Lizz Wright: “Fellowship”
My review of Fellowship– the latest album from the terrific vocalist Lizz Wright– is posted at CT.
Wright’s album, a collection of gospel standards and spiritually-minded rockers, comes along in a line of great gospel recordings from the likes of Patty Griffin, Mavis Staples, and, next month, Aaron Neville; all deserve consideration as some of the year’s best works, with Neville’s being quite probably my favorite of the bunch. Wright’s is very good, though: It took some time to win me over but I love how it throws gospel overtones into her signature blend of funk, R&B, and jazz. The nine-minute “Gospel Medley,” complete with handclaps, shouts, and Baptist piano, is particularly wonderful.
I should also say that Wright belongs on my Joe Henry wishlist.
Neil Young: “Le Noise”
We all pretty much assume– those of us familiar with Neil Young’s curmudgeonly sense of humor, and Daniel Lanois’ oft-intrusive production techniques– that the singer titled his latest album Le Noise as a sort of cheeky reference to his collaborator and co-architect of this new material. So let two things be known from the get-go. First, this is perhaps the least intrusive production job Lanois has ever done, save, perhaps, for some of his more recent Eno assists with U2. And second, the album’s title isn’t just a snarky acknowledgment of Lanois’ tendency to over-embellish; it’s a level-headed diagnosis of this album’s spiritual state, a reflection of the kinds of truths embedded within it.
I suspect that only Lanois could fully explain the technical specifications of this recording– he claims to have re-invented the guitar for this project, just the kind of pompous statement that might make one wary of his involvement, at least until the music is actually heard– but the logistics are simple enough. Le Noise is on the one hand a solo recording, with Young performing these songs by himself, and on the other an act of collaboration, with Lanois amplifying and looping and generally mucking up the sound of these recordings to make the album feel bigger, fuller, meatier than a one-man show has any right to. Only, he isn’t really mucking things up this time: His touches are rather stunningly light and even masterful in how they serve the songs, adding necessary flourishes of harmony and texture in the absence of a regular studio band. Solo record though this may be, it isn’t Neil in country-folk mode: This thing roars like a mighty ocean of pure volume and sound.
It’s focused in a way that not a one of Young’s albums from the past ten years has been. In a career that has lately been a long series of digressions– a genre exercise in Are You Passionate?, an idling concept record in Fork in the Road, a banged-out, blog-speed political manifesto in Living with War, a tailored “return to form” in Prairie Wind– Le Noise moves the singer/songwriter’s art forward with purpose and momentum. Its lean running time– eight songs, under forty minutes– suggests an economy that comes from intentionality, inspiration, and craft. Within its small-ish frame, though, there lurks a fascinating conundrum, with the album’s spectral and ethereal sound distinguishing itself immediately from any other Neil Young album but its basic feel and spirit being familiar: For all of its initial weirdness, Lanois’ embellishment actually highlights all the things that make Neil Neil, the chunky guitar riffs of “Walk with Me” providing a handy explanation of why Young has been called the Godfather of Grunge, the chopped-and-looped effects of “Angry World” doing nothing to mask what is a quintessentially Neil Young, country-rock melody. The latter is by far the most out-there thing here, with the rest of the album striking a profound resemblance to Brian Eno’s work with Paul Simon on Surprise, albeit far less radical; in both cases, a veteran producer creates a soundscape that is utterly foreign, but within that new environment the singer simply does what he has always done, the resulting album feeling at once fresh and familiar.
All of this is by way of saying, of course, that there’s more to this particular beast than just le noise: Its collaborative nature is a truly sympathetic and understanding one, with Lanois exhibiting a knowledge of who Young the Artist is and where he could go– presenting both Young and the listener with a case of looking back as a way of moving forward. Indeed, for all its bluster, what stands out about the record is its eerie sense of calm, the idea that the racket of Young’s guitar and Lanois’ feedback represents a sort of external chaos that leaves the singer internally unshaken. Lanois enforces this effect with the same reverb-heavy overhand he brought to, say, Dylan’s Time out of Mind, providing a sort of holy-moment clarity to these songs that puts Young in a reflective place even as the waves of sound crash all around him.
