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.
Tag: music
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.
Sunshine on a Cloudy Day: the anthology of Number Ones by The Temptations
Many Motown songs show mastery of that subject, as well as assertions of transcendent love, as in “You’re My Everything,” in which the singer’s high voice issuing dedication and praise may have presaged the work of the Isley Brothers and Earth, Wind and Fire; and certainly musicians such as Michael Jackson, Prince, Terence Trent D’Arby, Brian McKnight, and Maxwell have found much to emulate in this assured, expressive music.
Home, and the Difficulty of Making One: The Whole Love by Wilco, featuring Jeff Tweedy
The music of Wilco on The Whole Love is easy to listen to, not abrasive, not strange. “Sunloathe” is a ballad, with piano and guitar; and the mid-tempo “Dawn on Me” reminds one of 1970s rock; while “Black Moon” could hardly be simpler, with acoustic guitar and plain vocal declarations. It is all more reassuring than some might expect; and it is good and solid work, and a pleasure—work that deserves to be heard.
Music as Memory: David Lang’s This Was Written by Hand, performed by pianist Andrew Zolinsky
David Lang, the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his work “The Little Match Girl Passion,” inspired by both Hans Christian Andersen and Bach, has created work for dance and film as well as concert performance; and Lang is joined for this album recording by the interpretive pianist Andrew Zolinsky, who has performed Lang’s work before and that of other composers, as well as appeared with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Concerto Orchestra.
Building Sounds: Michael Gordon’s Timber, performed by Slagwerk Den Haag
Six percussionists participate in the music performance: Fedor Teunisse, the artistic leader of Slagwerk Den Haag, and Marcel Andriessen, Niels Meliefste, Pepe Garcia, Juan Martinez, and Frank Wienk. By turns, the sounds are of a pulsing rhythm, and a pecking sound that becomes lower then rises and becomes low again, and a rattling and rolling that is then ringing, a hammering that heralds, and finally something clocklike, with a quickened tempo that subsequently slows. It is fascinating.