
midlife and beyond--"about nothing and everything," which is what they
always wanted even if they were too cool to make it
plain. A MINUS
Poly Styrene/Gang of Four
No No Future
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Poly Styrene: Generation Indigo (Future Noise Music)
Life after "Oh Bondage Up Yours" began with Poly's dreamily unpunk
1980 studio-rock Translucence, a sui generis switcheroo
absurdly accused of presaging Everything but the Girl. Now there'll be
claims her easy-skanking groove is a "dubstep" breakthrough, once
again obscuring the main reason her music has connected since she wore
braces, which is that it's exceptionally tuneful, if not the main
reason we care, which is that she's an exceptionally good soul. She
never tops the vegan opener "I Luv Ur Sneakers." But the four humanist
protest songs she rolls out just before an unnecessarily dreamy closer
seem so unforced you feel for all those who have striven so hard to do
nothing more. Ari, Viv, Exene--because sisterhood is powerful, this
one's for you. A MINUS
Gang of Four: Content (Yep Roc)
As they add the quaver of age to Andy Gill's slashes and modernize
Jon King's animadversions with cellphone photos, comparison with the
20-year-old Mall quickly reveals how blessed the mainstays are in
drummer Mark Heaney, who in the great tradition of Marky Ramone has
both the musical sense to respect Hugo Burnham's simplicity and the
historical savvy not to attempt an anachronistic replication. Since
their consumerist analysis was never that deep and their self-doubt
always had a self-aggrandizement to it, all these adjustments are
welcome. In fact, my favorite song here is "A Fruitfly in the
Beehive," which begins a quiet patch the original band would never
have sat still for. It's not the only time they speak of repentance,
for what I don't know--not some endorsement, I hope. Inspirational
Verse: "Where are we headed for? For a distant shore? Or some brand
new war/Don't know why i can't ask for more, don't walk out the door,
what am I left here for?" A MINUS
Note: The Poly Styrene capsule above was written several weeks
before she died on April 25 of the cancer I was aware she'd been
battling but didn't mention in the review. I could now change the
tense to "she was an exceptionally good soul" in the only place the
review refers to her life as opposed to her work, which lives on in
the eternal present she deserves. But I feel as if somehow that would
be a kind of hedge, and so decided to let the review stand as
written--and also, more strangely I'm aware, the tag. Oh death up
yours.
AfroCubism/Monguito El Unico and Laba Sosseh
Like It Says--Salsa Africana
Friday, April 29, 2011
AfroCubism: AfroCubism (Nonesuch)
Here be Nick Gold's second attempt to come home with the literally
Afro-Cuban record he intended when travel screw-ups kept the Afro
contingent out of Havana and he concocted the Buena Vista Social Club
instead. It was recorded in Madrid, and I hope all involved had a
ball. But for those who never found the BVSC's creaky music as
remarkable as its rocketing sales, and who know in addition that many
of its key principals have passed, it's no surprise that the Africans
save this enjoyable but less than historic project. Lassana Diabaté's
balafon makes as much difference as Djelimady Tounkara's guitar, and
though neither vocalist is prime, ngoni master Bassekou Kouyate packs
more energy and gravity than second-stringer Eliades Ochoa even if his
own solo album underwhelmed. Still, if you really want to hear an old
man knock 'em dead, compare the Nico Saquito original of "Al Vaivén de
Mi Carreta." B PLUS
Monguito El Unico and Laba Sosseh: Salsa Africana--Monguito El Unico and Laba Sosseh in U.S.A. (Sacodisc '05)
So my salsa-playing brother-in-law listens for a while and chides me
indulgently for once again preferring African clave to the real
thing. Not so abashed I don't remain into what I'm into, I think I
hear what he means--the groove here is simultaneously more emphatic
and more contained than in the Eddie Palmieri he's always promoting
and the charanga he pops in now. Only as it turns out, these five
tracks, which I have as an unannotated burn, were cherry-picked from
circa-1980 sessions in which nasal, Cuba-born Monguito El Unico united
chesty, Gambia-born Laba Sosseh with NYC salsa hotshots. In Dakar,
Sosseh was a giant, supremely danceable in an era when salsa was the
chosen music of the newly independent elite. In U.S.A., he was an
exotic. This bypasses Sosseh's signature "Aminata" and "La
Bicycletta." But the synergy of the two contrasting voices--plus,
assuming the inevitable Nuyorican rub-off, three slightly different
conceptions of clave--makes for yet another seductive variation on the
Senegambian tinge. Not easy to find, and I've now heard other music by
both Sosseh and Monguito that seems worth exploring. But this will
always be where I started. A MINUS
MSN Music, April 2011
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