Rock Is Dead, but It Won't Lie Down

Randy Newman: "The Story of a Rock & Roll Band" (from the album 'Born Again,' 1979)

2024-09-30T08:31:00.000-07:00

MARILYN MCCOO & BILLY DAVIS JR.: BLACKBIRD: LENNON-McCARTNEY ICONS (BMG)

2021-10-29T02:39:00.035-07:00

The weirdest all-covers album of 2021 (so far) comes from the Fifth Dimension alumni and perennial pop power couple Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. What makes Blackbird: Lennon-McCartney Icons strange isn’t its contents—eight Beatles favorites plus one apiece from solo Lennon and McCartney hardly qualifies as eccentric—or its quality. Serious thought has gone into the arrangements, especially the gospel one that enables Davis to turn “Help!” into a prayer.

What makes Blackbird bizarre is the attempt to pass it off as a Black Lives Matter soundtrack. The cover art surrounds the couple’s faces with names such as “Trayvon,” “Breonna,” “George,” “Emmett,” “Martin,” and “Malcolm,” implying connections that are tenuous at best, non-existent at worst, and misleading in either case. Strangest of all, the video for “Ticket to Ride” grafts the song onto Rosa Park’s Montgomery bus protest. Dedicating “The Fool on the Hill” to Maxine Waters would’ve been less of a stretch.

BOB DYLAN: SPRINGTIME IN NEW YORK: THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 16 1980-1985 (Columbia/Legacy)

2021-10-24T02:29:00.013-07:00

(A somewhat different version of this review appeared in WORLD magazine....)

What makes the five-disc Springtime in New York: The Bootleg Series Vol. 16 1980-1985 the most arbitrary of Columbia/Legacy’s Bob Dylan Bootleg Series installments to date is that what Dylan was doing in 1980 and ’81 had little to do with what he was doing in ’83, ’84, and ’85.

Making it more arbitrary yet is that, having exhausted his ability or desire to write and sing exclusively about Jesus, he ended up writing and singing about practically everything else, leaving fans with a pile of recordings never meant to endure public scrutiny through which to sift in search of inexplicably discarded gems.

And, Dylan’s being Dylan, they’ll find some.

How many they’ll find on Disc One depends on how much they enjoy Self Portrait. Like that odds-and-ends collection, these dozen tour-rehearsal recordings plus one Shot of Love outtake find Dylan revisiting songs from his own catalogue and debuting the impressive forbidden-love original “Let’s Keep It Between Us” while trying on traditional numbers and other people’s hits for size.

Some fit better than others. “To Ramona” blooms in a full-band context, “Mary of the Wild Moor” would’ve been at home on Good As I Been to You, and “Jesus Met the Woman at the Well” throws elbows. The songs originally made famous by Neil Diamond, Dion, Dave Mason, Little Willie John, and Michael Johnson, however, don’t fit at all.

The highlight of Disc Two’s Shot of Love outtakes isn’t an outtake at all but an alternate mix of “Lenny Bruce,” raising the question of why more such mixes, which have long been known to exist, weren’t included. (Maybe Sony’s saving them for a copyright-extending 50^th-anniversary Shot of Love bundle in 2031.)

Also not bad: the “Willie and the Hand Jive” re-write “Price of Love,” the “Heart of Mine” B-side “Let It Be Me,” “Don’t Ever Take Yourself Away,” “Borrowed Time,” and “Is It Worth It?” (which probably got axed because of its resemblance to “Dead Man, Dead Man”—and because Dylan cracks up mid-song).

The pickings get slimmer on the last three discs as most of what they contain ended up on 1983’s Infidels and 1985’s Empire Burlesque with less arbitrary (that word again) lyrics, better production, or both. Even the Shadows in the Night-anticipating cover of Frank Sinatra’s’ “This Was My Love” suffers from Dylan’s not yet having learned to sing such material with the necessary sensitivity.

In fact, knowing how to sing even his own material had by 1985 become an issue. Four years shy of the evocative lower register that he’d unveil on Oh Mercy, he often defaulted to the kind of braying that ruins both Disc Five takes of “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky.”

But sometimes he made the braying work. (See “Straight A’s in Love.”) And sometimes he reined it in. On both the alternate “Blind Willie McTell” and the full-length “Death Is Not the End,” his voice and harmonica generate a calm in the face of doom that truly passes understanding.

Nick Lowe SXSW Interview, Pt. V (March 21, 1998)

2021-03-02T17:43:00.005-08:00

I wanted to ask you about the album Nick Lowe and His Cowboy Outfit.

Oh, yeah. I love that album. Yeah, that wasn't a bad one. What was on that?

It had "Half a Boy and Half a Man."

Yeah.

"Maureen."

Oh, yeah.

And a quite incongruous song--but one of my favorites nevertheless--"L.A.F.S."

Oh, yeah (laughs).

That album got me back into you. Then, I was living in Seattle in '85, where KJET-AM had your redone "I Knew the Bride" in heavy rotation, further reigniting my interest in your music, which I'd lost track of from about 1980 to 1984. Did you ever do a video for that?

Yeah, we did. We did do a video for it, actually, and quite a sort of fancy video--in England, yeah. I never saw it. I think it was sort of in between two stools then because--it was too sort of--it was too old fashioned for MTV, and I'm not sure whether VH-1 had started then. So it never really got much play as I remember. It was quite a good video, quite a good one.

Back to "All Men Are Liars," I've often wondered what you think now about the Rick Astley verse.

I've felt very sorry about that. I really do. I really do regret saying that. At the time, I thought that [the Rick Astley song] was so awful. I just hated the sentiment of the thing. I know it's--I mean, maybe I was a little oversensitive, because you hear awful music all the time--"I'm never going to do anything horrible to you." I thought, "What? Can anybody sawllow this, that I'm never gonna do anything--?" Sorry, that was a lie. So, then, I thought, because it was a big hit at the time and it seemed as if Rick was on his way--he was gonna be churning this stuff out. But I regret it because I've since found out that, one, he's a very nice man--I've never met him, but they tell me he's an extremely nice man--and the other thing is that he's down on his luck a bit now. So I do feel rather bad about it because at the time I wrote it, he was huge and about to do more of it, so I thought he was a legitimate target.

Do you regret that in 1998 people may not follow the reference?

Oh, no. No, I'm kind of glad that they won't follow the reference actually. And that does happen more and more. I blithely make references about bands and artists from my generations to--I mean, obviously, you're younger than I am, but to some journalists I make these remarks, and I see their faces go creepy blank. You realize, "You've gotta get your references a little more up to date, my friend!" That's the way it goes.

What did you think of the John Hiatt song on Little Village, "Don't Think About Her When You're Trying to Drive"?

Oh, I thought that was a really good one. I like it quite a bit. Yeah, that's a really good one. And it was a funny thing, that, because--that Little Village thing--because when we did John Hiatt's record, obviously it was John Hiatt's record. He was in charge, he had the songs, and we were there to back him up. When you take away the front person and you have four people in there trying to create something, people are very reluctant to step forward somehow. If it's somebody's actual record, then obviously they are questioned and asked, "How do you want this? How do we play this?" You know. But when it's four individuals, all rather edgy about it, you come up with a kind of compromise. So John got, I think rather unfairly, got castigated for that thing because he sang so many of the tunes on it that people thought he was stepping forward and hogging the limelight, whereas in actual fact he was doing us all a favor by coming forward and saying, "Well, I'll do it. I'll jump in there." So it was unfair, that, I think.

