Music Notes
By 
The musical highlight for me this week was seeing Artemis at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston. It broke a 2 month long show drought, which is way too long without live music for me. But December and January tend to be tough months, both because of the holidays and because the weather can be so bad in New England (not this year!) that artists understandably might choose to start their year in the South. As for Artemis, it is a long overdue female jazz supergroup. It formed in 2017 under the leadership of the pianist Renee Rosnes and at the time included both the great vocalist Cecile McLorin Savant, the clarinetist Anat Cohen, and the saxophonist Melissa Aldana, who all appeared on the group’s first album.
As supergroups go, Savant, Cohen, and Aldana have all moved on. But their replacements are great as is the rest of the band. For me, the great highlight is the drummer Alison Miller, who was just killer to see live. She can do almost anything, from pretty avant-garde work to amazing brush work on ballads and she got to do it all that night. Amazing to watch. Meanwhile, Ingrid Jensen on sax, Noriko Ueda on bass, and Rosnes are still with the group. They’ve also added the saxophonist Nicole Glover and the sax and woodwind master Alexa Tarantino to the group. A few of them are Berklee grads too and so it was a big party homecoming for them. They did everything from amazing originals to covers of Wayne Shorter ballads. Generally, they stay pretty firmly within the post-bop world of modern jazz but, again, can shift to play any number of styles.
It’s also worth noting just how damn sexist jazz was in its first half-century. Outside of vocalists, hardly any women got to play first rate work. That began to change in the late 60s with Alice Coltrane and Carla Bley (who is still with us by the way), but in both cases, one can sadly say that they wouldn’t have had those opportunities without their husbands. They weren’t the only ones of course–people such as Pauline Oliveros were also doing groundbreaking work. But it’s still been a long road, with people such as the Parkins sisters, Ikue Mori, and Susie Ibarra having to go through a lot to be heard. Today, things are much better on this front, but there’s still a lot of all-male groups out there. So to say that a female supergroup is beyond necessary is a huge understatement. And they are very much worth your money to see live.
Plenty of people have said plenty about Burt Bacharach and I don’t think I really have too much to add. So let me just say this–the man was an absolute master of pop music, yes, because he composed so many of the core hits of the second half of the twentieth century but also because there was that weird melancholy twist to his material that makes it simply different from the standard pop of any era. His work simply transcended anything produced before in its own unique way. Great artist. Huge loss.
On Jason Moran’s new project, which I will be seeing live very soon.
This is a cool story. Soul magazine is being restarted by the grandson of some of the people who founded it back in the 60s. It last published in 1982 and the need for specifically Black music publications is obvious. This could fill a big hole if it succeeds.
The Times has been running this real fun series about how to get into some jazz artist in 5 minutes. They’ve switched it up and asked a bunch of respected jazz people to recommend 5 minutes for someone who is active today. I was glad to see Sonny Rollins’ response because it suggests that even though he can’t play anymore, he can still go hear people. So hopefully his health is strong. Generally though, this was great and introduced me to a bunch of people I don’t know.
Fun story about Willie Nelson’s lifelong love of football, including how former University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal was one of his best friends in the 1960s and 1970s.
In a far more depressing note, the long-time Springsteen fan website Backstreets is shutting down over disgust that Bruce doesn’t care about the Ticketmaster disaster. When they said something to him about it, he basically said, yep, I only care about the money now. So they are out. A disappointing late life turn. How much money does Bruce need? I’m not going to attack any artist for making money, but when your whole life has been Bard of the Working Man and then you just end your career by a late-era Stones level of cynicism, well, that’s sad.
Who will win tomorrow, Christian McBride’s Eagles or Bobby Watson’s Chiefs? The jazz world is divided!
