It’s an odd sort of progression from surgeon to sandwich maker and from confectioner to showman. It’s hard, at times, to believe that this is a book about one person, though there is a kind of entrepreneurial, inventor thread that links everything Kerby does.
We Are Better (Attitude in Urban Dance): Renegades by Mark de Clive-Lowe, with Omar, Sheila Escovedo, and Nia Andrews
The eastern-sounding “Alabi” begins Mark de Clive-Lowe’s Renegades, followed by an invocation to dance, to communal pleasure, “Get Started,” which has chanting, and features soul singer Omar and a lot of Shelia E.’s percussion. Is the pleasure only in being together and dancing? Is there any other connection or purpose?
That’s the Way Love Is: The Best of Marvin Gaye, The 60s
The music listener heard references to family, church, and school in Gaye’s work, those early educators and touchstones, the expected resources for affection and knowledge, and often what must be left behind if life is to be lived fully or honestly. Leaving them behind meant freedom—and risk, if not trouble. There is a female choral arrangement in “Pride and Joy,” and it is somewhere between male doo-wop and the call and response of a church choir.
Emotion and Style, Jazz and Soul: Until Tomorrow by Zara McFarlane
Zara McFarlane’s voice can be really pure or take on a husky quality, and her inflections are subtle, varied, as in “Captured (part 3), a song about the memory of a woman, with a swinging rhythm. Delivered with syncopation, the lyrics of “Mama Done” suggest something ominous: “she talked herself right into the ground.” McFarlane’s voice floats in the air in the song “Until Tomorrow,” which seems to be about an impasse in a relationship that time and distance might ease. Her voice could be a sound alive on the wind, without a body.
Freedom in Contemporary Cuban Music: Gilles Peterson Presents Havana Cultura, The Search Continues
The production quality of the Havana Cultura music is quite good; the current development of technology facilitates first-rate recording sound, no matter where one is recording, something very different from the anthropological work of decades ago. The horn sounds official, triumphalist in “La Vida Interlude,” but the beat in the song is great.
The Country Dance Music of Fiddler Joel Savoy: Linzay Young & Joel Savoy, together; and The Right Combination by Jesse Lege, Joel Savoy, and the Cajun Country Revival
They are keepers of a tradition that includes Dewey Balfa, Michael Doucet, Feufollet, Wade Fruge, Doc Guidry, D.L. Menard, Dennis McGee, Steve Riley, and Horace Trahan. Yet Joel Savoy went on to explain that he listened to popular music: “My mom has very diverse taste in music, and we heard all kinds of stuff growing up. She used to make me mix tapes of all kinds of things like Django and Billie Holiday and lots of Cajun stuff—old-timey Cajun fiddlers, even some rock ‘n’ roll.” Savoy learned to play some of what was on those tapes; and, subsequently, he has performed with T-Bone Burnett, Allison Krauss, Steve Miller, and Linda Ronstadt.
An American Bluesman in Europe: Kid Man Blues by Bert Deivert
On the album Kid Man Blues, an album recorded in Sweden, Thailand, Germany, and the United States over a period of years, Bert Deivert does the Paul Jones song “Rob and Steal,” and there’s something very head-down-and-focused about the energy in the song, as if something burning in the music matches the intensity of the scavenging character being described. Downbeat, haunted, “Come Back Baby” is a moodily dramatic request for a lover’s return, featuring blues-rock guitar (that is, Dulyasit Srabua on electric guitar and John Dooley on electric bass).
Meeting and Memorial: Ray Charles’s duet anthology Genius & Friends, with Diana Ross and Angie Stone, Chris Isaak, Leela James, Idina Menzel, George Michael, John Legend, Willie Nelson, and Alicia Keys
The subject is desperation, being down on one’s luck, but the tone is self-aware, self-mocking, in the Charles-Nelson duet “Busted,” which was part of a 1991 television special, “Ray Charles: 50 Years in Music,” and the song has this chastening, truthful line: “I’m no thief, but a man can go wrong when he’s busted.” The collection Genius & Friends concludes with “America the Beautiful,” with Charles and Alicia Keys, whose singular, soulful voice is strong enough to carry the song, though she does not give it any special conviction.
A review of Home Front by Kristin Hannah
Home Front is a nail-biter from beginning to end. The descriptions of Jolene’s daily life in the military, which are likely far more horrific for a real-life soldier than what Hannah describes in the book, are both compelling and heart-wrenching. Jolene Zarkades is a fictional Army helicopter pilot, but her story reflects the all-too-real experience of servicemen and women trying to return to their families after a life-changing tour of duty.
A review of Ruth by Marlene S. Lewis
The new social order is shown in a scene in which Ruth has dinner with three key people in her life. Similarly, the recurrent Christmas celebrations, with their associations of goodwill, peace and justice, reinforce the new spirit of harmony. Christmas, as well, serves as a good structural device to show continuity despite the passage of time.