eMusic » ZZ

Joshua Redman, Walking Shadows

Britt Robson — Tue, 07 May 2013 13:00:13 +0000

A diverse but simpatico mix of American songbook standards, pop hits and group originals

This is Joshua Redman’s “ballads with strings” record, a venerable tradition that most includes such torrid beboppers as Charlie Parker and Clifford Brown. It continues Redman’s recent penchant for putting himself in new settings — his membership in the egalitarian ensemble James Farm and the knotty skronk he’s delivered guesting with The Bad Plus are other examples — but on Walking Shadows he allows himself the security blanket of deploying sidemen. It isn’t easy to come up with three more acutely creative jazz balladeers than the other members of his core quartet — pianist (and album producer) Brad Mehldau, drummer Brian Blade and bassist Larry Grenadier. Their low-key sensitivity is a secret ingredient here.

The material is a diverse but simpatico mix of American songbook standards, pop hits and group originals. Redman plays with gorgeous aplomb on Kern and Hammerstein’s “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” (the latter also features Mehldau’s best solo). He teases out the familiar melodies of The Beatles’ “Let It Be” and “Stop That Train” by John Mayer before taking transformative liberties with them via deft improvisations. The most arresting of the originals is Redman’s atmospheric “Final Hour,” in which his tenor has the low-toned plangency of a bass clarinet.

The presence of the strings — conducted by Dan Coleman, who also arranged them along with Mehldau and Patrick Zimmerli — varies significantly from song to song. Ironically, Bach’s “Adagio,” featuring a sublime Grenadier bass riff, is among the least ornamented offerings, while on the ’30s standard “Easy Living” and the intro to Mehldau’s “Last Glimpse of Gotham,” they’re more integral to the song than Redman’s sax; Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” is a compelling but messy pastiche. Nothing here is trite or bathetic however — no mean feat for jazz-with-strings endeavors. Walking Shadows is another colorful plume in Redman’s steadily adventurous career.

Joe Lovano’s Top Six Saxophonists

Ken Micallef — Fri, 03 May 2013 17:34:35 +0000

Joe Lovano’s output is voluminous and encompasses an array of jazz styles. He blew an immaculate, straight-ahead tenor saxophone on 52nd Street Themes, honored Charlie Parker on Bird Songs and revisited the ’50s-era school of cool on Streams of Expression. And then there’s his blustery, innovative work as a member of the Paul Motian Trio with the late, master drummer and guitarist Bill Frisell. Throughout, Lovano’s tenor is as flexible as the material he pursues, a burly, angular, shimmering, even romantic instrument that’s grounded in jazz but is ultimately not chained to it.

Perhaps more than with his other groups, Us Five gives Lovano a lab in which to try out new ideas, new configurations, and new sounds. The group’s latest release, Cross Currents (Blue Note), takes the group forward while Lovano looks back. Over the course of its running time, Lovano plays an assortment of horns and percussion, from Hungarian tarogato and Belgian aulochrome to Nigerian log drum and gongs; the group group includes Grammy Award winning bassist Esperanza Spalding and drummers Otis Brown III and Francisco Mela. This amalgam of unusual instruments, and the group’s dual drummer configuration, recalls the boundary-stretching ’60s recordings of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

“Some of the instruments I play on the album I have collected through the years,” Lovano says. “They’re ancient sounds, they go back in time in the history of the world of music, from Asia, North Africa, Nigeria. These sounds feel like the earth, like having it come from your soul. It’s not just a technical thing. When you vibrate on the tonalities of these instruments and don’t try to play any specific kind of music, you feel the soul of the music in a different kind of way.”

A similar philosophy extends to the makeup of Lovano’s group. “To have a quintet with double drummers, a lot of points of reference can happen,” he says. “Anything can happen if everyone is paying attention and sharing a space together. That’s the idea. The double drummer configuration was inspired by Art Blakey, Max Roach, Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell with Ornette, and Rashid Ali and Elvin Jones with Coltrane.”

As the masters have influenced Lovano, he has in turn influenced the new guard of younger jazz musicians.

“I realize what a deep relationship I have with all of these cats.” Lovano says. “It’s a beautiful scene today. As a musician, for a long time you’re in people’s audiences. Then all of a sudden, they’re in your audience. I was in Joe Henderson’s audience a lot,” he continues. “And the audiences of Dexter Gordon, George Coleman and Clifford Jordan. Once when I was playing the Berkhausen festival in Germany, Dexter was in the audience. That night I somehow held my notes just a little longer. I got up the next morning and Dexter was just coming in and we hung in the hotel lobby. I got the chills. That happens for all of us and it’s happening for these cats now. It’s a continuum. That’s how these things are handed down: in real time.”

eMusic’s Ken Micallef asked Lovano to listen and comment on new recordings from his favorite current saxophonists.

Novela - arr. by Kris Davis

Tony Malaby
2011 | Clean Feed / The Orchard

Tony has a very hip, contemporary approach. He's a New York cat, playing in a lot of ensembles exploring different ways of playing. He reminds me of when I first came into town in the '70s and early '80s and the different loft situations I was involved with, which really carried me into today. He is experiencing a lot of stuff in those directions. And also he's had a chance to play... with Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, which I joined in 1986. And he's been experiencing playing Carla Bley's great music, and he is putting together ideas and assembling his personal history. All of these cats are doing that. Novela is really reminiscent of Liberation Orchestra: the energy, the way he feels the music from within the ensemble and steps forward within it. Tony plays with a beautiful organic approach. To improvise and create music within the music is where I want to live.
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Gamak

Rudresh Mahanthappa
2013 | ACT Music + Vision / The Orchard

Rudresh really is developing a way of playing [that's drawn] from his roots and his personal explorations and the people he has been with. His sound on the instrument has a vocal quality that is really beautiful. I've known him since we met at the Gunther Schuller workshop in the early '90s. Then, he was coming from a certain alto approach influenced by Steve Coleman and cats from Chicago like Bunky Green.... On this recording, a lot of stuff is coming together for him: his lines, his story. He's got multi-dimensional roots. Some cats have deep roots, some have shallow roots, some have no roots. You can hear it in every phrase they play. The way you can make records today, there are no Bruce Lundvalls or Michael Cuscunas, it's easy to make your own CD now. It's good in one way. But in another way it stamps you if you're not ready. Maybe you only have 15 minutes in you and you have to record 70. That makes the listener want to hit the fast forward button instead of the repeat button. Not that these recordings were like that. But Rudresh is playing from very deep roots.
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Casting For Gravity

Donny McCaslin
2012 | eOne Music / Entertainment One Distribution

I heard Donny with Gary Burton when he first played in New York years ago in the '90s. He immediately impresses you, because he is very serious on his horn. He has more of a straight-eights feeling, an up-and-down approach in his rhythm that puts you in a certain direction. But he can play, man. The band on this record is strong and it's well-rehearsed and the execution is amazing. I think... they achieved their goal of trying to play perfect. It has that polished feeling to it. Donny is an incredible saxophonist, though this recording left me a little cold. It's about playing the layers, and I'm not sure if they played as a band or with a performance attitude in the studio as opposed to laying tracks. But everybody played their part incredible, like they were following a score, like it was already laid down on a computer. That is a way of recording, and that has its challenge. But it's not about interpretation as much as trying to play with perfection.
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The Sirens

Chris Potter
2013 | ECM

Chris has a lot of ideas. He plays beautiful bass clarinet and a number of horns. I've heard him through the years tackle a lot of different avenues and ways of playing with cats. He has a real special maturity all his own. He plays with a lot of trust and he really explores his dynamics within the music. He has beautiful rhythm and flowing ideas. The tunes on this recording have... a soulful expressive feeling to them. I first heard Chris playing with Red Rodney and he was playing alto. He didn't really start on tenor until he began playing with Paul Motian. He's real versatile and he has a strong presence in his tone and articulation and he can fit in a lot of settings because he's very free rhythmically on his horn. That's why you hear him with everyone from Steely Dan to Pat Metheny. He is definitely a disciple of Michael Brecker in a certain way, and he's gone in a direction that has led to those gigs. When Joshua Redman and Chris Potter and Eric Alexander played the 1991 Thelonious Monk competition, Alexander came in second. Eric was one of my students. Eric has great jazz roots in his playing, his study of Sonny Stitt and George Coleman, they taught him how to play. When I taught Eric at William Patterson College, he played a Sonny Stiff solo right off the bat. A lot is coming together for him now. He can play and he knows a lot of music. He's involved in the rich history of the music more than the others actually. Eric has a deep repertoire of his own. That's the depth of your soul and roots in the music, and Eric has a deep repertoire.
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Triumph of the Heavy, Vol. 1

Marcus Strickland
2011 | Strick Muzik / TuneCore

I've known Marcus for a while, he's got a real nice feeling. He plays relaxed and clear. He really needs to experience playing in a lot of situations. I've heard him with Roy Haynes's groups. But to put out a double CD like this, that's challenging and ambitious. I give him a lot of credit. He's playing tenor and alto and soprano and he's searching and discovering things all the time. He's... developing a sound of his own on those different horns. Beautiful. The people he's playing with on the record, they're like a family and you can really hear that comfort and flow; it's beautiful.
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Year Of The Snake

Fly Trio
2012 | ECM

Fly is a beautiful trio, they play with a wonderful clarity. And Mark plays with a brilliant execution on his horn. But he plays with more of a classical feeling in nature on the horn. He has a beautiful sound and there are soulful moments that appear, but his approach on the instrument is really a classical approach in a way. I mean his rhythm and execution, the way he plays up... and down the horn. He plays with an amazing range on his instrument. That trio has a classical approach in the way the music is written and the way they come off it in the rhythm and in the attitude they're playing. They're improvising but their dialogue is more classical in nature, the way it feels. They have soulful moments, but what is swing? That's expression, the waves, the life forms, the wind. Fly sounds lovely and beautiful and their music has a real presence, it captures you.
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The Byron Allen Trio, The Byron Allen Trio

Charles Farrell — Thu, 02 May 2013 19:17:13 +0000

One of ESP's lost gems, a convincing effort from start to finish

During the 1960s, Bernard Stollman’s ESP label worked a side of the street that was largely left untouched by any other labels. The jazz end of their roster was dedicated almost entirely to obscure (at the time) avant-gardists, and although Stollman claimed to know little about the music he was presenting, his historical track record has turned out to be remarkably good. Some of the musicians represented by ESP have acquired legendary status: among them, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, Paul Bley, Sunny Murray and Gary Peacock. But even the artists who eventually drifted into obscurity turned in efforts that are worthy of close attention.
Alto saxophonist Byron Allen is one of them. The Byron Allen Trio is a no-frills affair by Allen, bass player Maceo Gilchrist and drummer Ted Robinson. It’s evident that they’re young players, largely still in thrall to the Live at the Golden Circle trio of Ornette Coleman, David Izenson and Charles Moffett. But they’re good students, finding ways to make valuable use of what they’ve been taught. That makes The Byron Allen Trio a fine album on its own terms, although you wonder what the trio might have turned into, given time to develop.

“Time is Past” begins things briskly, with Robinson skillfully pushing an engaged Allen forward. The altoist is by turns bluesy, boppish and free. There are times when his linear playing resembles Jimmy Lyons, but the twisting lines are straight out of Ornette, and they retain the master’s sense of order and logic. Maceo Gilchrist’s role is harder to define. When he’s not using the bow, he tends toward observational commentary. He doesn’t add much to the pulse and he doesn’t engage in dialogue. Still, he’s effective; he knows what to put in and what to leave out. The music needs a third voice as a kind of mediator, and GIlchrist provides one. “Three Steps in the Right Direction” is a blindingly fast piece that features long, articulate lines by the leader. Robinson utilizes some left hand snare figures that come out of Sunny Murray. Although “Decision for the Cole-man” is, like the other tunes, taken at a fast tempo, Gilchrist’s lyricism is on display during large segments of his solo. Dedicated to Ornette, it’s the piece that most strongly pays homage to the Golden Circle trio. There’s enough individuality to keep it from being Coleman-lite though, and the prowess of all three players is easily apparent. “Today’s Blues Tomorrow” is the genuine article — a real blues in spirit, loose and funky and slightly off-kilter in an appealing way. The drums bully the saxophone a little (which works in this context) while Gilchrist holds down the fort with a steady walk. Gradually Allen takes up the challenge of the drums, ratcheting up his playing enough to hold his own, but steadfastly maintaining a heartfelt blues feel. After a thoughtful bass solo, the saxophone returns elegiacally, but again intensifies, moving briefly to a 6/8 semi-flamenco, to take the piece, and the album, out. The Byron Allen Trio is a convincing effort from start to finish, and one of ESP’s lost gems.

100 Years of Woody Herman

Kevin Whitehead — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 19:50:52 +0000

In the later 1930s, when swing bands ruled American pop, Woody Herman — born May 16, 1913 — ran a distant third to his rival bandleading clarinetists, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. But in the 1940s, when swing was on its way out, Herman put together his two greatest bands — his co-called First and Second Herds, among the great jazz orchestras period. And then, when big bands had really become dinosaurs, he kept his going another four decades.

As clarinetist, Herman’s timbre was drier than Goodman’s or Shaw’s, but his piping bent-note sound could really drive a band. Herman sang too, in an unassuming boy-next-door way, as if stepping in last-minute to replace the band’s real singer, who was stuck in traffic. He had to cultivate that casual air. In songwriter Isham Jones’s band in 1936, Herman sang “No Greater Love” like a ’20s crooner — through the nose, throwing himself at the lyric. Jones had been at it since 1920, and had his old-school mannerisms. But he also featured a lot of blues; “Blue Prelude” showed how much his men dug Duke Ellington.

When Jones broke the band up in 1936, the jazzier members continued as a co-op fronted by Herman. They kept “Blue Prelude” as their first theme, and kept playing the blues. The ensemble drive (like Woody’s singing) quickly got modernized and streamlined. They played opposite Count Basie at New York’s Roseland. Basie said later, “The only band that ever cut my band was that Woody Herman band.”

Herman’s idol was Ellington, and even Duke was struck by how much Woody could sound like his own suave Johnny Hodges on alto sax. Hodges also showed Herman how to make an entrance; his breakthrough “Woodsheddin’ with Woody” just plays possum, swinging in a light Basie groove, until his clarinet barges in. The compilation Blues on Parade charts the band’s progress from 1937-42, albeit in scrambled order. The earliest item is a swinging update of Jelly Roll Morton’s “Doctor Jazz,” the latest an early Dizzy Gillespie chart with boppish touches, “Down Under.”

Dizzy said in his autobiography that when bebop hit in the early ’40s, all the bands wanted a bop number in the book, but only Herman’s caught the new rhythms without coaching: “All the trumpet players in that band wanted to sound like me.” He hired a couple of women musicians during the War, trumpeter Billie Rogers and vibraphonist Margie Hyams.

Bebop’s influence is all over Herman’s First Herd, founded in 1944, a band with an Ellingtonian array of diverse soloists: vibist Red Norvo, short-lived Dizophile trumpet spitfire Sonny Berman, tenor sax sparkplug Flip Phillips, bassist Chubby Jackson (who played fast and had an extra high string, making his playing sound speeded up), and Bill Harris, a broad toned trombonist of the old school somehow perfect for the new material. (Hear “Bijou,” with an improvised Harris solo that sounds carefully worked out.) The Herd featured hot arrangements by Ralph Burns and Neal Hefti. Igor Stravinsky wrote them his harmonically modern (if rhythmically starchy) “Ebony Concerto.”

Maybe because his band had started as a co-op, Herman was always open to his musicians’ enthusiasms and ideas; the players embroidered Burns’s and Hefti’s charts in rehearsal. In a little over three minutes, the dadaistic “Your Father’s Mustache” crams in scorching trumpet and tenor solos, a quote from Stravinsky’s Petrouchka, a mock-gleeclub vocal, false endings and prime Herman clarinet. They play it tongue-in-cheek with enviable precision. Drummer Buddy Rich, subbing, learned it by ear, and nailed it.

In 1946 they broke up — everyone was doing it. A year later, the business totally tanking, Herman formed his Second Herd, with Stan Getz and Zoot Sims on tenor, that one that recorded Jimmy Giuffre’s classic “Four Brothers,” with its cushy close-harmony saxes pointing the way toward cool jazz.

The standard anthology of the First Herd, and the Second Herd’s first batch, is Columbia’s Blowin’ Up A Storm. The Second Herd’s lesser known final sides were for Capitol, Herman’s next home till 1950. There’s more Getz in his early glory as rapturous tenor balladeer (“Early Autumn”) just before he goes out on his own. But by mid-’49 things start to get weird: cheeky dixieland with harrumphing tuba, and a mocking “Mule Train” sung with Nat King Cole.

In the ’50s Herman had his dips like other swing survivors, but he bounced back once more. In 1964, he recorded the Beatles’ “Things We Said Today,” a feature for his slithery Hodges-style alto, and a sign of things to come. A few years later, his increasingly young, shaggy and amplified crew was playing tunes by Frank Zappa (“America Drinks and Goes Home”), Traffic (“Smiling Phases”), the Temptations (“I Can’t Get Next to You”), Steely Dan (“Kid Charlemagne”) — and “Proud Mary,” “Light My Fire,” “Ma Cherie Amour” and more. If music can be kitsch in a good way, these the-kids-will-dig-it sides qualify.

In those later years Herman also revisited oldies, and kept turning up new talent, like saxophonists Joe Lovano and Scott Hamilton, bassists Marc Johnson and pianist Lyle Mays. Another way Woody Herman stood out from his rivals: He was a pleasure to work for. He rarely lost his temper in public, was married to the same woman forever, and loaned money to acquaintances in need.

It all should have ended better. Late in life the IRS hounded him over back taxes, owing to dubious management by a trusted aide. In 1985 the feds auctioned off the house he’d lived in 40 years — never mind all the money he’d raised for the War effort back when — to a landlord who later tried to evict him over tardy rent. A battery of pro bono lawyers staved that off; donations flowed in from all over. That was in 1987, the year Herman played his last gig, and the year he died. He’d led a big band for 50 years.

Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Brooklyn Babylon

Seth Colter Walls — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:00:37 +0000

Florid with moment-to-moment intrigue and a fine document of an artist with a lot to say

With Infernal Machines, Darcy James Argue seemed to come out of nowhere: Who was this guy who wrote tunes drawing equally from the big band tradition as well as post-rock and classical minimalism? Why did he call his music “steampunk-jazz?” The reality was that this composer-bandleader came from the practice hall, where he’d been drilling his band for several years. Infernal Machines bowled us over with a fully formed, highly unique vision.

Brooklyn Babylon is his follow-up and, after a Grammy nod as well as three of DownBeat’s “rising star” awards, the album has got a lot of following up to do. A 53-minute suite originally written as one half of a visual-art-and-music spectacle at the Brooklyn Academy of Music back in 2011, the studio-recording version of Brooklyn Babylon raises a few questions of its own: Is this a proper jazz record, or is it a one-dimensional document of a live multi-media project? And: does it matter?

The answer does matter. If this were just a callback to some live event, it would be of interest mostly to those who attended the shows. But the first two tracks — “Prologue” and “The Neighborhood” — advertise that the new music here will be able to carry this idiosyncratic album on its own terms. The first piece features some high-spirited marching band romping-about, as well as a striking tenor sax solo from Sam Sadigursky. The second tune, after opening with a minimalist piano quote from LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends,” pairs electric bass with a sweetly idyllic clarinet solo that never gets too saccharine, thanks to some tart, brassy interruptions in the background. (Argue didn’t win that “arranger” DownBeat award for nothing.) The whole thing blooms into an electric guitar-driven section that, in turn, deftly morphs back into a reprise of its opening piano motif.

And there’s still more than 40 minutes of inventive music like that left to discover. Some of the pieces feature wooden flutes, others Afro-Peruvian percussion. Ingrid Jensen’s electric trumpet solo in “Building” calls to mind Miles’s best fusion bands. That all these sounds work together so elegantly is evidence of expert execution, not just singular vision; the entire program flows in a way that many modern-classical composers ought to envy. And you don’t need to look up the plotline of the (wordless) stage show — it was about an architect commissioned to build the world tallest carousel amid “embattled neighborhoods” — in order to enjoy the music. Argue’s curiosity and skill at integrating all his fascinations represent the humanism of the narrative capably on its own. Both florid with moment-to-moment intrigue and a fine document of an artist with a lot to say (and the ambition to match), Brooklyn Babylon is essential listening for all sorts of musical communities.

The Stooges’ eMusic Essentials

Andrew Perry — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:00:37 +0000

To celebrate the new Iggy & The Stooges album Ready To Die, we invited guitarist James Williamson to rifle through eMusic’s catalog and talk us through some of his favorite albums. You can read about the legendary guitarist’s choices below.

Andrew Perry interviews the band about their remarkable comeback album here.

The Complete Plantation Recordings

Muddy Waters
1993 | Geffen

I love Muddy Waters, he'd always have a couple entries in my Top 20. I saw him play in Detroit. I actually liken that scene to The Stooges, because at that time all the British guys were coming over and playing the blues back to us [Americans], and at some point, you go, "Well, that's good, but it ain't the real thing," so then we'd start going [back] to the old guys... and listening to them, and in a way that's what happened to us: people are coming back to watch us, because we did the original work. We're kind of the old blues guys of rock!

Iggy went to live in Chicago, pre-Stooges, to check out that scene. He was the drummer for a band called The Prime Movers, and they were very much a Chicago Blues-style band. They were quite good actually.
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Charley Patton: The Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Volume 1

Charley Patton
2013 | Document Records / The Orchard

There's a lot of real esoteric original delta blues — Robert Johnson and all those guys — and you just can't touch them. I haven't tried to play it much, but I love to listen to this stuff.
Most Things Haven't Worked Out

Junior Kimbrough
2000 | Fat Possum Records

I didn't ever see him myself, but Iggy took him out on the road, and I think they made a record, or at least a couple of songs together. I initially got in contact with Fat Possum because RL Burnside, Junior and all those guys were on that label. I started looking at their catalogue, and I said, "Hey you guys, I'm this guitar player, could you send me some of your... stuff?" and they ended up sending me this huge boxful of almost everybody that was interesting on their catalog. So I'm quite familiar with their stuff!
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El Camino

The Black Keys
2011 | Nonesuch

I like the Black Keys, especially this later stuff. It's some of their best songwriting.
Talking Book

Stevie Wonder
2000 | Motown

All this Motown stuff was in the air while we were growing up in Detroit. Stevie Wonder would actually play at the state fair, which was just an open field basically with a bunch of equipment, and he'd be on a stage which wasn't more than two feet high, with four guys around the edges so he wouldn't fall off, and he'd play "Fingertips," right up close and personal. I love "Superstition"... too — it's a great song.
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A Love Supreme

John Coltrane
2003 | IMPULSE!

Coltrane was a master. A Love Supreme, that's also an amazing record. He was completely plugged into something.
The Köln Concert

Keith Jarrett
1999 | ECM

My favorite is the Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett, which would've been in the mid-to-late '70s, but Spheres is pretty good, too, from around the same time. He's an improvisational pianist, and some of the things he's done are just incredible, very free, almost jazzy sometimes, but very melodic. He's also played with a ton of very good musicians.
Roger The Engineer / Over Under Sideways Down

The Yardbirds
2009 | The Yardbirds / Cadiz

I was a huge Yardbirds fan, I saw them play both with Jeff Beck and with Jimmy Page. That was prominent in my evolution. They were so exciting. They had a big hit over here with 'For Your Love', and then that attracted a lot of people to get their albums and stuff, and those albums were incredible, like Over Under Sideways Down — all those songs. Jeff Beck is one of... my very top guitar heroes. A couple of years ago, we were in France, but we came over to the UK to see an artist, and he was playing with her, so I got to meet him backstage, and that was a big thrill for me.
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Are You Experienced

The Jimi Hendrix Experience
2010 | Legacy Recordings

Before I joined The Stooges, we had a friend in common: Ron Richardson, who was the manager for the first band I helped found, called The Chosen Few. He was someone Ron Asheton knew, and he went out to California for the Monterey pop festival, and brought back home Are You Experienced? It was just a game-changer for all of us — after that, nothing was the same.
Bringing It All Back Home

Bob Dylan
1987 | Columbia

I was into Bob Dylan even more than Iggy was. I patterned my whole life around Bob Dylan. He would be No. 1 on my list, every record he made except for a few, I like 'em all! Bringing It All Back Home is a great album.
Kick Out The Jams

MC5
1999 | Rhino

The MC5 were well established at the time when The Stooges started. I wasn't in the band at that time, but I saw all those guys play at the Grande Ballroom and so forth. They were pretty mindblowing, I always liked them. They were quote-unquote, high-energy. Kick Out The Jams was a great tune, but the thing about the 5, though, was that they were all caught up with this political thing,... too. They had that Trans-Love thing going on, and lots of hippie politics. That aspect of the band didn't really resonate with me, but they were good guys, and great players, and they still are, the ones that are left. Fred Smith was a really good songwriter — real simple.
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Loaded

The Velvet Underground
1987 | Atlantic Records/ATG

I loved that Loaded album [final Velvet Underground album, from 1970], I used to play it all the time. A couple of years later, the Raw Power Stooges played Max's Kansas City [legendary rock 'n' roll club] in New York, and Lou came in and sat down at our table and was trying to pitch us to do a couple of his songs. Because of course he was in the last wave... of the Tin Pan Alley music writers. I had to inform him, "We write our own songs, Lou, we don't want any of yours!" Maybe in hindsight we were stupid, because he does write good songs.
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Radio Ethiopia

Patti Smith Group
1996 | Arista

She's a good friend. When I first went to New York in The Stooges, we always would stay at the Chelsea Hotel, and they had coffee makers in the room. I was making coffee, and in those days I was using sugar, so I knocked on Ig's door and said, "You know anybody around here? I need some sugar." And he said, "Well, I know this girl upstairs," so I went knocking... on her door, and I said, "Hey, I'm here in the hotel with the Stooges, and, er, do you have any sugar?" So that was the first time I met Patti Smith. She lived there of course, so she had sugar!
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New York Dolls

New York Dolls
1987 | Island Def Jam

We were contemporaries of The New York Dolls, and I really liked those guys. We'd see them on tours and stuff, and hang with them sometimes when we were in New York. I knew The Ramones a little bit as well. When they'd come out to Hollywood, they'd hang with me. They were nice guys!
Double Nickels On The Dime

Minutemen
SST Records / The Orchard

This album was the heyday for those guys. It's a good record. They were great players unlike some bands in the punk era, and Mike's really a talented musician. Today, in his own band, he's writing what he calls operas, but they're basically a huge string of one-minute songs, and they play them back to back [à la vintage Minutemen], and it's amazing to see how they can remember all that stuff... — there's maybe 30 or 40 of those things back to back. He's a very astute student of the industry as well, so he an interesting guy to work with.

I didn't pay attention to any of this kind of music when I was out of the business. At first I didn't even believe that all these guys were copying my style. I'm like Rip van Winkle, I just left everything and went to sleep.
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Push the Sky Away

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds
2013 | Bad Seed Ltd / AWAL

We played in Australia with them. I do feel that Nick's live act — I think he's taken a few pages out of Iggy's book. There's nothing wrong with that — I mean, even The Boss [i.e. Bruce Springsteen] crowd-surfs now. You gotta go with what works, right?

Kendrick Scott Oracle, Conviction

Ken Micallef — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:19:14 +0000

Broad themes, big idealism and a wide musical palette

“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred let us so love; where there is doubt let us so faith; where there is despair let us so hope; where there is darkness let us so light.” So Kendrick Scott prays over “Pendulum,” which starts off his third album Conviction with all the anticipation of an impending thunderstorm, all brisk rhythmic winds and enveloping atmospheres. Here the 32-year-old drummer/composer goes for broad themes, big idealism and a wide musical palette. Like the Bruce Lee sample that graces Scott’s “Be Water,” Conviction flows freely, the music morphing from intimate straight ahead (“I Have A Dream”) to Charles Earland worthy, odd metered cosmic funk (“Cycling Through Reality”) to improvisational R&B (“Too Much”). At its core, the collection reflects Kendrick Scott, the thinker, a musician with a musical vision reflected by a suite-like cohesiveness that mirrors his masterful skills as a drummer (Terence Blanchard, Kenny Garrett, Gretchen Parlato) and his expressiveness as a composer. For its sense of cohesiveness and continuity alone, Conviction is an album in the classic sense of the word. A sprightly, air-filled drum solo opens “Cycling Through Reality,” an odd metered rally through the sweet guitar of Mike Moreno, a soaring solo by saxophonist/bass clarinetist John Ellis, and the empathetic piano of Taylor Eigsti (Scott and Eigsti form a dual rhythmic juggernaut throughout). “Apollo” creates a gentle, Pat Metheny-esque rural vision, “Serenity” an introspective palette of acoustic guitars, sizzling cymbal and pop vocal, “Memory of Enchantment” further moments of piano endowed solace. Next to last, “Be Water” invokes another prayer in the form of a Bruce Lee sample: “Here is natural instinct and here is control. You are to combine the two in harmony. Be water, my friend. Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water.” Scott and Oracle swirl through the song, immersed in improvisation, inspired by Lee’s directive to follow the shape of the music wherever it may lead them with fervor and intensity.

Craig Taborn Trio, Chants

Britt Robson — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:00:56 +0000

Scrolling out like a seamless series of surprises

Craig Taborn HAS set a daunting standard with his outings as a leader: 2004′s Junk Magic, for one, is a jazz-electronica masterwork that updated Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew for the 21st century; 2011′s Avenging Angel, for its part has been hailed for expanding the language of solo piano improvisation. Chants doesn’t detract from the luster of that legacy. Drummer Gerald Cleaver (who has known Taborn for 25 years) and bassist Thomas Morgan have been playing the vast majority of these nine Taborn originals for years now, and the resultant music scrolls out like a seamless series of surprises, with interplay that is earthy and organic, yet whirring with intimate, nuanced colors, like a pastel kaleidoscope.

Sometimes the innovations are spun off from a repetitive riff, as on “Beat the Ground.” Sometimes they roam into a journey, as on the 13-minute “All True Night/Future Perfect,” which begins with a classically-oriented piano solo and concludes with roguish intensity. Sometimes they coalesce, as in the gorgeous bass-and-drums engagement during the quiet “In Chant.” They can feel “avant-garde,” as during the delicate sonic crumpling of “Cracking Hearts,” or bold and insistent, as in the rousing closer, “Speak the Name.” This is not your grandfather’s piano trio; this is a shape-shifting music that snuggles into nooks and crannies of its own making.

Interview: Craig Taborn

Kevin Whitehead — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:41:56 +0000

Craig Taborn is a famously voracious listener, equally at home with 19th-century piano literature and glitchy techno. He’s covered so much ground in 20 years of recording it’s impossible to get a fix on him. He emerged as saxophone hotdog James Carter’s henchman in the ’90s, on albums including Conversin’ with the Elders (Taborn meets swing giants Sweets Edison and Buddy Tate) and In Carterian Fashion (Taborn on organ). In the same period he began a series of collaborations with Art Ensemble of Chicago saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell. Then came noisy stints on electric pianos with Tim Berne and Dave Douglas.

Taborn’s ways of sounding out acoustic and electric keyboards come together on violist Mat Maneri’s Sustain of 2001, and his own Junk Magic with Maneri, Bad Plus drummer Dave King and tenor saxist Aaron Stewart. The synthetic beats dripping onto the molasses-slow ensemble on the title track provide a window into Taborn’s open mind. The Sustain rhythm section — Taborn, longtime drumming buddy Gerald Cleaver and bass powerhouse William Parker — later became the co-op Farmers by Nature. But first the pianist had another trio with Cleaver and bassist Chris Lightcap that made the acclaimed Light Made Lighter. (They did a memorable “I Cover the Waterfront.”) Taborn and Cleaver also make a rhythm trio with bassist Michael Formanek, in his quartet.

For all that inventive work and much, much more, it wasn’t till the 2011 release of the solo Avenging Angel that a wider audience noticed how good Craig Taborn is. The music is at once quiet and thrillingly virtuosic; he plumbs the piano’s depths, coaxing out its pure and impure tones. The follow-up, Chants, is for yet another Taborn-Cleaver trio, this one with bassist Thomas Morgan: rollicking music, involved and evolved.

Speaking with eMusic’s Kevin Whitehead in late March, Taborn touched on arcane composing strategies, the influence of electronica on his acoustic music, Sun Ra, Brian Eno, Morton Feldman, and the piano sound on old Blue Note records.

You’ve spoken about approaching piano as a “pure sound source.” For all your knowledge of harmony and music history, you’re really most concerned with getting the instrument to sound.

That’s the way I hear all music. My harmonic and melodic sensibilities exist within a larger world of sound. It mitigates how I hear harmony. Timbre, coloration, overtones, they all affect my choices.

That partly comes from my always being involved with electronic music, with synths alongside the piano. I got my first synthesizer within a year of my first piano lesson — a Moog Satellite followed by a Mini-Moog. I was like 12. Around the same time I learned what a triad was, I’m turning the knobs, figuring out how to make synthesizer sound like a trumpet. The Christmas after that I got a Rhodes electric piano. That was the early ’80s, when digital was just coming in and those older keyboards were really affordable. My parents were finding them in newspaper ads for around 100 bucks.

You’re well-versed in a broad range of music. Is it hard to play one kind at a time?

No. I don’t limit my creative choices based on idiom. It’s all available; the fun is to see how to fit things into the specific music I’m playing. It’s what drives me. I feel very free in an acoustic improvised context to think of electronic, non-tonal music: What would happen if I applied some of those strategies? Bringing in ideas from other musics can help move the music forward.

With Chants, you’ve now documented three very different piano trios with Gerald Cleaver.

The history is strong. We have a language. I like making music with Gerald because we address the specific situation or group. We’re looking to really serve the context, and to see how these situations can be different. Without talking about it, those groups each settle into an identity very quickly. The trick is to let it emerge before imposing any limits on it. Thomas Morgan and William Parker have super-strong identities on the instrument, too, and that’s a key factor.

A really wide beat will set William going.

You’re dealing with that wave. William has such breadth, such a long reach I can feel. I think of Farmers by Nature as a more traditional group. I settle into a zone where I think about the jazz piano tradition, and let that operate more. Not that I block other things out, but I’m thinking of Duke, Monk, Fats Waller. It may not sound like it in the end, because I can’t really play like those guys. There’s always that temptation to play in the tradition of the jazz piano trio, but I know William or Thomas won’t make it sound normal. I can open that door, knowing they won’t box me in.

“Saints” and “Future Perfect” on Chants feature one of the signature jazz sounds of our time: ringing unisons from bass and the pianist’s left hand. It’s the piano-trio-as-power-trio sound.

In that context, it’s an easy way to get the bottom end working. It solves lots of problems having to do with how the music projects. It’s tight, it’s heavy, it speaks to precision and cohesion. It brings things into bold relief — like power riffing in rock bands. But then you can put other things over it.

You do like higher metrical games. I can count out a 43-beat Don Ellis pattern, but don’t get far with “Beat the Ground.”

You could find an ultimate pattern that you could count, but it’s not counted through in the Don Ellis sense. None of the music is constructed around metrical cycles. I deal a lot with multiples, multiple meters that make up even larger groupings. It’s more about doing things modularly; the music can go in different directions. “Beat the Ground” has a larger rhythmic cycle, but Gerald might go through it one time playing against everything, and the next time locking it in. It’s like a pyramid. There’s another rhythm strategy underneath.