This week’s playlist. Good variety I think:
- Terry Allen, Lubbock (On Everything)
- Sun Ra, Purple Night
- Richard Buckner, Dents and Shells
- Joe Ely, self-titled
- Mount Moriah, How to Dance
- Flatt & Scruggs, The Story of Bonnie & Clyde
- Neil Young, Harvest
- Grey DeLisle, The Graceful Ghost
- Peter Rowan, The Walls of Time
- Gillian Welch, The Harrow and the Harvest
- Empress Of, Me
- Serge Gainsbourg, Histoire de Melody Nelson
- Willie Nelson, Red Headed Stranger
- Richard Thompson, Mirror Blue
- Drive By Truckers, Decoration Day
- Old 97s, Satellite Rides
- Natalie Hemby, Puxico
- Priests, The Seduction of Kansas
- Richard & Linda Thompson, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight
- Peter Gabriel, Security
- Solange, When I Get Home
- Smog, Dongs of Sevotion
- The Stooges, Raw Power
- Jane Weaver, Modern Kosmology
- Jason Isbell, Southeastern
- Wussy, What Heaven is Like
- Juliana Hatfield, Pussycat
- William Parker, Painters Winter
- Wayne Horvitz, Whispers, Hymns, and a Murmur
- Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come
- U.S. Girls, In a Poem Unlimited
- Bukka White, Mississippi Blues
- Mitski, Laurel Hell
- Traffic, John Barleycorn Must Die
- Bruce Cockburn, High Winds White Sky
- Snakefarm, Songs from My Funeral
- William Parker / Hamid Drake / Rob Brown / Lewis Barnes, Petit Oiseau
- Indigo de Souza, Any Shape You Take
- Margaret Glaspy, Emotions and Math
Album Reviews:
FKA Twigs, Magadelene
Old man finally gets around to hearing important 2019 album from huge star. I don’t know that this completely changed my life like it seems to have so many people. Seen by many as the album of the year in 2019–the AV Club among them–one expects the moon. But if maybe the moon isn’t quite reached here, at least it’s an early space mission that circles the globe a few times and gets a lot of rightful attention for it.
A-
A Far Cry/Shara Nova, The Blue Hour
Interesting group project in the modern classical world. Five composers–Rachel Grimes, Angelica Negron, Shara Nova, Caroline Shaw, and Sarah Kirkland Snider–all came together to work up a series of compositions about the space between life and death based on the poetry of Carolyn Forche. It works well enough, though I don’t think it is brilliant, largely because it is really not that easy to tell what each composer brings to the table here. But to have an all-female group of composers collaborating to make music together, I mean, like the Artemis discussion above, there is massive value in that.
B
Black Lives: From Generation to Generation
This is great if you think of it as a mixtape of Black political music and not something that really is that cohesive. Twenty-five musicians from, mostly from the U.S., but some from the Caribbean and Africa, all composed a song about Black Lives Matter and related issues for a compilation album around the theme. Politically it’s great. Musically, it’s good. Interestingly, not that many of these musicians are huge names, with Oliver Lake probably the most famous in my world. Huge range of styles here too. Again, even if it doesn’t all cohere, it still works great as a mixtape and as for the politics, you aren’t going to be disappointed there.
B+
Wilco, Cruel Country
Yawwwwwnnnnnnnn……….
Wilco decides to become the Americana band everyone always thought they were and what they deliver is 21 freaking songs that roll in at 75 minutes that are almost all slow acoustic songs where Jeff Tweedy continues to sing as if he doesn’t actually care very much. It’s not terrible, but it’s not good either. The Wilco problem is also the Ryan Adams problem (well, not THAT Ryan Adams problem; by all accounts, Tweedy is a real good guy who canvasses his neighborhood for Democratic candidates, whereas Adams is a scumbag) and the Son Volt problem and the Alt-Country problem of that whole scene–the diffident, too cool for school singing that is like taking every stereotype about Gen X disengagement and irony and turning it into a musical movement that simply has never impressed me much. This doesn’t help change my position.
C+
Arooj Aftab, Vulture Prince
This is cool. Aftab is a Pakistani composer and singer who uses the music of her home country, as well as jazz and various forms of folk music to create a pretty unusual group of songs. She lives in Brooklyn but is deeply motivated and moved by the difficult circumstances of her home. She was initially working more in the soundscape world, but really changed things up for this album for a more lively affair. Aftab has a great voice and the use of Pakistani instruments in concert with traditional jazz and European classical instruments is simply a different sound than you’d usually hear. Moreover, her home music really is more in Pakistani traditions than jazz, which means that she isn’t creating some sort of Pakistani-tinged jazz. She’s creating jazz tinged Pakistani music. At the very least, worth your time. I’ll probably buy it.
