Music Notes
By 
I saw two shows this week, both before the election, so I could actually enjoy them. The first was Allen Lowe and the Constant Sorrow Orchestra, at Firehouse 12 in New Haven. I had never seen Lowe before, a saxophonist who has played with approximately everyone in the last fifty years and has his fans but never quite hit the big time, or at least as big time as jazz gets these days. He has a super neat project, called Louis Armstrong’s America, which is a gigantic set of songs (69!!!!!) that each represent a particular theme in his life or something that was going on while he was active in music. It’s not a cover project. Lowe talked about this and said he had all respect for anyone who wanted to cover Armstrong as a tribute but he thought it would be more interesting and fulfilling to think about his larger impact on music and the world around him, as well as its impact on him. He got together a lot of musicians for these various recordings. There was a much smaller band for this show: Lowe on tenor sax, Frank Lacy on french horn/trumpet/trombone, Elijah Shiffer on alto sax, Lewis Porter on piano, Will Goble on bass, and sadly I did not catch the name of the drummer. These were cool compositions because they really did start with a musical theme of the moment where the story is set and then they go off in different directions that remain pretty accessible while extremely interesting. Frank Lacy was especially fun to see; you don’t get a lot of French horn in jazz these days. Or maybe any days. Anyway, I need to hear more of this, but it was a good set.
Then I went full Gen X and saw the Juliana Hatfield Three at the Sinclair in Cambridge. First time and I mean, finally! It was fun, if not profound. I don’t really go for nostalgia acts and Hatfield really isn’t one generally, but she was playing the entirety of the Become What You Are album, which is a good album, but it was such a 90s throwback to play the whole thing in order. She didn’t care and that’s fine. She said she was still really proud of the album and for that matter of the 90s. That’s cool and I mean, it was a peak Gen X moment for sure. I think there were a few people under 40 there, but let’s be clear that audience was extremely 45-55. Honestly, that’s rare for me; I’m either one of the youngest people at a lot of the jazz or folk shows or one of the oldest people at the more rock shows. But when I see DBT or Old 97s or now Hatfield, it does feel very generational. I did think the show would be more political, especially given it was right before election and especially because she played her song “Rhinoceros” about Melania submitting to sex with Donald Trump (“Guess who’s getting FUCKED by the Rhinoceros!” what a chorus), but she just played it, made a very passing reference to the election happening and hoping it went the right way (sigh), and moved on. I guess that’s a very Gen X move too.
By the way, the opening band was great. We sometimes forget given the intense focus on Seattle bands of the 90s there was there was a ton of great rock and roll coming out of Boston, Hatfield included. So she had Hilken Mancini and her band open and that kicked a lot of ass. Mancini was the singer of Fuzzy but never quite made it bigger than that. She then started a punk aerobics deal for Gen X people who weren’t going to work out to Jane Fonda like mom. And she plays and releases some music and I need to hear more of it. Boston punk legend Thalia Zedek came on stage for a song too, which she tends to do at these kind of shows. I’ve seen her do that a couple of times at Wussy shows. I enjoyed that as much as seeing Hatfield.
Other news:
I’m a fan of the songwriter Christopher Paul Stelling and although he’s played in Rhode Island many times, it’s never works out for me to see him. Well, he had a surprise concert last night in the town of Warren and I am on his email list. Of course it was the one night this month I have plans….But in any case, he noted that Rhode Island has been key to his career, but it’s getting harder because so many venues are closing. That’s certainly true. Both the Columbus Theatre and the Askew have closed. The Columbus is a grand old theater with two stages where I’ve seen many shows. Some comedy club guys have purchased it and plan to do some needed renovations and reopen it; let’s hope for the best on that one. Askew was a small club, maybe not perfectly designed, but could get acts like the Old 97s lead Rhett Miller doing his solo tour. In fact, I was supposed to see Jim Lauderdale there tomorrow, but it shut its doors this week. Ugh. I mention all of this because of my larger concerns for the smaller end of the music industry, clubs bigger than a local coffeehouse but smaller than the 5000 seat venue. Go see live music and support these places! The music dies if you stay home doomscrolling!
I’ve never even heard of the hippie band It’s a Beautiful Day, but their songwriter and keyboardist Linda LaFlamme died.
As if living in Syracuse wasn’t unpleasant enough--any radio station switching to all Christmas music 20 days before Thanksgiving should have its license taken away.
No, music was not better when you were younger. Kill the nostalgia inside you! It’s a purely reactionary emotion, as we saw this week in fact…..
Here’s one of those great random Bandcamp playlists–German New Wave.
I literally could not care less about the Grammys, but here’s the full list of nominations for those who might.
30 year anniversary of Iris Dement’s great My Life.
Rolling Stone ranks the top 50 salsa albums of all time.
Charli XCX sampling Bonnie Raitt is making the latter a lot of money.
This week’s playlist:
- Bob Dylan, Desire
- Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Past is Still Alive
- Waxahatchee, Cerulean Salt (taking over the lead in listens for any album since I got this computer in March 2024, with 9)
- Torres, What an Enormous Room
- Laura Veirs, My Echo
- Waylon Jennings, Waylon Live, disc 1
- Borderlands: From Conjunto to Chicken Scratch
- Bobby Bare, Cowboys and Daddys
- Bill Callahan, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle
- Dolly Parton, Just Because I’m a Woman
- Miles Davis, In a Silent Way
- The Louvin Brothers, When I Stop Dreaming: Best of the Louvin Brothers
- The Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet
- Ennio Morricone, The Legendary Italian Westerns
- Brennan Leigh, Ain’t Through Honky Tonkin Yet
- Bonnie Prince Billy, Master and Everyone
- War on Drugs, Slave Ambient
- The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs, disc 3
- Rambin’ Jack Elliott, Kerouac’s Last Dream
- Jake Blount, The New Faith
- Bonnie Prince Billy, Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You
- Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska
- Bill Frisell, The Willies
- Eric Taylor, Resurrect
- Blood Lemon, self-titled
- Waylon Jennings, Waylon Live, disc 2
- Margo Cliker, Pohorylle
- Old Crow Medicine Show, Tennessee Pusher
- Steve Earle, El Corazon
- Ian Tyson, Cowboyography
- Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, Balance
- Sonny Fortune, Long Before Our Mothers Cried
- Mates of State, Mountaintops
- Joe Ely, Live Shots
- Yo La Tengo, This Stupid World
- PJ Harvey, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
- Neil Young, On the Beach
- Sonic Youth, Dirty
- John Moreland, In the Throes
Album Reviews:
Thurston Moore, Flow Critical Lucidity
This is not the greatest Moore release ever. Of course Sonic Youth were all big Deadheads, but they took the best part of that experimentation and put it into their own noise-based music. This on the other hand sounds like a lesser version of The War on Drugs, jammy but also kind of pointless and heading off into the smoky ether haze. “We Get High” is a perfectly good name for a song, but it also might suggest the state of Moore while recording it.
C+
Reyna Tropical, Malegria
This is the project of the hip as fuck producer and guitarist Fabiola Reyna. It was supposed to be a duet album, but shortly before it was being made, her bandmate died in an e-scooter accident (really, stay off those things!). She suffered a ton of grief, as one would when your best friend dies. So the album honors him by switching off from the real songs to snippets of recorded conversations they had. Were I to listen to this a lot, I’d probably skip those, but they do work artistically. Meanwhile, the reason we are listening are the other songs, which pull broadly from the Latino musical diaspora, with a lot of Mexican and a lot of Colombian influences especially. It is fairly highly produced, but in the good way that makes it all more interesting. Reyna is a perfectly good guitarist too. I saw her at Newport Folk, having heard of this project but not actually having heard it. I enjoyed it live and I enjoyed the album too.
A-
Wadada Leo Smith/Amina Claudine Myers, Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoirs, Lakes, Paths, and Gardens
Smith and Myers are two of the all time legends of modern jazz. Smith has gotten very into taking the American landscape and history and wrapping his music around it in recent years, in a way that sometimes makes more sense in his unique mind than maybe for the rest of us. So here he and Myers, one of the great if quite challenging pianists of our time, think about the beauty of Central Park, which for New Yorkers at least is as good as it gets. There’s certainly nothing wrong with this project, but it is hard, slow listening, which sometimes has held these projects back a little bit. Brilliant music, if you are in the mood. But you might not be in that mood very often.
B+
Joe Santa Maria, Echo Deep
Santa Maria is new to me. He’s a woodwinds guy, based out of LA. Plays just about everything on this album–all the saxes, flute, clarinet, some keys. Very interesting work and so varied within the album. Some of these pieces are like chamber music, others have such a big bottom to them it sounds like techno at first a little bit. As you’d expect, very woodwind heavy, which includes Andrew Conrad on other winds. You also have Dan Rosenbloom, Brandon Sherman, and Andrew Rowan all on trumpet, Ryan Dragon and Julianne Gralle on trombone, Lauren Baba on various strings, Tim Carr on drums, David Tranchina on bass, and Max Kutner on guitar. As you might expect, with all this, Santa Maria delivers a big sounding album, which I happen to like. In the liner notes, he talks about all the influences here, ranging from the folk music he listened to on public radio stations when he lived in the Midwest to his travels in Indonesia. That helps explains the enormous range of this recording. It also reminds me that I really do need to do a bit more work exploring the west coast jazz scene.
A-
Hauschka, Philanthropy
I’ve always Hauschka’s piano work just fine. Volker Bertelmann is an interesting guy and when you want to hear some kind of hipster piano work, he can fill that gap. It’s not something I necessarily want to hear very often, but I’ve never regretted picking up the couple albums of his that I own. Could see even buying this one. It’s an expansive album that ranges from the challenges of prepared piano to small scale orchestra work, with the electronic music influence that has always shaped his music. Solid, at the very least.
B+
Ethan Iverson, Technically Acceptable
Certainly more than technically acceptable, but also a pretty boring piano trio. The cover of “Killing Me Softly With His Song” is case in point why this belongs more at a piano bar than an album I would want to hear again. Leave your tips in the jar, they are good musicians. Oddly, they follow that cover with a rather difficult cover of “Round Midnight” with a pretty challenging vocal, but the piano still remains bar trio work. If there was any question about the technical ability, the three part sonata at the end would kill them, but then that forces to ask why the rest of the album is so boring.
C+
Jolie Laide, self-titled
This is Nina Nastasia’s new band, with Jeff MacLeod. And it’s pretty good. I’ve been happy for her middle aged revival and this extends that. The songs are very much about traveling and the freedom the West offers. from the beach of California to the deserts of Nevada. The album begins with the lyrics “Back to the West” and that’s where she’s going, recovering her life after a very difficult marriage that led to her partner’s suicide. This is an album of a woman recovering her life, her sense of self, her past, and her plans to move forward. Good project. Great songs.
A-
Bonnie Prince Billy/Nathan Salsburg, Hear the Children Sing & The Evidence
I can’t as say I was initially that thrilled about the idea of Bonnie Prince Billy singing 20 minute covers of Lungfish songs, turning them from their post-punk originals to modern folk. But BPB does whatever he wants to and while sometimes it can be a complete disaster, usually it’s worthy and this is another example of the latter. The lyrics don’t even feel that repetitive nor the whole project that drawn out. You just kind of fade into this album and then after a much longer time than you realize, the song is over. Sure, why not do this.
B+
Shovels & Rope, By Blood
Generally a pretty big Shovels & Rope fan with their spousal team of earnest singers. But their album from 2019 was more solid than great. Nothing truly stood out here that I thought really drove it home. Evidently, fans saw this album as a big step forward and I believe it, but I thought 2016’s Little Seeds better. Still, there’s nothing wrong with any of this–they bring their punky rootsy music into a pretty appealing package that probably will make both sides of any couple pretty OK with it.
B
As always–and especially today–this is a thread for all things music and art and NONE things politics, except where they might intersect with the music as a couple of these notes do.