I’ve been into building up forms for a long time, so a specific piece’s form is not just one thing: There are larger supportive hierarchies of different complexities. I’ll have three or four layers for people to address with different harmonic and rhythmic structures. You can switch from one to another at will and it all fits. “Beat the Ground” has a whole other improvised section we didn’t record because it would have run too long, where we play over the same form, but with chord changes that mark out a different rhythmic cycle.

As far back as the late ’50s, Sun Ra was dealing with multiples like that: one part’s in 13, another’s in 5, and the drummer plays free. He was way ahead in terms of orchestration. The rational and irrational at the same time: that’s something I work with a lot. Different meters, and then a layer that isn’t even in time, floating over all that.

Even in high school I was into writing and playing in polymeters. Sun Ra was definitely one influence. Another big one was Geri Allen — those late ’80s and early ’90s records you can’t find anymore, on Minor Music or JMT, or The Nurturer. She builds these really nice melodic structures; her ostinatos had architectural and melodic intent.

I’m always looking for ways to achieve more speechlike improvisation. A patterned, grid-like way of playing complicated stuff is too diagrammatic for me. I favor ecstatic playing. The model there is Sonny Rollins, the way he played over bebop tunes in the ’50s. What he plays fits, but it’s very loose and creative. How free can you be, and still hold to the structure? Or, if you play an ostinato with one hand, how free can you be with the other?

On Chant, a lot of the time we hold to the form, but it’s not a mandate. On “Saints,” we never break from it; we always come back around, and mark the end of the form. Intense structure and playing free: Gerald shares that interest, and Thomas too. I’ll think we’re playing free as it happens, but when I listen back to a recording, the form is still in the background. We’d internalized it so much, we never left it.

Your solo record Avenging Angel changed the way people look at you. Did it feel like a breakthrough at the time?

It was a happy day in the studio. I approached it as a way to document this solo music I’d been developing for eight years. I had been thinking about doing that before ECM came into the picture. I had already been talking to Manfred [Eicher, label head and producer] about recording the trio but we hadn’t been able to schedule it, everyone’s so busy. Meanwhile in 2010, I did a week-and-a-half solo tour in Europe, and maybe he got wind of that, because a week later he asked me to do a solo record. I was ready at that point: shedding for hours a day, just practicing and playing exercises to prepare.

It was a best-case scenario: We could record anywhere, and he really understands recording solo piano. And it was fantastic piano! But it was an improvised program, so it really came down to the particular day. That’s the crapshoot. We recorded in Lugano, and I’d been teaching that week at a Swiss jazz camp three hours away — teaching kids how to play jazz. One night I played a solo concert, and then I was driven to Lugano, arriving at like 2 a.m. I was tired the next day going into the studio. When I started playing, things seemed to be clicking. After a couple of pieces I thought, “This is going well.”

You recorded many more pieces than are on the album.

Thirty-two, maybe, altogether? It’s possible more will come out. I’ll have to go back and listen. Some pieces go to the same areas; some others I know were pretty cool. Manfred’s been talking to me about another solo project, but I don’t think it’s developed enough since then, yet.

At the beginning of “Forgetful,” you make acoustic piano sound like a Rhodes: a spectral composer’s illusion.

The piano is a pretty subtle instrument. In the right sonic space, and with an instrument that’s willing, you can get that sound. But it’s also about knowing how to record it. Close miking is good for some things. Wide miking reveals others, the overtones reverberating against the body of the instrument itself. The pianoforte was designed as a concert instrument, to project into a room. Miking has a lot to do with how hard you’re hitting the instrument. At this particular volume, 20 feet away may be optimal. You’re also working with the resonance of the room. Manfred knows how to get a good piano sound. He was very hands-on with the miking.

My ideal, when I’m playing straight-ahead jazz, is the Blue Note-in-the-’50s-and-’60s piano. I always liked that sound, but didn’t know why Wynton Kelly, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill and Cecil Taylor all had it. It was the piano [at engineer Rudy van Gelder's studio] and the way it was miked: That sound projects an identity as much as the player does. That piano had a certain bounce to it. But they got a new one a while ago. Maybe it was beyond its time. (Pianos are like wine: at a certain temperature, they age really well. Then they peak and go down from there.) I hear it’s still in the building, but outside the studio. I’d like to play that once, just to see what the action was like.

Do you hear a relationship between quiet pieces like “This Voice Says So” and ambient music?

That Brian Eno thing is always operating. For me all improvisation is more about paying attention to sound than generating ideas. Attention and manipulation: ambient is one approach to that. It’s the philosophy of John Cage. He was really talking about a way of tending to sound, and I try to give it that level of attention. Morton Feldman always paid attention to decay, to the entire shape of a note. He composed around the idea of what happens after the initiation of events. That gives a different energy to the music.

Lots of jazz improvisation is about always generating ideas: It’s dealing with attacks, always seeking the initiation of events. When you think about Miles, Wayne Shorter, Roscoe Mitchell in the jazz continuum, these deeper guys pay attention to the entire musical event, to the entire shape and bloom of a note — where it’s going and where it ends. When it ceases to be audible and becomes imaginary. That’s the key to a deeper world of music making. The real masters are aware of that, like Gerald, or Thomas, or Mat Maneri. You can tell immediately how aware of that they are. Some musicians don’t pay such close attention — they’re moving on when things are still unfolding.

A Beginner’s Guide to Donald Byrd

Hua Hsu — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 18:18:46 +0000

“I knew damn near everybody,” the late trumpeter and bandleader Donald Byrd joked during a 1987 Pacifica Radio interview, reeling off names like Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis. What’s striking is that, at this point in the interview, he’s still talking about his high school years. When the Detroit-born and bred Byrd passed away in February at the age of 80, it was a reminder that “damn near everybody” was, at some point, touched by the trumpeter, bandleader, producer and teacher. Few artists’ careers so neatly embody the various stylistic turns of postwar music, from jazz to soul to funk to disco and beyond. It’s a tribute to Byrd’s eternally open mind that when the British DJ and jazz hound Gilles Peterson paid tribute to Byrd’s life, he did so with two distinct mixes: “The Acoustic Years” and “The Electric Years.”

And few artists were so comfortable with such constant change — a true rarity in the world of jazz, where form is virtue. While his creativity and dexterity as a trumpeter never quite paralleled the talents of Clifford Brown (who he replaced in Art Blakey’s band) or Miles Davis (a fellow early convert to a more electric, fusion-driven jazz sound), few figures can claim an influence as diverse or longstanding as Byrd’s. He played with Nat King Cole, Eric Dolphy, Monk and Coltrane. He appeared on over a hundred albums as a bandleader and sideman, and his 1973 breakthrough Black Byrd remains one of Blue Note’s all-time best sellers. He was a mentor to Herbie Hancock, giving the young pianist one of his first big breaks, and, as a college professor, his protégés would form bands like Blackbyrds and N.C.C.U. (“Super Trick”). He collaborated with Isaac Hayes on a disco classic (“Love Has Come Around”) and appeared on the first installment of Gang Starr rapper Guru’s Jazzmatazz series.

What follows are some of the defining moments of Byrd’s career, during which he was unafraid to try damn near anything.

Donald Byrd, “Jeannine”

At The Half Note Cafe: Vols 1 & 2 (The Rudy Van Gelder Edition)

Donald Byrd
2004 | BLUE NOTE

Donald Byrd assembled a great band in the late 1950s, and At the Half Note Cafe captures them in sizzling form. There's a vigor and energy to this live recording that's lacking in some of Byrd's early Blue Note studio sessions. On the joyous "Jeannine," Byrd is economical and restrained, willing as always to give ground to those around him. In this case that includes Pepper Adams's nervy, wild sax and Duke... Pearson's spritely piano.
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Donald Byrd, “Hush”

Royal Flush

Donald Byrd
2006 | BLUE NOTE

By 1961, the 29-year-old Byrd had established himself as a hard-bop cornerstone, recording five studio albums for Blue Note and guesting on many more. Few listeners who dropped the needle on Royal Flush could have guessed they were witnessing the debut of a legend. The breezy, bluesy gem "Chant" introduced the world to Herbie Hancock, who Byrd had mentored throughout the early 1960s. Years later, Hancock would remain grateful for Byrd's belief... in him, as well as this piece of advice from Byrd that the young, struggling pianist wouldn't understand until years later: never give away your publishing rights.
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Donald Byrd, “French Spice”

Free Form (The Rudy Van Gelder Edition)

Donald Byrd
2004 | BLUE NOTE

By 1962's excellent Free Form, Byrd was beginning to stray from the bop-derived formulas that had long defined mainstream jazz. His band was evolving, thanks to an increasingly confident Hancock, and here they're joined by Wayne Shorter, in one of his last freelance gigs before signing on with Miles Davis. Byrd's role as a connector of ideas is particularly evident here on the moody, abstract title cut, the funky "Pentecostal Feelin'" and... the playful, elegant "French Spice."
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Donald Byrd, “Christo Redentor”

A New Perspective (The Rudy Van Gelder Edition)

Donald Byrd
1999 | BLUE NOTE

Byrd was entering a fruitful, adventurous phase of his career by the time of 1963's A New Perspective. But if the album cover suggested a turn toward the modern — Byrd leans against the door of a curvy sports car — his experiments would have to plumb the distant past first. This was one of Byrd's best "spiritual" records, essentially a hard bop record featuring a gospel choir. Fantastic and life-affirming from... start to finish, the choir's textures and exhortations perfectly complement the band's rhythms and effervescent solos. It's highlighted by "Christo Redentor," Byrd's mournful trumpet rising above a chanting din.
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Donald Byrd, “Fancy Free” and “The Dude”

After cutting a few solid, if straightforward, Blue Note sides in the mid ’60s, Byrd began moving away from acoustic jazz in the later part of that decade. Miles Davis had gone “electric,” and soon others were following suit. For Byrd, it began with Duke Pearson’s electric keys, which radically shaped the texture of 1969′s Fancy Free, lending everything a freer, more felicitous feel. In 1970, he released Electric Byrd and there was no going back. In retrospect, plugging in suited Byrd’s accommodating style. “The Dude” isn’t radically different from some of his more rhythm-driven numbers from the early 1960s, only the groove is front and center. Fusion remains a dirty word among some jazz devotees, but it was more than a tweaking of the jazz sound. It was also a new approach to composition and recording. Electric Byrd‘s “Xibaba,” for example, is an absorbing, almost shapeless piece that finds Byrd and his new band — featuring Brazilians Hermeto Pascoal and Airto Moreira — concerned more with ambience and energy than structure.

Fancy Free

Donald Byrd
1993 | Blue Note Records
Electric Byrd

Donald Byrd
1996 | BLUE NOTE

Donald Byrd, “Black Byrd”

Black Byrd

Donald Byrd
1992 | BLUE NOTE

Electric Byrd and 1971's Ethiopian Knights had formalized Byrd's turn toward the funkier, fusion sound then sweeping the jazz community. It was 1973's Black Byrd that turned jazz's civil war into a popular phenomenon. Thanks largely to production from Larry and Fonce Mizell — a member of the Corporation, Motown's hit-making production squad — Black Byrd didn't sound like anything else around. "Black Byrd" was a groove, but one you could sing... along to. While Miles was flirting with avant-garde classical composition and psychedelic chaos, Byrd and the Mizells were turning toward radio-friendly rhythm and blues. To the horror of traditionalists, Black Byrd — with its attention-grabbing synths, funky percussion and vocals — was one of Blue Note's best-selling albums of the decade.
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Blackbyrds, “Blackbyrds’ Theme”

The Blackbyrds

The Blackbyrds
2007 | Fantasy Records

Byrd held a series of university teaching posts throughout the 1970s, and at least two bands formed out of his classes: North Carolina Central University's N.C.C.U. (which later became his backing band in the late 1970s) and Howard University's Blackbyrds. Byrd and the Mizells produced the first few Blackbyrds records, but they were never just a Byrd vanity project. They always seemed like a very creative funk band with jazz chops, especially... on their trio of classic early albums — 1974's self-titled debut ("Funky Junkie," "Summer Love"), Flying Start ("Walking in Rhythm," "Blackbyrds' Theme") and 1975's City Life (featuring the B-boy classic "Rock Creek Park").
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Donald Byrd, “Think Twice” and “Wind Parade”

The partnership between Byrd and the Mizells peaked on these two albums from the mid ’70s, Stepping into Tomorrow and Places and Spaces. It was on tracks like the sensual “Think Twice” or the genial funk of “Dominoes” that they began distinguishing their sound as more than just jazz with R&B characteristics. The compositions are sophisticated and atmospheric, as indebted to the instrumental interplay of Byrd’s past as to the technology of their present. There’s an open, spacey feel to the albums, a sign of Byrd and the Mizells’ growing confidence within this new jazz idiom. Occasionally, the songs from this era are also ridiculously catchy, as on the adventurous, frequently sampled classic “Wind Parade.”

Stepping Into Tomorrow

Donald Byrd
2000 | BLUE NOTE
Places and Spaces

Donald Byrd
1997 | BLUE NOTE

Donald Byrd and 125th St. N.Y.C., “Love Has Come Around”

Love Byrd

Donald Byrd And 125th Street, N.Y.C.
2008 | Rhino/Elektra

By 1981, Byrd could safely claim some kind of connection to every significant jazz musician of the previous 30 years. The only thing left, obviously, was to record an album with soul man Isaac Hayes. Backed by 125th St, N.Y.C. (previously known as N.C.C.U.), Love Byrd is a fairly snoozy effort highlighted by an unlikely gem: "Love Has Come Around," a dancefloor scorcher (and playlist staple of legendary DJ Larry Levan).

Black Moon, “Buck em Down (remix)” and Guru and Donald Byrd, “Loungin’”

Hip-hop and dance music made jazz relevant to kids in the early ’90s. Not everyone cared for the repurposing of their old sounds, but Byrd embraced it. After all, Byrd’s jazz-funk had been divisive in the ’70s, but decades later it was these intrepid works that producers like DJ Premier of Gang Starr or the Beatminerz gravitated toward. Byrd was sampled countless times, but I’ve always loved how the Beatminerz’s Evil Dee rearranged “Wind Parade” for Black Moon’s “Buck ‘em Down” remix, lending the steely original a bit of grace. For Guru, Gang Starr’s other half, his Jazzmatazz series was essentially a way to give back. “Donald Byrd — word/ On the track, quite exact,” Guru hails, and Byrd matches the rapper’s gruff monotone with some playful, old school riffing.

Diggin' In Dah Vaults

Black Moon
2005 | Nervous Records
Jazzmatazz Volume 1

Guru
1993 | NOO TRYBE

J Dilla, “Think Twice”

Welcome To Detroit

Jay Dee aka J Dilla
2003 | BBE Music / !K7 Records

Jay Dee made a name for himself as one-third of A Tribe Called Quest's beat-making faction (the Ummah). Thanks to his work on Common's critically acclaimed Like Water for Chocolate and Q-Tip's post-Quest endeavor Amplified, Dee has also established himself as a hip-hop super-producer. While Dee's stock continues to rise (working with Janet Jackson, Erykah Badu, and Macy Gray), his underground projects have been less fruitful. Reason being, when it comes to... enlisting new MCs to collaborate with, Dee has yet to locate a lyricist capable of augmenting his sublime production. This fact became apparent during Dee's short-lived stint as a member of Slum Village, and the trend continues with his first solo outing, Welcome 2 Detroit. Here, Dee continues to showcase a diverse assortment of sensuous melodies and booming funk samples. The Detroit-bred MCs who Dee chooses to highlight -- Phat Kat on "Rico Suave Bossa Nova" and Beej on "Beej-N-Dem, Pt. 2" prove to be very mediocre lyricists. Yet Dee did manage to round up a few hometown prospects, as Frank N Dank liven up "Pause" and Elzhi rips a few furious verses on "Come Get It." Though Dee flips a few clumsy bars as well, Welcome 2 Detroit really takes off when he sticks solely to an instrumental script, retouching trumpeter Donald Byrd's "Think Twice" and transforming Kraftwerk's indelible "Trans-Europe Express" into the strippers'-anthem-in-waiting "B.B.E. (Big Booty Express)."
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Dave Douglas Quintet, Time Travel

Steve Holtje — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:17:02 +0000

Contemplative modal tunes with elliptical, elusive melodic twists

The seven tracks here come from the same April 2012 session as last year’s Be Still, with the same then-new band: tenor saxophonist Jon Irabagon, pianist Matt Mitchell, bassist Linda Oh and drummer Rudy Royston (minus the guest vocalist on Be Still). Unsurprisingly, sometimes the mood and style are similar to that collection: contemplative modal tunes with the sort of elliptical, elusive melodic twists heard in classic Wayne Shorter material, but within a 21st-century milieu wherein gears are switched more often. However, there are a lot more swinging, upbeat compositions: the giddily whimsical “Beware of Doug,” on which Royston’s chops are unleashed with a brief but dazzling solo; “Little Feet” with its wildly off-kilter rhythms; the rocketing “Garden State,” where the band’s ability to coordinate lines shooting off in multiple directions and skewed times is mightily impressive, sounding spontaneous even if much of it probably required advance coordination. It would be fascinating to learn in what order the session’s compositions were laid down: in spite of being recorded at the same time as Be Still, Time Travel seems like a maturation, or an evolution, thanks to its greater diversity.

Jaimeo Brown, Transcendence

Britt Robson — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 18:06:31 +0000

Passion and reverence that soaks into your soul

Jaimeo Brown’s Transcendence is “essential” music, in the sense that the essence of the black church, the blues and the emotional gutbucket that marks the best jazz improvisation help distinguish its identity. And yet this is almost the opposite of a “roots” album; Brown, a drummer-conceptualist in his mid 30s, has fostered a species of music that incorporates the scalding blues-rock guitar and hip-hop sonics of Chris Sholar (probably best known for his Grammy-winning work with Kanye and Jay-Z on “No Church In the Wild”); extended samples from the rural Alabama gospel group the Gee’s Bend Quilters from their recordings in 1941 and 2002; the sinuous, Carnatic-styled East Indian vocals of Falu; the resonant, ductile jazz tenor sax of J.D. Allen and piano of Geri Allen; and Brown’s own polyrhythmic, African-bush-to-NYC-club assaults on the drum kit.