A-
Rodney Crowell, Texas
This isn’t quite first-rate Crowell, but it works well enough by and large. Feeling a bit nostalgic perhaps or just wanting to hang with his friends, he decided to make a mostly duet album about various Texas stories. Like any collaborative album like this, the results vary somewhat. The best songs are very good. “56 Fury” with Billy Gibbons is serious rock and roll and a great combination. They should play together more often. Less successful is “Deep in the Heart of Uncertain Texas,” plagued by Ronnie Dunn. But the songs are mostly solid and most of the collaborations work well enough. Fun at the very least. Plus Rodney Crowell has reached National Treasure stage and should be promoted to all.
B+
Mehmet Ali Sanlikol & What’s Next featuring Dave Liebman, The Rise Up: Stories of Strife, Struggle and Inspiration
I really didn’t intend to listen to a bunch of politically inspired lengthy albums this week. Just happened that way. Like the Aftab album discussed above, Sanlikol set out to deal with political themes in new ways combining his traditional music with jazz. In this case, the Turkish pianist created a big band atmosphere to explore three incidents in Islamic history in a positive light as a way to counter anti-Muslim hysteria. I don’t know that you can really quite succeed in such a goal without many words in a jazz album, but taking the project for what it is, it works well. The first story revolves around the Sufi poet Mevlana Celaleddin-i Rumi. The second is about how the Ottomans welcomed the Jews kicked out of Spain, and the third is about Mimar Sinan, a 16th century Orthodox Christian taken by the Ottomans who not only embraced Islam but became a master Islamic architect. So that’s all cool. And I love the big band sounds here. They are hard to make work because of the economics, but the sound is amazing when done right and this is done right. The influences are quite clearly from Sketches of Spain, which Liebman pushed in part of his collaboration here. The combination of Middle Eastern harmonies with big band jazz is just great. More of this please.
A-
Lana del Rey, Chemtrails over the Country Club
I liked this a hell of a lot better than I thought I would. I’ve been left pretty cold by del Rey in the past, but I don’t know if it was the mood I was in here or what, but I found the arrangements far from overcooked and the lyrics actually pretty good. I like the album title too, though that’s neither here nor there. I think the reason I liked this is that it is less overcooked than her previous work. Fewer producers, less loud production, more clear lyrics and instrumentation. It’s also clearly influenced by people such as Dolly Parton, which doesn’t hurt. Unlike most pop music, it’s an intentionally American album, in the sense of exploring the contradictions of this ridiculous nation. And of course I love things like that. So yeah, this was actually pretty good for me.
B+
Art Ensemble of Chicago, The Sixth Decade: From Paris to Paris
Like a lot of jazz releases, only selected tracks are available streaming here, so this is a limited review.
But limited as it may be, if this represents the album as a whole, oh my god. At this point, the Art Ensemble of Chicago is Roscoe Mitchell, Famoudou Don Moye, and whoever they want to play with. For this brand new album, it’s a huge band that includes, among others, Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid, and about 15 other musicians.
“New Coming” is one of the best tunes in any genre I’ve heard in a long time. The available songs move from noise fests to more limited dissonance. The poetry works incredibly well as a way to anchor the performances. This reminds me how much I like spoken word with jazz compared to jazz vocals. The power of a poem spoken grounds things instead of taking them into flighty land. This is obviously simply an aesthetic preference on my part, but it’s mine and I’ll hold onto it. And when that poetry is by Moor Mother, hello! This is an expectedly politicized, Black nationalist performance.
The one question here is the cost. On Bandcamp, the lowest price for it is 25 Euros. And that’s a lot. Now, I think the idea of the $10 download is a bit dated. Inflation goes up, so should album prices. I’m not really complaining about the price of albums here–$10 is pretty low for a good piece of music. So maybe $25 isn’t really that much? But it is unusual for the present. In any case, I’ll probably buy it soon no matter the cost. Moreover, when you consider how much these musicians need the money and how many people are getting a cut of this, 25 Euros seems quite reasonable.
Nothing from this is available on YouTube, so here’s an Art Ensemble live show in Berlin from 1991 to get you all excited.
A
Royal Blood, Typhoons
Do you like your rock and roll super cheesy and filled with electro pop cliches? If you do, I have the album for you! Blech. There’s nothing wrong with combining rock and dance music–hardly anything new there. I just prefer it remotely good.
C-
As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics.