Building the 1000 Recordings list, I began from the presumption that the reader would be approaching “cold,” ie, wouldn’t know any of an act’s output, and so my first consideration was always accessibility: Is this album a good point of entry? This led to no small amount of agonizing between personal preference and accepted wisdom, between the big influential hit and the lesser-known gem.
With R.E.M., the tug of war involved Murmer, the debut album that is widely credited with opening up new pathways for rock bands, and Fables of the Reconstruction (1985), the band’s third full-length effort, which contains some of its most cryptic and wonderful songs. There’s a newly remastered version of Fables, a two-disc keepsake complete with an entire disc of demos. It’s the perfect Next Stop for anyone who started with Murmer and is curious about the band’s subsequent trajectory. Though the demos are not essential, Fables itself emerges as something brilliant and rare, a hurtling, slightly blurry, mesmeric travelogue filled with half-scenes and mysterious impressions. I got reacquainted with it during hour two of a five-hour road trip; from the opening cathedral-bell guitar tritone of “Feeling Gravity’s Pull,” it held me completely. It’s arguably the most engrossing lane-changing music in the band’s discography.
That’s partly because the songs seem to all connect, in some way, to the notion of travel – even in the slower songs, there’s a sense of things moving forward, if not careening out of control. And it’s partly because of the odd characters one meets on journeys, the train conductors and creepy porchdwellers and lost GPS-lacking souls seeking directions at filling stations – the forlorn ones with rusted vending machines and signs advertising long-defunct regional brands. But it’s also because of the circumstances: The band had been on the road for most of four years, playing songs from its first two records, and had yet to take a reappraising breath. As guitarist Peter Buck says in a brief liner note, “the four of us were completely out of our minds at the time.” Where tunes from the previous albums had been road-tested, Fables was a studio creation.
The remaster sharpens the edges of the songs, and, at the same time, makes clear that Fables wasn’t just about edges – the band was in pursuit of a diffuse, dusty-road psychedelia in which graceful guitar arpeggios support sprawling and often beautifully harmonized vocal ruminations. Producer Joe Boyd (Nick Drake, countless others) plays a George Martin-like role here, showing the band some of the ways the studio can expand, and make awesome, the noises produced by four individuals. He takes care to ensure that each element in the layered schemes is rendered distinctly – he catches the fleeting dissonances in the stacks of vocal harmony (“Green Grow the Rushes”) and provides each of the overlapping vocal parts, in the gloriously unhinged peak-moment chorales of “Driver 8” and others, with enough space to shine. Turns out those under-the-hood details, mostly lost on earlier CD iterations, are essential to the sound – and powerful enough to argue for a (long overdue) Fables reappraisal.
How I Got Over provides a welcome reality check for those vaguely uplifting platitudes about “change” and “hope” that ushered in the Obama era. A series of vignettes about the modern struggle to keep family and soul together under difficult circumstances, it features some of the grabbiest refrains this hip-hop crew has ever offered – for proof, start with “Dear God 2.0,” featuring My Morning Jacket’s Jim James and his Monsters of Folk cohorts. Then check the title track, the ticking-timebomb “Now or Never,” and the elegant “Right On,” which derives some of its wattage from none other than Joanna Newsome.
JASON MORAN: Ten (Blue Note). This inventive trio date marks a decade of collaboration between jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran, bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits. The Bandwagon, as the trio is called, has pushed at the edges of jazz convention by incorporating loops of odd sounds (one track here features feedback from the guitar of Jimi Hendrix) and conversations, improvising over hip-hop rhythms, and exploring radical ways to balance consonance and dissonance. Moran’s compositions here continue to push the trio into new territory – check the ambling, beautiful “RFK in the Land of Apartheid” – and there are also striking covers, including two versions of Conlon Nancarrow’s “Study No. 6.”
ETOILE DE DAKAR: Once Upon a Time In Senegal (Stern’s Music). Though it had a short run (roughly three years), the band that launched the career of Youssou N’Dour carved out a reputation for incandescent, impossibly fluid rhythms in support of bouyant, spirit-searing refrains. This 2-disc set surveys the best of the group’s studio recordings, made between 1979 and 1981; many have never been released outside of Africa. Those familiar with N’Dour’s later work know to expect lightning bolts when he sings; the surprises here include what’s behind him – intricate layers of guitar that give the music shimmering, ever-changing textures.
KETIL BJORNSTAD: Rememberance (ECM). The Norwegian pianist Ketil Bjornstad has a gift for earnest, bracingly simple melody – at times on this vivid journey, his compositions approach a murmering modern-day update of Erik Satie’s piano music. The title of this trio work featuring drummer Jon Christensen suggests nostalgia, but there’s no looking back happening here. Instead, the poised Bjornstad pursues a nuanced, pastel-tinged atmosphere that might just mirror the motion of brainwaves during periods of calm reflection. Remarkable for nighttime stargazing.