There is a quite literal looking-back in “Hitchhiker,” a track Young has been fiddling with for some time now, which recounts his own carer trajectory by measuring his own self-destructive impulses, specifically his stints as a junkie: As a song about addiction and abuse, it’s surgically precise and oddly stoic in its appraisal, Young sounding matter-of-fact both about his regret and the gratitude he holds for his faithful family. This song and “Love and War” are the ones getting the most attention, probably because they’re so explicitly autobiographical, but of the two I prefer the latter, a sort of Spanish guitar ballad (one of two acoustic numbers) that makes some amusingly self-deprecating allusions to Young’s political outspokenness; it’s a more reflective and humble song than anything on Living with War, and yet it offers no apology: Young regards his moral indignation now with a calm sobriety, but stands by every word he said.
The songs offer thoughtfulness and complexity despite being cut very close to the bone; Young’s songwriting suffers when he fusses over it too much, and here everything is primitive and howling. These songs don’t feel rough-draftish or improvised so much as they do instinctive, outpourings of the real, inner Neil during a moment of surrender. “Walk with Me” is very much this way, a bizarrely pissed-off sounding love song that only becomes clear in its motivation at the very end; Young mentions the grief that has accompanied him over the past year as he has buried two close friends, and in that context his aggressive pleas for intimacy and companionship take on a yearning, spiritual quality. So, too, does the next song, “Sign of Love,” a celebration of life-long fidelity and grace that doesn’t sound like it comes easy, but comes through hardship and determination.
Young intermingles worlds here, the personal slant of those opening numbers suggesting a level of spiritual metaphor, and ultimately giving way to something broader in its focus by the time he comes to “Peaceful Valley Boulevard,” which winds its way through American history and surveys the same anger and confusion expressed elsewhere on the record, but still sounds like it comes from a place of clear vision. The set ends perfectly and purposefully with a song called “Rumblin’”– a song about something stirring, within the singer’s own heart and in the world around him. Something is stirring, alright. Le Noise is the work of an artist whose best impulses no longer lie dormant; it is, in its buzzing and echo-laden way, quintessential Neil, and it’s also quite unlike anything he’s done before.
The stuff of Legend
I suppose I could just as easily have called this one “John Legend shows his stuff.” In case you’re not already aware, today marks the release of Legend’s new, album-length collaboration with The Roots on a bunch of 60s and 70s protest classics, a wonderful and winsome album called Wake Up! that, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, immediately catapults Legend to the ranks of his generation’s greatest soul singers, and proves him to be no mere R&B showman, but an artist of real ambition and, er, roots.
Evidently, though, my opinion is hardly a universal one. The album is getting lackluster reviews, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why. I’m not normally bothered when albums that I love don’t do well with the broader community of music critics, but in this particular case I find it to be both baffling and a bit troubling: It’s as if these people are listening to an entirely different record. I’ve seen the music here described as “toothless” and “declawed,” and even accusations that The Roots are “phoning it in.” How these critics can miss the passion that drips from every note of this thing– all the grit, the soul, the fire and the humanity– is beyond me. Few records in 2010 are as teeming with life as this one. And as for The Roots: They lock into soul-fired R&B grooves to kill for, they turn on a dime between funk and reggae, gospel and jazz, and they stir up one hell of a ruckus when the song calls for it. I would go as far as to say that no other band working today is capable of making music like this, on this level.
I’ve also seen it written that Legend is “self-important,” one assumes because he is taking on songs that deal with justice, poverty, inequality, war, education reform, and social change. In other words, some critics think that giving a shit about what’s going on in the world makes one “self-important.” Who knew?
For the record, I think this is much more than just a good throwback R&B album. I’d just about call it a masterpiece, easily one of the year’s best albums, and a new high watermark for Legend, possibly for The Roots themselves. Here’s just one of the reasons why:
Jamey Johnson: “The Guitar Song”
By double-album standards, The Guitar Song is decidedly non-conventional– and not just in the obvious ways. To be sure, the mere fact that this album exists– in 2010– turns standard practice in its head; when, after all, was the last time a major-label country music artist, existing comfortably within the mainstream, released such a sweeping work? It’s largely unprecedented in the modern day; aside from Vince Gill’s four-disc, completely in-a-league-of-its-own These Days, Johnson’s album stands as the champ, at least in terms of sheer ambition.