You mentioned the way that old pop songs, like Cole Porter's, contained many subtle and sophisticated references. I wondered if when you wrote "Cruel to Be Kind" you were conscious of the phrase's Shakespearean roots.

No, I didn't know that it was a Shakespearean quote until people started saying to me, "Oh, what a brilliant thing you made up! 'You've gotta be cruel to be kind'!" And I started to say that it's a very well-known expression. Where I come from, people say it all the time, "You've gotta be cruel to be kind."

You didn't know it originated in Shakespeare?

I didn't know it was a Shakespearean quote. It was then that somebody said, "Well, it's actually from--" Whatever it is.

Hamlet.

Is it from Hamlet?

"I must be cruel only to be kind."

Brilliant. That sounds so much better though, doesn't it" (laughs)?

Nick Lowe SXSW Interview, Pt. IV (March 21, 1998)

ARCHERS OF LOAF: TOLSTOY'S LAST STAND

2020-06-25T01:08:00.006-07:00

Originally published in B-Side (April/May 1994)

During my years of writing for B-Side magazine, the editors imposed several silly style rules. One was to refer to musicians by their first names. (Had they interviewed Dylan, they’d have written, “Bob bristles when asked for the millionth time to explain ‘Desolation Row’”). Another was never to write “said” or “says” in a direct-quotation tag, even though writing anything else usually causes readers to pay undue attention to the verbs.

As originally published, the piece that follows adhered to those two rules. As slightly edited below, I’ve amended most of the quotation tags. I have not, however, changed the first-names approach because, oddly enough, it seems to work in this context. At any rate, I hope you enjoy what you’re about to read.

* * * * *

Those who track the movements of alternative music’s restless muse tell us that Chapel Hill, North Carolina, qualifies as one of several college towns in contention for the title of the “next Seattle” (a title formerly known as the “next Minneapolis” and the “next Athens”). These muse trackers cite as prime evidence Icky Mettle, the Alias Records debut of the sub-poppier-than-thou Chapel Hill racket makers Archers of Loaf, three of whom inaugurated their Christmas season by phoning this magazine from their manager’s house for a short winter’s chat and, simultaneously, watching Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer.

“Oh! Rudolph, the Red-nosed Reindeer with Burl Ives is comin’ on!” exclaims Matt Gentling, the band’s bassist, in the middle of his fellow Archer Eric Johnson’s explanation of how he makes his guitar sound like an air-raid siren on the song “Hate Paste.”

“That’s that little noise thing that Eric made,” observes the drummer, Mark Price.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” says Eric. “It’s a delay peddle—”

“The claymation bit!” Matt interrupts.

“He wants to know about my brilliance, guys!” Eric objects.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” says Matt.

“O.K. What I do,” says Eric, “for the kids out there—”

“I want to be a dentist!” Matt interrupts again, mimicking the misfit elf on TV.

“—who reads this can take my advice ’cause I’m a guitar—”

“Wizard,” says Matt.

“—connoisseur,” says Eric.

“What were you saying about the drummer?” says Mark.

Matt cracks up. Eric tries again.

“What I was sayin’ is—”

“Shut up!” shouts Mark.

Matt cracks up again.

You get the idea. One would hardly mistake an interview with the Loaf for an episode of Firing Line. “We might as well go ahead and warn you that we always confuse interviewers,” says Eric (whom we shall henceforth refer to as “Eric J.” to avoid confusing him with the band’s lead-singing lyricist, Eric Bachmann). “We’re very sarcastic. Beware.”

Back to the air-raid-siren guitar sounds on “Hate Paste.”

“O.K.,” resumes Eric. “What you do is you take the delay time and turn it all the way down, and then you take the repetition and turn it all the way up.”

“Then you get a dual motor crossover,” adds Mark.

“What you get is a sub-divided matrix,” adds Matt.

“What happens,” says Eric J., “is it’s impossible to have no delay time in a repeat. So the peddle just starts, like, makin’ all this noise, and if you have a fresh battery in there—”

“It’ll cook,” says Matt.

“—it’ll start screamin’, and boy does that get me off!”

Matt cracks up again.

“Print that,” says Matt. “That’s a good quote.”

One should not assume from such banter that “Hate Paste” is the only Icky Mettle track to feature skronky guitar sounds. Indeed, all thirteen songs—from the catchy, previously-available-as-45s “Web in Front” and “Wrong” to the downright entropic “Fat” and “Backwash”—bulge with the shrieks of tortured amps. But just as essential are Eric Bachmann’s weird lyrics and the plaintively hoarse way that he shouts them in a sometimes vain attempt to be heard over the aforementioned guitars. It was, in fact, the coming together of the two Erics in late ’91 that launched the entire Loaf concept, giving the quartet’s on-again, off-again involvement in various combos going back to high school a splattery, post-punk shape.

Eric B.’s absence on this night precluded questions about what he means when he sings lines such as “All I ever wanted was to be your spine.” But Matt, Mark, and Eric J. have plenty to say about their frontman nevertheless, starting with the “intellectual” look lent him by his wire-rimmed glasses.

“It’s his Russian-novel reading,” says Matt.

“He’s really into reading Russian novels,” says Eric J.

“He has a big tattoo on his butt that says ‘Pain,’” says Mark.

“Yeah, exactly,” says Matt, “because that’s—”

“That’s what it’s all about,” says Mark.

The trio’s discussion then moves on to the topic of Eric B.’s lyrics, lyrics that, although Matt, Mark, and Eric J. did not feel at liberty to discuss them, they discussed anyway.

“Um, I mean, we hate them,” says Matt, “and you can tell him that.”

“We try to keep them all the way down in the mix,” says Mark.

“We’re looking for a new frontman,” says Matt, “so if you have any suggestions—”

How about Randy Bachman?

“From Bachman-Turner Overdrive? He’d be a frontman-and-a-half. You don’t happen to know his number, do you?”

Icky Mettle hit the stands on September 13, approximately six months after Archers of Loaf signed to Alias Records. The Alias A&R man John Wells heard the band’s first single, “Wrong” b/w “South Carolina” on the Stay Free label, and came to see the Archers play. Before long, they’d joined the Alias roster. And although it was recorded in March 1993, Icky Mettle still represents, according to Eric J. and Matt, what the band does onstage.

“We’ve evolved,” says Eric J., “but not very far.”

“We’ve evolved from one side to the other,” laughs Matt, “not necessarily up or down.”

“I think we’ve gotten better.”

“Like, we’ve gotten a million times better, I think. But as far as the songs that we’re recording now, it’s weird. We have a couple of singles about to come out, and those are a pretty even mix of brand-new songs and really old songs.”

Broaching the subject of Eric B.’s lyrics again, Matt manages an at least half-serious appraisal.

“I like his lyrics because they’re pretty open to interpretation. Usually, they mean something personal to him, but you can’t get too specific about them because they weren’t intended that way, I don’t think, unless maybe for his own use.

“‘Web in Front,’ however,” he says on second thought, “does refer to an obscure Russian novel.”

The other news about the Archers has to do with the seven-week tour that they completed just after Thanksgiving. It amounted to their most extensive jaunt ever. And while it provided plenty of thrills, it also provided monotony and exhaustion.

“The first two weeks felt like four weeks,” says Eric J., “and then the third week felt like a week-and-a-half. And then the fifth week felt like just a week. The seventh week felt like three weeks.”

