The band of musical boasters, herders, and nut-breakers known as Cracker are singer and guitarist David Lowery, guitarist and keyboardist Johnny Hickman, drummer Frank Funaro, and bassist Sal Maida; and their influences include British rock and America’s southern music. Listening to Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey, one can hear musicians ready to claim any sound that appeals to them, whether it’s the roughness of punk or the slickness of new wave.
The Persistence of Memory: Streisand’s The Way We Were/All In Love Is Fair album and the television program “Live in Concert”
Streisand is bitterly ironic (sad, frightening, funny) in “The Best Thing You’ve Ever Done,” in which she uses an actress’s sense of drama, and offers the most ageless singing imaginable. “The Way We Were,” a song of contemplation and remembrance, may contain too many strings, and drumming that lacks conviction, but Streisand’s voice saves what might otherwise be nothing more than deplorable nostalgia, and she emphasizes a fact: we often remember and wonder if our lives might have been different.
A review of Lemniscate by Gaynor McGrath
The reader moves along the lemniscate path with Elsie, as she tries to make sense of what she sees, and work out what it means to her own life in its broadest context. Throughout the book the writing is descriptive and interesting, full of the sights, sounds and tastes of the places she visits. The book takes the reader to places that are both exotic, and made familiar by human elements.
A review of The Greatest Moving Abroad Tips in the world by Lorraine Mace
It’s small enough to fit in your handbag, and a good solid construction that should take the reader through the early stage trips, to the final move, and beyond to settling in. This is a fun, easy to use, and inexpensive guide which could save you lots of costly and painful errors and mistakes. If you’re planning a trip abroad, it would certainly pay to take advantage of the considerable knowledge of the ‘moving abroad queen’ Lorraine Mace.
A review of Winning Correspondence Chess by Kon Grivainis
The meat of the book is contained in chapter four, where Grivainis gives twenty six of his best games, arranged by theme (e.g. “Positional Wins”, “Defending Attacks Against the King”, “Middlegame Struggles”). In the main, Grivainis appears to be a solid positional player, but with a drop of poison. Like Lasker, he seems adept at tailoring his play to combat his opponent’s style. And he has a penchant for the Trompowski Attack.
A Bristling Exuberance: Shirley Horn, You Won’t Forget Me
Shirley Horn’s way with a song does much that I love in different arts: it expresses and interprets, it goes beyond eloquence and creates elegance, and it gives pleasure. Shirley Horn (1934-2005) had a long career, but she is one of the singers—along with Abbey Lincoln, to name another— whose work many could hear more clearly in the last years (rather than the prime years) of Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, singers whose reputations did not leave a lot of oxygen for the breath of others.
The Power of Musical Rhetoric: The Decemberists, The Hazards of Love
The album The Hazards of Love begins with ominous organ tones—are they serious or merely melodramatic? Yet, the music that follows is sturdy, formidable, although some of the songs may be only fragments, parts of a larger story and theme, a story of love and separation. It is notable that the voices we hear are not connected to the blues, which has influenced much American and English rock.
The Crazy Pride of a Free Man of Color: K’naan, Troubadour
In light of hip-hop’s materialism, narrow perspectives, prejudices, violence and vulgarity, it can be hard to know whether hip-hop is worth critical attention (and many rappers reject the value of critics). Who is paying (perceptive, thoughtful) attention, to artists, to critics? It is fascinating, if not perplexing, that the blackest of genres—hip-hop—has found acolytes around the world, in places such as France and Israel and Russia and Japan—and Somalia. I suspect that what many hear in it is self-affirmation, a toughness of sensibility equal to the toughness of the world.
Nature and Art, Music and Criticism: Andrew Bird, Noble Beast
One of the intriguing qualities of Andrew Bird’s work is what seems to be a core of serenity, beyond joy or sorrow, isolation or community; and I wonder if the quality of his attention—dispersed among his creativity and his responses to the beings and things of the larger world—is a key to that serenity: no single thing is his focus.
Musicians in the Poor Man’s Provence: fiddler Cedric Watson, triangle player Christine Balfa, and the band Feufollet
While playing some of the traditional music of the American south, the Creole and Cajun music of Louisiana, the creative artists Cedric Watson, Christine Balfa, and Feufollet, render that music as the exciting music of the present, of now: these musicians choose to honor tradition but are more inclined toward improvisation and invention than imitation.