VARIOUS ARTISTS: Palenque Palenque: Champeta Criolla & Afro Roots in Colombia, 1975-1991. (Soundway). Great dance music is like gumbo: It becomes rich, far greater than the sum of its parts, when seemingly disparate ingredients are blended with sensitivity. An excellent illustration of this is Champeta, dance music that connects Colombian beats, like cumbia, with irreverent appropriations of African rhythm. Fiery and psychedelic, mindful of tradition but shot with a zealous energy missing from much Colombian music, this is an instant party.
The Rolling Stones are no exception – the current catalog upgrade program is at least the third of the CD era. But unlike most acts, the iconic British band has been fanatically stingy with unreleased material -- the 2005 Rarities was the band's first vault project. Sure, the CD reissues have offered perhaps upgraded sound (there’s some contention about this) and packaging, but in each case, it's the exact same music. That changed last week, with the double-disc “expanded” version of Exile on Main Street, the 1972 gem made under mythically debauched conditions and containing some of the most inspired playing the Stones ever captured on record.
This iteration is notable for what the band didn’t do – “sweeten” or correct a mix that vocalist Mick Jagger has complained about loudly for decades. (There’s been a beefy remastering, but the vocals are still somewhat obscured at times, and the guitars still register with that unruly wallop). It’s also notable for what it includes – alternate recordings of a few of Exile’s most inspired pieces (a deliciously unhinged “Loving Cup,” “Soul Survivor”) and a stack of tunes the band recorded during the Exile sessions but opted to keep on the shelf. Some of these are “exercises” – one sounds like a pale “Paint It Black” knockoff.
Still, if you love rock and roll, you need this. Because it provides a slightly wider prism through which to view and appreciate the creative tumult of the Rolling Stones. It catches the band at a key point on the timeline, the moment after they’d coughed up a trilogy of rock classics and were downright fearless, determined to expand the scope of the enterprise with explorations of country, gospel and blues.
You need this because it is one of those rare records that can slap you sideways before any of the words or the guitar chords can even register. No matter where you drop in, you feel this thing. Can the same be said of the new Hole?
You need Exile because it is an example of musicians creating in spite of the atmosphere of copious indulgence that surrounded them – on the alternate “Loving Cup,” the Stones sound too blotto to care about tiny details, yet not so far gone that they can’t dig deep and play. Cue this up to hear how looseness can be a high virtue.
You need this for “Plundered My Soul,” one of the newly unearthed tunes. Over a settled, medium-slow groove that has been dismissed by critics as “generic” Stones, Jagger tells of a woman he badly misread, and the misery that followed. Another song in the key of dejection, it is a sly little marvel, with that intensely visceral sound harnessed to a tight, disciplined, endlessly memorable refrain.
You need this because every so often, it’s nice to come face to face with boldness, to be reminded what boldness sounds like. As impressive as the songcraft is – and the basic hammer-and-nails verse-chorus stuff is unassailable here – there’s something more fundamental underneath. What drives Exile is an attitude. It describes a stance (or a series of them), ways of being in the world. Thirty years on, it’s somehow life-affirming to discover that the oppositional framework extended beyond the original texts. That there was more confrontation where “Rip This Joint” came from. And we need to be reminded. Because that energy has long since leeched out of corporate rock culture, and if current recordings are any indication, it’s not coming back anytime soon. On top of everything else, Exile can serve us as a kind of benchmark, reminding how potent rock and roll once was and measuring just how empty it can get when an intangible X-factor, like boldness, leaves the world.
The jazz saxophonist and composer, architect of some of the most challenging and influential tunes in the jazz canon, premiered a new piece (an extended meditation called “Lotus”) with his quartet recently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Since then, I’ve been thinking back on Shorter’s long career, in search of five recordings (beyond those discussed in the book) that chart at least a bit of his trajectory. These are by no means the only titles to own; as with everything 1000 Recordings, they’re merely starting points for further exploration.
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: Africaine (Blue Note, 1959). The first recording from Blakey’s group to feature Shorter and trumpeter Lee Morgan, Africaine is a supercharged slice of hard bop. Shorter wrote the title track and the spry “Lester Left Town;” his saxophone solos are bursting with ideas, and Morgan is positively brilliant throughout.
Wayne Shorter: Speak No Evil (Blue Note, 1964). In the early phases of his career, Shorter dwelled in the shadows of his friend John Coltrane – though he lacked Trane’s fluid technique, he borrowed some of the great saxophonist’s harmonic devices for his own solos. By this, his third Blue Note date as a leader, Shorter has found not just his compositional voice – see the majestic “Witch Hunt” and “Infant Eyes,” marvels of beauty and invention – but a distinct identity as an improvisor. Check out the way he claws at and gently opens up the title track’s recurring motif.