“So in total,” Matt calculates, “it felt as if we were gone six months.”

And for those who still need a reason to trudge out and see the Loaf when they next hit the road in the spring, the following observation might serve as the ultimate motivator: They sound a lot like the Replacements probably did between Hootenanny and Let It Be.

“When I went to high school, they were like my personal messiahs,” Matt recalls. “I worshiped them. They’re like a significant portion of my life. Yeah, that’s cool as hell, man. I don’t mind being linked with them at all.”

Nor should those interested in the sound of the next Seattle mind being linked with Archers of Loaf, whether by concert ticket, CD player, or a love for Rudolph.

MARCANTONIO BARONE - GEORGE CRUMB: METAMORPHOSES, BOOK I: X. THE BLUE RIDER BY WASSILY KANDINSKI

2020-06-23T05:30:00.000-07:00

MARCANTONIO BARONE - GEORGE CRUMB: METAMORPHOSES, BOOK I: IX. THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY BY SALVADOR DALI

2020-06-23T05:27:00.000-07:00

MARCANTONIO BARONE - GEORGE CRUMB: METAMORPHOSES, BOOK I: VIII. CONTES BARBARES BY PAUL GAUGUIN

2020-06-23T02:58:00.000-07:00

MARCANTONIO BARONE - GEORGE CRUMB: METAMORPHOSES, BOOK I: VII. CLOWNS AT NIGHT BY MARC CHAGALL

2020-06-23T02:51:00.000-07:00

MARCANTONIO BARONE - GEORGE CRUMB: METAMORPHOSES, BOOK I: VI. PERILOUS NIGHT BY JASPER JOHNS

2020-06-22T22:38:00.000-07:00

MARCANTONIO BARONE - GEORGE CRUMB: METAMORPHOSES, BOOK I: V. NOCTURNE. BLUE AND GOLD BY SOUTHAMPTON WATER BY JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLER

2020-06-22T22:23:00.000-07:00

MARCANTONIO BARONE - GEORGE CRUMB: METAMORPHOSES, BOOK I: IV. THE FIDDLER BY MARC CHAGALL

2020-06-22T22:13:00.000-07:00

MARCANTONIO BARONE - GEORGE CRUMB: METAMORPHOSES, BOOK I: III. CROWS OVER THE WHEATFIELD BY VINCENT VAN GOGH

2020-06-22T22:01:00.000-07:00

MARCANTONIO BARONE - GEORGE CRUMB: METAMORPHOSES, BOOK I: II. GOLDFISH BY PAUL KLEE

2020-06-22T21:45:00.000-07:00

MARCANTONIO BARONE - GEORGE CRUMB: METAMORPHOSES, BOOK I: I. BLACK PRINCE BY PAUL KLEE

2020-06-22T21:30:00.000-07:00

INFINITY GOES UP ON TRIAL!: A DOZEN MEMORIES OF THE BOB DYLAN RETROSPECTRUM, MODERN ARTS MUSEUM, SHANGHAI

2019-10-18T20:51:00.004-07:00

(Click to view the horizontal photos.)

NINE UNPUBLISHED REVIEWS (OF MINE) FROM 2018

2019-01-01T15:38:00.002-08:00

For one reason or another, the following 2018 reviews that I wrote for WORLD went unpublished. I present them here for your delectation.

43RD & EXCELLENCE

Aceyalone & DJ Fat Jack

“I’m old skool, so what?” announces Aceyalone at the outset, and he’s serious. There isn’t one of these 16 tracks that he couldn’t rap uncensored on network TV, and the music—yes, music—flows as smoothly as he does. How smoothly? “You do it, and you don’t think about it,” says a jazz interviewer in the context of discussing Coltrane (“Doing or Judging”). How old skool? Both “Saturday night, my name on the poster” and “Sunday morning, crab cakes, Mimosas” rhyme with “Love in my holster” (“Bang Bang”).

WILD MUSTANG SUITE

Charles Denler

The title of the second movement of this album’s title suite, “All Creation Breathes,” provides an apt metaphor for Denler’s expansive, windswept piano-and-orchestra music. Uncluttered enough to qualify as New Age but detailed enough to evoke the undomesticated grace of its equine subjects, it serves as a conduit for breath-like melodies that stop short of over-romanticizing by not lasting long enough to “over” anything. The average length of the 13 pieces: two minutes. The exception: an opening fanfare of which Elmer Bernstein would approve.

THE CHRISTMAS REVELS

Diego’s Umbrella & Friends

The season’s most earthily festive offering comes courtesy of musicians billing themselves “San Francisco’s ambassadors of gypsy rock,” although they’re more “gypsy” than “rock,” what with fiddles, rudimentary percussion, the Hanukah tango “Ocho Kandelikas,” the alms-giving round “Christmas Is Coming,” and a lustily sung “Lord of the Dance” making mincemeat of commonplace decorum. Only “Sleigh Ride” and “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas” fail the revel test. Everything else—the carols, “Auld Lang Syne,” and John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas” included—feels freshly and vigorously hewn.

UN NIÑO NOS ES NAÇIDO

Joel Frederiksen, Ensemble Phoenix Munich

The 19 selections by at least 16 composers (the Anonymouses and questions regarding who composed the infectious “Ríu Ríu Chíu" complicate the math) flesh out the subtitle: “Christmas Music of Spain and Latin America from the 16th and 17th centuries.” The four-part singing, like the period-faithful instrumentation and the texts, is reverently solemn but not severely so—“Dadme albricias” practically gambols. For that matter,

portions of Bartomeu Càrceres’s 10-song medley “La Trulla” (which combines Christological precision with, believe it or not, bunion humor) do too.

FOLKJUL II: A SWEDISH FOLK CHRISTMAS

Gunnar Idenstam, Ulrika Boden, Sandra Marteleur, S:t Jacobs Kammarkör

The metaphysically suggestive sonorities of nine of these 17 selections arise from the 28 dynamics-spanning voices of Stockholm’s S:t Jacobs Kammarkör and Gunnar Idenstam’s rumbling Allen Q350 digital organ. The metaphysicality of the changes of pace, whether sprightly or hushed, owes a good deal to the lithe expressiveness of Ulrika Boden’s voice and Sandra Marteleur’s violin. “In dulci jubilo” provides the melody most likely to be recognized by non-Swedes. The full-ensemble rendering of Martin Luther’s “Från himlens höjd” will leave even the garrulous speechless.

SOUL FLOWERS OF TITAN

Barrence Whitfield & the Savages

Peter Greenberg (guitar) and Phil Lenker (bass) continue to supply most of the originals. Together or apart, they account for one third of these raucous, headlong plunges into the heart and soul of rock and roll. Whitfield, meanwhile, remains more than happy to shout his way to their core and out again. That’s “out,” incidentally, as in “far out” if one is to take Greenberg/Lenker’s “Let’s Go to Mars” literally. Of the covers, the Willie Wright beats the Hank Ballard, and the Finley Brown beats them both.

SILENT NIGHT: EARLY CHRISTMAS MUSIC AND CAROLS

Arianna Savall & Petter Udland Johansen, Hirundo Maris

Hirundo Maris is an early-music/folk-music ensemble co led by Savall and Johansen, who get top billing because, in addition to playing harps (Savall) and the Hardanger fiddle and mandolin (Johansen), they do the singing (in multiple languages, no less). But while the purity of their voices makes an ideal vessel for lyrics celebrating the virgin birth of Christ, what most evokes the unigue mystery of the event is the sounds of their bandmates’ citterns, flutes, whistles, border pipes, mute cornetts, dobros, bells, claves, and ayoyotes.

ENCORE

Andrew W.K. is a one-man power-of-positive-thinking movement, accessorizing his power-metal career with motivational speaking and an advice column. But despite the simplicity of his message, it could use a glossary. By “party,” for instance, he means “Celebrate life.” By “devil,” he means anything negative that makes people stronger because it hasn’t killed them. “After all,” he says in one of the spoken interludes on his new album, You’re Not Alone (Sony), “these ups and downs aren’t here to hurt us. They’re here to thrill us, to make the rollercoaster ride of life even more interesting and spectacular.”

Deep? No, and utterly without grounding in any philosophical or theological framework as far as W.K. takes it. The thing is, he admits as much, even titling one new song “I Don’t Know Anything.” It’s this open-hearted simplicity that makes one want to root for him—and his music an ideal soundtrack for doing so.

ENCORE

Between the extremes of Mariolatry on the one hand and, for lack of a better term, “Mariphopbia” on the other is the honor due Mary by followers of her Son who would perfect their imitation of Him in all things, including His observance of the Fifth (in some traditions the Fourth) Commandment. It is in this spirit that many of the “Ave Maria”s, “Salve Regina”s, “Regina Coeli”s, and “Stabat Maters” were composed, and it’s that spirit that those compositions can fortify.

Available as 54 tracks on four CDs or as 61 downloadable mp3s, Warner Classics’ Radio Classique: Ave Maria—Les Plus Beaux Chants Sacres compiles performances circa 1961-2014 of works spanning every century from the 14th (the Llibre Vermell de Montserrat) to the 20th (Natalie Dessay singing Philippe Rombi, various choirs singing Rachmaninoff, Poulenc, Jolivet, and Davies). Over half of the texts derive from Luke 2:28 and 1:42. They’ve seldom sounded so rich for so long.

POEM: "NO QUESTIONS, NO DINOSAURS"

2018-04-15T05:20:00.005-07:00

1.

No noon rest, no quiet tinder
No squirt rinse, no red squid
No taurus resin, no equus suds
No disaster sounds, no noise donors

No inside oats, no susan diets
No norse tunes, no neat stains
No quota trains, no tin nuns
No nation rust, no treason ruts

No sin dross, no sand daisies
No raisin squares, no sinus rain
No drain rent, no stasis dunes
No dirt rants, no oars arouse

No notions, no rinds, no turds, no dinner
No quest, no noses, no trends, no sequiturs

2.

The land is too dry
for planting, and our crops are
burning in the field

__________________________________________

(As published in the second issue of American Writing [1990], wherein it was misattributed to "Arsenio Ortega." My first published poems in over a quarter of a century can be found here.)

My 1994 Interview with Maria Muldaur Is Finally Online...

2018-02-16T19:19:00.001-08:00

... here: Maria Muldaur: THE DOOR Interview (November/December 1994)

CHARLES DENLER: THE COMPLETE Q&A

2016-07-24T16:50:00.001-07:00

In the July 31, 2016, issue of WORLD magazine, I published a feature titled "Sound of Solace," based on an interview that I conducted via e-mail with the composer Charles Denler about his latest album, Moment at Dawn. With Denler's permission, I present the (almost) complete text of our exchange below.

In one e-mail to me, you wrote, “I am a Christian composer….” What does that term mean in your case?

When I was a freshman in college studying music, my parents came to visit me. I remember wondering why they would drive all the way to Boston on a Sunday afternoon. They had come to tell me that my younger brother had been killed; he was only sixteen. In my brokenness I found Christ. I would consider myself to be a conservative Christian. I was a worship pastor for nearly fourteen years before I felt God leading me into writing music for film, television, and the concert stage. I start each day with a three-to-four mile walk. This is where I meet with God, and it’s where I feel His presence the strongest.

With what church were you a worship pastor?

I worked with four main churches over the span of fourteen years: The Worship Center (Hebron, CT) Shiloh Christian Center (Sierra Vista, AZ) New Life Christian Fellowship (Glastonbury, CT) First Church of Christ (Wethersfield, CT). We now live in Colorado and attend Jubilee Fellowship Church in Lone Tree Colorado.

If you had a Wikipedia entry, what details would the section titled "Personal Life" contain?

I was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and I grew up in the town of Marlborough, Connecticut. My beautiful wife Kay, and I have been married for twenty-four years. We have two incredible children, and we live in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Our house sits at the edge of a wildlife sanctuary

with breathtaking views of the Indian Peaks from our back porch. This has been my muse for many years. Along with being a composer, I am also a music professor at Colorado Christian University in Lakewood, Colorado.

On the back cover of Moment at Dawn, why do you include the Latin phrase meaning “for my father” under “all music composed by Charles Denler”?

Almost all of my music has been inspired by God’s handiwork in nature. His signature is all over creation. It just makes sense to dedicate my work to Him.

The back cover of Moment at Dawn also reads, “Excerpts from the live premier of Portraits of Colorado, An American Symphony No. 1….” Where and when did this live premier of the complete symphony take place?

The live premiere of Portraits of Colorado, An American Symphony No. 1 was on May 31, 2013, at Boettcher Concert Hall in Denver, Colorado.

The back cover also reads, “Portions of the original symphony have been rewritten, re-orchestrated, and re-named to more accurately represent the composer’s initial design....” Does this disclaimer mean that some [much?] of Moment at Dawn was recorded or re recorded in the studio and not at Portraits of Colorado’s live premiere?

All of the pieces were embellished after the premiere with synth textures to add depth to the music. This was done in my studio. I recorded track seven, "Another Day," with the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra after the premiere in Denver.

At what point in the life of Portraits of Colorado did you decide to “carve out” excerpts and reshape them into a separate, stand-alone suite?

Portraits of Colorado was initially recorded prior to the live premiere to be used in television commercials promoting Colorado’s amazing beauty. Colorado Tourism funded all of the recordings, and their campaign was incredibly successful. The ten-movement symphony was released on the Reference Recordings label to classical radio. I really felt that the music needed to be heard outside of classical circles to reach its full audience. I approached the record company and asked them if I could use the music from the live concert as a new release for instrumental and new-age radio. They were very encouraging and gave me a green light. I spent the fall of 2015 mixing, recording, and embellishing the tracks. The new album was released in January and has reached #10 on the ZMR radio spin charts. My goal with the new album, incidentally, was to present an image of hope.

Why present the world with a 36-minute “image of hope”?

Have you ever been through something that felt like a night that never seemed to end? Just when you were almost ready to give up, you noticed that the sun was beginning to peek over the horizon, announcing the advent of another day. Moment At Dawn is that moment when you suddenly realize that you have made it through to the other side, and you're going to be O.K. I endeavored to create an album that reminded me of the hope, the promise, of another day.

What decisions about the makeup or the sequencing of Moment at Dawn’s 14 individual pieces did you make to enhance their “hope-miming” qualities?

The music had to have a depth to it, something bigger than I could create with a live orchestra. A really low C can only be reached on a contra bass with an extension. This low C has a wonderful, deep, acoustic feeling, but it was just not low enough for me. I needed to hear a low Bb two octaves below that lowest note on the piano keyboard. This effect could only be achieved by sampling the bass and dropping it off the staff. The songs on the album move between orchestra pieces to intimate piano and violin solos. I wanted the listener to feel the ebb and flow of life in the music: big grand moments to intimate times of beauty and solitude.

You play the piano and the synthesizers on Moment at Dawn. Did you ever consider turning this role over to another musician? In other words, was there a reason that you wanted your fingers to be the ones that played the keyboards?

It takes hundreds of hours to prepare for a concert. It would honestly be a huge relief to have another pianist play at my premieres, but I have always felt that God has wanted me at the piano to minister. During the live concert premiere, people were weeping in the audience. Being there for them means everything; it is important that I make that connection.

You’ve said that Moment at Dawn has been labeled “new age-classical fusion.” Does this label mean anything to you?

I have always found it difficult to categorize my music within a specific genre. Recently, the album won a gold medal at the Global Music Awards. They labeled the music as "new age-classical fusion," and the radio stations seemed to agree. I imagine that the term "neo-classical" might also apply. My music tends to have an ambient textural feel mixed with thematic recurrences. Theme and variation are a strong component in my writing. I tend to use motifs as a way of telling a story and creating synergy within a larger work.

With which composers do you feel the greatest kinship? Given the “American” nature of Moment at Dawn, one might suspect that you see yourself descending from, say, Aaron Copland.

There are so many amazing composers. I spend about an hour each day studying the works of the masters. This has been my practice for nearly thirty years. I have always admired Aaron Copland. His music taught me that dissonance in small amounts is beautiful with a quick resolve. Brahms showed me how amazing thick, dark, chordal structure works within the strings, and John Williams taught me that melody is king.

What led to your soliciting cover art from Jerry Malzahn? Had you simply seen and liked his work, or had you already known him?

I had met Jerry Malzahn very briefly about five years before I wrote my first symphony. He was a renowned Colorado landscape painter with works in the White House. When I was commissioned to write the symphony, I started downloading his paintings and hanging them all over my studio for inspiration. After a few months, I started feeling guilty about downloading his work, so I decided to call him. I told him that I had been downloading his work, and he got really quiet on the phone. I wasn’t sure if I had offended him. Then he said, “That’s amazing because I have been listening to your music as the inspiration for my paintings.” We have been collaborating ever since! He is a dear Christian brother in Christ.

Of your numerous credits, which of the projects that you have been involved with has brought you the greatest satisfaction as a composer?

A few years ago, I was asked to score the music for a film with Richard Gere* called Teenage Witness. This PBS documentary was about a Holocaust survivor named Fanya Heller. I was moved to tears. My family has some Jewish roots on my father’s side. It was a very difficult but incredibly rewarding film to work on.

Ennio Morricone is one of few composers to enjoy a reputation both as a scorer of films and as a serious composer. Are there any misconceptions about what you do and how you see yourself that you would like to dispel?

People often feel that composers need to be categorized-- classical composers, film composers, modern composers, etc. I am just a composer. Sometimes my music is heard on the concert stage, and sometimes it is heard on a TV or in a movie theater. All that matters to me is that I am reaching my audience. Where they happen to be sitting is of no importance.

Moment at Dawn is available on iTunes, all major web outlets, and at charlesdenler.com.

_______________________________________

*I.e., narrated by Richard Gere

Remembering the Late John Fred

2015-07-01T18:55:00.002-07:00

(As published in the May 4, 2005, edition of the Times of Acadiana...)

When John Fred (Gourrier) died from kidney-transplant complications on April 15 at the age of 63, a chapter in the history of Louisiana blue-eyed soul and frat-rock R&B officially came to an end.

I say “officially” because the John Fred chapter had, for all practical purposes, come to an end 35 years earlier, when the momentum generated by the Baton Rouge native’s “Judy in Disguise (with Glasses),” a chart-topping novelty song in 1968, finally ran out. A catchy and goofy spoof of the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Judy in Disguise” made Fred a star and a one-hit wonder simultaneously. And, as all one-hit wonders know, their only options are to accept their 15 minutes of fame or to attempt to recreate their one hit in various, um, disguises.

So it was that just one year, when Fred signed with MCA, his first single was “Silly Sarah Carter (Eating on a Moonpie).” With its snappy, horn-punctuated tempo and titular heroine (with ellipsis), it was obviously “Judy in Disguise” in disguise. And, as would later be the case with Walter Murphy’s follow-up to “A Fifth of Beethoven” (“Flight ’76”) and Rick Dees’ follow-up to “Disco Duck” (“Disco Gorilla”), “Silly Sarah Carter” bombed. By 1971, Fred and his band, originally the Playboys—and later “His Playboy Band”—were kaput.

About the name game: Although Fred had christened his group the Playboys as early as 1956 (after Hugh Hefner’s then ground-breaking magazine), he eventually changed the name to avoid being confused (or perhaps litigiously involved) with the more popular but by no means more talented Gary Lewis & the Playboys.

In recent years, archival and new John Fred recordings have appeared under both names. In 1991, Shreveport’s Paula Records issued a 26-track best-of titled The History of John Fred & the Playboys. Then, in 2001, Varese Records issued the 17-track Absolutely the Best of John Fred & His Playboy Band. (Get the Paula disc if you can; although both compilations contain “Judy in Disguise” and the best song Fred ever recorded, the reflective “Sometimes You Just Can’t Win,” only the Paula disc cottons “Mary Jane,” a hazily psychedelic tribute to a certain herbal intoxicant that ranks alongside Neil Diamond’s “Pot Smoker’s Song.”) In between, Club Louisianne issued some “unreleased masters” credited simply to “John Fred.”

As if to set the record straight, Fred released Somebody’s Knockin’ (TJ Records) in 2002, an album of all-new recordings credited to John Fred & His Playboy Band. The only problem was that printed atop the stationery that he was using at the time was “John Fred & the Playboys.” I know because with my review copy I received a handwritten note that read, “Would you please review my CD in your newspaper? Thank you. John Fred.”

The aforementioned Club Louisianne album, by the way, was titled I Miss Y’all.

Now it’s our turn.

Henry Gray: Still Howlin'

2015-06-26T11:14:00.000-07:00

(As published in the August 4, 1999, issue of the Times of Acadiana...)

A perusal of any ticket-selling website shows that there’s no shortage of musical living legends on the road these days. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are playing together for the first time in more than a decade, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon for the first time ever. The problem is that anyone who wants good seats at both shows will spend a total of $190.50—$381.00 if he brings the wife, $827.25 if he adds the two-point-five kids.

The good news for people with both a mortgage and a taste for legendary concerts is that the Summer Cultural Arts Series by Henry Gray at the Lafayette Middle School auditorium this Sunday afternoon costs absolutely nothing. Backed by Andy Cornett (bass), Brian Bruce (harmonica), and Earl Christopher (drums)—a.k.a. the Cats—the 74-year-old Baton Rouge pianist and veteran of the Howlin’ Wolf group will roll out an hour-long set of the music that’s made him one of the world’s most in-demand blues musicians.

Henry Gray was born on January 19, 1925, in Kenner and grew up in the town of Alsen. By the age of eight, he’d taught himself piano, and by 16 he’d begun playing with a band in a local club. Although he joined the Army two years later and eventually saw combat in the Philippines during the last years of World War II, he continued to hone his musical skills in USO shows by playing rock-and-roll and rhythm-and-blues. “The same thing I play now,” he recalls. “They love it today, and they loved it then.”

Upon his discharge, Gray moved north to Chicago and fell in with a burgeoning electric-blues scene that would transform rock-and-roll 20 years later when approximated by the Rolling Stones. By the time he joined the Howlin’ Wolf band in 1956, he’d spent a decade making a name for himself both as a session musician (having recorded with Jimmy Rogers, Jimmy Reed, Junior Wells, and Willie Dixon) and as a live performer (with Bo Diddley and Morris Pejoe). When he left Howlin’ Wolf in 1968, he’d etched his name in blues history. Since then he has maintained that place with a performance schedule that would exhaust many a younger man.

It was at a club performance in Baton Rouge during the early 1970s that Gray first met Andy Cornett, the bassist and harmonica player who would eventually become his manager. “There were people like Tabby Thomas, Guitar Kelly, Silas Hogan, and Moses ‘Whispering’ Smith,” says Cornett, 49, who now resides in Lafayette. “Henry was playing piano, and he was amazing. Between sets we were both meandering in the crowd, and I kept thinking, ‘I ought to go up to him and tell him I really like his stuff.’”

Suddenly, Cornett bumped into someone, turned around, and found himself face-to-face with the great man himself. After a brief exchange—in which Cornett admitted that he played harmonica and guitar “a little bit”—Gray offered a hearty “Keep it up, man, keep it up” and shuffled off.

A year later, the two met again. “They had him playing at LSU in the Student Union building for Black History Month,” says Cornett, “and he was ripping it, man! He took a break, and I went up to him. I said, ‘How are you doing, Mr. Gray? You remember me?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I remember you. You playin’ harmonica still?’ I went, ‘Damn! That was pretty amazing to me.” Cornett, harmonica in hand, asked to sit in, and Gray said O.K. “We locked in,” says Cornett, “and we really ain’t looked back since.”

The Gray-Cornett combination has proved mutually rewarding. Cornett has had the pleasure of performing with his hero, and Gray has benefitted from Cornett’s organizational skills. Cornett not only set up a steady backing band for Gray, who dislikes performing solo, but also has kept Gray in the public eye by scheduling tours and recording sessions like the one in 1988 that resulted in the Blind Pig album Lucky Man.

Lucky Man elevated Gray’s public profile, but those closest to him think that it fell short of doing Gray justice. “I don’t think it was a well-produced record,” says the veteran British slide guitarist Martin Simpson, who has performed with Gray off and on for the last 10 years. “I don’t think it represented what Henry really is.” Brian Bruce remembers that he and Cornett had sent Blind Pig a tape of Gray with the Cats but that the label’s producers thought that they could get a better record out of him themselves. “They did their take on Henry,” says Bruce, “but it wasn’t Henry in his element.”

Gray’s element, according to practically everyone who has seen him perform, is the stage. To this end, Cornett organized a Henry Gray show last March at the Grant Street Dancehall that not only brought Gray together with Martin Simpson again but that also brought Simpson together with his Acadiana slide-guitar counterpart Sonny Landreth. One result was Live: The Blues Won’t Let Me Take My Rest, a 15-song, 73-minute CD of the evening’s highlights with which Cornett hopes to attract the attention of a record company capable of promoting it as the major blues release that it is. (Those disinclined to wait can order it at http://bayouweb.home.mindspring.com/grayweb/henry1.htm.)

“We spent about three years trying to put this together,” says Bruce. “We have a number of different recordings from different clubs, but there was always something that didn’t work. This one made it.”

“We had been talking for a long time about doing something that we had complete control over,” adds Cornett, “and it worked. The night was amazing, and we were able to capture it.”

Cornett and Bruce are not alone in their enthusiasm. The album has yet to be officially released, and already the blurbs are piling up. “His piano and voice are in top form as he boogies, shuffles, strides, and plays straight 12-to-the-bar blues,” says the Louisiana Music Factory’s Jerry Brock. “This new CD is delightful and is a great addition to my collection,” says the Saphire Uppity Blues Women’s Ann Rabson. “These are raw, deep blues, musically unpredictable and unfettered.”

Gray's own assessment of the album is terser. “It’s all right,” he says. “It came out pretty good.”

It’s a hot July afternoon, and Gray is relaxing in the living room of his Baton Rouge home after a month-long European tour. His popularity abroad, which is considerable, has a downside. While it enables him to make more money in a month than most other 74-year-old men make in a year, it also requires him to submit to rigors that musicians half his age have been known to find taxing. “They want me to go back to Europe in September,” he says, “but I don’t think I’m going. I’m tired.”

According to Gray, the most tiring parts of a tour are the amount of sleep that he gets (“hardly none”) and the riding (“Travel all day and play half of the night”). Then there’s the availability, or the lack thereof, of sidemen. On this latest tour, he was paired with the Marva Wright band for three weeks, but he also did a week of solo gigs. “I’ve played by myself all over the world,” he says, “but that don’t mean to say I like it. By yourself is a killer. I like to be with somebody.”

Last July Gray made headlines by performing for Mick Jagger. It seems that the head Rolling Stone had requested the presence of the Legends of Chicago Blues—an all-star ensemble featuring Gray and other original members of the Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Little Walter bands—at his 55th birthday party, and the American Legends concert promoters were happy to oblige.

In addition to Gray, the Legends of Chicago Blues include Dave Myers and Little Smokey Smothers (guitars), Abb Locke (sax), Mojo Buford (harmonica), Bob Stoger (bass), and Willie “Big Eyes” Smith (drums). Together they attended the Rolling Stones concert at the Stade de France in Paris before proceeding to the hotel at which Jagger’s private birthday party was held. That the Stones had made their initial splash by covering songs such as Howlin' Wolf’s “Little Red Rooster” and Muddy Waters’ “I Just Want to Make Love to You” made the hiring of the Legends seem almost like a belated thank-you gift.

At one point, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, and members of the Stones’ extended stage band joined Gray and company for an impromptu jam, after which Richards was heard to exclaim, “This band is the shit!” Coming from Richards, such praise was high, probably in more ways than one.

As with most aspects of his career, Gray has little to say about partying with Jagger. (Q: [Coaxingly] “That must have been some party.” A: “It was.”) When pressed for reminiscences, anecdotes—anything—from his dozen years with Howlin’ Wolf and his 20 years as a member of Chicago’s blues elite, all he’ll say is “I don’t know stories. They was all nice to me.”

The one subject he will discuss is money. Why did he leave Morris Pejoe in 1956 for Howlin’ Wolf? “More money. I wanted money. I needed money. So I did it.” Why, although his résumé includes playing spirituals in a Chicago church, does he avoid playing gospel music in his shows? “I don’t get paid for that. I’ve never made a dime on gospel. I get paid for playing the blues. I’ve got to eat too.” What advice does he have for young musicians? “I would tell them to listen to the blues if they want to make some money. There’s nobody that wants to listen to rock-and-roll but teenagers. Old folks, they don’t want to hear rock-and-roll. They want the blues.”

Gray is wrong about a couple of things. First, there is money in rock-and-roll. (Just ask Ticketmaster employees about Bruce $pringsteen and Paul $imon.) Second, old folks aren’t the only ones who like their blues Gray. Tab Benoit’s duet with Gray on “Too Many Dirty Dishes” is a high point of Benoit’s 1997 live album Swampland Jam. And Kenny Neal, the son of Gray’s fellow Baton Rouge bluesman and occasional touring partner Raful Neal, sings a killer lead vocal on “The Red Rooster,” a track from Telarc’s Grammy-nominated Tribute to Howlin’ Wolf, on which Gray performs.

But Gray is right about a bluesman’s needing to watch his wallet. “These old guys have seen too much,” says Cornett, who once had to tell a record company that Gray was blowing off a scheduled recording session in favor of a European tour that paid better. “You know, too many promises, not enough money.”

Sit with Henry Gray long enough, however, and something besides the love of money glints from beneath the cracks in his facade. Labeling that something can be difficult, but it’s at the root of what makes musicians treasure the memory of their first encounter with him. “At the end of the very first song that we played together,” Martin Simpson recalls, “he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t you ever get above me, boy!’” The Gueydan guitarist Bobby Broussard recalls that he “had a really screwed-up guitar” when he first performed with Gray. “It sounded terrible when I went to play some slide. But he liked me and accepted me, which I thought was amazing.”

Perhaps when it comes to identifying his true motivation, Gray himself says it best: “I get paid for the blues, I love the blues, and I play the blues. Now that makes sense to me!”

Hadley Castille: Hanging with Hadley

2015-06-26T07:02:00.001-07:00

(Originally published in the June 20 and the June 27, 2001, issue of the Times of Acadiana)

Hadley Castille vividly remembers the day in 1992 that he found himself in a New Orleans recording studio, preparing to add his distinctive Cajun fiddling to “Big Fran’s Baby,” a song composed by Clint Eastwood for the soundtrack of his film A Perfect World. “We were about to record,” Castille recalls, “and the producer said, ‘Mr. Castille, Mr. Eastwood wants to add a bagpipe to this song.’ Well, I was feeling a little ornery that day, so I said, ‘A bagpipe? Not in my music.’”

Castille stood and turned to leave, only to find himself face-to-face with the New Orleans saxophonist James Rivers, a large, imposing man made larger and more imposing on this day by the bagpipe that he was wearing. “I turned back around,” he remembers, “and said, ‘Well, maybe just this once.’”

Castille laughs heartily but still maintains that the Scottish instrument was an odd choice for what was supposed to be a Cajun song heard on Texas radio in 1963. To set the record straight, he re-recorded the song—sans bagpipe—on his 1995 album, La Musique de les Castilles: The Third Generation (Swallow).

His latest album, Quarante Acres et Deux Mulés/Forty Acres and Two Mules (Master-Trak) is likewise 100% bagpipe free. It’s also as excellent an hour of music as Castille has ever fit on one album. Subtitled Cajun Swing, Two-Steps, Waltzes, Blues and Ballads, it distinguishes itself from the majority of Cajun discs, contemporary and otherwise, in both its stylistic variety and its quotient of original material. Of the 15 songs, 11 were composed or co-composed by Castille and his son Blake, and the four that weren’t range imaginatively from golden-age classics (Harry Choates’ “La Popuet Elastique” and “La Valse du Port Arthur,” Iry LeJeune’s “Grand Nuit”) to modern-day zydeco (Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-Chas’ “Everything on a Hog Is Good”).

Engineered by Castille’s longtime technician of choice Mark Miller and embellished with contributions from David Egan, Sam Broussard, Pee Wee Whitewing, and Lee Benoit, the Quarante Acres et Deux Mulés swings with an ease, elegance, grace, and beauty that justify the high esteem with which Castille and his Sharecroppers Cajun Band have been held both locally and abroad for more than 20 years. Furthermore, originals such as “Radio à Batterie” (which goes “The Western Swing Bob Wills would play / That is why…my Cajun fiddle / swings that way”) and “Helaire Carrier” (about the notorious real-life “bandit of St. Landry Parish”) suggest that, his fiddling skills notwithstanding, Castille’s true gift might be his translation of Cajun history into that most durable of folklore: the story-song—or ballad.

“When I went to Canada in the late ’70s,” Castille says, “it just awakened me to the idea that this was something special. I thought, ‘If it means that much to them, there’s something about this music and culture that we need to preserve.’”

Born in Leonville in 1933, Castille had been performing Cajun music since his Army days during the Korean war. But he didn’t fully grasp the importance of being musically earnest until 1979, when the warm reception that greeted him and his fiddle at a Canadian music festival convinced him that there was an audience for his unique blend of Cajun music and Western swing.

To those who’ve followed Castille since, the excellence of Quarante Acres et Deux Mulés will come as no surprise. But amid the highly accomplished playing, arranging, and storytelling, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Castille is also one of Cajun music’s finest singers: He’s as unlikely to strain after high notes or to sing through his nose as he is to accept too much credit for his vocal prowess. “In the old days,” he explains, “when there was no amplification, Cajun singers would sing in high G to project, to get through the noise. Today you can sing where you feel good and work on your tone rather than try to reach high notes and stay on pitch.”

You can also, it seems, broaden your audience that way. “When I first started playing Canada,” Castille recalls, “people would tell me—in French!—‘We like your music, but we don’t understand what you’re singing about.’ So I began to speak more distinctly to them, and I got to thinking that maybe I should do the same thing as a singer, to try to be clearer with the pronunciation. Now even the locals tell me, ‘We understand what you’re saying.’”

Castille’s desire to make himself understood abroad was also behind his decision to begin playing blue, Louisiana-shaped violins. “We were playing at a fiddle convention in St. Boniface, and after we got through, we went and met some of the folk. A little lady came up to me and said, in French, ‘Mr. Castille, this Cajun country of Louisiana, where is that? Is that close to Nova Scotia?’”

Castille decided that playing a violin in the shape of his home state was preferable to lugging around an atlas and eventually had two such instruments made—the “backwards” one that he’s shown playing on the cover of his 1985 album Going Back to Louisiana/Je suis retourné à la Louisiane (“I thought that the toe of the state would get in my way,” he says, “but it didn’t”) and the “correct” one that he’s holding on the back cover of 1989’s Along the Bayou Teche.

Today, due in large part to Castille’s efforts and those of other gifted Acadiana musicians who think globally while acting locally, the location of “this Cajun country of Louisiana” is less of a mystery than ever. “I realized a long time ago,” Castille reflects, “that there was something about the Cajun fiddle that catches people’s ears, that makes them feel good.

“And the more I studied it,” he says, “the more I came to understand what it takes to get that sound.”

Illinois Entertainer Reviews 2014: A-B

2015-05-24T16:32:00.000-07:00

LILY ALLEN

Sheezus (Parlophone/WEA)

Allen’s her own woman and all, but she has precursors: Julie Brown (who she’s as funny as), Tracey Ullman (who she sings as well as), Millie Jackson (who she’s working on being as dirty as) and chick flicks, for which this album, like her other two, could be a soundtrack if R-rated chick flicks were the norm. All but foregoing timelessness and universality, she sets herself the challenge of remaining up-to-the-minute and more or less succeeds, tweaking Kanye West in the title cut, bitching up “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” and mentioning Instagram and Wordpress. The catchiest song is the Abba-gone-zydeco “As Long As I Got You.” The sincerest is “Insincerely Yours,” which goes “Let’s be clear, I’m here ... to make money.”

THE BAD PLUS

The Rite of Spring (Sony Masterworks)

Why not a top-flight jazz trio’s interpretation of the twentieth century’s most inflammatory work, what with jazz’s comprising the twentieth century’s most inflammatory musical innovations and all? Well, there are no dancers (Le Sacre du printemps was a ballet after all), and no jazz trio, no matter how gifted or well intentioned, can evoke riotous pagan spirits as convincingly as an orchestra. In short, there’s no way that this skeletal, one-dimensional recreation of a fully fleshed three-dimensional experience won’t have twenty-first-century ticket buyers feeling as if they’ve been had. Still, the sole surviving dimension hath charms to roil the savage breast. And there’s something to be said for leaving something to the imagination--and for giving the drummer David King room to strut his overcompensatory stuff.

THE BASEBALL PROJECT

3rd (YepRoc)

3rd improves this indie supergroup’s already impressive slugging percentage. Coming in for admiration and-or sympathy this time are Luis Tiant, Dale Murphy, Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, Larry Yount, and every beloved player with a lousy personality (“They Played Baseball”). Coming in for disapprobation and-or sympathy: Lenny Dykstra, Alex Rodriguez, and Pascual Pérez. The music ranges from folk-rock to power-pop, the singing from Scott McCaughey’s and Steve Wynn’s sports-nerd whimsy to Linda Pitmon’s ball-girl charm. Best of all is the Dock Ellis tribute “The Day Dock Went Hunting Heads,” which recounts the time that Ellis jump-started the slumping Bucs by hitting every Cincinnati Red batter that he faced before getting pulled in the first inning. Thirty years later, the incident still possesses inspirational properties.

BLACK LIPS

Underneath the Rainbow (Vice)

Who’d’ve thunk that an impassioned Atlanta combo would’ve been just the thing to drag the Black Keys’ preoccupation with anachronistic garage rock kicking and screaming into the twenty tens? And who’d’ve thunk that, having succeeded, the combo’s results would sound so unexceptional? “Don’t Die” is good advice, of course, but Chuck Berry, Alice Cooper, Brownsville Station, and Pink Floyd have done better schoolhouse rock than “Waiting.” As the soundtrack to a water-treading refusal to mature, most of this album passes muster. None of its sentient fans, however, will be rocking or rolling to it in five years. Maybe the jazz-fusionists, classical revisionists, every talented musician who’s not Jack White, and Yogi Berra are correct: The past ain’t what it used to be, and, what’s more, it never was.

THE BLIND BOYS OF ALABAMA & TAJ MAHAL

Talkin’ Christmas! (Sony Masterworks)

Clarence Fountain is still MIA, Paul Beasley’s falsetto is still too squeaky, and Taj Mahal is content mainly to pick and strum instruments. But someone (Ricke McKinnie? Ben Moore? surely not the nonagenarian and sole original member Jimmy Carter?) is doing a pretty-good Fountain impersonation, Beasley’s solo mic time is limited, and Mahal’s deep black-diaspora roots are a perfect complement to the more circumscribed but equally deep roots of the Boys. Of the half-dozen originals, “There’s a Reason We Call It Christmas” has the makings of a bonafide holiday standard, and “What Can I Do?” could’ve improved Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy. As for the gospel-rocking album-opener, “Do You Hear What I Hear?,” it’s so radically re-arranged that you’d swear it was an original too.

JOHN BUTLER TRIO

Flesh + Blood (Vanguard)

Don’t let the “jam band” tag that’s attached itself to this Australian band put you off. Although the songs tend toward the five-minute mark, there’s a concision to the execution that brings the riffs to the fore, making them and the lyrics (not superfluous), the singing (adequate at worst, sing-a-long-ish at best), and the titles to which they’re attached (“Devil Woman” is not a Cliff Richard cover) feel rootsy without giving off excessive patchouli whiffs. “Livin’ in the City” even manages to bring Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” overground while honoring the titular echoes of Stevie Wonder. Live, of course, matters might get out of hand. Flesh + Blood, however, is a studio album. Why, “Bullet Girl”’s parts are practically greater than its metaphysical whole.

Illinois Entertainer Reviews 2014: C

2015-05-24T16:26:00.000-07:00

CAGE THE GODS

Badlands (The End)

What kind of chicks are these leather-clad revivers of good-ol’ hard rock trying to seduce? The kind who like being called “little woman,” being dragged “back to hell,” and being reminded that since those who gave them what they want find them “so fucking beautiful”, they should simply “handle it.” And that’s just Track One (of 13). In short, boilerplate bad-boy misogyny lives or at least refuses to go gentle into that good night. Call it the daze of Guns ’N Roses. No, the title cut isn’t a Springsteen cover. (Would that it were.) No, “Falling” isn’t a LeBlanc & Carr cover. (Ditto.) Only “Bruce Willis” (“I wake every morning with a feeling I’m getting too old for this shit”) justifies the effort. (Hey, Looper wasn’t that bad.)

ERIC CARMEN

The Essential Eric Carmen (Sony/Legacy)

What makes this thirty-track, “essential” collection better than the eighteen-track, 1997 “definitive” one with which it shares sixteen cuts? Not the obscurities--neither the pre-Raspberries “Get the Message” nor 2013’s “Brand New Year” goes all the way, and the studio version of “That’s Rock N’ Roll” on The Definitive is more essential than this album’s live 1976 run through. Meanwhile, “I Wanna Hear It from Your Lips” remains vanished down the memory hole, and 1997’s not-bad I Was Born to Love You might as well never have happened. Still, Carmen’s sixteen definitively essential/essentially definitive moments really are pretty great. And then there’s the heretofore uncollected “Love Is All That Matters,” the most beautiful melody that Carmen ever lifted from a nineteenth-century Russian composer.

CARLENE CARTER

Carter Girl (Rounder)

The latest album by June Carter Cash’s daughter replants the Carter Family’s musical roots in twenty-first-century alt-country soil--seven of the dozen songs were written by the family’s paterfamilias, A.P. Carter (eight if you count “Lonesome Valley 2003,” an A.P. classic updated by Carlene and NRBQ’s Al Anderson). Rife with gospel-music archetypes, they’ll apprise newcomers to the “first family of country music” of the fact that Christianity used to be cool. But it’s the Carlene original, a re-recorded “Me and the Wildwood Rose,” that sets the tone: “In my Grandma's house her children would sing, / guitars a twangin' and their laughter would ring. / I was little, but I was the biggest kid. / I wanted to do what the grown-ups did.” At fifty-eight, she finally has.

ROSANNE CASH

The River & the Thread (Blue Note)

In interviews, Cash has related the fascinating backstories of these eleven songs (fourteen in the deluxe version) with so much detail that they almost overshadow the songs themselves. She also lets on as how, at fifty-eight, she now regards the music of her hit-filled youth as rather lacking in gravitas. Well, given the alt-country heaven from which she’s channeling the meditative melodies of her maturity and the autobiographical richness of her Deep South lyrics, it’s easy to see (and hear) what she means. Still, there are a river and a thread running through her entire impressive oeuvre, and they’re worth listening for--especially when they unite her with her daddy’s old-time religion and thus unbreak the circle bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye.

CIBO MATTO

Hotel Valentine (Chimera)

Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori haven’t recorded as Cibo Matto since Bill Clinton was president. But shuffle these ten new tracks among the nineteen on 2007’s Pom Pom: The Essential Cibo Matto and you’ll be hard pressed to tell which are which--that is, unless you’re one of the relatively (and obviously) few consumers who pushed 1999’s Stereo*Type A (the band’s previously highest-charting release) all the way to 171 on Billboard and therefore have an unfair advantage. The partly rapped, partly sung lyrics still sound like hijacked playground chants, and the largely electronic, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink instrumentation still sounds like pop art for pop art’s sake. Only the minimalistic (and maybe racist) “Housekeeping” justifies the formula--hence (no doubt) Hotel Valentine’s debuting at 168.

Illinois Entertainer Reviews 2014: D-F