Does it matter when a mature musician decides to explore a musical genre, such as the blues, that has become somewhat neglected? On the album Into the Blues, Joan Armatrading’s song “A Woman in Love” is about the power of love, its ability to calm, to correct; and the blues notes in the song do not forbid rhythmic propulsion or Armatrading’s distinctively contemplative—austere, open, and pleasantly thoughtful—vocal tones. It is possible to hear a difference in her sound and yet it is a difference that does not obscure Joan Armatrading’s temperament or the nature of her much-loved gifts (it is simply a new accent, a new tonal color).
Tag: music
Masters at Work: George Benson and Al Jarreau’s Givin’ It Up
George Benson’s voice lacks the mannerisms one might have expected from someone of his mature age (his voice seems clear, deep, expressive, flawless—I cannot imagine what a George Benson imitation would sound like). Benson’s solo performance of “All I Am,” composed by Rex Rideout and Phillip Jackson, affirms the song narrator’s humility and genuine love.
Comic Voice, Tragic Vision: Modest Mouse, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
The singer offers gifts, offers to be cordial, but expects no good: “Let’s shake hands if you want but soon both hands are gone, ha-ha-ha!” Is the narrator mad, without logic, or is the world? “Well we all stumbled round tangled up in the cords from our phones, VCR, and our worldly woes,” he sings. Is the technology of the world—the abundance of the world—resource for the fulfillment of purpose; or disguise, distraction from deep purpose?
All Your Friends and Sedatives Mean Well: Cassadaga by Bright Eyes, featuring Conor Oberst
There is an instant when a musician’s work can seem to embody his time, the most important aspects of his culture’s current history, but if he does not change, does not grow in fresh ways, he begins to embody not the present but the past. Yet, the growth of an artist must be true to the mind and nature of the artist rather than a fulfillment of the wishes of audiences and critics; and, sometimes, the best artists give us desires and pleasures we did not anticipate.
Experiments Conducted: Burnt Sugar’s More Than Posthuman, and Not April in Paris, and Blood on the Leaf
The path to success, whether small or large success, can be paved by inheritance or by luck, but, it seems to me, it is most usually preceded by hope, intelligence, passion, discipline, and a plan, as well as resources. Burnt Sugar is to be commended for pursuing a path its members, apparently, consider vital to themselves, a journey that a small audience in different parts of the world has decided to share with the band.
Courage, Compromise, and Corruption: A Weekend in the City, by the band Bloc Party, featuring Kele Okereke
A Weekend in the City is a sketch, if not a map, of the contemporary moment and of London, a sketch of the modern city; and it is a musical recording with very public ambitions and a private heart. The development of culture, knowledge, and technology in a city are the basis of its modernism; and that culture, knowledge, and technology are ever growing, ever tested: and tested by each life, and by the diversity and the weight of all the lives, to be found within it.
Cuban Pianist, International Treasure: Bebo Valdés
t is a mastery, elegant and elegiac, of the “the cultivated and the popular,” in an album of “thirteen pieces exemplifying Cuba’s major musical genres, starting with the emergence of a recognizably Cuban music in the mid-19th century,” in which the songs “are presented more or less chronologically—contradanza, danza, danzón, bolero, guaguancó,” an album that promises to become a pleasure and a defining reference for others, as much as it has been a joy for pianist Bebo Valdés.
Humor, Outrage, Vulgarity, and Intense Rhythm: Fishbone’s Still Stuck in Your Throat
Listening to Fishbone’s Still Stuck in Your Throat, I hear punk rock, jazz, Caribbean rap, rhythm and blues, and even something I might call a ballad, but I hear little that I can recognize, even generously, as funk: which to me signifies not only a heavy, thick musical groove but the most expansive sensuality. Fishbone is a lot of things, including sexual, but sensual? I don’t think so.
Yes We Can Can: Our New Orleans 2005, featuring Allen Toussaint; and Harry Connick Jr.’s 2007 Oh My NOLA
Toussaint’s voice is softly inflected, masculine, and neither heavy nor light, somewhere in between, with a nice firmness and tone, and he sings “Yes We Can Can” supported by vivid percussion, amid an appealingly idiosyncratic rhythm. The song has become just weeks ago, and now, one of my favorites.
Instruments Made of Ice: Terje Isungset, Two Moons
Terje Isungset’s Two Moons is the kind of work that compels one to ask, What is music? Is it all sound, any sound? Is it whatever sound is intentionally made; and made by a self-described musician? Is it organized sound? Sound intended to be pleasing to the ear; or, simply, sound intended to be contemplated as music?