The Avant Gershwin collection’s “Porgy and Bess Medley” is another tour de force. Between a mother’s humbling instructions and a lover’s deceptive attention, a “woman is a sometime thing.” (How Austin manages singing that and not sounding misogynist or self-incriminating is fascinating.)
Month: April 2007
Friendly Collaborators, Gorgeous Music: Randy Crawford and Joe Sample, Feeling Good
Joe Sample is right: Randy Crawford has immense control of her voice. I hardly can imagine a singer able to produce a more pure vocal line. “All Night Long,” written by Curtis Lewis, and sung by Aretha Franklin in her early days, is about a man who haunts a woman’s dreams, though she does not know him well: on Feeling Good, it is bluesy, passionate.
A Generation’s Work Continues: Neil Young’s Living With War
The false intelligence, the expectation of military success, and the early sense of triumph and victory have given way to death, the bodies returning home with little ceremony, to increasing losses on both sides, to grief and bad memories, all recounted in Young’s “Shock and Awe,” with its propulsive, shimmery percussion, jangling guitar notes, and grief-filled horn, a song in which Young recalls, “We had a chance to change our mind, but somehow wisdom was hard to find.
Dissent is the Highest Form of Democracy: Michael Franti and Spearhead’s Yell Fire!
Yell Fire! is another chapter in Michael Franti’s career, another attempt to do work that expresses his personal sense of the world and his place in it. He is someone who does not quite fit common expectations: he is not selling our own greed and desire for glamour back to us, nor, though young and handsome, is he selling sex to us, or stupidity or hatred. He has invested in mind, sensitivity, and public concern; and his reward will be our awareness and our active—or activist—response.