Resistance to other people’s self-serving solicitations, whether they involve work, school, or love, is the theme of “Too Much Monkey Business,” and Berry’s guitar rhythms are fast, repetitive, and (now) have the aspect of something classical, as if one were…
Tag: music
We Are Not the Same: U2’s Achtung Baby
The drama and momentum of “The Fly” still reach me, especially when Bono sings, “It’s no secret that a liar won’t believe anyone else.” I have known many people like that. The hushed intensity of Bono’s singing is persuasive, nearly…
Cry for Us All Beauty: Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark
Joni Mitchell’s voice and phrasing are original, are full, high, quick, rich, sensual. She sounds tones of speculation and skepticism, of expectation and experience; and she is amazing. By Daniel Garrett Joni Mitchell Court and Spark Elektra/Asylum Records, 1974 “It…
Maintaining Jazz’s Relevance: World Saxophone Quartet’s Political Blues and The Roy Hargrove Factor’s Distractions
Which way jazz? Wynton Marsalis, a man who argues ideas, rather than pandering or slandering, has advocated music education for youth and greater media attention for public awareness in support of jazz, very intelligent promptings. Does anyone have to be told that the world in which we live, with the works of Marsalis, the World Saxophone Quartet, and Roy Hargrove, will be the foundation upon which the musicians, music lovers, and citizens of tomorrow will build their own world?
Black Mambazo, Afro Celt Sound System, Femi Kuti, and Angelique Kidjo
African Rhythms, World Sensibilities: Ladysmith Politics as a subject is sometimes less about the real world than about the artist’s supposed feelings and good intentions. Artists who say Yes are usually more welcomed than those who say No. South Africans…
This is What Being Human Sounds Like: The Dears’ Gang of Losers
Are the exile and marginality that are contemplated in the band’s songs the results of consciousness and choice, or imposition by others? Are the characters in the songs pariahs because they are artists and intellectuals, because they are poor, ethnic, female, queer, or other?
Excellence, Three Ladies of Song: Ella Fitzgerald’s Best of the Song Books, Diana Ross’s Blue, and Natalie Cole’s Leavin’
Ethel Waters, Josephine Baker, Lena Horne, and Nancy Wilson are singers whose works contain more than three colors in their palette, singers whose voices are capable of sounding more than tones of anger, lust, and pain, singers whose work is…
In the Shadow of the Past: John Legend, Once Again
The themes of John Stephens’s songs are variations on romance, and the songs resist cliché to the extent that they are imaginative or realistic, as the need (or case) may be. The collection’s first song—in which the singer asks someone…
Troubadour: Eric Bibb’s A Ship Called Love
Beauty is not always simple, and brilliance and excellence are not simple. The relationship of one kind of ethic to another—for instance, an ethic founded in reason, science and civil liberties versus a religious ethic—is not simple. By Daniel Garrett…
Looks Nothing Like Jesus: The Killers’ Sam’s Town
Light percussion, then a speeding beat and swirling music, then tiny techno beats, followed by heavier drumming and a voice and lyric lines about the inertia of others and the singer’s sense of his own energy and destiny begin the…