But even beyond the stick-in-the-eye this gives to the Nashville music machine, The Guitar Song is a damned ornery thing, a very bold and full statement that is sometimes difficult, always done on its own terms, and never really feels like a “double album” in the familiar sense. By that I mean that there has, in the annuls of rock and roll, been more to the double album than sheer length, with the bulk of the good and famous ones reveling not just in a sense of sprawl but also of liberation: Surely The White Album is noteworthy first and foremost for the dizzying creativity it displays, for its fractured and kaleidoscopic view of pop music where rules no longer apply– not simply for being the Beatles album with the longest running time. Sign ‘O the Times, meanwhile, is perhaps the great Prince album not because Prince sustains the same trick for a two-disc runtime, but because Prince’s bag of tricks is seemingly bottomless.
The Guitar Song is not a double album that revels in its wide-open boundaries or its sense of abandon. It’s not an album celebrating breadth, but depth: Johnson digs his heels in and goes about the noble and sometimes thankless work of craftman-like songwriting, burrowing deep into a very classicist and traditional vein of country music and carving out his own imprint there.
This is the hard stuff, plain and simple– country music with no frills and nothing fancy, squarely in the outlaw camp. The first two singles are actually among the biggest curveballs on the set– “Macon” is southern rock with gospel flourishes, and “Playing the Part” is a sort of neo-outlaw anthem with some small touches of modernity. There are strands of both of those things here, but for the most part the songs here go into a quieter, simpler direction– traditional outlaw country built on Waylon and Willie, with enough wrinkles to keep things interesting but no real stylistic excursions.
The luxuries here are ones of craft, then, not of style– meaning that there’s nothing at all flashy about this music, but that it’s very meat-and-potatoes, Johnson choosing not to change the winning formula of That Lonesome Song so much as cultivate it further, expanding it subtly but not really changing its essence. And so the set’s double-disc sprawl comes not from variety but from a sense of unhurried, unfussy work being done– of Johnson expanding his abilities not just as a songwriter but an interpretive singer with wonderful covers of Tillis and Cochran and Kristofferson; with many songs drifting well past the six- and seven-minute marks, sometimes with easy-going backporch strumming and sometimes with full-band jams; with Johnson putting his wonderful whiskey-soaked baritone to use in some spoken-word recitations, in true Porter Wagoner style– one of many tips o’ the cowboy hat to Johnson’s deep-seated country conservatism.
Indeed, that conservative streak may well be the album’s defining characteristic, and it extends not just to the music but to the songs themselves, which Johnson cuts very close to the traditional country bone. The record is a song cycle divided not-so-neatly into two parts– a “dark” album chronicling a descent into brokenness and sorrow, then a “light” one that deals more explicitly with redemption– but the album is as much a commentary on country songwriting as it is a philosophical exercise, with the songs dealing directly and earnestly with familiar country themes (there’s plenty of drinkin’ and cheatin’ and heartache on the first disc; on the second, love, God, and the South) and sometimes going meta, the title track being a country-fitted overview of life’s journey as seen through the eyes of pawn-shop guitars, and “That’s Why I Write Songs” serving as a sort of mission statement, an explanation, a defense, and a quasi-commentary track all at once.
Johnson’s devotion to craft– and the sheer length of this project– afford him the chance to actually dig deep into these themes, expanding on them patiently and profoundly over the record’s duration, which means that both discs take a little time to get going but become increasingly rewarding as they progress, and as the listener revisits them; by the time the first record hits an outstanding back-stretch that includes a staggeringly lonely and cold reflection on self-destruction (“That’s How I Don’t Love You Anymore”), a hilarious and grimly precise broken love song sung from the perspective of “Heartache,” a ruthless cover of Mel Tillis’ “Mental Revenge” that fits perfectly within this album’s framework, and a devastating, Haggard-styled closing lament called “Even the Skies are Blue,” it is indeed tempting to say that Johnson is doing his finest work yet.
I’m less enamored of the more philosophical numbers, and of the second disc in particular, precisely because Johnson’s hard-country conservatism begins to outweigh the real-world grit and gravity he brings to his weepies and laments. “California Riots” hates on the West Coast in a rather reactionary way, and represents a streak of back-to-the-South pride anthems that sound a little stodgy. “By the Seat of Your Pants” is the kind of genial little country number that Brad Paisley might write, life lessons wrapped up in down-home, cornball humor; stretched out past six minutes, it’s nauseating. “I Remember You” is the album’s token “spiritual,” a tired religious meditation that sounds like the twinkling background music at a Southern Baptist altar call; why couldn’t Johnson have instead stretched out further in the gospel-fueled direction hinted at by “Macon?”