After a couple of straight-through listens, the entire package soaks into your soul. The terrifying, god-fearing declamations of the Gee Bend vocalists on traditional spirituals anchor the opener, “Mean World” and “You Can’t Hide.” The former finds drummer Brown and saxophonist Allen enacting the blitzkrieg of woe that befalls the wretched, yielding to a soundscape designed by Brown and his father, Dartanyan Brown, that wafts like dust and fog over a desolate plain at the end. On “You Can’t Hide,” Sholar’s guitar electrocutes and illuminates the Holy Ghost, followed by another caldron of phrases from J.D. Allen.

But the passion and reverence unfurls at differently evocative levels of intensity. “Somebody’s Knocking” features the parallel ululations of Falu’s voice and Andrew Shantz’s harmonium. “Patience” leads with the well-deep bass of Dartanyan Brown. “Power of God,” my for-now favorite track, lowers the volume on the gospel singers so that Geri Allen’s incredibly beautiful, understated piano can take hold, resulting in a softly shimmering tune. “Accra” is a drum showcase for Brown inspired by his trip to Ghana a week for the recording session. Transcendence concludes with another pair of spirituals, “You Needn’t Mind Me Dying” and “This World Ain’t My Home,” that mesh raging gospel and gauzy hip hop dappled with the rubato jazz of Allen’s horn. It will find a place on my best-of listings at year’s end.

Uri Caine and Han Bennink, Sonic Boom

Ken Micallef — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 13:23:36 +0000

A wild, impish triumph that delivers everything its pairing promises

This inspired meeting between adventurous keyboardist Caine and gale-force drummer Bennink delivers everything their pairing promises. Caine, known for his avant-jazz/chamber excursions that approach classical masterworks with a uniquely twisted flavor, is challenged and encouraged at every turn by Bennink, a master of free jazz drumming with a unique, gleeful attitude. Recorded at Amsterdam’s Bimhuis in 2011, Sonic Boom is comprised of nine brief but exhilarating songs — if these roller coasters of form somersaulting function can be called songs. Caine plays impishly, no doubt inspired by Bennink’s childlike shenanigans, the kind of thing you might tell a young child to “STOP!” if not for the sheer joy billowing from his drums and cymbals. Performing primarily improvised material, the duo also cover Monk’s “Round Midnight,” but it goes all wrong. Caine extracts the familiar melody from the piano’s keys and internal wires, but then everything is dissembled and scattered, as if Madlib were dissecting/delivering the performance via two Technics SP 1200 turntables. Sticks fly, brushes swoon, Monk screams for mercy, and before you know it the pair are swinging sweetly, sparkling, like it’s 1959. They follow with an avuncular blues, “As I Was,” a sonic freefall through shocking accents; “Furious Urious,” and the equivalent of a swinging, Willie the Lion Smith barrel house shuffle, “Lockdown.” A triumph.

Sean Nowell, The Kung-Fu Masters

Britt Robson — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:56:13 +0000

Dynamic arrangements that spit and sizzle

Sean Nowell has firmly established his credentials as a stolid post-bop saxophonist with a string of discs stretching back to 2006, but he opens The Kung-Fu Masters by covering Jimi Hendrix (a resplendent rendition of the sinuous classic, “Crosstown Traffic”) and devotes the liner notes to a single quote from martial artist Bruce Lee that begins, “There are no limits.” The adjoining photo of Nowell — left leg and hand poised for a karate kick and chop, right hand cradling his tenor sax, sunglasses on, neck muscles tensed, mouth yelling — undercuts his industrial-strength alter ego just a smidge with good humor, and so does the music. The Kung-Fu Masters is named after a septet Nowell has led since 2009, long enough to flex an impressively muscular mix of jazz, funk, rock and electronic, leavened with an appealing dab of carefree fun.

The Hendrix and Bruce Lee references help program the wayback machine to the ’60s and ’70s. Sure, there are some blipping riffs and pronounced effects, especially from Nowell’s longtime cohort (and Posi-Tone label mate), keyboardist Art Hirahara. But the bulk of the tracks on Kung Fu feature three-part horn arrangements (with ace bop trombonist Michael Dease and trumpeter Brad Mason joining Nowell) that are taut like a traveling blues revue or, more often, greasy and groove-oriented like the Crusaders, Bohannon, or the JBs. Throw in Adam Klipple’s fatback organ and the powerhouse funk-rock rhythm section (drummer Marko Djordjevic and bassist Evan Marien) and you’ve got music that spits and sizzles on the grill.

The talented, practiced band and Nowell’s dynamic arrangements rescue The Kung-Fu Masters from retro cliché. Check the way all seven members are deployed on the snaky funk, replete with a four-note vamp played rondo style, on “In the Shikshteesh,” the Shaft-on-the-Autobahn dislocation of “The Outside World,” the slingshot-groove skirmishing between the horns and the keys on “The 55th Chamber,” and the porridge of textures that comprise “Uncrumpable.” On The Kung-Fu Masters, Sean Nowell gets back to his bad self.

Interview: Ben Goldberg

Kevin Whitehead — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:13:31 +0000

The adventurous, lyrical, soulful San Francisco clarinet improviser Ben Goldberg made his reputation 20 years ago with the New Klezmer Trio. That band played what klezmer might have sounded like if it had kept evolving parallel to jazz. Since then, Goldberg has been involved in diverse bands and recording projects, playing original combo music, reimagined Americana (on the quartet Junk Genius’s 1999 Ghost of Electricity), a tribute to his early hero Steve Lacy (the door, the hat, the chair, the fact), a song cycle for nonet, and much more. For the last few years Goldberg has also played in the song-oriented Bay Area quartet Tin Hat.

Now, he has two matching new records out, for complementary quintets. Both albums feature Goldberg’s writing, improvised counterpoint, tenor saxophone, and drummer Ches Smith, and both begin with a little Bach-inspired chorale. On Subatomic Particle Homesick Blues, recorded in 2008, Goldberg shares the front line with trumpeter Ron Miles and tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman. (Devin Hoff’s on bass; Scott Amendola replaces Smith on “The Because Of” and “Possible.”) The 2012 recording Unfold Ordinary Mind has Wilco’s Nels Cline on guitar, and contrasting tenor players in hard-toned Rob Sudduth and furry-sounding Ellery Eskelin. In that quintet Ben takes the bassist’s role, playing the low contra-alto clarinet.

In between those two, Goldberg recorded Go Home with Miles, Amendola and guitarist Charlie Hunter, which came out in 2009. eMusic’s Kevin Whitehead spoke with Goldberg about Bob Dylan, working with new collaborators, and his new records.

You recently posted an article about the development of the New Klezmer Trio, a band where you took old techniques and came up with new music based on the same principles. Your later Steve Lacy tribute did something like that too: took some of his ideas about instrumentation and cuckoo-clockwork tunes, and made them your own.

We’re all drawn to certain things very strongly; they wake up something in you. Then we try to find out what’s at the heart of it. As much as you’re moving toward something else, you’re also moving toward your own heart. What energizes me is never knowing how it’s all going to turn out. The best we can do is put the best ingredients in, and work with them to create something tasty. For the last eight years, Bach chorales have been a big ingredient.

You’ve said they’re a big influence on Subatomic Particle Homesick Blues, but the counterpoint often smacks of old New Orleans jazz more than Bach.

Yeah, isn’t that funny? It just felt like so much fun to have the three horns going at it like that. The opening piece, “Evolution,” starts with that little hymn, but then where do you go? Did it need a B section? Instead I wrote out a roadmap: saxophone with rhythm, then a clarinet and trumpet duet, everybody plays together then the rhythm section drops out, whatever. Most of the actual content on that one was spontaneous, but “Asterisk” and “Possible” have composed counterpoint. That was the beginning of working with that for me. Now I’m committed to it. My earlier music was more like, play the melody and then blow.

“Who Died and Where I Moved To,” where you solo on contra alto clarinet, has a 1960s boogaloo beat.

I spent a lot of time listening to Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder” at an early age, mostly because of Joe Henderson. Things get in your mind at an early age, and are always sitting there.

Your arrangement of the country/folk tune “Satisfied Mind” sounds almost like a field holler; I don’t recognize the melody.

It’s a transcription of Bob Dylan’s version from Saved. For me, that period gets to the heart of Dylan; it’s so stark. Everything’s so heartfelt and full of yearning.

Did you know Joshua Redman when he was coming up in San Francisco?

No, we only met not long before we recorded. He’d gone to a concert I’d played on, and I heard later that he’d liked it, so I invited him to play a concert together. After that I said, let’s make a record, and he said yes. I met Devin Hoff and Ches Smith through pianist Graham Connah, playing in his sextet. He always had great rhythm sections — like Trevor Dunn and Kenny Wollesen who were in Junk Genius. Graham’s totally nuts, but his big band arrangements are unbelievably great.

Ron Miles I’d only met around 2007, the first time I heard him in person. He’s the world’s greatest melodist: When he plays a melody, it’s always perfect. I can’t get over it, or get enough of it. Sometime after we’d made that quintet record, I was set to record Go Home as a trio with Charlie Hunter and Scott Amendola in New York. When we found out Ron was going to be at the Village Vanguard with Bill Frisell that week, we asked him to join us.

Playing with Charlie Hunter made me confront deficiencies in my own playing I needed to work on. He has such a strong groove, especially when playing with Scott; they have a strong hookup. In my clarinet playing, I always wanted to cut across the groove, but in relation to it. I wasn’t sure how strong I was at holding up my own end of the groove itself.

Charlie and I were doing a clinic once, where he told all the guitarists in the room to put down the guitar for a year to play the drums. Then they’d understand the groove as the most important part of guitar playing. After that, I began practicing clarinet while playing drums with my feet. The idea being, the groove comes first. Then when I played clarinet on a gig, it would still be present.

I think of Subatomic Particle and Unfold Ordinary Mind as your before-and-after-Charlie records. On the first you’re in the front line, on the second you’ve switched over to the rhythm section, playing contra-alto clarinet.

That role is still pretty new to me. I knew I wanted to be the bass player in a band, but what did I know about that? I got the contra alto in 1997, and played it right after on one track from the album Twelve Minor, but then it sat in the closet for a long time. Later when I joined Tin Hat, they suggested I play bass on the contra-alto. It took awhile to gain facility on it, but then all of a sudden it opened up, and I fell in love with the sound. Between you and me, it looks hard, but it’s easy to play, the one I have at least.

It is kind of scary, situating myself in the rhythm section between Ches and Nels Cline, two very strong musicians. Now it was sink-or-swim time. When we recorded Unfold Ordinary Mind, we hadn’t played together before, and I wasn’t even sure we were making a record: Let’s just go into the studio and see what happens. Unexpected things started happening, like at the end of “xcpf,” where Nels goes into his looping thing, and Ches and I bring the groove in and out. That wasn’t planned.

Do you ever feel constrained, playing bass parts instead of soaring over the top on clarinet?

Not at all. It’s all I want to do now. Playing the same figure for seven minutes is a different kind of challenge: Am I nailing it, am I putting it in the right place, am I working with Ches? It’s a wonderful opportunity to do my best.

Certain ideas have become attached to improvised music that are a little oppressive: “Don’t ever repeat yourself, or be too melodic.” But think of Louis Armstrong and the old cats. Every time he improvises, he kills me. But he also kills me when he plays a melody he’s played a thousand times.

The quintet’s non-California ringer is New York tenor saxophonist Ellery Eskelin.

The first time I heard him play one note on record, I thought, “This is someone I have to get close to.” That one note contained everything: the most beautiful and ridiculous thing I ever heard. I think I wrote him a letter after that. We had done a few things over the years — a 1997 quartet record that never came out, and later some Go Home gigs where he replaced Ron. I could hear how Ellery and Rob Sudduth would fit together. They’re both strong and kinda ornery. I knew it wasn’t going to be like, “After you” — “No, after you.”

One more thing: It was only around the time we played some gigs in December that I made a connection to an unbelievably important record for me, Paul Motian’s The Story of Maryam. It has the same lineup but with a different bass instrument: two tenor saxophones sometimes playing at the same time, with guitar and drums. Maybe subconsciously I was moving toward completing a circle, returning to a record that was a model for how I wanted to play.

Aaron Diehl, The Bespoke Man’s Narrative

Britt Robson — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:55:23 +0000

Welcoming the association with the Modern Jazz Quartet

Any ensemble fronted by piano and vibes is going to garner comparisons to the Modern Jazz Quartet, but by his biography, his compositions and arrangements, his song choices and his approach to music, it is apparent that Aaron Diehl welcomes the association. Two years after touring with Wynton Marsalis, and while still a teenager at Juilliard, Diehl spent six months helping the widow of MJQ pianist and musical director John Lewis archive her late husband’s scores, tapes and manuscripts. Diehl’s cerebral, conservative yet thorough command of Euro-classically tinged jazz precociously harkens to Lewis’s conceptual depth, and in vibraphonist Warren Wolf, he has a foil with a quicksilver elegance akin to Lewis’s MJQ partner Milt Jackson.

Citing Lewis and Duke Ellington, Diehl says he wanted to write and arrange songs that showcase his longtime quartet. (Wolf and bassist David Wong have been with Diehl for nearly five years and drummer Rodney Green for more than two.) The Bespoke Man’s Narrative opens with three originals: the suave “Prologue” (repeated as the closing bookend, “Epilogue”), the fleet, cavorting “Generation Y” (a wonderful vehicle for Wolf’s flying mallets), and the hushed, contemplative “Blue Nude.” Then a trio of covers improves on this auspicious beginning. “Moonlight in Vermont” unfurls with an effortless glide that reminds us how enjoyable hoary standards can be when invested with enough love and scholarship. Diehl’s near-solo piano rendition of Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose” plumbs for all the melancholy beauty stored in the tune, enriched and amplified by Diehl’s boyhood stint playing services in his father’s funeral parlor. And the entire quartet nails the delightfully airy agility of Milt Jackson’s “The Cylinder.”

Diehl’s “Stop and Go,” brims with clever time changes, highlighted by Diehl’s hammering right hand and Green’s efficient and exquisite drum solo on brushes. An ambitious 11 minutes of Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin” includes another notable Green solo and Diehl’s brittle, almost harpsichord-ish piano tone. And Gershwin’s “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” like the Ellington cover, respects the original to the point of reverence yet still triumphs, this time on the basis of Wong’s beautifully bowed work, Green’s brushes and Diehl’s twinkling passages.

Tomasz Stanko New York Quartet, Wislawa

Peter Margasak — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:00:10 +0000

Sounding as hungry and fiery as he did four decades ago

The veteran Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko has long been a reliable and rewarding source for jazz of smoldering intensity. He’s a deeply lyrical, probing player whose investment in free jazz is real, but he’s consistently couched his most “out” explorations in a brooding elegance. Over the last decade or so he’s made a series of gorgeously meditative and quietly scalding albums for ECM with rhythm sections half his age. While he continues to keep a residence in Warsaw, for the last five years he’s also kept an apartment in New York, fostering relationships with younger American players. The magnificent double album Wislawa is the first fruit of those new collaborations. The album is named for the Polish poet and Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska, with many of Stanko’s compositions inspired by specific writings.

He’s surrounded by a remarkable band — the inventive and highly original Cuban expat pianist David Virelles, the unassumingly flexible, sturdy bassist Thomas Morgan, and the great Detroit drummer Gerald Cleaver — and while he clearly maintains his trademark sound, he wisely cedes his band plenty of leeway. In fact, it’s hard not to notice conceptual parallels to the great Miles Davis Quintet with Wayne Shorter; this band doesn’t sound much like that unit, but it does borrow from its pin-drop intuition, heightened interaction, and love of wide-open spaces. The surfaces aren’t always placid: On the mildly turbulent “Mikrokosmos” Stanko unleashes a solo of raw power, his burnished tone cracking with a burst of emotional volatility, while on “Faces” there’s a delicious tension between the trumpeter’s visceral, slashing lines and the blocky, subdued chords hammered out by Virelles. Despite the generational gap between Stanko, who’s 70, and the rest of his band (Morgan is 32 and Virelles is 29), there’s no artistic divide. On Wislawa, the quartet is seriously locked in, and the trumpeter sounds as hungry and fiery as he did four decades ago.

Duke Ellington, Complete Columbia and RCA Victor Recordings with Ben Webster (featuring Jimmy Blanton)

Charles Farrell — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 19:42:04 +0000

Among the most significant works in jazz

Any significant band leader who stays in the public eye long enough will end up sparking arguments among aficionados about their “greatest” ensemble. Most have two or three groups that could be debated; Duke Ellington had four or five. This iteration, the 1940s orchestra with bassist Jimmy Blanton and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, is always near the top, and this mammoth collection provides powerful evidence in support of that assertion.

Complete Columbia and RCA Victor Recordings moves through a staggering array or material and styles. Immediately apparent is how galvanizing an effect the youngster Jimmy Blanton had on the band. The first “modern” bassist, he added a buoyancy and propulsion to the rhythm section that was entirely new in jazz. He also streamlined the time feel, moving it away from the 2/4 meter of his predecessors. His solo on “Jack the Bear” was likely the most closely studied bass piece of its day. Ben Webster brought tremendous muscle to his up-tempo features like “Cottontail,” an irresistible swing to “Perdido,” and a deep but never saccharine emotionalism to ballads like “My Little Brown Book.”

Still, it’s vastly reductive to suggest that these two catalysts made the band. As always, the Ellington orchestra was filled with unique soloists, all of whom were given specialty arrangements. “Concerto for Cootie” gives the eponymous Mr. Williams a chance to show off the expressivity of his plunger mute, “All Too Soon” lets you languish in the luxurious phrasing of trombonist Lawrence Brown, and Johnny Hodges takes you to another world on “Warm Valley.” In classics like “Koko,” “Harlem Air Shaft” and “Sophisticated Lady,” Ellington’s compositions and orchestrations need no star soloist: They remain among the most significant works in jazz.

Steve Lacy, Barry Wedgle & J.J. Avenel, Live in Lugano

Charles Farrell — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:00:31 +0000

Yearning music of remarkable power

Despite being one of the most singular voices to come out of jazz, and one of its most prolific and productive chroniclers, Steve Lacy may not be afforded the seminal status that his playing, composing and band leading warrants. Lacy was a specialist: He played only one reed instrument, the soprano saxophone. And although that horn gained great currency during the last quarter of the 20th century (and has maintained it), the soprano is still thought of largely as a doubling instrument. Even though Lacy is unquestionably one of the three most important soprano saxophonists in the instrument’s history (Sidney Bechet and Evan Parker are the others), his legacy will fall short of canonization. Still, it’s worth nothing that when John Coltrane wanted to take up the soprano, he went to Lacy for advice and instruction.

Live in Lugano features Lacy joined by the well attuned guitarist Barry Wedgle and the saxophonist’s longtime bassist J.J. Avenel. It’s a smart and edgy trio. Lacy’s powerful voice never threatens to topple the established group balance. The players use markedly different approaches to the music, but each listens closely. Lacy’s distinctive tone, unusually full bodied and always perfectly in tune throughout its entire range (the soprano is notoriously subject to going out of tune) contrasts nicely with the woody sounds of Wedgle’s acoustic guitar and Avenel’s bass. “On a Train Going By” begins with a standard Lacy compositional approach: a repeated figure, followed by melody simple and deliberately stated. Behind this, guitar and bass set up a resolute chugging pattern; the train is on its way. Lacy alternates between patterns, solidly-chosen melodic lines, and an astonishing array of “train” effects done through the use of harmonics and false fingerings.

It’s a virtuoso performance, and it’s followed by others: The glissando in the “Wickets’” theme is executed with jaw-dropping ease. Wedgle’s accompaniment here is cranky commentary that serves as an effective counterweight to Lacy’s increasingly fervent lines. “Clinches” features African thumb piano playing an ostinato figure as the soprano comes in, moving from off-mic toward the center, then backing away. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard, and it’s enormously effective. Lacy is back, front and center of “The Eye,” while J. J. Avenel sets up a dangerous sound pattern, resonant and dark, rhythmically tensile. Wedgle strums metallically, alternating this with dry, almost toneless sounding chords. Above this all, Lacy lays out the desolate theme. It’s yearning music of remarkable power.

Stan Getz Quartet, Live at Birdland 1961

Charles Farrell — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 20:53:06 +0000

An outstanding set of live jazz played by one of Getz's most engaged quartets

Tenor saxophonist Stan Getz gained commercial success early in his career because of his limpid tone, elegant phrasing and selection of strong but easily-accessible repertoire. In the 1960s, he scored a monstrously big hit with the Jobim tune “Girl From Ipanema,” and things soared to a level he was able to maintain for the rest of his life. But for all his mainstream success, Getz was always a great, and totally committed jazz musician, esteemed as much by his peers as by his public. And, in spite of his well-established reputation as an urbane, ultra-smooth player, he was more than capable of feverish improvisation over an extended set.

Live at Birdland 1961, although a nicely balanced set, leans toward the more aggressive aspect of Getz’s playing. The musicians who round out the quartet — Steve Kuhn on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Roy Haynes on drums — were particularly sharp on this date, playing with keen attention to the leader. But the rhythm section was also oddly mismatched in an intriguing way: Kuhn was an allusive player, seldom working along orthodox configurations, while Garrison was stalwart and propulsive, but holding to the middle ground. And Haynes was mercurial, his reflexes honed through years of playing in the jazz vanguard. Starting with a bristling “Airegin,” Getz alternates between fast geometric patterns and staccato bursts, Haynes’s commentary goading him on. Kuhn decides that discretion is the better part of valor; rather than going head to head with the leader, he opts for lyricism. Deejay Symphony Sid, who announces throughout the program, is given a brief tribute during “Wildwood,” where the tenor fluctuates between a relaxed “Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid” and 32nd-note dazzle.

Getz is all over the horn, and it’s good to be reminded of how absolute his control of the instrument was, even at its lowest register. The ballads are predictably stellar too; Harold Arlen’s “When the Sun Comes Out” maintains a meticulous balance of emotion and intellect, with Getz setting the mood and Kuhn sustaining it. Getz also shows his bop bona fides on the intensely burning “Jordu.” Live at Birdland 1961 puts out in the center of an outstanding set of live jazz played by one of Getz’s most engaged quartets.

March Music Days: The Crucial 100

J. Edward Keyes — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:45:00 +0000

Enter for a chance to win $500 in eMusic Credit!

I’m going to be candid about the inspiration for this list: In 1995, Alternative Press published a list of the 99 best records to be released since they began publication 10 years prior. As an amateur student of rock music, by that point I’d consumed dozens of lists like this, all of them in established, respectable music publications, and all of them bearing an eerie similarity to one another. So you can imagine my surprise when I scanned the Alternative Press list and came across not familiar glorified workhorses, but names like The Dwarves and PJ Harvey and the Fastbacks.

That list was revolutionary for me. It was the first list that dared to say the canon was wrong. It was the first list that redefined which records mattered and why, and the first list to present popular music through a decidedly defiant perspective. Most importantly, it was the first list to suggest that maybe you don’t really need to own all those James Taylor records. It is in the spirit of that list that we present eMusic’s Crucial 100: 100 albums that we think it’s important you own. These are the albums that rearranged our brains, and influenced the music that we care about. And for you lucky winners of our $500 credit contest: This is where we think you should start spending.

Songs of Unrest & Revolution

There's A Riot Goin' On

Sly And The Family Stone
2007 | Epic/Legacy

No one — not Bob Dylan sneering at Mr. Jones, not Roxanne Shanté tearing other female rappers to ribbons, not U-Roy sending up "gal-boy I Roy"— has put so vicious a mockery on record as Sly Stone did with There's a Riot Goin' On. Only he wasn't attacking a straw man or the competition: as his band disintegrated around him (Sly did much of the instrumental work himself, with few full-band performances... and a handful of guitar parts handled by Bobby Womack), Stone was side-eyeing his impossibly hopeful earlier records. Riot turns everything he'd ever done inside out — and, as the ultimate proof of his genius, made it even stronger. Here, the affirmations of old turn queasy, and set up withering denouements: The brave and strong survive . . . But you're crying anyway 'cause you're all broke down. When I'm lost, I know I will be found . . . Look at you fooling you. That extended to the music, too, most clearly on "Thank You For Talkin' to Me, Africa," in which the audaciously celebratory 1970 single "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" is sent back on the road covered in soot and at a third of its previous gear, but it's equally easy to hear the stuttering horns of "Brave & Strong" and the jagged guitar vamp of "Africa Talks to You 'The Asphalt Jungle'" as Bizarro World versions of "Dance to the Music" and its kin. It's the longest, darkest night of the soul ever put on record; it's also the deepest, most compulsively listenable album Sly — or anybody else — ever made.
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Things Fall Apart

The Roots
2004 | Geffen

In February 2000, the Roots won their first and only Grammy for "You Got Me," the lead single from fourth studio effort Things Fall Apart. In its chorus, Erykah Badu sings as if she's already lost hope in her tour-diary romance; remorse breaks her words into two. But Things' Grammy-winning single barely indicates just how much the Roots had learned to illustrate the hip-hop stories they'd grown so adept in telling —... tales of a pained, conscious existence rather than a drugged-up one, orchestrated by mellowed-out arrangements far more nuanced than even Badu's masterful aching. In "Table of Contents (Parts 1 & 2)," ?uestlove's cymbals whirr as if being sucked into a vacuum cleaner as Black Thought ricochets across his retelling of the band's origins in South Philadelphia. A playful tit-for-tat with Mos Def ("Double Trouble") simmers and pops around gently pulsing chimes. Scott Storch's fingers listlessly drag their way through a keyboard melody over which a fraught Black Thought cries: "Building his fifth foundation in the wilderness/ thoughtless, trespassing into the Thought's fortress." "You Got Me" helped the Roots sell more than 900,000 copies of Things Fall Apart — more commercial attention than the Philadelphia band's ever received before. But as soon as the Grammy-winning single thrust the Roots into mainstream airwaves, the band decided to stray as far from Top 40 territory as possible. The result? The genre-bending Phrenology.
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Radio Ethiopia

Patti Smith Group
1996 | Arista
New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)

Erykah Badu
2008 | Motown

The C.D. Version Of The First Two Records

Bikini Kill
1994 | Bikini Kill Records

"We're Bikini Kill, and we want revolution girl style noooooow!" On this album's first song, nestled between shards of feedback, lead singer Kathleen Hanna howled the battle cry that lit riot grrrl afire. But it wasn't a double dare, it was a promise: for an instigative seven years, Bikini Kill dealt fierce blows to punk rock's misogynist "White Boy" (as one song is titled) through abrasive guitar blasts and lyrics that combined... feminist polemic with the distinct intellectual valley-girl patois of their progressive hometown — teeny-tiny Olympia, WA. Encouraged by the DIY dictum that playing music sloppily was better than not playing music at all, Bikini Kill tore through their riffs with punk-rock vehemence and vision — but it was Hanna's exceptionally raw singing style that really got the band motoring. Sounding like the final hour of an exorcism, she growls, grunts, sasses, snarls, whines and screams this mother out; witness the snotty, possessed energy of "Suck My Left One" (a song congruous with X-Ray Spex's "Oh Bondage Up Yours"); the bloody shrieks and feedback tilt-a-whirl of "Thurston Hearts the Who"; and the self-determined anthem "Feels Blind," where Hanna spits, "I eat your hate like love!" Though their best album, Pussywhipped, arrived two years later, these tapes (half-produced by Fugazi's Ian MacKaye) seethe with untamed, eruptive energy and the thrilling first spark of ideation.
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Money Jungle

Duke Ellington
2002 | BLUE NOTE
We Can't Be Stopped

Geto Boys
Rap-A-Lot Fontana

Legalize It

Peter Tosh
1999 | Columbia/Legacy

The token communal house/dorm room/juice bar/island resort's reggae album (second only Bob Marley and the Wailers' Catch A Fire), Peter Tosh's solo debut Legalize It remains a stone classic, even if most of its fans rarely explore beyond the dense foliage of the front cover and title track to the treasures within. As a teen in the early '60s, Tosh befriended Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer and the trio became... a vocal group before eventually evolving into the Wailers. After two smash successes (Catch A Fire and Burnin') as well as a car accident that fractured Tosh's skull, Island refused to release a Tosh solo album and he left the fold to pursue his own rebel path to stardom.

While "Legalize It" has remained a rallying cry for decades (most recently in California), it's actually his least politically-charged album, though it is his most emotionally-fraught. Aside from the lilt of "Ketchy Shuby," Tosh grapples with darker moods. The heave of "No Sympathy" has Tosh match his aching guitar line: "Only me feel the pain/ not one good word of advice/ from any of my so-called friends" and "Why Must I Cry" — despite its bright synth line and island meter — finds him isolated by his heartache. On the roiling piano of "Igziabeher (Let Jah Be Praised)," Tosh conjures up biblical disasters to scatter non-believers and his enemies "as the smoke was driven away." And he doesn't mean that kind of smoke.
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Fear Of A Black Planet

Public Enemy
1994 | Def Jam/RAL
London Calling

The Clash
2000 | Epic

Repeater (Plus 3 Songs)

Fugazi
Dischord Records

If 13 Songs was a soup of dubbed-out Stooges songs, Repeater boiled it all down to screeches and thuds, welding shards of feedback, bass thrum and tom rolls — a sound as stark as the album's blue-and-white cover, and as dynamic as the interior photos. Lyrical impressionism mixes with guilt and rage. At one end: "What a difference/ a little difference would make." At the other: "We are all bigots/so filled... with hatred /we release our poisons." The title track bellows at D.C.'s crack crisis; "Merchandise" reminds you of what they don't sell on tour. "Provisional" from Margin Walker gets a two-guitar reboot as "Reprovisional," hinting at power that was once only implied. "Shut the Door," a compassionate, furious look at a heroin overdose, is almost haiku-like in its simplicity and all the more powerful for it.

The CD pressing of Repeater was appended to include the 3 Songs 7-inch. "Joe #1" is a thudding instrumental, "Break-In" an older song about assault, but "Song #1" is a almost a post-hardcore manifesto: "Fighting for a haircut?/ Then grow your hair/ Crying for the music?/ I doubt you really care/ Looking for an answer?/ You can find it anywhere/ It's nothing."

Dig the new breed.
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Pink Flag

Wire
2009 | CAROLINE WORLD SERVICE
Lyte As A Rock

MC Lyte
2010 | Rhino/Elektra

Dark Nights of the Soul

Exile in Guyville

Liz Phair
ATO Records

In 1991 — at least five years before the first blog was identified as such — Oberlin art history grad Liz Phair quietly sent around a series of home-recorded cassettes she'd made under the moniker Girly Sound. The recordings were crudely rendered, rudely conceived (covering such post-feminist subjects as "Black Market White Baby Dealers" and "Willie the Six-Dicked Pimp") and immediately caught the ear of alt-nation's underground cognoscenti, who recognized an art-damaged... rebel without a cause when they heard one. Those recordings quickly went down in rock history as one of the finest albums of its era, maybe even of all time: she released 1993's Exile in Guyville, which for all intents and purposes reads today as an eighteen-track, album-length blog, replete with all the technologically-enabled oversharing and snarktastic, hit-and-run gender politics this description implies.

Phair was living at home with her parents in Winnetka, Illinois (suburbia being the best locale from which to wage war on an unsuspecting, male-dominated rock hierarchy) when she began re-recording some of her early Girly Sound demos with producer Brad Wood. What took shape was originally touted as a song-by-song response to Pussy Galore's noisy assassination of the Rolling Stones classic Exile on Main Street — a claim that no longer seems plausible (is "Girls! Girls! Girls!" really Phair's answer to "Turd on the Run?"); the record helped paint her as something of a pop-culture pirate princess from the get-go. The album quickly established its no-holds-barred M.O. with "Glory," an ode to cunnilingus ostensibly meant to "empower" but equally intended to shock, to determine which people were paying attention (and most certainly, the little girls understood, championing Phair as their tough-talking older sister almost immediately). This was followed in rapid succession by rough-and-ready autobiography that portrayed Phair as little but "a cunt in spring, you can rent me by the hour" ("Dance of the Seven Veils"), a scheming pleasure addict who "jumps when you circle the cherry" ("Canary"), a commitment-phobic tramp who secretly wishes for a boyfriend who "makes love 'cuz he's in it... and all that stupid old shit" ("Fuck and Run"), employs devastatingly personal self-critique ("How sleazy it is, messing with these guys") on "Shatter" and showcases her signature Girly Sound tune "Flower," a multi-Liz madrigal promising some anonymous indie rock dude she'll be his "blowjob queen" and "fuck you and your minions too" (unfortunately changing the "and your girlfriend too" lyric from her original tapes). All of this devastation was delivered in a voice so deadpan and emotion-free it was described by Rob Sheffield as "Peppermint Patty on a bad caffeine jag" and came across like the alt-nation's musical answer to another Liz, Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose self-skewering pseudo-confessional narratives also oddly prefigured the stylistic norms of the blogosphere by a number of years.

How an album so prescient and influential — one can argue that Alanis Morrissette owes the entirety of her career to the firewalk first traveled on Guyville — ever disappeared from Matador's catalog is beyond me, particularly when you consider that in this post-digital, file-sharing age, nothing should ever truly go "out of print." But the album's re-release, while not offering anything particularly revealing in the way of extras save for Phair's interpolation of "Wild Thing" as something of a Mean Girls rewrite, does underscore its importance by stripping away the pretend-porn veneer that originally defined it and revealing the core of what it was, is, and always shall remain: the document of a generation of women in transition, preparing the way for what the New York Times recently described as the lingua franca of the internet, a dialogue that, by turn, has emerged as "smart yet conversational, funny in a merciless way, righteously indignant but comically defeated, where every man [cheats] on his partner and all the women are slutty." Welcome, boys and grrls, to the 21st Century.
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De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas

Mayhem
1997 | Century Media / The Orchard
Blood On The Tracks

Bob Dylan
1984 | Columbia

Low

David Bowie
1999 | VIRGIN

"One day I blew my nose and half my brains came out." That was David Bowie in 1976, nearing the end of a years-long coke binge that had burned through the better part of his nasal passages and rendered him so clammy and paranoid he was diving into black magic to escape, drawing pentagrams on the floor of his L.A. apartment, keeping his own urine in jars in the refrigerator and burning... black candles as protection from evil spirits. He was seeing ghosts, giving loopy interviews heavy on Hitler-praising pull-quotes and his marriage to Angie was on the verge of collapse.

And so Bowie, with Iggy Pop in tow, went to Berlin to get clean (an aim at which he only fitfully succeeded) and, as he put it, "[to discover] a new musical language." Low, the first part of his celebrated Berlin Trilogy and the first stage in a full sonic reinvention. Unlike the plastic soul of Young Americans or Station to Station's manic panic, Low revels in total existential blankness. Bowie was openly in the thrall of bands like Neu! and Kraftwerk, and Low clearly reflects the influence of the former's stentorian, motorik rhythms and the latter's subzero synthesizers.