Miles Davis: Nefertiti (Columbia, 1967). It is impossible to fully appreciate Miles Davis’ ‘60s quintet from just one studio document – each time the group recorded, it was in a strikingly different musical place. Shorter’s impact is felt first on E.S.P. from 1965, in effortlessly spiralling themes that veer gently toward free jazz. Recorded two years later, Nefertiti is looser and at the same time more introspective, a series of yearning melodies that grow more poignant as they evolve.
Weather Report: Mr. Gone (Columbia, 1978). This album, which followed the fusion group’s massive hit Heavy Weather, is often dismissed for its meandering crossover tries (“River People,” written by the late bass dynamo Jaco Pastorius). But it contains one of Shorter’s most haunting themes, “The Elders,” and a stunning reworking of a tune the saxophonist wrote during his tenure with Davis, “Pinocchio.”
Wayne Shorter: Alegria (Verve, 2003). This ambitious project marks a rebirth of sorts for Shorter, showcasing a variety of musical styles and approaches, from old British folk songs to composer Hector Villa-Lobos’ “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5.” Shorter works in a variety of settings here, and while all of them are interesting, the material featuring his regular trio – pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Pattitucci, drummer Brian Blade, now together for ten years – positively sparkles.
Of course it’s already possible to download “Hanky Panky” while reading James’ recollections about his first hit. My thought was for something more proprietary: James does a vivid imitation of music kingpin Morris Levy in his midtown Manhattan office, intimidating competitors and verbally abusing artists and songwriters. Something along the lines of “Click here for a thirty second clip of Levy threatening to destroy a songwriter’s career….”
I’ve never heard Levy’s voice, but there’s plenty of industry folklore around his story – he started out running the souvenir photo concession at a few New York nightclubs (including the jazz mecca Birdland), then went on to own the clubs and run several labels, all while holding down a spot in the upper echelon of the Genovese crime family. Applying mob tactics to the music business, Levy became a larger than life figure, pioneering the pirating of singles and albums as cutouts while refusing to pay artists and songwriters the royalties they earned. (James summerized Levy’s approach this way: “Morris Levy sold music by the pound.”)
James had an inevitably complex relationship with Levy – after all, he was a teenager when the notorious businessman gave him his first national break. The book chronicles how James came to understand Levy’s personality and the machinations of Roulette, one unsavory confrontation at a time. In the interview, James veered into a teensy bit of Sopranos-speak, but more often used a grave, impatient tone to conjure Levy holding court. It was more than great Q&A entertainment: For a few minutes there, what you heard was the sound of a dark, little-glimpsed sliver of the music business coming to life.
]]>The superlatives attach like burrs to Brad Mehldau, and they grow heavier with each record. The pianist is the last best hope of jazz. A smart, nimble-fingered visionary. A provocative composer who is developing rapidly.
This is no accident. Mehldau has been willing to try stuff, and explore, in bolder strokes and on larger canvases than most of his peers. Though he’s released a bunch of records – some would say too many featuring his trio – he has been careful to vary his endeavors, alternating between live documents and ambitious works like the current 2-disc Highway Rider, a project for quartet and studio orchestra that reunites him with Jon Brion, the wizard who produced Mehldau’s landmark Largo.
That’s just smart career planning. There’s also something more fundamentally musical at work: Unlike Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus and others currently in the jazz spotlight, Mehldau is not allergic to pretty melodies or moments of sublime-bordering-on-blissed-out consonance. Born in 1970, Mehldau has famously covered tunes written by the Beatles, British folk avatar Nick Drake and the rock trailblazers Radiohead. The Bad Plus works similar turf, but Mehldau’s treatments arrive fully baked: Everything he does springs from evident reverence for the melodies – rather than impose his own logic, his flights embrace and reflect the logic of the tune.
Hearing Mehldau’s recent compositions, there’s the sense that he’s “gone to school” on the pop song. He’s internalized the compact structures of pop, absorbed the melodic graces and harmonic cadences, assimilated the schemes of tension and release. The work’s sparkling moments, like the wistful “Come With Me” and the Elliott Smith homage “Sky Turning Grey,” show that Mehldau has integrated this stuff with the rest of his already formidible vocabulary: Lilting, Badfinger-esque piano reveries morph into superfast bebop chase scenes, then broken chords suggesting waterlily impressionism, then assymetrical knots of complex, defiantly tangled dissonance.
Crucially, none of these moments feel like tricks, or contrivances. Like a thoughtful singer-songwriter who worries that production tricks may overtake his message, Mehldau gravitates toward what the piece needs, not what he as an improvisor needs to “prove” within the piece. This humility helps make his solos deeply moving, and remarkably accessible: Where some jazz players use abstraction as a kind of sheild, Mehldau is not afraid to let a simple declarative melody ring, to follow an impossibly sweet line to its endpoint, to share something of his spirit as he navigates the open road.