I suspect, though, that for many country fans these songs will work better than they do for me, and in a way it’s hard to find too much fault with them: They are further expressions of the deep country roots that this album stretches into the soil, and if some material works better than others all of it feels like it’s anchored in tradition, in conviction, and in a sort of earned authenticity that gives The Guitar Song real grit. I couldn’t comment on the extent to which this material is autobiographical, but it is, at least, less explicitly so than the stuff on That Lonesome Song, which is perfectly fine: Johnson doesn’t suffer from a lack of country-music cred, and everything he does feels lived-in and sincere. That’s what makes The Guitar Song a distinct and rather marvelous thing: It isn’t only impressive in its reach but in its execution, in its focus and in its depth, making it a country music opus that challenges here and there but rewards in spades.
Grinderman: “Grinderman 2″
Its title suggests a sequel, but Grinderman 2 is more of an origins story. This is seedy, seamy rawk that erupts from the loins of its creators– an orgiastic onslaught of sex, violence, and sleazy middle-aged riffing.
The actual origins of Grinderman 2, it seems, lie in spontaneous combustion– a head-on, on-the-spot collision of improvised mayhem and barely-roped-in chaos, of impulses both staggeringly hip and dismayingly tasteless. You can hear Miles Davis (circa On the Corner) in some of the rhythms, Queens of the Stone Age in some of the slack-jawed riffing. You can hear Sly Stone funk and Howlin’ Wolf primordial blues. You hear psychedelia, drone, the most vulgar kind of garage rock. Mostly, you hear noise: Even more than its forebearer, 2 equates ecstasy with sheer volume, finding primal pleasure in out-and-out, in-the-red noise. The opening one-two combo of “Micky Mouse and the Goodbye Man” and “Worm Tamer” form a crude, unholy union of ear-bleeding, explosive violence; taken together, and in terms of sheer sonic assault, they’re the most epic Nick Cave music since “The Mercy Seat.”
You can talk about the music in terms of its influences, but it makes more sense to talk about it in terms of the way it moves. In that sense, though the music’s strange sensuality may come from multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis and his limitless supply of sawing violins and electric bouzoukis, the sheer physicality of this stuff comes from Jim Sclavunos, the drummer who seems to give the album is primitive, sexual thrust. He charges through the ever-escalating tempo of “Micky Mouse,” a nasty proto-punk slow-build, and brings malignant, death-metal ferocity to “Evil!” He gives a queasy, stoned thump to “Kitchenette,” a feverish slink to “Heathen Child,” a hypnotic anchor to the swirling “When My Baby Comes.” And then he drops out almost altogether for “What I Know,” its near-ambience seeming to float above everything else here.
The bump and grind of this stuff seems instinctive; there’s an animal-like spontaneity to it that makes it seem as though the Grindermen are simply giving in to their most base inner selves. But I don’t think that’s entirely true: Granted, the Grinderman umbrella has provided a sort of shelter for Cave and three of his Bad Seeds to do something a little more loose and primal than what they do with their full unit, and that looseness has spilled over into the regular gig, as well; Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!– so far the only post-Grinderman Bad Seeds record– was a howling good time, nasty and sexy and irreverent like no Bad Seeds record in a long time, and in a good many ways Grinderman 2 feels more like a sequel to that album than to the first Grinderman.
And yet, I would suggest that, if the album’s coal-black heart and filthy mind were born of its improvisational roots, its ultimate vision and structure were probably formed by Cave and producer Nick Launay (who also put the life into Lazarus) in the editing room– and that it’s neither as tossed-off nor as depraved as it first seems, its lupine ferocity and utter sonic decadence notwithstanding. There’s a real form to it, a sense of structure that suggests its nine-song duration is not because the band ran out of ideas before hitting a nice even ten, but because it’s a completed composition, a full-bodied statement with a definite beginning and end. “Micky Mouse and the Goodbye Man” feels like a black comedy until you realize how utterly serious it is; it’s a theme-setting, thesis-giving introduction to the rest of the album, a tale of two brothers that seems to take us to the very cradle of sex and terrorism, suggesting that the two are outgrowths of the same, most basic desires.