The album is famously divided into two halves, with a batch of Bowie-sung "song fragments" counterbalanced by a suite of gorgeous but deeply unsettling ambient-instrumentals; what's most notable is that, spiritually, Bowie feels as ice-cold and absent on the songs where he sings as on the ones where he doesn't. Herky-jerk "Breaking Glass," with its hectoring Carlos Alomar guitar line finds Bowie as self-referential as he'd ever been, darkly warning "don't look at the carpet — I drew something awful on it," before snidely declaring: "you're such a wonderful person — but you've got problems." De facto pop single "Sound And Vision" — if only because no other song on the album features an immediate hook — finds him distrusting his own senses, cooing "Don't you wonder, sometimes, 'bout sound and vision?" over the kind of chilly cascading synths that typically turn up on Joy Division albums.

As solid and striking as the vocals are, though, Low's back half is where it moves from experiment to masterpiece. Using layer upon layer of unholy synthesizer, Bowie — with the help of producer Brian Eno, himself no stranger to the power of ambiance — create an entire, flickering nighttime urban cityscape, where hustle and busyness ("A New Career in a New Town") slowly give way to the awful eeriness of nighttime ("Subterraneans"). Bowie's voice appears in fits and starts, mostly chanting strange, monosyllabic nonsense words — a thin, pale warlock looking glumly into his cauldron, drawn and spent. Taken together, the two halves of Low offer a picture of an artist at a crossroads, unsure of where to go next, but knowing all roads lead to darkness.
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Children of God/World of Skin

Swans
2003 | Young God / Revolver

Up until 1987, the last place in the world you might have expected to hear an acoustic guitar was on a Swans album. But with Children of God, the band augmented its brute physicality with a "New Mind," as the opening track put it, and a new palette to match. ("I will be there/ With my eyes wide open/ I will be there/ I will be ready/ To receive/ The new mind.")... From the cover alone, with its puce-and-fuchsia color scheme, its swirls and crosses, you could guess that Swans had entered a new phase, and the album's first three tracks made that abundantly clear. "New Mind" sounded more or less like the Swans of yore — more cleanly produced, perhaps, but still displaying the same doomy riffs, the same war-dance drums, the same call-and-response vocals — but the "In My Garden" came from a different universe entirely, with a high-necked bass melody inspired by Joy Division, limpid pianos reminiscent of Harold Budd, and a wraithlike Jarboe intoning, "In my garden/ We'll never die." "Our Love Lies" completed their transmutation with strummed acoustic guitars and tambourine and Michael Gira not just growling but singing, his baritone sinking to the lower limit of his register like a body weighted by stones. The rest of the album alternates between slow-motion head-bangers, like "Our Love Lies" and "Like a Drug," and deathly folk songs judiciously touched up with synthesizers and effects, like "Blood and Honey" and "You're Not Real, Girl." On the hypnotic title song, Jarboe's ecstatic mantra ("We are children/ Children of God") swirls above see-sawing guitars and stark, metallic drum beats; there's little doubt that, whatever their previously nihilistic outlook, Swans finally see the light of redemption, however fleetingly.

A few months before Children of God, Gira and Jarboe explored even more gentle textures on a pair of albums recorded under the name of Skin. Jarboe's voice carried Blood, Women, Roses, while Gira assumed center stage on Shame, Humility, Revenge, but both albums shared the same downy textures, forsaking Swans' usual sturm und drang in favor of strings, acoustic guitars, hushed synthesizers, and echoing electronic drums — a mixture that could almost have been mistaken for This Mortal Coil. Both records were repackaged in 1988 as the double LP, The World of Skin, and 14 songs were selected for 1997's Children of God / World of Skin reissue.
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Sister

Sonic Youth
1987 | Squeaky Squawk / TuneCore
American IV: The Man Comes Around

Johnny Cash
2013 | American Recordings

Bone Machine

Tom Waits
1992 | ISLAND RECORDS

Released after a five-year break between albums — then the longest in his career — Bone Machine marks the beginning of a era in which Waits's records are isolated and self-contained, as if he goes dormant after each session and reemerges only after he's come up with something to say. The marionette march of "Earth Died Screaming" recalls the clatter of Rain Dogs' "Singapore," but Waits strips the songs bare as he... goes, paring away the excess; "Jesus Gonna Be Here" is just upright bass, dobro, and Waits's voice echoing in what sounds like an empty warehouse. On "In the Colosseum," he sounds as if he's been to hell and back and might just consider repeating the journey, the clanking percussion forging a concrete link to the album's title. Like the contemporaneous The Black Rider, Bone Machine risks falling into a fire-and-brimstone rut, but "Black Wings" shifts the album into a slightly less apocalyptic register. "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" could be a demented Disney theme, and "That Feel" closes with a dash of ghostly gospel harmony. It's hardly Waits's most approachable album, but its skeletal embrace is surprisingly welcoming.
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Enter The Wu-Tang

Wu Tang Clan
1993 | RCA Records Label
Pornography

The Cure
2006 | Rhino/Elektra

Funhouse [Deluxe Edition]

The Stooges
2005 | Rhino/Elektra
The Queen Is Dead

The Smiths
1986 | Rhino

Rid Of Me

P.J. Harvey
1993 | ISLAND RECORDS

The cover of PJ Harvey's second album shows her in the shower — a typical setting for a male fantasy, but one that she upends by being depicted mid-hair-flip, creating an arc of wet hair and water that frames her gently grinning face. That upending of traditional tropes of desire was all over her debut, Dry, but it becomes even more in-your-face on Rid of Me, which is littered with body parts... and fluids and the emotions brought forth by their deployment. Engineered by Steve Albini in such a way that it brought the essential tensions of Harvey's music — masculine/feminine, beautiful/ugly, ecstatic/unfulfilled — right to the forefront, Rid of Me contains some of the most iconic songs of Harvey's career — the ode to swagger "50ft Queenie," the low-end-plumbing depiction of female frustration "Dry," the take-the-reins cover of Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited." There's also "Yuri-G," a depiction of romantic madness that might be one of the most-overlooked songs in her catalog, despite its garage-borne chorus and fearless troop toward its endpoint.

But it's the differing treatments of the gender-flipping "Man-Size," which are presented as both a straightforward, slow-build rock song and as a piece arranged for strings and voice (called "Man-Size Sextet"), that perhaps best encapsulate the tension that's all over the album; while the Albini-engineered "Man-Size" has at least a bit of foreplay involved before Harvey breaks into a caterwaul on the song's final chorus, on the string-assisted version (which was arranged by Harvey's percussionist Robert Ellis) nerves crackle and snap against each other thanks to the strings clashing against each other in an icy, dissonant way as Harvey declares her dominance — at times, though, she does it in such a controlled way that it sounds like she's communicating through a jaw wired shut from repressed desire. The beauty brought forth by the strings only serves to underscore the jitters brought on by the idea of possibly possessing what is desired; that fear isn't brought on by the idea of possible transcendence as much as it is borne by the idea of losing that always-desired feeling, and subsequently having to root around the ugly, unfulfilling world of debasement and thwarted intentions explored elsewhere on the album.
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Sonic Terrorists

The Cold Vein

Cannibal Ox
2001 | Definitive Jux / The Orchard

The enduring idea of a hip-hop underground relies on our faith in the entrepreneurial spirit. Nobody wants a boss, and this is part of what compelled El-P to leave Rawkus in the late 1990s and form his own label, Definitive Jux, future home of Aesop Rock, Cage, Mr. Lif, Murs and others. He poured himself into the label's first album, the debut from Harlem rappers Vast Aire and Vordul Mega. The Cold... Vein remains an outlier classic, El-P channeling his inner Eno, and Vast and Vordul looking up from their comic books and imagining their escape from the present might come in the form of teleportation.
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Richard D. James Album

Aphex Twin
2005 | Rhino/London-Sire

Arguably Aphex Twin's definitive album — and not only because it bears his birth name — 1996's Richard D. James Album keeps you guessing. How can something feel at once so slight and so substantial? Whimsical melodies play out like music-box fantasias against forbiddingly complex drum programming; James has never seemed more like a trickster, with his self-evident sense of humor running from goofy ("Milkman") to deranged (the strange outro to "Girl/Boy... (Redruth Mix)"), but tracks like "Boy/Girl Song" and even the quadruple-time "4" hide an unmistakable sense of melancholy beneath their cartoonish folds. Many of the tracks here run to a measly two or three minutes — a blink of the eye, compared to the epic inclinations of so much electronic music. But with tempos racing to 180 BPM or so, and with chopped and rearranged breakbeats sprayed in a kind of hyperrhythmic slurry, James squeezes more action in his short-form sketches than many producers manage in an entire album. Hyperactive and/or mischievous listeners will get their fix in the brazenly kinetic antics of "Corn Mouth" or "Inkey$"; sensitive types are advised to start with the coy "To Cure a Weakling Child" or the plangent "Figerbib."
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Dummy

Portishead
1994 | Island Def Jam
Screamadelica

Primal Scream
1991 | Sire/Warner Bros.

Untrue

Burial
Hyperdub / The Orchard

We all know about the "Difficult Second Album" — the oft-rushed record made amid suffocating expectations and incessant touring. But some follow-ups not only make good on a promising debut but also retroactively imbue the entire enterprise with more intrigue than could have been recognized at the start. In 2007, M.I.A.'s Kala and LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver entered the ranks of this special kind of second album, and so did Burial's... Untrue.

Part of the allure of dubstep, the sound that Burial — an anonymous London musician — helped establish, is that it's so sparse and elemental that it eludes description almost by design: To formally address the qualities of dubstep is to paradoxically do damage to its most evocative parts — the parts that aren't there, the haunted parts, the spectral spaces that surround the tangible sounds and make it all happen through the force of their very absence. It's complicated, but it's also extremely compelling — and more immediately so on Untrue than it was on the self-titled 2006 debut that made Burial's name.

Untrue benefits from the conspicuous presence of vocals that prove newly forceful and free. Whereas voices served as atmospheric agents on the debut, here they drive tracks into the space of certifiable songs. "Archangel" announces the change at the start, with a mercury-mouthed male diva singing about "kissing you" and "holding you" in desperate, unsettling tones. A similar strategy plays out in "Near Dark," in which the vocal sentiment in the refrain "I can't take my eyes off you" applies just as much to ears.

The way that Burial foregrounds vocals as melody-makers veers back toward 2-step garage, the poppy post-jungle sound that ultimately evolved into grime and then into dubstep. The formal lures of dubstep proper remain here, but they also sound more kinetic and progressive. Even when the voices fade and drift like mist in the background, there are moods to be gleaned from the beats — the ticks and trips that toggle like drum 'n'bass risen from the grave as something irretrievably decayed but also irresistibly angelic.
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Homework

Daft Punk
1997 | VIRGIN

The mid-1990s was a prosperous time for aspiring dance artists, as big beats graced TV commercials and briefly invaded the charts. But the album-length statement of genius remained an elusive quest. That's what made Homework, the debut album from the mysterious French duo of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, so absorbing. Rather than a collection of singles — massive though they were — Homework managed to capture a feeling of discovery... and exploration.

So there were the era-defining hits "Around the World" and "Da Funk," as well as throbbing club wonders like "Phoenix," "Revolution 909" and "Indo Silver Club." But there were also occasions for reflection and nostalgic pauses, like the ethereal, cresting "Fresh" and the noisome funk of "Oh Yeah," or skits like "Daftendirekt" and "WDPK 83.7 FM," a tribute to the teachers broadcasting daily along the FM dial. As the name suggested, Homework resulted from years of careful study of the finest house, techno, electro and hip-hop records. Perhaps this appreciation for musical history is what compelled Daft Punk to even greater heights in the years to follow. Despite the mystery around their true identities, this is a debt they were never above repaying, from the elaborate, reference-filled Homework album sleeve to "Teachers," a roll call of the duo's personal heroes.
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The Raincoats

The Raincoats
1979 | We ThRee / The Orchard
The Shape Of Jazz To Come

Ornette Coleman
2005 | Rhino Atlantic

Short Films & Diary Entries

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

Lauryn Hill
1998 | Ruffhouse

Wanting to shed the sexist perception that fellow Fugee and ex-boyfriend Wyclef Jean had shaped her, Lauryn Hill retaliated by creating one of the best albums of the 90s. "Music is supposed to inspire," she sings on "Superstar" — perhaps to Jean, her failed svengali, perhaps to her label bosses, perhaps to her own demanding audience. "So how come we ain't getting no higher?" She then sets out to answer the... question for herself.

Like Marvin Gaye's epic albums of the 1970s, "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" is an emotionally raw set of performances. Hill's voices proliferate, sometimes moving in unison or harmony, sometimes commenting on or responding to one another, sometimes pleading, preaching, declaring and doubting all at once.

The incendiary, hard-rocking "Lost Ones," the witty, winning "Doo Wop (That Thing)," the angry, avenging "Final Hour," and the sweetly remembered "Every Ghetto, Every City" are her moments of clarity. But for the rest of the record, she works through the confusion and ambivalence wrought by love and betrayal — never more intensely than on "Ex-Factor" and "I Used To Love Him." Even the songs about uplift, like "Tell Him," "Everything Is Everything" and "Forgive Them Father," are rooted in the possibility things truly might not improve.

"The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" reached its commanding heights only by ruthlessly plumbing the depths. It remains a searingly honest, deeply wrung portrait of a great artist at the peak of her powers.
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Mama Tried

Merle Haggard & The Strangers
2001 | CAPITOL
What's Going On

Marvin Gaye
2003 | Motown

Court And Spark

Joni Mitchell
1975 | Rhino

At a time when the lyrics "ro-ma, ro-ma-mah/ ga-ga, ooh-la-la" can land a singer a spot high up on the Billboard charts, it's fun to play an album like Court & Spark, if only to remember the range of feeling that the English language can express when one knows how to use it. A quintessential Joni Mitchell record, Court & Spark looks at loneliness, solitude and love from many sides, and... concludes that no matter whom you're with or what good times you may be having, the sad, gray days will soon come calling.

At least it's not a bummer to listen to. Far from it, in fact. Mitchell's voice is clear and lovely, as fresh and flawless as spring. And her music is a wild, beautiful tangle of jazz and folk that gives audible form to love's crazy contradictions. (Not surprisingly, it's the best-selling album of Mitchell's career). Listen to Court & Spark, and you might imagine that, instead of giving her lover a clutch of pretty flowers to show how she feels, Mitchell would take him by the hand and run with him through a fragrant garden labyrinth. A simple woman she is not.

Court & Spark yielded her highest-ranking single: "Help Me," which reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1973. It also features a cover of the Wardell Gray bebop composition "Twisted," which jazz singer Annie Ross popularized with her swinging 1952 rendition. But for me, its telltale track is "Down to You." Mitchell sings, "Everything comes and goes/ Marked by lovers and styles of clothes/ Things that you held high/ And told yourself were true/ Lost or changing as the days come down to you." It's practically a Joni Mitchell manifesto: feeling love fully yet expecting — no, knowing — that it will end and that we are all ultimately alone. Oh, Joni.
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It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best

Karen Dalton
2006 | CAPITOL
Illmatic

Nas
Columbia

My Life

Mary J. Blige
1994 | Geffen

Both singer and sound were more confident on this second album from Mary J. Blige, the first she co-wrote, and considered by many fans her best. Out went the chilly New Jack Swing echo and synth deco of her debut; in came an extended heart-to-heart with fans by the fire over a beat that meant business.

Let it be admitted that the sound is more conventional: The '70s soul samples of... the title track and "Be Happy" are seamlessly blended or recreated rather than recontextualized in a rap way — the direction executive producer Sean "Puffy" Combs and frequent studio guest the Notorious B.I.G. were taking hip hop in general. But if D.C.-hired producer Carl "Chucky" Thompson was brought in to make Blige sound like a true soul singer at home in her mother's music, he did his job: Blige makes Rose Royce's "I'm Goin' Down" her own, in part because down was exactly where she was going.

Or as she would sing 11 years later, "'94 was My Life, and my life wasn't right, so I reached out to you and told you what I been through." She also told you what she was still going through: "I'm satisfied even when I cry," she sings on "No One Else," presumably to the track's co-producer K-Ci Hailey, whom she later described as the inspiration for much of My Life's blueness. "Mary's Joint," with its longing melody later borrowed for Janet Jackson's "I Get Lonely," sounds like hopelessness kidding itself, while the No. 1 dance hit "You Bring Me Joy" seems unconvinced. Most double-edged of all is "I Love You," with its repurposed Isaac Hayes piano line and dog-whistle synth (a nod to Dr. Dre), as funky and resigned as Marvin Gaye at his most autumnal. Has the title sentiment ever sounded more doomed?

Blige put the question to herself squarely on "Be Happy": "How can I love somebody else, if I can't love myself enough to know when it's time, time to let go?" The album sold 2.8 million copies in the U.S. and was nominated for a Grammy in the R&B album category. But it marked the twilight of Uptown Records and a parting of ways with Puffy.
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The Belle Album

Al Green
Hi Records / Fat Possum
Car Wheels On A Gravel Road

Lucinda Williams
1998 | Island Def Jam

Coat Of Many Colors

Dolly Parton
2007 | RLG/Legacy

Coat of Many Colors is the moment when Dolly Parton became a star. Its title track a Top Ten narrative of Dolly's humble origins a story that follows her still Coat brought her out from Porter Wagoner's shadow and cast her as country's Self-Made Woman No. 1. It also wonderfully encapsulates every element of the nearly 40 years of Dolly's career that have passed since its release: it dabbles in bluegrass and... roots music, features triumphant, Memphis-style R&B, and winks at the majesty of pure pop, all in a tidy 27 minutes. It's a killer. The best song by a long shot is "Here I Am," a song so stupendous it's a miracle it was never an enormous, career-defining hit. Written by Dolly (as is almost every song here), "Here I Am" is a big, '70s-style power ballad, a finger-wag to any man that might underestimate how great even a little bit of Dolly would be in your life. "I can help you find what you've been searching for," she brags with stunning boldness. No bashful lady, she. It's hard to call Coat of Many Colors a country record; it's so much more than that. But every song has its roots in Americana, in the humble hollows of the Appalachians and the songs and tunes passed down through God, through love and through sorrow. Dolly knows all of these. She sings from experience "Traveling Man" and "My Blue Tears" (which can make you weep from its beauty) and it's one she boldly shares. Dolly's career has been incredible in its longevity and its sincerity. And even amidst all of her success, this is her best moment.
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Different Class

Pulp
1996 | ISLAND RECORDS
Ready To Die The Remaster

The Notorious B.I.G.
1994 | Bad Boy Records

Leviathan

Mastodon
Relapse Records

Featuring two ex-members of influential noise-metal band Today is the Day, Mastodon creates fringe music for the mainstream — proggy, rhythmically complex torrents of melodic noise that incorporate elements of death metal, grindcore, hardcore, thrash and math rock, and somehow still groove like Skynyrd on crank. With Leviathan, the band funneled its multifaceted attack into a concept album based on Herman Melville's literary classic Moby Dick. Nothing could seem less metal;... little sounds more metal.
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Bakesale

Sebadoh
Sub Pop Records
Being There

Wilco
1996 | Reprise

Innervisions

Stevie Wonder
2000 | Motown

Early '70s protest soul had as much silliness and bandwagon jumping as any other musical era. But it can't be a coincidence that Stevie Wonder's greatest album is also his most deeply pessimistic — not only because there was so much to rail against in 1973, and that the government's and society's crimes against humanity had a special sting that would dissipate the more frequently they occurred (familiarity breeds disinterest at least... as much as contempt), but Stevie has always been at his sharpest when he has a direct target to aim for.

