Month: January 2019

A Good Old Circus

An inaction-packed couple of days leaves me little with which to entertain you peripherally–care to hear about my new crown or my crossing my own no-NFL-TV picket line?–so let’s get to the music.

Indeed, it is, as Al Johnson memorably sang (and still sings), CARNIVAL TIME! We always celebrate that in our house, and Sunday I lazily clicked on a YouTube playlist I made last February and ended up listening to the whole thing (at the expense of investigating any albums). It’s not half-bad, and it’s not just the well-known tracks, though those can be played endlessly. Let me offer it to you again–it features great songs from the above-pictured Nathan and the Zydeco Cha-Chas, Danny White, Lil’ Buck Sinegal, and Betty Harris (clockwise from upper-left). Bon temps roulez all the way into March!

Heroes are Gang Leaders: The Amiri Baraka Sessions

The 2018 American Book Award winners for oral literature go way out, around, and inside the life and work of Baraka. It helps to have some of the poet’s oeuvre under your belt, but it isn’t necessary–you live in this world. Poetry-with-music of both a volcanic and bitterly hilarious nature.

Interjazz IV: Good Old Circus

Skeptics say you can’t tell wide-open free sessions apart, but when Willem Breuker’s in the house, even a neophyte listener’s earbrows are sure to be arched by distinct features. That title is perfect. With drummers by the name of Moholo and Oxley cracking the whip.

Sir Shina Peters: Sewele

The newest offering from Strut Records’ Original Masters subscription series is the first juju record other than King Sunny Ade’s that I’ve ever heard. Though the keyboardist can overexpress himself cornily at times, Peters’ singing and guitar are more than within shouting distance of his more famous compadre.

Stax Singles Volume 4–Rarities and The Best of the Rest

One would think that by a fourth volume (and each is a multi-disc set) the compilers would be loudly scraping barrel’s bottom. Not so. Yes, there are some mediocrities, but the many delights (instro-rockers The Cobras–guy named Cropper on guit–Rufus Thomas delivering a miraculous “Fine and Mellow,” the Nightingales’ scintillating “A Little Overcome,” Hot Sauce covering Swamp Dogg, The Dixie Nightingale’s heart-stopping “The Assassination”) beach them in their wake. I am strange, but, not planning to, I listened to the whole thing in a sitting. Also: if you didn’t know, Jim Stewart and Co. recording a lot more black music than soul.

…and still out in my truck is good ol’ Sandinista! One thing I forgot to mention the other day is how wonderful it was that the boys shared their tracks with a church choir, a little kid, and Timon Dogg (humanistic, democratic outreach in action) and moved their vocals into the mix’s midrange. It annoyed the ever-lovin’ shit out of me when I was 19, but I was a dum-dum; I totally get it now, and it makes me smile! Miss ya, Joe.

Cubano Beatitudes

I’ve been in an unshakable jazz mood for the most part the last two days, with a nice boost from fellow phono phanatic and ace Cuban cook Jimmy Trotter. I’m telling you, if you’re ever in Fulton, Missouri, between 11 and 2 in the afternoon, find The Fulton Cafe and ask Jimmy what you need–he will tell you with great accuracy and verve, then serve it to you with relish. Yesterday? A Cubano sandwich for me, ajiaco for Nicole, and fresh fruit salad, sweet espresso and poached guava with cream cheese and crackers for us both! Damn, man! And on his visits back to the table to check on us, Mr. Trotter educated us on the band Acetone, which I will be reporting back on in a few days. As I left, I was moaning to him about physical media, and instead of commiserating like most everyone else does, Jimmy enthused, “It’s all about building the perfect collection, man.” Yeah. I digress, but when I got home I jacked the Cachao comp referred to below in the changer and cranked it, and went ahead and ordered that Patato & Totico LP I’d been hesitating about for three weeks.

For your listening pleasure, here’s a playlist sampling the records below–including the entire Cachao compilation.

Also, did you know Carnival season has begun? Get yourself loosened up Louisiana style with yet another Living to Listen playlist! Shuffle these 47 tracks and you will be lit and lifted.

Cachao: Master Sessions, Volume 2

The titular master’s tumbling lope drives these tracks, but guest Paquito D’Rivera’s alto sax and clarinet often shift the mesmerizing rhythm into a classical gear. Volume 1 is terrific, too, and dig Doug Erb’s cover art for both volumes!

Leonard Cohen: Can’t Forget

A weird live document consisting of mostly soundchecks, with the late scoundrel audaciously (not to say successfully) singing the blues and covering George Jones. Like his fellow “poet” Robert Zimmerman, he gets away with some serious shit.

Creation Rebel: Vibrations 1978-1982

Take several pieces of Prince Far I’s band–like a lot of instrumental reggae and Adrian Sherwood productions these leave me a little cold.