The flame of unchecked desire burns a big black hole clean through this record, and it’s generally less a lighthouse or a beacon than it is plain-and-simple arson. In “Worm Tamer,” it’s burned even love until it’s left black and charred; Cave rattles off sexual innuendos in a loose, Howlin’ Wolf narrative, and come-ons have never sounded so bleakly menacing or nasty. “Heathen Child,” though, is outright threatening. Cave plays a sneering, gleefully sordid lecher who casually spouts blasphemy as he circles his filthy lover; but when you come to a line like “you thought your government would protect you? You were wrong,” it’s clear that we’ve crossed from one kind of animal-like savagery to another.
Cave’s lyrics are peppered with men who know what they want and get what they want. Beneath its madcap cacophony, “Evil!” finds the narrator shouting himself hoarse trying to woo his lady; and while “I don’t need the stars, you are the stars!” might sound romantic on paper, what does one do with the ominous rise of the song’s titular refrain? Do predators, terrorists, evil men really start out so innocently as this? And what, indeed, does one do with “Palaces of Montezuma”– at first blush a love song as sweet and pure as any Cave has penned, and worthy of a man who wrote “Breathless.” Here, too, though, the singer’s noble intentions mask something sinister and decrepit lurking at the edges, desire giving way to imbalance, everything seeming to spin ominously out of control toward the song’s conclusion.
The Grinderman albums have both, it seems, been about misdirection: Blatant sex hides mid-age anxieties, noise cloaks melody, and, in “Kitchenette,” biting humor diverts attention from what is in fact a lethally serious focus on the crisis of modern marriage and family. Everything surrounding it employs much the same trick: The sheer lurid nature of the songwriting is shocking, but the shock is a buffer, for the real concerns of the album are not only serious, but frighteningly so. By the way: I should note that there are some sublime harmony vocals on “Palaces of Montezuma,” and that “Heathen Child” conjures some sounds that are, on a pure sonic level, true sensual delights. Beneath the ugly aggression, there’s beauty, there’s form, there’s craft. Put everything together and it’s bloody brilliant– dangerous rock and roll for those who prefer to laugh through their despair, and who know that the primal stuff can’t be ignored, no matter how depraved it may be.
John Legend and the Roots: “Wake Up!”
There’s a wonderful moment in the video for “Wake Up, Everybody,” stylish and real and pregnant with meaning, that summarizes rather nicely the spirit of Wake Up!, an album-length collaboration between John Legend and the Roots crew. The time is the early 1970s, and guest performer Common– in period attire, washed-out camera effects signaling a bygone era– steps through a doorway, rapping a short verse about the necessity of love to enact social change. When he emerges on the other side of the door frame, though, the scene changes: The color reverts back to present-day clarity, and Common is now dressed in the the style of 2010. Crucially, though, the song remains the same, uninterrupted.
Wake Up! is an album steeped in the music of the late 60s and early 70s; ?uestlove, an outspoken champion of vintage soul and R&B music, produces this thing in a way that suggests not just a passing interest in the fashions of the era, but a real devotion to its aesthetics and its ideals. But this is not a throwback, an exercise in nostalgia, or a monument to ages past. The concern here is for the present. This is, if you’ll pardon the pun, music with roots, and it does what any rooted thing ought to do: It draws strength and inspiration from the past as it confronts the challenges of its own time with a sense of perspective, of continuity with our heritage, of an understanding of what’s changed and what’s timeless.
I hate to think of it as a covers-record, so nuanced and distinct is its own identity, but that’s technically what it is. Legend contributes one original– the album-ending ballad “Shine”– but the rest of the songs here are protest songs from the 60s and 70s. Most of them will be unfamiliar to you; aside from Nina Simone’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free,” none of them are particularly well-known. They come from blaxploitation flicks that most of us have never seen, from obscure one-hit wonders long lost to the passage of time, from reggae journeymen who were never even close to hitting the mainstream. At the end of the album, ?uestlove picks cuts from names we know, but the titles remain elusive– as though he’s flaunting just how vast his internal musical encyclopedia really is. Surely “Wholly Holy” is not one of Marvin Gaye’s more well-known songs, and “I Can’t Write Left-Handed” is a rather amazingly deep cut from the Bill Withers canon.
These are songs that resonate, chosen not for their obscurity but for their relevance; that they are so obscure suggests only that they deserved another turn at the pass. Wake Up! is a strong-enough collection that they just might become the protest standards in 2010 that they never quite became back in their own day. Legend has noted that most of these compositions didn’t even need to be revised; there are songs about war, about the environment, about social inequality, about educational reform. Some of them speak explicitly to issues within the black community, but the implicit message of the album is that there aren’t any issues that are meant just for a particular group of people. We’re all in this together.
?uestlove– the album’s chief architect, one gathers from interviews and such– achieves an uncommon timelessness here that comes through an unorthodox means, by putting the vintage material on a collision course with the present day. The performers are more than capable of pulling off a note-perfect homage to 60s funk– see “Our Generation”– but a streetwise rhyme or two injects hip-hop energy, and what’s amazing is how thrillingly modern and engaged the song seems despite the retro-leanings of its production. At the same time, ?uest doesn’t feel the need to pile on hip-hop references on everything here; “Wake Up, Everybody” is a more perfect and pure invocation of the 60s, its orchestral flourishes signifying a very specific time but a very universal emotion.
That said, string and slickness don’t figure much into Wake Up!, an album that almost amounts to willing character assassination on Legend’s part. Those who know him as a smooth R&B ladies’ man will be shaken and thrown completely off balance by opener “Hard Times,” a greasy funk burner with a killer Black Thought cameo (one of two on the album, both of them scene-stealers) and a vocal from Legend that’s out-of-this-world in its grit and its sheer ache. He practically screams himself hoarse and never fully recovers even as the album progresses; ?uestlove forces the most raw, cracked performances possible from him, and it makes a convincing case for Legend as one of the great soul singers of his generation. But that’s nothing compared to the follow-up, a jam called “Compared to What” that’s so dark and greasy it could pass for a Sly Stone outtake from the There’s a Riot Goin’ On era, coupled with rhythms from Miles’ electric period. A sax solo in the song’s middle section is pure blues– the truth-tellin’-est sound to be heard on record all year, I suspect.
There are big risks here, both for Legend– who is not traditionally wont to participating in six-, seven-, even eleven-minute funk and rock work-outs, as he does here, nor to peppering his albums with jazzy piano improvisations or spoken-word segments– and also for The Roots, who one-up the instrumental virtuosity and musical eclecticism of their live shows and their Jimmy Fallon segments by focusing neither on sheer length or breadth but depth, making convincing and committed excursions into reggae and jazz that don’t pander with surface-deep genre signifiers but reveal full immersion in the music. And really, there is no other way to describe the eleven-minute outpouring of “I Can’t Write Left-Handed”– the most astonishing and epic material on record, either for Legend or The Roots.
What the album demonstrates, on the whole, is the commitment of the artists to making a protest album that’s honest, brave, and on the balance– something that can, will, and must reach people. There is real anger here, as there must be for something like this to work; calls to social change take on urgency after the opening one-two of bitterness and frustration in “Hard Times” and “Compared to What.” “I Can’t Write Left-Handed,” meanwhile, begins with compassion but turns purely to rage– not blind anger, but honest-to-God, real-as-shit moral indignation over the continued loss of lives in foreign wars. The full-on worth of this record is made on this song, less a protest song than an ethical imperative. That being said, a protest album simply doesn’t work without love songs: “Humanity (Love the Way it Should Be)” is as necessary to making this thing work as anything else here, a paean to brotherly love that contextualizes the concerns of this record not as hippy-dippy histrionics but simple and inarguable truths.
Legend’s turn on all this material is outstanding, and he’s fortunate to have The Roots backing him; the legendary hip-hop crew is having an inspired year, this project coming on the heels of their own How I Got Over, which is, among many other things, an album-length argument for perseverance– in and of itself– as a good and noble thing. Wake Up! works on a similar tack; the thesis of this one is of positivity as a good, necessary, and imperative thing regardless of circumstance– that really trying to make things better, to love our neighbor a little more and a little better with each passing day, is not an optional thing; to call this album vague, to accuse its hopeful spirit of lacking content, would be to miss the point entirely. It’s an album of real action that is every bit as important and profound as it ought to be– a by-turn harrowing and inspiring and ultimately rousing call-to-engagement that absolutely earns its album title.
