Yet, it is usually interesting, if not illuminating, to hear new sounds, something I began to contemplate once more when considering the work of Robyn Rihanna Fenty, whose popular work seems to draw from different genres—hip-hop, rock, dance, and Caribbean music—to create a sound that is, at once, personal and impersonal, familiar and fresh.
Category: Music reviews
A Great Voice Evokes, Inspires Feeling: My Soul by Leela James
The slow, intimately blues-tinged song “So Cold,” a response to a quirky lover, is a quick reminder of the gifts of Leela James, in which it is easy to identify with her voice and to feel empathy for her. Leela James has a great voice, the kind of voice one hears and then feels like crying or making love.
Glamour, Grace, and Grit: the anthology Breathe Again: The Best of Toni Braxton
Toni Braxton is both a song stylist and a popular entertainer; and she has touched places in an audience that used to be reserved for the obscure divas requiring special introductions and interpretations. It says much that her toughness is direct but not frightening, and that her sensuality is easy to see but does not diminish respect for her.
Let Us Now Praise Sensitive Men: Bob Baldwin, Never Can Say Goodbye: A Tribute to Michael Jackson
In tribute to a man lost much too soon, the jazz pianist Bob Baldwin has produced an album that executes with delicacy the established and known rhythm patterns of Michael Jackson’s songs, and, sometimes, even adds intensity, but, for the most part, Bob Baldwin does not extend the songs into new territory, new invention.
Freedom and Discipline: Turtle Island Quartet, Have You Ever Been…?
In the interpretation of the Turtle Island Quartet, I hear something fine and sensuous. Just as the native rhythms that might have sounded one way when played on an African landscape with African instruments sounded differently when played on European instruments on American soil as part of the improvisations on composed music that is jazz, the sound of Jimi Hendrix’s songs are different with classical instrumentation and technique.
A Gentleman, a Model: Brian McKnight, Evolution of a Man
Brian McKnight does not sing of ghetto life in run-down tenements, violent hustles and narcotic sales, of whores and pimps, or rats and roaches; nor does he sing of temporary jobs and unemployment checks, of bad bosses and landlords, of sudden evictions and midnights spent deciding whether to beg, borrow, steal—or die. He sings of love as game, luxury, and spiritual fulfillment.
Eastern States, Tunisian Oud: The Astounding Eyes of Rita by Anouar Brahem
By Daniel Garrett Anouar Brahem, The Astounding Eyes of Rita Produced by Manfred Eicher ECM, 2009 The oud is a lute, a traditional instrument in the music of Tunisia, a music featuring significant woodwind instruments and lutes in an ancient…
This is the Time for Change: the album Grand Isle by Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys
How many people know the music of Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys; or are likely to learn of it? Often people lament that the music industry is in a crisis, and that music criticism is as well: the multiple sources for finding and commenting on music make it hard to identify and push a few artists forward and up, for the industry to self-select its preferred stars, allowing them fame and wealth, leaving others to struggle vainly to achieve the same. More music is available and known by smaller populations, but fewer musicians are loved by all of us.
Route 66 by Michael Daugherty (and Marin Alsop and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra)
The Iowa-born composer Michael Daugherty studied at the University of North Texas, the Manhattan School of Music, and Yale, and he has taught music at Oberlin and the University of Michigan, and worked with national orchestras, and received awards for his work, which includes the musical compositions “Metropolis Symphony” and “Raise the Roof.” Daugherty has been able to avoid the daily nine-to-five grind that ignores or insults emotion, misuses intellectual energy, represses imagination, and stifles the spirit; and he has had the encouragement, recognition, and support that sustain accomplishment. Consequently, the public has the benefit of Daugherty’s creativity.
Eccentric Music: Vagabond Swing’s Soundtrack to an Untimely Death
Although the previous music advanced the story to exile in the city and a return home, the text for “Chapter 6” notes that the father leaves his field for the city, and years later returns to the now grown son he had helped to rear, and there is—as with many fathers and sons in legend and myth—a bloody meeting between the two. The album Soundtrack to an Untimely Death by Vagabond Swing, a band of multi-talented individuals, ends with a tribute to Django Reinhardt; a conclusion of trumpet, harmonic voices, and disparate rhythms—light, sultry, jazzy, eastern.