On Innervisions, Wonder took stock of the world around him and found a good deal of it wanting — yet he refused to give in to despair, even when sneering at drug abuse on "Too High," cutting a flim-flam man to pieces on "He's Misstra Know-It-All," or, most unforgettably, turning his voice to gravel to warn against damnation on "Living for the City." There's an inherent optimism that lights the darkest passages of this very dark album; that fits with Stevie the activist. But surely the amount of wrong to lament in the early '70s did its share to spur Wonder to his peak.

Rather than a soothing, instantly iconic rolling electric-keyboard melody of the sort that opened Talking Book ("You Are the Sunshine of My Life"), "Too High" worms in at a daunting angle, heavily informed by jazz (Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters was released only two months after Innervisions) as well as funk, and sounds as slippery as the song's subject. The falsetto doo-doo-doo refrain is a little shticky the first time it appears and mournful the last, after the woman who lets drugs take her life over dies: "What did her friends say?/ They said she's too high." "Misstra Know-It-All" and parts of "Jesus Children of America" dig at false preachers. "Living For the City" ends on a sermon. Stevie was a scold, all right, but he picked his targets perfectly.

The mammoth Songs in the Key of Life is rightly seen as Wonder's I-can-do-it-all culmination, but Innervisions ranges more confidently across nearly as much terrain. "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing" goes to Cuba and brings back a great spoken intro: "I speak very, very, um, fluent Spanish." "Visions" is a spiderweb of guitars (and Stevie's Fender Rhodes) that could have been on any number of the period's folk albums. The moony synths of "Golden Lady" turned prog heads around; "All in Love Is Fair" will surely end the first act when Broadway finally gets around to a Stevie jukebox musical (step on it).

And "Higher Ground" is classic rock, flat out: the rhythm swinging and jittery, pounded along by Wonder's sinewy drumming, the twining synthesizers and clavinet tangling like guitars, and Stevie at his most call-the-troops. It's like a totally sober version of John Lennon in "Tomorrow Never Knows": "Believers, keep on believing/ Sleepers, just stop sleeping." Yet listen close to the song's fade-out. There's an ad-lib, just barely audible: "Don't you let nobody bring you down — and they'll sho' nuff try." Brrr.
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Mystic Visions

Judee Sill

Judee Sill
2005 | Rhino/Elektra

With her tender, imperfect vocals, lank brown locks and low-slung acoustic guitar, the singer and songwriter Judee Sill embodied the earnest, folksy spirit of California's Laurel Canyon in the 1970s. Sadly, Sill also embraced the era's excesses, and her dark biography is befitting of a martyred cult idol: After running away from home as a teenager, she married an aspiring gangster, was arrested for armed robbery and hauled off to reform school,... picked up a heroin habit, and hustled for cash as a petty thief. But with help from Graham Nash, David Crosby and David Geffen, Sill channeled her personal lapses — and the gospel hooks she collected in reform school — into two stunning folk records before dying of a drug overdose in 1979.

Judee Sill was released in 1971, and — unsurprisingly — it's lyrically preoccupied with grand notions of redemption and hope. "Sweet silver angels over the sea, please come down flyin' low for me," Sill begs on the impeccable "Jesus Was A Crossmaker," over building piano and eventual percussion. On opener "Crayon Angels," Sill lodges another plea for rescue: "Nothin's happened but I think it will soon, so I sit here waitin' for God and a train — to the Astral plane," she sings. Like Nick Drake, Sill's records weren't particularly appreciated in her lifetime, and her posthumous canonization feels almost cruel, but Judee Sill remains a haunting, evocative portrait of a singer using her voice to seek salvation.
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Ah Um

Charles Mingus
1999 | Columbia/Legacy

If you're looking for a first serious jazz album to listen to, this might be the one. Charles Mingus occupied a unique place in jazz, one foot planted squarely in tradition — particularly the composer's tradition of Duke Ellington — and the other in the new thing which, in 1959, when this was recorded, was in the process of coming into existence. Both tendencies are in full display here, with one... of Mingus's finest bands (although he referred to it as a "workshop," which is quite accurate) running through a brace of originals that pay tribute to the past ("Open Letter to Duke," "Jelly Roll") and express the present ("Fables of Faubus" refers to the governor of Arkansas 'bitter opposition to racial integration).

There are first recordings of two of Mingus 'immortal classics here. "Better Git It In Your Soul" is infused with a gospel feeling, with Mingus yelling encouragement in the background, and was a shout-out to the "soul" movement in jazz, which stood in opposition to some of the more hyper-intellectual stuff on the scene. "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" was Mingus 'obituary for the great tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who had just died. The overwhelming sadness of the melody disguises the fact that it's absolutely of its moment in structure and harmony.

Mingus, as a bassist, relied heavily on his reedmen, and three of his best, John Handy (alto sax, clarinet), Booker Ervin (tenor sax), and Shafi Hadi (alto and tenor sax), are on board. The trombone underlying the ensemble is Jimmy Knepper on some tracks, Willie Dennis on others, piano is by the incredibly underrated Horace Parlan, and Mingus 'long-time rhythm partner, Dannie Richmond, sits at the drums.

It doesn't get much better than this: I've been listening to this album for over 30 years, and I hear something new every time I sit down with it.
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Fables Of The Reconstruction

R.E.M.
1998 | IRS CATALOG
Sign 'O' The Times

Prince
2007 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

Manos

The Spinanes
Sub Pop Records

The first indie-label album ever to hit No. 1 on the college radio charts was an unlikely one: this debut by the peculiar, wonderful duo of singer/guitarist Rebecca Gates and drummer Scott Plouf. The Spinanes had initially been very much a part of the early-'90s "international pop underground" scene ("Entire" mentions a cassette by Olympia, Washington, band the Go Team), but they quickly became as interested in precision and complexity as in... soft, fragrant melodies. Gates's lyrics here are impressionistic and emotive, but the duo plays so crisply that they sound absolutely specific. It helped that half of their hooks were rhythmic: "Spitfire" is built around Plouf's snare cracks, "Noel, Jonah and Me" around variations on a stop-time lurch. And they had a sense of negative space that's rare for a rock band — Gates's dreamy murmur and resonant, open-tuned riffs up top, Plouf's inexorable attack at the bottom, and nothing but air between them.
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Psychedelic Soul

The Temptations
2003 | Motown

When Dennis Edwards replaced David Ruffin in the Temptations in 1968, producer/songwriter Norman Whitfield gave a brand new bag to Motown's most popular male group. Introduced to the psychedelic sounds of Sly and the Family Stone via Temp's member Otis Williams, Whitfield took Stone's fusion grooves and made them cinematic. Starting with "Cloud Nine," Whitfield de-emphasized Ruffin's departure by distributing the vocal line across the Temptations' widely differing voices á la... Sly and Family, while white session guitarist Dennis Coffey brought the wah-wah of Jimi Hendrix. "Cloud Nine" won Motown its first Grammy, and it established the label's new sophisticated, yet streetwise style soon embraced by all of its stars. For its 1969 sequel "Runaway Child, Running Wild," Whitfield expanded the track's length to nearly 10 minutes, and the prototype for disco's extended mixes was born.

What distinguished Whitfield's sprawling productions from lengthy acid-rock tracks was that they weren't mere jams. Based on verses and choruses just like the group's early hits, "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" and the others are paced as miniature symphonies with multiple peaks and valleys. The same strings that gave Motown its density during the mid '60 were now isolated over the beat. Instead of a constant blare, instrumentation came and went, swelled and subsided. The constant fluctuations made the listening experience more like a journey — a key disco metaphor. Rather than encouraging dancers to sprint, Whitfield paced his records to suspend them in rapture.
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All-Night Dance Party

Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds & Nigerian Blues 1970-6

Soundway: Various Artists
2011 | Manufacturer / Believe Digital

Some compilations that highlight a particular sound during a particular time follow a straight line. But when that time and place is as relatively under-documented as early '70s Nigerian pop, such tidiness isn't so necessary — it's enough to just crack the door and to keep it open for an enticing while. That's why Nigeria Special, a brilliant two-hour tour through a musical world that ranged far more widely than even a... serious fan of this era and place might have been aware, is such a triumph. Covering the period just after the Biafran War (1967-70) had ended, Nigeria Special concentrates on the region's late highlife and the post-Fela Kuti fallout of Afrobeat — Kuti was an exemplar of the style, but by no means the sole model of success. If that means the collection's focus blurs a little, that's more than made up for the sheer breadth, range and intrigue on display here.

Many of Nigeria Special's cuts are so juicy it's impossible to believe they've never been made available outside of Nigeria before. The Funkees'"Akula Owu Onyeara" — originally released in two parts, and edited together here for the first time — works like Fela at his most rhythmically sinuous; the simple keyboard figures could be Morse Code signal for uncut funk, and it has one of the most perfect endings you'll ever hear. George Akaeze & His Augmented Hits'"Business Before Pleasure" is delectably light-footed Afrobeat with laconic chants and jazzy horns so friendly they belie the title: this is business as pleasure. The nonstop forward motion of the Semi Colon's "Nekwaha Semi Colon" is formally disco — the hi-hat/kick-drum pattern points right at it — but it's so hypnotic it seems rooted in something far older (and more intrinsically Nigerian). The highlife tracks are equally hot: St. Augustine & His Rovers Dance Band's "Onwu Ama Dike" is made even lovelier by its slightly messy rhythmic feel, not to mention the semi-sweet horn line.

Compiler Miles Cleret claims that there are thousands more such goodies that have just been sitting in Nigeria waiting to be rediscovered. The 26 included here are such a pleasure to listen to that, for anyone who loves them, they could inspire fantasies of booking a flight to Lagos and starting a treasure hunt of one's own.
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New York Dolls

New York Dolls
1987 | Island Def Jam
In the Jungle Groove

James Brown
2003 | Polydor

Get Happy

Elvis Costello & The Attractions
2007 | Hip-O Records

After a drunken quarrel on the Armed Forces tour turned into a disaster that left Costello looking like a dick at best and a racist at worst (in retrospect, it was definitely "dick"), he took solace in old soul records — the deep Southern soul of Stax most of all — and somehow ended up cranking out even more amazing songs than he had been over the previous few years. The album... that subsequently came out of a frantic recording session in Holland speeds through 20 songs in 48 minutes, and it's the Attractions' most impressive work as a group: flexible, powerful, psychically synched-up, and above all fast. They effortlessly pull off one soul groove after another (keyboardist Steve Nieve cops licks from Booker T. and the M.G.s all over the place), as well as tear-in-my-beer country ("Motel Matches"), ska ("Human Touch") and garage rock ("Beaten to the Punch"). Those last three, by the way, all happen in a seven-minute span.

If some of these songs are formal exercises, they're fantastically entertaining formal exercises: The opener "Love for Tender," for instance, is the riff from "You Can't Hurry Love" taken at bottle-of-amphetamines speed, wrapped around approximately five thousand puns about money ("I pay you a compliment/ You think I am inno-cent"), and executed in less than two minutes. The first single, oddly, was a cover — Sam & Dave's downtempo soul duet "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down," reworked as crazed new wave — but Costello's original songs reward ungnarling their tightly-knotted wordplay, especially "New Amsterdam," a little waltz about portable exile that he recorded on his own. The big lyrical picture of Get Happy!! is a bitter young man measuring himself against the guys that the girls he likes seem to be more interested in, and figuring out reasons to despise them all; by the end, though, he's figured out that he's kind of a dick, too.
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Rocks The House

Etta James
1992 | Geffen

This 1963 show from Nashville's New Era Club is a candidate for best live album ever, and you need only hear her version of Jimmy Reed's "Baby What You Want Me to Do" to realize that. It's one of the sexiest things ever recorded, with Etta wailing and moaning before making erotic nonverbal sounds — you can't even call it scat-singing — that bring the house down. The raunchy band, featuring David... T. Walker on guitar, is torrid; the audience, which roars out call and response with Etta, is fevered. "Tell Mama," indeed. Or else.
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Gold

Buddy Holly
2005 | Geffen
Aquemini

Outkast
1998 | Arista/LaFace Records

One Night Stand - Sam Cooke Live At The Harlem Square Club, 1963

Sam Cooke
2005 | RCA/Legacy

1963, Miami, Florida — below the Mason Dixon line. Jim Crow was still law, Martin Luther King was just about to march on Washington, and the bluntly named Chitlin Circuit (the collection of clubs where black artists played and sang for black audiences) was still in full operation. Sam Cooke had been a star for most of his life by the time of this now-legendary gig at the Harlem Square Club. At... 32, the singer already had a best-selling Greatest Hits album, and had entranced legions of church-goers as a certified gospel sex symbol through the fifties (including a very young Aretha Franklin, who has always admitted her melismatic signing style was a straight-up tribute to her friend's liquid vocals). Cooke had been working his audience members, especially those of the female persuasion, into bosom-heaving frenzies for years — and not just because of his movie-star good looks. The plain truth: Cooke could sing like no other man before or since.

This live recording shows off all of Cooke's gifts. "It's All Right," is the gospel classic "Touch the Hem of His Garment" (which, not coincidentally, Cooke had already made into a hit with the Soul Stirrers), secularized. Except instead of praying to Jesus for mercy, Cooke advises each man in the audience to "shake and wake" his woman up when he comes home at night, wait until she "wipes all the sleep from her eyes," and tell her "Believe me baby, it's all right." A perfect lullaby.

Songs such as "Cupid" or "Twistin 'the Night Away" may sound retro now, even corny at times, especially to ears used to the tough funk of James Brown or George Clinton. But that's because it's almost impossible, in our current Yes We Did era, to imagine what it must have been like back then for a soul singer whose rough edges were so easy to smooth. Cooke could charm with such ease, it would have been a piece of cake for him to go the Sammy Davis route. But he didn't. And JB and Dr. Funkenstein, not to mention Prince and (early, fantastic) Michael Jackson, wouldn't have been the same if he had. Live At the Harlem Square Club does have a bit of a preserved-in-amber quality. That's not the record's fault, however. By 1964, Cooke was dead, shot to death in a motel under circumstances that were never clear (his last masterpiece, the introspective, heartbreaking, "A Change is Gonna Come," was not released until after his death). It's wonderful to be able to hear his voice here, so relaxed and true, and with the audience he knew and loved the best. As Cooke tells the ladies in the crowd, and they ecstatically croon back, "I think of you every morning, and dream of you every night."
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Off the Wall

Michael Jackson
1983 | Epic
Absolute Belter

Various
2010 | FINDERS KEEPERS

Bruised Knuckle Bottle-Breakers

Dig Me Out

Sleater-Kinney
2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

t the end of the decade of "women in rock" (yes, Virginia, we only get one), this trio born of the Northwest "riot grrrl" scene defined feminist punk by ingraining the lessons they'd learned in their Women Studies classes as deeply into their music as phallocentrism is etched into the sound of Led Zep or Snoop Dog. Go beyond the lyrics (which do read like a punk Sisterhood Is Powerful) to revel... in the non-linear dialogue of awesome yowler Corin Tucker and chatterbox Carrie Brownstein, the taut-yet-flexible song structures rising up from Janet Weiss's Amazonian drums and Brownstein's guitar heroism, which sparkles in circles instead of hammering for the gods. Dig Me Out has the anthems any grassroots movement needs, but the band can also do lovestruck ("One More Hour"), funny ("Little Babies") and spooky ("Jenny") —` thus proving conclusively, for any doubters, that grrrls are people, too.
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Lifestylez Ov Da Poor & Dangerous

Big L
1995 | Columbia
New Day Rising

Hüsker Dü
1985 | SST Records / The Orchard

Exile On Main Street

The Rolling Stones
2010 | UME Direct

The re-release of a treasured cultural touchstone is occasion for seeing how the work in question has telescoped the years, and, more to the point, how your own perceptions and persona have evolved and grown along with it. With the second coming of Exile On Main Street, the Rolling Stones' controversial and iconic masterwork, the looking-back not only encompasses myself, but the glimmering binary stars of the Stones, Mick and Keith; and,... in some ways, these responses overshadow the album itself.

