Music Notes
By 
Last Friday, I saw the duo of Brandon Ross and Stomu Takeishi at Firehouse 12 in New Haven. I frequently make the trek down there these days to see interesting looking jazz acts. This is the third time I’ve seen Ross, including with his great band Harriet Tubman and in other people’s bands at Big Ears (I always count Big Ears as seeing people once even if you see them 5 times, it’s just too much otherwise). I had never seen Takeishi, though I’ve been listening to his work for 25 years or so, I think first hearing him work on Erik Friedlander albums. Their project is a real quiet one and that sort of contemplative thing requires deep listening. I have no problem with deep listening–big Pauline Oliveros guy, but if you aren’t expecting that–and I wasn’t–it means something a little different than maybe i was hoping. Of course that’s the chance you take. But watching them work as a duo and especially Takeishi doing such a fantastic job dominating that bass was great and of course Ross is a total master of the guitar. So it was cool, though perhaps I would have preferred to see this as a set at a festival than make it the center of a day.
See the musicians you want to see while you can see them. Recently, I learned that the great Joe Ely is dealing with Parkinson’s and Lewy body dementia. Ugh. This hit me twice this week hearing about two very ill musicians. Brian Setzer can no longer tour because of an autoimmune disorder making it impossible to play guitar. Meanwhile, Marcia Ball has announced she an ALS diagnosis, among the worst diseases in the world. Something takes us all and it can happen at any time. In terms of seeing musicians, see them while you can. In fact, that’s a good way to live life generally. Don’t wait til you retire. You might not get a retirement anyway.
Speaking of people I never saw, we need to take a minute and remember the legendary drummer Jack DeJohnette, one of the greatest musicians to ever get behind a kit in jazz history, who died this week at the age of 83. He could do it all and did, including working in Miles’ electric band (the drumming on Live-Evil is DeJohnette), Keith Jarrett’s Standards Trio, and Charles Lloyd’s late 60s band that bridged the jazz and rock world. Plus there’s all his own solo work. He was one of the greatest living jazz musicians.
We also lost electric bass pioneer Anthony Jackson. Among many other things, that’s his bass on Madonna’s “Borderline.” He basically created the six-string electric bass guitar and who doesn’t love that deep electric bass?
I finished Daudi Abe’s book Emerald Street: A History of Hip Hop in Seattle this week, published in 2020. Now, you might not take Sir Mix-a-Lot seriously. I mean “Baby Got Back” is not exactly the most sophisticated song ever. And sure, the video faced legit accusations of sexism. Not denying that. But as he says in the book here, he was also pushing back against visions of women’s bodies that were inherently white and thin and he was celebrating Black women’s bodies. Of course both of these things can be true. In any case, what made him interesting as well is how central Seattle was to his entire career, which included getting Mayor Norm Rice in his videos and frequently celebrating his city. Note: Sir Mix-a-Lot, with fellow Seattle rapper Kid Sensation, was the first concert I ever went to on my own. Must have been either 1988 or 1989 and I was a freshman in high school. Seattle is no center of hip hop compared to Atlanta or Oakland, not to mention LA or New York. But it also has had a long-standing scene that has produced a number of known figures, including Macklemore and Ishamel Butler of Digable Planets and Shabazz Palaces, which itself was a specifically Seattle band. So that’s not nothing. This is maybe not a great book, but it is good enough and it is a way to get at Black life and popular culture in a city not often associated with that.
Here’s an actual question I could use some help with. Every now and then someone sends me a CD or I pick something rare up. But I am having a heck of a time getting those CDs onto my computer/hard drive. I have two CD burners, one of which I bought last year as part of this project. I was able to get some on with it, but now it just stops or it burns 1 or 2 songs and then stops and ejects. I don’t think it’s my computer, as the hard drive with all my music works just fine plugged into the same adapter. Given that I am a technological idiot, what advice does one have for the best way to handle a problem like this? Note: I am actually at a show right now that I will talk about in the next Notes so I can’t respond immediately, but I would appreciate any advice anyone might have on this annoying issue.
Steve Albini’s collection of stuff seems to be a lot.
Zohran Mamdani took some time from his campaign to talk to Pitchfork about music, including Kendrick’s evisceration of Drake. Some might think this is a waste of time for politicians. Anyone who says that is completely out of touch with the reality of politics today and how any media strategy that has any chance of working is going to include a lot of niche publications of whatever ilk.
This week’s playlist, lighter than normal due to being really busy with the late semester doldrums:
- Wet Leg, Moisturizer
- The Beths, Jump Rope Gazers
- Tal National, Tantabara
- The Bakersfield Sound: Country Music Capital of the West 1940-1974, disc 9
- Richard Thompson, Small Town Romance
- Bruce Cockburn, High Winds White Sky
- King Crimson, The Great Deceiver, disc 2
- Tomeka Reid Quartet, Old New
- John Zorn, The Circle Maker: Issachar
- Aretha Franklin, Lady Soul
- Willie Nelson, ….And Then I Wrote
- Courtney Marie Andrews, Loose Future
- Touch My Heart: A Tribute to Johnny Paycheck
- S.G. Goodman, Planting by the Signs
- Two High String Band, Insofarasmuch
- Margo Cliker, Pohorylle
- Loose Cattle, Someone’s Monster
- Townes Van Zandt, At My Window
- Matt Sweeney/Bonnie Prince Billy, Superwolf
- The Waco Brothers, Resist!
- Drive By Truckers, English Oceans
- Kevin Morby, This is a Photograph
- Laura Gibson, Goners
- Dave Alvin, Public Domain: Songs from the Wild Land
- Steve Lacy, Evidence
- Yo La Tengo, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One
- John Coltrane, The Africa/Brass Sessions, Vol. 2
Album Reviews:
Neko Case, Neon Grey Midnight Green
I have always been pretty mixed on Neko Case and I’ve never seen her as the legend that so many people of my generation do. That’s not to say I dislike her–not at all. There are good albums out there, including her early more country work, her New Pornographers albums, and the superb The Worse Things Get…. album. But there’s a lot more than I kind of shrug my shoulders at, which she would make music that led somewhere more clearly and was a bit less flighty in both lyrics and vocals, even as the voice itself is amazing. So when I hear a new Neko album, I feel it can fall along a pretty broad scale between outstanding and forgettable.
This one is more toward outstanding I think, though it’s not quite there. She still sounds great of course–the voice is the voice and that hasn’t diminished one bit. I still feel that sometimes she needs to be less floaty in both voice and lyrics, my critique of her has been too many literary references and singing like someone who reads a lot of English literature and is half in some Austen novel. But her songwriting feels generally sharper here than normal and a lot of it is grief and aging oriented. Being in her mid 50s, friends start to die and of course that means you are going to die soon too and that’s a damned hard to thing to wrap your head around, let me tell you what. There’s also some newer production techniques here that once or twice made me surprised I was listening to a Neko Case album and that’s a really good thing. I also suspect that I will enjoy this more the more frequently I listen to it.
B+
SZA, SOS
Let’s see what the kids are listening to these days. Or at least what the kids were listening to 3 years ago when this SZA released this album. And sure, yeah, I get it. She’s a pretty skilled R&B artist who likes fucking and likes singing about fucking. Assuming she’s singing about herself, I wonder how a superstar navigates the world of sex. And given that she still sings largely about a certain level of insecurity, how does playing a supporting role in a Super Bowl halftime show impact that? Is she still insecure with men after what is undoubtedly living precisely the life she wants? I don’t know that it impacts the music, but it does make you wonder. And it’s not like success doesn’t lead to the same insecurities rising up again and again. In any case, it’s solid enough contemporary R&B, not sure that this reaches Rhianna or Beyoncé levels of great though.
B
Esther Rose, Want
Rose is a Santa Fe based songwriter who many in that world love and I needed to hear. She’s pretty good. Plenty of songs about drinking and drugs here, though she’s stopped drinking, which has never stopped someone from singing about it (Jason Isbell and Margo Price being two good examples of this). Evidently, this is a big increase in the sound and I think that works for her, as the acoustic folk thing gets old really fast and I don’t think it would work that well here. She’s a little country, but this is really folk rock and a good enough version of it to keep listening.
B+
Common/Pete Rock, The Auditorium, Vol. 1
Such smooth and sophisticated hip hop that seems to be for people like me, i.e. older folks. And, I mean, Common is 53 years old, so this makes sense. He’s still got all the skills and Rock provides excellent production. This flows so smooth and I don’t know, hip hop for grown ups seems awfully appealing these days. We’re feeling pretty good here, resisting oppression too, but mostly laying back to talk about the good parts of life.
A-
Miss España, Niebla Mental
This is fun 80s style synth punk from a Madrid band. Like so many bands today, they aren’t exactly creating new ground. But the bass that dominates on the opening track drags you in immediately and so do the vocals. The sounds is very 80s, more 80s than I usually like, but that bass, vocal power, and energy really puts it over the top for me. Not great, but good enough for another few listens at least.
B+
Anna Calvi, Hunter
Did not totally love this 2018 release from a singer who is very mannered and theatrical in a way that I find a bit offputting. If I want to listen to opera, I’ll just listen to opera. This isn’t opera, but she sings like that. Not being much of a goth guy either, there’s just not a lot here to appeal to me. It doesn’t suck, just not super my thing.
B-
Billy Mohler, The Eternal
The only person I knew from this quartet was Jeff Parker on guitar and while I know Parker has done a lot of different things, since I was never a Tortoise fan really, I haven’t followed his work super closely. But this is a quite solid quartet playing some very good modern jazz. Mohler is a bassist and unsurprisingly, this is a bass-centric recording. I guess he’s made a good living working on soundtracks and as a studio guy in non-jazz settings, but he sees himself as a jazz musician at heart and so made this project. I hope he makes more albums. It has a sort of 70s post-free jazz but also post-bop vibe to it, from the era in which soul and funk were entering into the conversation of jazz. The rest of the band is Devin Daniels on sax and Damion Reid on drums.
A-
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Live Like the Sky
Simpson is a well known Canadian indigenous activist and writer who also occasionally releases music. Her 2021 album Theory of Ice is one of my favorite albums of the last decade–a bit like PJ Harvey but also more spoken word about Native life and colonialism. She can craft a good sound with the bands she puts together. Her brand new release is a little more lush than Theory of Ice and I don’t know that I like the sound quite as much, but I do love the lyrics, which continue to damn climate change and genocide and celebrate place and Native traditions and survival in the face of oppression. Plus, the sound grew on me over time. She sings in English and Mississauga Nishnaabeg (I think). This is one you really want to read the lyrics on. She’s not really a storyteller in this context (the songs don’t have a lot of lyrics to them) as much as she a fragmented poet who sets an atmosphere that gets the point across about colonialism with real power.
A-
As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics, well except for where it came up in the post….