Global Unity Orchestra: Baden-Baden ’75

Check out the number of artists listed on the cover (and, of course, their names), and you might question how much orchestral unity is possible. Skepticism is good. But these folks have great ears, and the move as a team–it’s a matter of expanding your idea of unification. A turbulent, dense, and exciting session.

The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society

Cute, wry, attractively loose, tuneful, this album is certainly one of their best, and it’s got philosophical teeth, too. I was delighted to hear my wife humming along in the next room to several songs about impermanence. I wish “Days” had closed the original release, but at least it’s on my expanded edition.

Charles Mingus: East Coasting

A foggy, restrained vibe–in contrast to the hot, direct sunlight and nearly wild atmosphere of better-known Mingus sessions–conceals a classic unit (Hadi, Richmond, Knepper in particular) playing with great soul and power. One of the bassist-composer’s most underrated records.

Phineas Newborn: Fabulous Phineas

The deft-fingered wizard from Memphis delivers his first solo session, and quicksilver would be an understatement in describing this ’50s solo session.

Charlie Parker: Early Bird–with Jay McShann and his Orchestra

I wager many have checked this Stash-label recording out strictly as Bird-watchers and have come away gobsmacked by one of the best swing bands of the war years. McShann was the man for many decades; every American house should have a record the pianist plays on. The kind of blues Albert Murray vaunted as an aid to stomping out of the briar patches of life.

Jimmy Scott: Falling in Love is Wonderful

The album cover will not delight the #MeToo movement, but inside the jacket the man who influenced as many female as male singers is at his absolute best, stretching and bending a set of heartbreaking standards. With Ray Charles playing piano and label-head.

David S. Ware: Godspelized

That title is a bit awkward, but Ware, a tenor saxophonist of gravid tone and wide beam, takes outward stylistically and upward spiritually. No gospel covers, unless Sun Ra’s “The Stargazers” counts, but a call is being placed to the beyond. Featuring Ware’s frequent partners Matthew Shipp and William Parker, with Susie Ibarra on drums–no slouches they.

Mostly Catching Up, Partly Second-Guessing—and Remembering a Question I Usually Forget

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House-cleaning: catching up on items from last year that I either slept on or hadn’t given enough time. Due diligence: checking out a hot item from 2019 (that adjective ain’t mine–yet). Inspiration and research: diving deeper into the work of a player featured in last year’s Oxford American Southern Music issue, which you should buy–it’s chock-full of goodness. Vehicular study carrel: revisiting a friend from 37 years ago I didn’t appreciate enough.

Bad Bunny: X100 PRE

I’m not sure how bad because my Spanish ain’t so hot. That trap rattle is so pervasive I’m either gonna have to practice or punt.

Etta Baker: One Dime Blues

I’d heard Baker pick on a great Music Makers CD book companion, but a wonderful article in the above-linked OA sent me scurrying to this, which not only induced me to read while listening to it, but also beguiled me with fluid-but-ear-tickling picking ala Doc Watson and David Doucet.

The Clash: Sandinista!

Still growing on me after four decades. Lord, I was green and impatient in (at?) the mercy of rockism’s means when I pouted at it in ’81! I’m not sure even London Calling is as interesting as its follow-up, and the band’s continuing drive to grow and learn (mentally and musically) misted by driver’s eyes as I beheld it once again. They had brains (always), brawn (when they needed it), and big blood-pumpers–bigger than any punks I can think of from their time to now. Now: if I can just better judge every record by how likely I’ll be to be listening to it when I’m 95….

Hop Along: Bark Your Head Off, Dog

Kid’s songs are sharp, especially “One That Suits Me.” But that voice–I’m not sure it serves the songs like it could. Half-hector, half-hyperhiccup, it defies me like Kleenex, Joni Mitchell, and Corin Tucker don’t; perhaps that’s the point. But I find myself listening through her for not only the words but the band, which holds surprises.

Joshua Redman: Still Dreaming

I have had an irrational aversion to Redman since the days of his rivalry with my man James Carter. But damned if this doesn’t sharply honor his dad’s and Ornette’s method and sound; in fact, he’s so inventively, confidently languid it’s almost a new reality. And Brian Blade? Somewhere, Higgins and Blackwell are smiling from ear to ear. Who knows: maybe this offering will lure Carter out of the recording wilds?

Henry Threadgill: Double Up, Plays Double Up Plus

I’m sorry: I love Threadgill’s alto (he doesn’t play on this at all) and respect his compositions, but that harrumphing tuba irritates the shit out of me. My New Year’s Resolution is to be more honest with myself.

Thurst: Project Isle Demotion

Though these slackers’ new EP is slacker than Cut to the Chafe, its ventings are so inventive they may catch you up short. Just after you’ve begun to muse about Mark E. Smith after two songs about titular “fuckfaces,” they assay “Reading Poetry Over Noise,” which features stiffened short hairs and post-nasal drip, then close up shop.

Miguel Zenón: Yo Soy La Tradición

The 42-year-old Puerto Rican alto saxophonist is fully integrated here with the deft Spektral [string] Quartet, playing with fire, imagination, lyricism, and discipline and achieving an admirable balance between the jazz, classical, and folk music that informs the project. At about the time it threatens to lapse into gentility, some flamenco-ized handclaps snap them and the listener out of it.

2019 Opening Gesture? Canasta and Soul Serenades

I am an album guy, just like I’m a novel guy. On New Year’s Day ’19, Nicole and I drank screwdrivers, played four hands of Canasta, and loaded up the changer with smokin’ soul, mostly in the form of compilations. Today, I shook out the cobwebs with a Alvin Youngblood Hart-dominated movie soundtrack from years ago about which I knew zilch–and AYH is my man.

I hope whatever you serenaded yourselves with as you passed into the last year of the Teens was equally soulful.

Chitlin Circuit Soul

The blossoming of what they still call soul blues (’73-’97)–not quite as raunchy yet as it has gotten, but Bobby Rush’s “Sue” points the way (also starring Z.Z. Hill, Bobby Bland, Latimore, Little Milton, Millie Jackson, and Marvin Sease).

Dave Godin’s Deep Soul Treasures Taken from the Vaults…Volume 2

All of Godin’s comps are musts for soul fans who’ve just traversed the canon–here, the gems are underappreciated classics from masters like Otis Redding, Johnny Adams, and Irma Thomas as well stone eternals from the here-and-gone Wendy Rene, Eddie Giles, Doris Duke, Bessie Banks and Toussaint McCall. Better than Volume 1!

Aretha Franklin: I Never Loved a Man the Way That I Love You

Re’s voice and piano are Olympian–but King Curtis’ tenor and Jimmy Johnson’s guitar are very worthy escorts.

Funky Broadway–Stax Revue Live at the 5/4 Ballroom

I just finished Jonathan Gould’s excellent Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life, which has re-whetted my appetite for all things Stax. Here’s a 1965 package tour document from Los Angeles that’s uneven but exciting. No Otis or Sam and Dave, but the MGs, Mar-Keys, William Bell, and Rufus Thomas shine.

The Genius of Ray Charles

Really, not much soul here–it’s mostly standards (a rollicking “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Am I Blue,” a couple by Charles’ idol Louis Jordan), delivered with panache–but “Two Years of Torture” is the essence of deep cut and “Come Rain or Come Shine” is seldom anthologized. The guiding format for his ABC years is taking shape, and why would anyone have been surprised?

New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival 1976

Way out of print, but definitely worth tracking down. Toussaint, Dorsey, Thomas, King, K-Doe, and Parker all deliver the goods with conviction and sharp backing, Lightnin’ Hopkins strikes from Texas with three raw bolts, and the set closes with Fess rolling out magnificent versions of “Tipitina” and “Mardi Gras in New Orleans.”

Sam Cooke: A Man and His Music

Not counting the opener, written by God, and the closer, written by a transported Cooke just prior to his demise, most of this material, had it been sung by, say, a teen idol of the time, would have been revealed as pretty crappy. But it wasn’t sung by them.

Soundtrack to film The Great Debaters

Alvin Youngblood Hart is one of the most underrated blues guitar players and singers alive, and he’s never felt limited to the blues. I’d heard of but not seen the film this music was recorded for, and didn’t know Hart was involved. Involved he is, aided and abetted passionately by none other than Sharon Jones and the Carolina Chocolate Drops. The material’s pre-war gospel and offerings from the likes of the Mississippi Sheiks and Tampa Red.

The Stax/Volt Revue Volume 1–Live in London

More live Stax–March 1967. If I recall my recent reading accurately, this was the first time the MGs had ever played live behind these acts–cost-cutting was the motive, and Booker T and the boys were studio rats, normally. Here we do have Eddie Floyd, Otis, and a near-cataclysmic three-song closing salvo by Sam and Dave.

Sweet Soul Music–Voices from the Shadows

One of the greatest soul music compilations ever, assembled by Joe McEwen and Peter Guralnick as a companion for Guralnick’s just-as-great soul history of the same name. Like the Godin collection above (with which it shares a couple tracks), it is essential for listeners who’ve just kept to soul’s main roads. Honestly, as a whole, it aches, never more heartbreakingly than on George Perkins and the Silver Stars’ “Crying in the Streets,” the ballad of April 5, 1968.

Note: I would like to thank visitors for reading. I kind of fell off the cyberplanet for most of 2018’s second half, and I hope to appear more consistently in 2019.