I have particular reason to welcome a chance for reappraisal, since two weeks after Exile's original release in the late spring of 1972, I reviewed the album for Rolling Stone, giving it a medium-cool analysis I've had some cause to regret over the years. It was a classic case, as the cliché goes, of not seeing the forest for the trees. Song by song, even over the kitchen sink of a double album set, individual highlights seemed hard to come by, though the thrill of hearing "Happy," "Rip This Joint," and "Shine A Light" has been burnished on this reissue by their many sing-alongs over the years, and "Tumbling Dice" is a undeniable classic. But to my then rock-critical ears, thinking with head instead of heart, this was a comedown from the Stones scaling the peaks of some of the most cataclysmic music of their career, an arc that seemed to ascend around Beggar's Banquet, continue through Let It Bleed and burst into fireworks with Sticky Fingers, when, not so coincidentally, they were at their apex of creativity and influence. I was spoiled, and my disappointment showed, especially given the first long form double album of the Stones' career.

But Exile, as the title implies, is more about time and place, a mood and atmosphere, and its sprawling, ramshackle track listing, trying on blues forms and extending heightened jams, stretching out for long solos from Stones' sidemen like sax player Bobby Keys and pianist Nicky Hopkins, with an especial nod to the group's slide guitarist at the time, Mick Taylor, gives the album a documentary in-the-making feel, enhanced by a remastering, which seems to clear up some of the tube-driven haze of the original vinyl edition (whether this is a good or bad thing I will leave to your speaker system).

The tale has oft been told of the Stones setting up a mobile recording studio in Keith Richards's basement in the south of France, inside a mansion called Nellcote, though the album was later pieced together in sessions that transported tapes from London to Los Angeles; and it is within this compressed, hothouse atmosphere, a heart of darkness on the verge of tropic (see the claustrophobic "Ventilator Blues," and the booklet photos of sprawled bodies on the floor of the makeshift studio, not to mention Charlie's striped jacket being used as a bass drum muffler!), that the Stones put together the loosest, most freewheeling album of their career.

That's the way Keith wanted it, and his current view of Exile is that it is a sacred text, allowing no tampering within its concentric circles of recorded groove. Mick, however, couldn't resist and in the bonus disc, gathered with the help of Don Was, adds new lyrics to four songs that are a call-and-response to his younger self: "You always brought out the best in me," he lays his heart on the line in the frankly beautiful "Following The River," and I wonder if he's talking about Keith. The alternate takes and "bonus" material don't change Exile so much as show its process, the tracks that didn't make the official release holding their own: "I'm Not Signifying" is lascivious in its cakewalk, and "Plundered My Soul" is all impassioned romp, galvanized by Charlie Watts' archetypal loping drums, affectionate regret coloring the remembrance.

Beyond bonus, however, it is Exile's remarkable resilience as an album that pushes play in this decade. Much of its myth is just that — a celebration of lifestyle and rock stardom that took root in a fecund, overheated basement as the hours ticked till dawn. It was Mick who gathered the tapes of the Nellcote sessions and overdubbed the gospel-ish feel that imbues Exile with its sense of redemption amidst decadence. The duality of the Stones' was never more manifest than here, with Keith's voice entwining harmonies with Mick, Mick slightly back in the mix, and the force of the band carrying them forward. It's interesting to compare the two versions of "Soul Survivor" with each fronting the song, just as it is fascinating — now almost four decades later — to contemplate the roads not taken: In the opening "Rocks Off," one of the Stones' many nigh-trademark barrelhouse stompers, a bridge appears out of nowhere, and the song slows, turns psychedelic as tremolo phasers wash over the guitars and vocal. It seems almost contrary to the festive mood, a malevolence and an intimation of gathering storm clouds, and I find myself wishing they would have followed its tangent.

But then, I'm not so different than I was when I first took a stroll down Main Street. Neither is Exile.
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Walk Among Us

Misfits
1982 | Rhino/Slash
Songs For The Deaf

Queens of the Stone Age
2007 | Interscope

The Black Album

Jay-Z
2010 | Roc-a-fella Records

The song that has always enchanted me on The Black Album is the last song, which is called "My 1st Song," which is meant to be the last song of Jay-Z's career. Got that? It is a beautiful, bedeviling denouement; Jay has rarely rapped better, more intricately, and with such purpose. It's because he knew exactly what he was meant to be doing: Saying goodbye. "Goodbye, this is my second major breakup/... My first was, with a pager/ With a hooptie, a cookpot, and the game/ This one's with the stool, with the stage, with the fortune/ Maybe not the fortune, but certainly the fame."

Knowing what we know now — Jay-Z would be back to full-time recording artist status in three years — makes examining the self-flagellation of The Black Album something of a fool's errand. Elizabeth Mendez Berry wrote for The Village Voice that he'd become "bored by the alter ego he'd outgrown." So how seriously do we take the musings on a half-hearted retirement? Well, maybe without that specter hanging, we can hear it for the achievement it is: a great Jay-Z album.

Originally conceived as a single-producer venture in 1998 with DJ Premier, The Black Album wouldn't come together until years later. It was later advertised with a one-producer, one-song plan, which also never panned out. Finally, it became a typical sort of Jay-Z project, featuring contributions from trusted collaborators, in-house Roc-A-Fella super-producers, Kanye West and Just Blaze, sensing the moment as much as Jay, and crucial additions from a murderer's row of sound men (Timbaland, Eminem, DJ Quik, The Neptunes twice, Rick Rubin, out of rap retirement for a spell) and a handful of then-unknowns and never-heard-from-agains (9th Wonder, The Buchanans, Aqua). Together, there are canonical songs: "Public Service Announcement (Interlude)," initially just a tossed-off one verse proclamation of pride that became a defining document for the MC, with lyrics — from "got the hottest chick in the game wearing my chain" to "like Che Guevara with bling on, I'm complex" — that became rallying cries. Rubin's stomping "99 Problems" still sounds like a tank full of cowbells taking a 40-foot drop onto the pavement. Kanye's "Encore" is a convivial farewell song, though it comes early in the mix. Eminem's "Moment of Clarity" is tightly wound, but never tight-lipped, as Jay raps, "I've dumbed down for my audience and doubled my dollars/ They criticize me for it yet they all yell holler." Even "Threat," the then-ascendant 9th Wonder's contribution, returns Jay to the creeping majesty of his debut, Reasonable Doubt.. And what would a pro forma Jay-Z album be without a Neptunes trifle? At the time of release, "Change Clothes" seemed a grievous error, a cold calculating move designed to ensure record sales. So many years on, it is what it was supposed to be: a palate cleanser.

"My 1st Song" still kills me. It's that "maybe not the fortune" line. Jay-Z has long been a dramatist, a self-styled orchestrator of his own mythology. And nothing could be more grand than a ceremonial retirement. Except, maybe, for the even grander comeback. But then, there is one more Easter egg worth parsing on The Black Album. From "Encore": "When I come back like Jordan, wearin' the 4-5/ It ain't to play games with you/ It's to aim at you, probably maim you." Considering said comeback, he was more right than he knew.
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The Score

Fugees (Refugee Camp)
2008 | Columbia
Let It Be [Expanded Edition]

The Replacements
2008 | Ryko/Rhino

Moody and Beautiful

Post

Björk
1995 | 143/Lava/Atlantic

Having established herself on the pop stage with Debut, follow-up Post (1995) saw Björk's ambitions go widescreen.With everyone from Tricky to Howie B to 808 State's Graham Massey fighting over the producer's chair and a musical palette ranging from ambient dub ("Possibly Me") to strident techno-pop ("Army of Me") Post boasts a musical vision to match Cecil B. DeMille.

And then there's the lyrics. Bizarre, brazen and remorselessly tongue-in cheek,... songs like "Enjoy" and "You've Been Flirting Again" are dark, delirious examinations of the mating game whilst "Hyperballad" is euphoric — "We live on a mountain/ Right at the top/ There's a beautiful view" — but only to disguise a damning rejection of consumerism. It was smash hit "It's Oh So Quiet" which kept the accountants happy, however. A reworking of Betty Hutton's Hollywood showtune "Blow a Fuse" delivered with a kindergarten cutesiness, confirming her role as indie-rock's reigning queen of weird. From this point on, Björk was in the big league.
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Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul [Collector's Edition]

Otis Redding
2008 | Rhino Atlantic
Tapestry

Carole King
1999 | Ode/Epic/Legacy

Sketches Of Spain

Miles Davis
Columbia/Legacy

Arranger Gil Evans was one of Miles Davis's key allies throughout his career. Starting in 1957 they collaborated on four projects for trumpet and orchestra, beginning with the fine Miles Ahead and ending with the problematic but still rewarding Quiet Nights. The series 'middle volumes are Porgy and Bess, where Gershwin's music inspires some of Miles's most poignant trumpeting, and the exquisite Sketches of Spain. Its long flagship number recasts a... slow movement from a 1939 guitar concerto by Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo; it's enlivened by Evans 'gorgeous dissonances for flutes and massed brass, and flamenco echoes from rattling castanets. But the album's real marvels are a pair of shorter pieces derived from field recordings, which push Miles into previously uncharted territory. "The Pied Piper" is based on a Peruvian Indian pennywhistle melody, played by a pig castrator to advertise his services as he makes his rounds. Miles imbues it with such deep feeling, it's as if he empathizes with the pigs. "Saeta" draws on music for a Spanish Holy Week procession, right down to the sound of a brass band advancing from and then retreating into the distance, like something out of Charles Ives; the dire, wounded sound of Davis's trumpet is unforgettably stark.
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Bandwagonesque

Teenage Fanclub
1997 | Geffen
My Favorite Things

John Coltrane
1998 | Rhino Atlantic

Voodoo

D'Angelo
2000 | NOO TRYBE

The success of his 1995 debut Brown Sugar left D'Angelo in a minor funk, irked by the music industry and suffering from a bout of writer's block. The unease that accumulated during his sabbatical surfaced with his 1998 single, "Devil's Pie." Built on a paranoid, tail-chasing DJ Premier bass loop, D'Angelo turned away from the earthly delights of Brown Sugar and crooned about the spiritual crisis in hip-hop and beyond: "Drugs and... thugs, women and wine/ Three or four at a time/ Watch them all stand in line/For a slice of the devil's pie." From its very title to its dark aesthetic, Voodoo fixed on the possibility of purpose and redemption beyond the material world — this was an album that explored the meaning of "soul" as something more than a musical classification. There were still crushing moments of conventional beauty, like "Untitled (How Does it Feel)" or the charming "Send it On," and Method Man and Redman lend their intimate chemistry to the muscular "Left and Right." But on moments like "Chicken Grease," with its sketches of a bygone Southern simplicity, and the captivating "Africa," Voodoo felt ghostly and haunted, as though D'Angelo and Soulquarians were trying to conjure a portal to the past during their marathon jam sessions.
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The Bends

Radiohead
1995 | CAPITOL
Nina Simone Sings The Blues

Nina Simone
RCA/Legacy

Lady Soul [w/bonus selections]

Aretha Franklin
1987 | Rhino Atlantic

The first four songs here, including the gigantic hit "Chain of Fools," are Aretha the newly minted superstar stepping out from behind the gospel pulpit to address the secular world. The rest, from the "I Never Loved a Man" outtake (!) "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" to her sister (and backup singer) Carolyn Franklin's deep ballad "Ain't No Way," are all about the pulse and ache of sex —... they're not come-ons, exactly, but meditations on what happens behind the bedroom door, and what that means to everything outside it. And the all-star band, featuring Bobby Womack, Spooner Oldham, and (briefly) Eric Clapton, rolls toward the blues right alongside her.
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Charles Lloyd & Jason Moran, Hagar’s Song

Peter Margasak — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:12:07 +0000

An artistic partnership that's never been more simpatico and sublime

The reedist Charles Lloyd, who turns 75 on March 15, is almost twice the age of pianist Jason Moran, but over the last few years the two musicians have developed a mutually fulfilling partnership. Moran, one of the most visionary composers, improvisers and conceptualists of his generation, has appeared on three of Lloyd’s albums since 2008, and with Hagar’s Song, they not only share equal billing for the first time, but they demonstrate that their artistic partnership has never been more simpatico and sublime.

The centerpiece of the album is Lloyd’s five-part titular suite, written for his great-great-grandmother who was taken from her parents in Mississippi and sold into slavery in Tennessee when she was 10 years old. It’s understandably the most solemn and sobering music on the collection: On the meditative opening section “Journey Up River,” Lloyd blows serene, measured melodies on bass flute, while “Dreams of White Bluff” adopts a tense, tightly-coiled energy, with both musicians shaping roiling lines that simmer in a narrow pitch range. Then, a tender, imploring melody emerges, ruptured by a turbulent, free jazz-inspired episode before the pair gather themselves back in. On some of the pieces, Moran underlines his keyboard rhythms with tambourine and heightens the percussive feel by reaching inside the piano and damping its strings to get an insistent, buzzing effect.

The suite is sandwiched by a diverse array of jazz standards and a couple of classic rock songs. Moran brings hints of stride to a gorgeous spin through Ellington’s “Mood Indigo,” while Lloyd demonstrates his peerless ability at reshaping melodic phrases, making the standard “All About Ronnie” sound like an entirely new, equally tuneful and seductive composition. The ability to reinvent old material is a gift both musicians share, although they tend to go about it in different ways. Lloyd plays with melody and mood like molding clay, steeping his performance in the essential feel of the tune, but changing accents, restructuring lines, and digging into the harmony with an unceasing sense of curiosity — without ever sounding like he’s merely experimenting or trying things out. Moran, on the other hand, uses his deep investment in jazz history to give many of his performances an appealing post-modern charm; on a version of “Rosetta” by Earl Hines he seems to skip across generational jazz styles at will, never missing a beat. The album closes with tender renditions of “I Shall Be Released” — The Band’s Levon Helm died a few days before the pair went into the studio — and the Beach Boys ballad “God Only Knows,” which sends the collection home with an undeniably stunning, delicate benediction.

Ryan Keberle and Catharsis, Music Is Emotion

Britt Robson — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 19:19:49 +0000

Ryan Keberle and Catharsis, Music Is Emotion

Ryan Keberle’s third album as a leader is not as different from the first two as he might imagine — and that’s a good thing. The son and grandson of professional musicians, Keberle studied at the Manhattan School of Music and graduated from Juilliard, has a prime seat in some of the most adventurous big bands today, including those led by Maria Schneider and Darcy James Argue, and teaches at Hunter College. So it is hard not to hear a little defensiveness when he writes in the liner notes, “This record is about music from the heart and the soul and not from the brain.”

Keberle probably underestimates the wonderful emotional transparency of his striking compositions and arrangements on his first two discs, especially the second one, Heavy Dreaming. But where those records featured a “double quartet” instrumentation of Keberle’s trombone with rhythm section abetted by four other brass players, Music Is Emotion scales it back to a piano-less quartet, with trumpeter Mike Rodriguez joining him on the front line. The fewer musicians creates greater intimacy, and more chances and space for each member of the ensemble (named Catharsis), to express himself.

Thus, the interplays and calls-and-responses are more individual or duo on Emotion than on denser, earlier discs. It starts right away with “Big Kick Blues,” where bassist Jorge Roeder sets the pulse and the horns follow; later, Keberle and Rodriguez take turns being the refractory moon off each other’s sun — and the blues is served with heart, brain and soul.

For the third straight disc, Keberle pays tribute to the Beatles with a cover song, this one “Julia,” which rolls out a moving horn treatment and then let Roeder go off on a solo. This happens on a majority of the ten songs — the bassist is pervasively in the spotlight and delivers his personality without disrupting the emotional or structural texture of the tune. Other covers include Billy Strayhorn (“Blues In Orbit”) and Art Farmer (“Bluesport”) both with guest saxophonist Scott Robinson, enabling Keberle to bring back the “little big band” feel that is a virtue of his writing. And check out “Carbon Neutral” which open with two minutes of the irrepressible Roeder on arco. In sum, then, another smart, but heartfelt Ryan Keberle outing — hope he gives himself an emotional pat on the back.

Wayne Shorter Quartet, Without A Net

Britt Robson — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:07:47 +0000

Open-ended but purposeful, alert yet accepting

Seven months away from his 80th birthday, the greatest living composer in jazz has released his first record in eight years. Wayne Shorter’s Without A Net features eight live songs from a 2011 European tour with his longstanding quartet, along with a more recent 23-minute, chamber-styled tone poem, also live, with the five-piece Imani Winds abetting the regular ensemble.

It is an event of a record, Shorter’s first for the Blue Note label in 43 years. But Without A Net is distant from such Blue Note classics as Juju and Speak No Evil in more ways than one. His preferred saxophone is now the soprano instead of the tenor, and nearly a half-century after his Blue Note albums stunned listeners with their buffed, lean, hard-bop ingenuity, Without A Net is open-ended but purposeful, alert yet accepting. It reflects the tranquil whir animating Shorter today,an elderly master of musical composition and a longtime follower of the Buddhist faith.

Without A Net contains all the Shorter verities — the harmonic sophistication, the patient song construction, the innovative probing of melodic nooks and crannies, the geometric integrity of his solos. Perhaps because Shorter isn’t fully absorbed in a few listens, I’m most favorably inclined toward his reworking of two older tunes. Without losing its circular motif, “Orbits” is more allusive than the snappy bop version opening Miles Davis’s Miles Smiles in 1967 and the string-laden remake on Shorter’s Alegria in 2003. And “Plaza Real” sheds the overtly Spanish tinge from its original with Weather Report in 1983, transforming into a series of refractions between Shorter’s soprano and his three cohorts that reveals quite a bit about his modern-day conceptions on the straight horn.

Of the originals, “Starry Night” is indebted to the Latin, classical and beautifully elliptical jazz phrasings of pianist Danilo Perez. “S.S. Golden Mean” is a relatively playful number that finds Shorter’s quoting “Night In Tunesia,” and “Zero Gravity” begins as a toe-tapper with Shorter whistling over John Pattituci’s sturdy bass riff before slides into the sort of levitating interplay implied by the album’s title. There is also a 13-minute rendition of the theme song to the movie “Flying Down To Rio,” the first pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers, released in 1933 — the year of Shorter’s birth. It seems this wizened old dog always has a few tricks left in his arsenal, and can operate “without a net” because, at this late stage, he will almost assuredly land gracefully.