Partly my tardiness is intentional: I’ve been thinking about how to make this little intermittant blog useful for those who wish to explore music, and one recurring question has to do with how much homage should be in the mix. The automatic media reflex is to stop and appreciate the work of the deceased, and lots of times I’ve been part of that choir. But right after the great Vic Chesnutt died this winter, as I was gearing up to write about his wonderously trenchant, bracingly blunt songs, I stopped short. Since the mission of 1000 Recordings is to celebrate greatness, it seemed of limited value to restate what should be obvious, what scores of people had said, what was essentially in the entry for Is The Actor Happy?
Besides, words only take you so far. I feel the same futility with Alex Chilton: If you don’t get his songs, these wonderfully compact structures that seize and exhaust an idea in the time it takes some songwriters to clear their throats, no pretty adjectives piled high are going to help you. Even the Replacements deleriously giddy “Alex Chilton” – which, with the terse “I’m in love, what’s that song?/I’m in love with that song,” immortalizes the circuitry of pop obsession – might not do it. And it's one of the all-time best tribute songs.
To gauge Chilton, the quintessential underloved pop auteur, drop into a few places in his discography. Start where he started, in a band called the Box Tops, singing a stone-cold classic ‘60s radio song, “The Letter,” that entertained millions. Seek out the strikingly different albums by Big Star, which find him progressing through various tones and colors in pursuit of a singular pop/rock bliss. Spend some time with any of the jangle bands of the ‘80s – notably R.E.M. – and you will hear Chilton’s influence, echoing around the brambles and the barbed wire. Maybe that’s all the tribute necessary: Alex Chilton never sold skadillions after that first hit, but his ideas about melody and catharsis, and his knack for infusing simple songs with deeper meaning, wound up hitting just about everybody.
Somewhere in the middle of Michael Harrison’s solo performance of Revelation Saturday night at Denver’s Newman Center for the Performing Arts, a perfectly rounded French horn melody rose up from the belly of the piano and hovered lazily in the air, calmly defying piano-ness. A little later, after Harrison dug into a sustained chord in the lower register, a men’s choir appeared. Then a lone male voice, singing long tones.
These were sonic apparitions, coaxed from the shadows by a musician who has spent years pursuing new ways to make the piano resonate. What Harrison has found is nothing short of spectacular – at times it felt as though the instrument was literally singing, happily shaking off centuries of tempered-scale tyranny.
Harrison’s tuning, a system based on whole numbers (here’s a lucid explanation), transforms not just the scale and the relationship between notes, but the harmonic overtones as well – the instrument speaks in a completely different way. Some open chords yeild beautifully consonant swirls of sound, while clustered chords can suggest the terrifying dissonances of a car wreck in slow motion. Repetitive drones in a single “mode” quickly become hypnotic; starting modestly, they blossom into rich overlapping layers of transcendence-seeking chants.
Harrison’s performance was the centerpiece of a weekend of inspired and strikingly accessible contemporary classical music. For me, it was also a lesson in recorded versus live experience: I’d been dazzled by the 2007 recording of Revelation (it’s mentioned in the back of 1000 Recordings as one of the 108 to know more about), but didn’t – couldn’t – fully appreciate its power or its nuanced range of expression until Saturday’s performance, in the intimate and acoustically rich Gates concert hall.
(Full disclosure: I was there as a moderator, introducing the pieces and offering background on the artists, most of whom have recorded for New York-based Cantelope Records.)
Festivals like Mile High Voltage offer opportunities to witness spontaneous creativity – exchanges between artists that usually can’t happen on the concert-touring circuit. Among the highlights were three distinctly different trips through Terry Riley’s landmark In C with an ensemble featuring most of the festival headliners including So Percussion and the Denver-based collective known as The Playground. The constellation of talents, assembled by curator Peter Robles and led by Bang on a Can’s Evan Ziporyn, turned out to be ideally suited to the piece – each version, including a lunchtime concert at a bank building downtown, had a different “soul.”
The festival premiered a short chamber work by steel pan player Andy Akiho, "NO on To kNOW one," which alternated between frenetic polyrhythms and moments of eerie placid calm.
Ziporyn played a spirited solo set Friday, and then was joined by Harrison for two positively riveting duets in pure intonation. Initial expectations were low, because the two had never played together and, more significantly, the tuning system is so intricate. After a moment or two of furtive, cautious moves, the pair began exploring with purpose, and discovered a series of vivid landscapes – some anchored by a vast drone, others built around spooky post-jazz chord sequences well suited to improvisation. The brief set was easily the festival’s most inspired “happening,” one of those chance encounters that you just know will develop into a full-scale project one day.
Before “Celebrate,” These Guys Really Jammed
WILD AND PEACEFUL
Kool and the Gang
When the producers of the TV sitcom Everybody Hates Chris, based on comedian Chris Rock’s adolescence, wanted music to accompany a scene of Halloween bedlam breaking out at school, they turned to Kool and the Gang’s 1973 hit “Jungle Boogie.” It was an inspired choice: The rubbery bassline and taunting, wild-animal horns form a brazen and choatic sound-picture.
“Jungle Boogie” is one in a string of thumping, totally infectious Kool and the Gang gems that arrived years before soft nothings like “Joanna” and the tepid wedding-reception wiggle “Celebrate” made the Jersey City collective into a commercial juggernaut. Like the brass-rock band Chicago, Kool and the Gang started out making credible music: Its early albums were built on uptight R&B rhythms reminsecent of the great James Brown bands, and its live show, documented on a thrilling concert album from 1970, Live at the Sex Machine, regularly attained supercharged heights.
Wild And Peaceful is both a roaring party (the Wild side 1 on the original vinyl) and a more reflective, unselfconsciously sophisticated inquiry (the Peaceful side). The several songs that became hits – “Jungle Boogie,” the similarly feral “Hollywood Swinging” – have energy to burn and melody to spare. But in truth everything Kool did around this time is informed by a sense of invention, and a polished execution later picked up by Earth, Wind and Fire. Spin this to be reminded that sometimes big hits are the worst thing to happen to a group.
Released: De-Lite/Polygram, 1973.
Key Tracks: “Wild And Peaceful,” “Jungle Boogie,” “Hollywood Swinging.”
Catalog Choice: Live at the Sex Machine.
Next Stop: The Ohio Players: Fire.
After That: Rufus: Ask Rufus.
During “list season” at the end of 2009, I participated in the Village Voice jazz critic's poll. I’d avoided the poll for the last two years, in part because of a busy schedule (these things do take time) and in part because there wasn’t a tremendous amount to say where jazz records were concerned.
That wasn’t the case this year: Improvised music is experiencing a creative resurgence that even its most ardent supporters could not have predicted. At precisely the moment Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal chose to ponder the declining health and/or “death” of jazz, a cadre of bold individual thinkers waltzed in, with music of such spirit and drive it all but mocks the journalistic hand-wringing. If jazz is even close to dead, we need to ask those obit-writers (and I’ve been one over the years) to please explain the audacious sparks running through pianist Vijay Iyer’s Historicity, the Voice poll winner.
Suddenly, there are recordings featuring stunning and cohesive trios doing intricate – but, crucially, not overly brainy – original music. Big bands are happening, and those arranging for them wring out wild colors from unlikely combinations of instruments. New and occasionally daring singers are emerging, and their work amounts to more than another light dusting of the Great American Songbook; several, including Magos Herrera, wrote beautiful, achingly lyrical tunes that deserve to be played again and again, in many contexts.
There are probably tons of explanations for this activity, which has been erratic and diffuse and easy to miss unless you regularly prowl the jazz corner of blogland. There is, though, one striking point of commonality: Very few jazz records of consequence from 2009 were brought to you by the major labels. While it’s true that imprints attached to major labels (Blue Note, Nonesuch) continue to document jazz, this year most of the new thinking came from smaller, independent operations, places that don’t need to sell skadillions to remain in business. Places where considerations of art – like, say, a tune that stretches out for more than five minutes – can sometimes trump those of marketing.
Think about that for a minute: The creative burst in jazz happened just a few years after the executives at the majors concluded there aren’t compelling business reasons to pay attention to it.
Following this logic, here’s a modest proposal: To begin to lift hiphop out of its current creative torpor – that dull place where so-called superstars spew routinized nonsense about their alleged greatness (see Kanye West, 50 Cent, et. al.) – maybe it’s time to wrest control of it from the big labels. Bring it back to a more human scale. Return the emphasis to developing voices, not gaming the marketplace to pump up the quarterly numbers. Majors out of hiphop now! It’s worth a try, because, sadly, there isn’t all that much to lose.
Sure, the music industry remains mired in a digital-rights quicksand, but that doesn't mean recording artists have to be: Breezing past those problems, they're developing inspiring works that speak to what it means to be alive right now on our fragile planet, what it means to be a sensitive soul confronting a sea of indifference, what it means to dream. This year there were way more than ten records that got me thinking. These are the ones I returned to again and again.
Mulato Astatke and Heliocentrics: Inspiration Information Vol. 3 (Strut). This collaboration between Ethiopian keyboardist/vibraphonist/bandleader Mulatu Astatke and the British collective Heliocentrics looms as the year's most inspiring left-field surprise. Even those who know Astatke—whose jazz/funk band of the '60s is well documented on the Ethopiques series, and whose music dominates the soundtrack of Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers—will be amazed by the bouyant music here. As he's done forever, Astatke basically spices up folk song melodies with jazz-influenced Western harmonies, and his creations spur the members of Heliocentrics toward grooves that suggest the exuberant gospel joy of Charles Mingus' Workshop one minute and trance-inducing acid house the next.
Blk Jks: After Robots (Secretly Canadian). Fearless prediction (or wild hope): 2010 is the year alternative rock shakes off its Vampire Weekend delusions, and realizes that the real thing—in the form of an inspired, wickedly accomplished rock band from South Africa—can be so much more relevatory. After Robots, the jaw-droppingly great full-length debut of Blk Jks, should speed this conversion along. Its mystical invocations and thoughts on the de-humanizing effects of technology are propelled forward by spinning, tumbling grooves and frightful splashes of guitar dissonance, the likes of which we haven't heard since King Crimson
Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca (Domino). There's lots going on in here—though the ear might first be enchanted by songwriter Dave Longstreth's off-kilter hookcraft, eventually the more agitated instrumental schemes come rattling along to claim some spotlight. Thing is, the clutter factor is high—at times the juxtapositions sound willfully random, the audio equivalent of an overstuffed antiques emporium. Often what's truly interesting about the songs isn't the primary vocal but the two or three contrasting lines that crisscross it, and that's perhaps why this demanding set has been hailed as visionary and derided as unlistenable.
Magos Herrera: Distancia (Sunnyside). Mexican singer Magos Herrera could easily have devoted this record to nothing but interpretations of classic Brazilian and Latin-jazz tunes. Her readings of "Vera Cruz" and "Inutil Paisaje," two songs immortalized by Elis Regina, show not just consummate poise but a deep understanding of tradition and, crucially, a sneaky sense of invention. Tucked alongside those works are another reason to pay attention to Herrera: Her inviting, super-melodic originals. These describe longing for the archetypical faraway lover in poetic, sometimes astoundingly beautiful terms, and that's exactly how she sings them.
Norah Jones: The Fall (Blue Note). It's a quintessential breakup record, laced with forlorn "come back" cries and refrains that chronicle long nights waiting for the reprobate lover to return home. Happily, though, it's not entirely a croony affair: Jones and producer Jacquire King draw on sounds from the modern hitmaker's toolkit (deep subsonic bass, retro electronic keyboards, haywire electric guitars) yet miraculously retain the intimacy of her previous works. This turns out to be an incredibly effective platform, especially for songs that can seem initially slight. Listen long enough and you realize that the texture (and, occasionally, the busted-apart tone) of Jones' voice sits at the core of these miniature torch dramas, which each illuminate distinct stages in a painful unraveling.
Mastodon: Crack The Skye (Reprise). The only trouble with this, the fourth studio effort from the super-inventive Atlanta four-piece, is that from a distance, it just sounds like run-of-the-mill heavy metal. Dig past the usual elements—the fearsome stack of jacked-up serrated-saw guitars, the thudding bass-drum-driven beats—and you discover intricate prog-rock polyrhythms, chopped up into fine weaponlike slivers and then scattered in all directions. You also discover accounts of a out-of-body experience, thoughts on Russian czars and assorted cosmic notions, these delivered by frontman Troy Sanders with none of the doomy braying that has become metal's most unfortunate cliche.
Maxwell: BLACKSummersNight (Columbia). In this New York Times interview to help launch his first record in 8 years, R&B singer Maxwell declares that he's bored with the pop blueprint—tunes that hinge on a simple theme and an endlessly repeating hook phrase. His solution? He starts with less obvious, sometimes threadbare melodies, and then sets out to alter and embellish them as the tune unfolds. That single shift gives these elaborate productions a pronounced sense of adventure—we follow Maxwell through twisting ad-libbed detours as he searches for genuinely new ways to express devotion, awe, etc. He doesn't find new ways every time, but the search is thrilling all the same.
Mos Def: The Ecstatic (Downtown Music). How bad off is hiphop right now? To my ears, it's almost barren creatively, stuck in such a rut that any reasonably solid offering—like this totally competant, occasionally brilliant set from actor/MC Mos Def—gets hailed as some type of "major statement." The Ecstatic is not that. But it is among a meagre handful of 2009 hiphop records to link exceedingly smart rhyme-saying jujitsu ("Darwin, darlin'") with rhythms that are far more intricate than the typical boom-bap.
Phoenix: Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Glass Note). The French electro-pop veterans finally deliver the record that some champions have been awaiting forever—a dizzy confection filled with not just one or two catchy lusty pop songs, but a whole delerious album of them. Even when making wacky lunges into faraway realms ("Lisztomania"), Phoenix manage to remain true to the ideal of pop as uplift. Which, these days, is no small thing.
St Vincent: Actor (4AD). This began as just another laptop record. Annie Clark says she turned to programs like Garage Band to break out of old songwriting patterns. Pointing and clicking, she found weird assymetrical melodies, and in the process discovered a taste for unusual combinations of instruments. Her often unsettling songs, which she finished in an old-fashioned recording studio, feature odd constellations of clarinets and violins as well as truly ear-stretching vocal harmonies.
Neko Case: Middle Cyclone; Vic Chesnutt: At the Cut; Bill Frisell: Disfarmer; Rosanne Cash: The List; Monsters of Folk: Monsters of Folk; Keith Jarrett: Testament Paris/London.
Of course not all of the significant developments in music were new releases. There were also great ambitious catalog endeavors. Among them: The remastered Beatles album catalog (tremendous!); Ella Fitzgerald's previously unreleased Twelve Nights in Hollywood from 1961 and 62; the complete Miles Davis catalog on Columbia, a monster set bundled with a terrific live DVD from 1967; Keep an Eye on the Sky, a box collecting the output of the influential and criminally overlooked Memphis pop band Big Star.
Given how much music has floated past (and through) the average person’s ears, and the relentless torrent of releases from labels big and small, it is probably impossible to arrive at anything near “definitive” in such endeavors. Still, we try. Below, some random thoughts on the decade. (I’ll post a ten gems of 2009 in the next week or so.)
Songs We Heard Endlessly and Are Still Somehow Thrilled By
“Crazy”: Gnarls Barkley
“Toxic”: Britney Spears
“Get Ur Freak On”: Missy Elliott
“Rehab”: Amy Winehouse
“Bootilicious”: Destiny’s Child
Artists Whose Contributions This Decade Will Loom Larger Over Time
Norah Jones, The National, J Dilla, Sigur Ros
Artists Who Are Ubiquitous Now But May Not Be Forever
Kanye West, The Black Eyed Peas
Albums That Deserved Wider Attention (And Will Someday Be Seen as Influential)
Juana Molina: Segundo; Vijay Iyer: Reimagining; Jason Moran: The Bandwagon; Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts; Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago.
Albums That’ll Be Studied In Record-Making Schools For Years To Come
Radiohead: Kid A; Outkast: Stankonia; Beck: Midnite Vultures, Sea Change; The Arcade Fire: Neon Bible; Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot; Coldplay: A Rush of Blood To The Head.
Genre Most in Need of Life Support, Based on This Decade’s Releases
Hip-hop.
Genre Poised For Creative Resurgence, Based on This Decade’s Releases
Jazz.
Most Interestingly Varied Discography of the Decade (includes collaborations, etc.)
Bela Fleck
Most Interesting Collaboration (A crowded field that includes Jack White and Loretta Lynn, etc…)
Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate: In the Heart of the Moon
Most Inventive Launch Campaign
U2: “Vertigo” (Apple)
Most Dismaying Launch Campaign
U2: No Line on the Horizon (Blackberry)
]]>For a while there, at least as long as it took to promote the two respectible albums that followed her monster debut Come Away With Me, it looked like Norah Jones was set for life. She could ride that chanteuse thing forever. She could reel off those luminous, self-pitying torch ballads one after another. She’d established a brand, and like all saavy brand managers, she seemed to know her wheelhouse and exactly how far to stray from it.
Until now.
This week, Jones ditches the cozy cocoon of the torchy cabaret and sets off on a repositioning mission, placing herself somewhere in the vicinity of the present. The scantily-clad shrill-diva present. The ProTools present. The Beyonce/Kanye present. For her fourth effort The Fall, the singer and songwriter wrote and gathered material that is similar in spirit and aspiration (and backbeat!) to the endeavors of our most lavishly overproduced pop stars. The media will seize upon the “risk” involved in this – after all, the Old Coot Society has plenty of members who love Jones just the way she was. And besides, the diva field is a tad overcrowded.
It could be argued that staying put is the best career move for Norah Jones. But apparently with her, the impulse isn’t about dollars or market share – it’s curiosity. As her previous works (including the lively Little Willies side product) show, she’s a seeker, a singer and musician with a restless streak and the confidence to test her spectacularly expressive multi-hued voice in new surroundings. Though some of her longtime accomplices (Jesse Harris) are on board, The Fall is a profoundly new thing – she’s collaborating with a super-successful rock producer (Jacquire King, of the recent Kings of Leon) and a band full of R&B hotshots, on songs that strive to slip some subtlety and dimension into the mostly prefab pop present. That’s an admirable crusade, because it’s not at all clear whether a woman well versed in the Advanced Calculus of Gershwin melodies and the coy come-on (a la Blossom Dearie’s immortal “Lover, peel me a grape”) can connect with an audience for whom “Text me ASAP” qualifies as a profound lyric.
It’s a split-level trick Jones runs here: The tunes on The Fall are more rhythmically assertive, and in terms of production, more contemporary, than anything she’s done before. But her vocal phrasing – that wistful behind-the-beat approach she picked up from the jazz greats – is the same as it ever was. The contrast, it turns out, is sublime and delicious. If you’re tired of divas filling every second of every track with outsized exortations, check Norah Jones here, as she rolls through sweet nothings suffused with yearning and doubt and those deep-in-the-gut tones people emit, involuntarily, when they’ve been wounded by love. This is singing on a human scale.
That duality – the cool chop of modern production providing a foundation for the glowy warmth of Jones’ voice – pretty much defines The Fall, from the slinking opener (“Chasing Pirates”) through a glance toward Fleetwood Mac (“Young Blood”) and a ripe old Texas downer (“Stuck”). The tunes themselves are sturdy, sometimes slight-seeming and a bit unexceptional. Then Jones starts slithering around, singing in that casual, forever-hurt way, and suddenly, unexpectedly, they blossom into something profound. It’s not the words, or the tunes. It’s Jones – and that ache she brushes over the lines, the graceful turns and little twinges that transform ordinary lyrics into expressions of disarming depth.
Richard Thompson, the British singer/songwriter, has mastered this particular gauntlet – his latest songs sometimes follow roadmaps he’s used before, yet wind up in surprising, wholly new, places. He uses the traits we’d identify as his “signatures” – the skeptical voice, the wry observations, the predatory bite of his rhythm guitar – to lure listeners into whatever he’s thinking about right now.
Some truly great artists find themselves trapped by their signature traits. The singer and songwriter Rickie Lee Jones, whose Pirates (1000 Recordings, pg. 410) is a marvel of storytelling, has struggled with this occasionally over a 30-plus-year career: Her voice and demeanor as a singer is so distinctive, every new song can, from a distance anyway, resemble one of her classics. To combat this, she’s changed up lots about her sound and her process. She’s experimented with loops and different instrumentation and spoken wordish poetry, sometimes creating thick and almost disturbing atmospheres (Ghostyhead), sometimes winding up in a faux-boho tableaux that’s a tad too familiar (parts of The Sermon on Exposition Blvd.).
Jones has a new album, Balm in Gilead, in which she “finishes” songs she worked up and then left on the shelf at various times over the years. It begins with a track called “Wild Girl” that’s upbeat and plenty endearing – and to all but her diehards will likely register as just another Rickie Lee Jones tune. But further in, after a few vignettes and a charming softshoe written by her father called “The Moon Is Made of Gold,” Jones slips listeners into a luminous, jaw-droppingly gorgeous six-minute sanctuary.
“His Jeweled Floor” begins in the mists, with groaning sounds. When Jones enters, she could be in church, or warming up for church. There isn’t really a tempo, but Jones implies one -- moving with the measured, steady cadence of a devotional singer, leaning into the chord changes like she just knows the next one brings everlasting salvation. Her warm, been-around lead voice is one of many – also in the multitracked choir is Vic Chesnut and Victoria Williams – and as the song unfolds, the layered voices swell up into a massive cry, and then spread out, scattering little ad-libbed asides deep inside the tangled vocal architecture. The tune ends in the same epic drone as it began, and as it does, you realize this music is totally unlike anything she’s done before. And then the words, which have cycled through a few times, really begin to resonate. “On his Jeweled Floor,” she sings in that wonderfully weary voice, “I am standing now, Can you see me as I am?”
I’ve had lots of questions about this one, and I guess I should start by saying I really like Oasis and regard Noel Gallagher one of the most talented songwriters to emerge in the last 20 years. I considered Morning Glory not because of the commercial success cited above (my mission was to offer portals into as many different worlds as possible, regardless of popularity) or the “pandemonium,” but because of the songs – marvels built on classic pop form and graced with extra-large, almost majestic melodies.
Like many critics, I enthused about Morning Glory when it was released. So, when building the preliminary lists for the book, I had it pegged as a no-brainer. It had to be there. Then I went back and listened again, after not really paying attention to “Wonderwall” or the other songs in some years. I was astonished to find that just about every song was totally absorbing for a few verses and the initial chorus, and then sorta hit a wall, becoming suddenly and unexpectedly dreary. What kind of cough syrup were we all downing in 1995 to stay with these tunes as they plodded dutifully along? How can a tune as structurally sound as “Don’t Look Back in Anger” resonate so powerfully, and then wear out its welcome so quickly?
Check it out for yourself. Cue up a few songs from Morning Glory and follow them closely. You may find that the luster fades long before the song does. For me, this became a big concern, enough to make me rethink the album’s inclusion. (Just because I’m curious, I spotchecked a few later Oasis records and encountered the same thing, though it was most pronounced on Morning Glory.) It could just be that the songs last a minute or so too long. And it could be something about the songs themselves – when you start paying attention to this, you discover that lots of esteemed hits grow tiresome in this way.
Today’s example: To really hear time stand still, check out Madonna’s “Holiday.” It starts out promising a great exotic escape, and a few minutes later, you’re deep in the drudgery of the slow line at the dry cleaners.