Mavis Staples: “You Are Not Alone”
My review of You Are Not Alone– the new, Jeff Tweedy-produced album by Mavis Staples– is posted at CT.
This one just keeps growing in stature and richness the more I listen to it; honestly, I’m ready to call this the best-produced set of music Mavis has recorded, at least in the latter part of her career– and given that she’s worked with names like Joe Henry and Ry Cooder, that’s pretty high praise. She and Tweedy turn out to be not an odd couple pairing, but a match made in gospel music heaven.
New Orleans En Vogue
Not so very long ago, Paste ran a feature listing five great tribute albums devoted to the city and musical legacy of New Orleans– pulling off the neat trick of highlighting one of my own favorite musical trends of 2010 and supporting their argument with a completely separate set of examples than I might have picked. There have, to be sure, been a number of ambitious compilation albums celebrating New Orleans’ musical legacy, many of them pitched as straightforward, post-Katrina charity projects. And a lot of those records are pretty good.
My favorite Crescent City celebrations of the last year or so, though, have been a little less directly socially- and politically-tilted, instead simply celebrating the city and its musical past and present, their homage not explicit but inherent. So I’ve come up with a short list of my own: Six reasons why New Orleans is shining as bright and ever in 2010– and why the city’s music still inspires.
Trombone Shorty and the Galactic crew
To some extent these are interchangeable; Galactic released a new album called Ya-Ka-May in February which featured Shorty’s dynamite playing, and he released his own record as a bandleader a few months later, produced by Galactic’s Ben Ellman. On their own, the two albums are both dynamite, sharing the same Mardi Gras spirit and line-music festivity, the same metallic sheen but soulful center; together, they paint a picture of a city whose music scene is always looking forward. If you think New Orleans’ musical legacy begins and ends at Preservation Hall, think again; there’s music here– “sissy” rappers and bounce, mind-boggling fusions of jazz, pop, funk, and hip-hop– that, unless you’re a local and are especially hip to their scene, is probably like nothing you’ve heard before.
Dr. John
At the other end of the spectrum, here’s a man who embodies– more than anyone alive, perhaps– the musical heritage of New Orleans. And his latest, called Tribal, is a wonderfully complete synthesis of John’s trademark smooth soul and R&B, late-night funk and rock and roll swing. It’s a monument to the man, Dr. John, and to the city that inspires him– spiritual homage, musical history, wonderfully alive and in-the-moment recording.
Allen Toussaint
Ever since his post-Katrina collaboration with Elvis Costello– the tremendous, Joe Henry-produced The River in Reverse– Toussaint has become the patron saint of New Orleans music. He’s appeared as a featured musician on both the Galactic and Trombone Shorty albums this year, and brought a certain New Orleans flavor to the latest album from Cyndi Lauper. And his songs have appeared on– yep– Trombone Shorty’s album, but also Mavis Staples’ and Dr. John’s.
Treme
David Simon’s New Orleans-set HBO drama has done more than a little to elevate the standing of the city’s music scene in the broader culture; and if there’s any doubt about the communal nature of said scene, would you believe that an episode of the show features cameos from Costello and Toussaint, recording The River in Reverse? Or that the soundtrack album– due later this month, and featuring an outstanding of of traditional, spirited Crescent City brass and roots music– features contributions from not only some of the show’s cast members, but also Dr. John, Allen Toussaint, and Trombone Shorty?
Aaron Neville
The R&B legend turns toward old spirituals and gospel numbers for his latest, I Know I’ve Been Changed– but he also turns toward his New Orleans roots, recruiting– who else?– Allen Toussaint to anchor the studio band on a sturdy upright piano. The songs often sound like they could have been cut live on a Sunday morning in an old Baptist church, but Toussaint brings a bit of swing to the proceedings. Joe Henry produced this excellent set– and speaking of which…
Joe Henry
Henry seems as responsible as anyone in bringing Toussaint back into the public eye. He produced the Neville album, too, and is currently working on a New Orleans blues album with Hugh Laurie. Rumor has it a few of the city’s musical pioneers will show up to play along– and don’t be surprised if that includes a few names that are featured elsewhere on this list.
