Restart

I've decided to start music blogging again and to restart this blog instead of creating yet another one, mostly because I like the name... ok, because I can't think of another name. Reading over my posts from two years ago, I'm kind of amazed at how much I've learned about music since then, and I want to try my hand at some slightly more informed album reviews. (Perhaps I can atone for once referring to the Grateful Dead as "decadent" on this blog—hi Mom!) Additionally, I'm now attending college in Boston, where the music scene eclipses that of anywhere I've ever lived before, so a large part of this blog will include reviews of venues and concerts in the greater Boston area—or at least that portion of it accessible by public transportation, since I am a broke carless college student.

"But Jack," I hear you cry, "why start your blog again after so long?" And well you should ask. Perhaps I'm motivated by an altruistic drive to share great music with the world and bring joy and satisfaction to millions, or perhaps I just want to use the Internet to spew my arrogant views about music to anyone who will listen. (Anyone? ...Anyone?) I like to think that the truth lies somewhere in between. Since I'm probably going to pursue a career somehow related to music, whether as a performer, songwriter, journalist, academic, DJ, high-powered record executive, airport bar pianist, hobo, or whatever, it makes sense for me to practice writing about it in order to develop my ear and my figurative pen. It's also good for my sanity to spend some time writing something other than emails or academic papers.

I will also, of course, share interesting and amusing links. To get started, here's a jazz bagpipes (!) version of A Love Supreme (reviewed on this blog here), performed by Rufus Harley and Sun Ra.

Sticks That Made Thunder

The SteelDrivers are a reasonably tradition-embracing bluegrass band composed of session musicians from Nashville. "Reasonably tradition-embracing" means that they still use all the instruments you would expect, and they don't go off into Happy Jazz Land much (or at all, really), but that they are definitely pushing the boundaries of what Bill Monroe himself would find tolerable. Also they write all their own stuff. Their eponymous debut album was released this January on Rounder, and it has already become real good friends with my CD player.

The main attraction is Chris Stapleton, guitarist, lead singer, and songwriter (all the songs are written by him and one other person; the person in the second slot varies from tune to tune). Actually, that's not quite true. Stapleton is a damn solid rhythm guitar player (a species which is a dime a dozen in Nashville) and a damn fine songwriter (not as common a species, though not always a guarantee of well-arranged and well-performed music), but the main attraction of the SteelDrivers is Chris Stapleton's voice. I mean holy Odetta this man can friggin' sing. And the mental image I had of him after listening to this record a few times is nothing like the picture you see at right.

The best way to understand the force and quality of his voice is, well, to listen to it and make your own judgment, but if you put Travis Tritt's voice, a box of cigars, a couple bottles of Jack Daniels, a few feet of your driveway, and some okra in a blender and put it on "Chunky," you might get something like Stapleton's voice. This intricate metaphor, however, fails to give you an idea of his versatility: he can warble and moan on the languorous Civil War song "Sticks That Made Thunder" (an apt image for instruments as well as muskets); he can rasp and cackle on "If it Hadn't Been for Love," a murderer's lament-type song that's one of my favorites from the album; and he can howl in a clear and shatteringly powerful (but still chunky as hell) Howitzer of a tenor on tunes like the boppin' bluegrassy opener, "Blue Side of the Mountain." And he can do a tasteful amount of that Mariah Carey melisma crap when he feels like it, too. Nor is he afraid to make his voice sound flat and brash when it fits the line or the syllable. I could go on, but the point is that Chris Stapleton's vocal chords are one of the finest artifacts of modern bluegrass.

His songs ain't bad either. My chief gripe about modern bluegrass bands, as I believe I've griped before, is weak songwriting in the midst of tight instrumentation and phenomenal chops, and so by comparison with some of the dreck I've heard passed off as bluegrass, the SteelDrivers' songs are fantastic. In the grand scheme of things this makes them better than average but not instant classics (except maybe "If it Hadn't Been for Love," which deserves to be covered well and frequently). The songs nod to and flirt with bluegrass cliches while occasionally inverting or altogether rejecting them. There's a war song, a drinking song, a murder song, a homesick song, a few lovesick songs, you know, but they're well-done expressions of their various archetypes.

The instrumentalists are chosen from Nashville's finest session musicians, and it shows. Together they achieve a remarkably tight and crisp sound, while managing to sound raw and unpolished. How does that work? I'm terribly jealous of this effect. Individually, they vary. Stapleton has great rhythm with his guitar but eschews lead lines. Bassist Mike Fleming is like a pet rock: groovy and steadfast. Banjoist Richard Bailey is my favorite instrumentalist in the band, with wonderful bounce, sparkling tone, and eternal creativity. Mandolinist Mike Henderson (who co-writes many of the songs) remained an enigma for a while because, whether it's the poor mix of the album (hard to believe on such a slick product) or the poor quality of the Amazon download or the cheapness of my equipment, I couldn't hear the mandolin breaks on any of the songs worth jack when listening on my CD player. With headphones, on my computer, I found his breaks to be competent, clean, simple, and firmly within what Bill Monroe would find tolerable. Fiddler Tammy Rogers... well, now, let's be fair, I'm a fiddle player, and thus am terribly critical of other fiddle players. She's quite good, and plays with a lot more soul than many Nashville fiddle robots I know of, but sometimes she tends to sound a bit frenetic and sometimes her breaks tend to sound kind of the same. Also there is one lick that she plays over and over and over again in various songs, no matter the key or time signature, which gets to be aggravating. (Listen for it... it starts on the flat 7th of the chord and has a big slide in the middle.) She does sing some fine harmonies upon occasion as well.

Altogether, this is one of my most highly recommended bluegrass albums of the past year or so. It may get knocked down a few slots after I spend all my Amazon money on new stuff, but it's a very enjoyable, slightly edgy, jazz-free traditional piece of tightly orchestrated yet foot-tapping bluegrass, essentially demonstrating the many sides of a marvelously gifted singer and some friends he gathered into a band, from honky-tonkish romping to a level of precision after Flatt & Scruggs' own hearts to limit-pushing, genre-pulling, rocked-up, twangy singer-songwriter material. Check it out.

Sleep With Your Glasses On

Half-watching an episode of "Classical Destinations" the other night (a show on PBS hosted by Simon Callow and featuring various locations around Europe that presumably served as inspirations to the great Western composers), I was struck by a couple of things about Franz Schubert. He was an astonishingly prolific composer, writing nine symphonies (a la Beethoven), several operas, a bunch of piano concerti, and over 600 songs. According to legend, he slept with his glasses on, so that he could begin composing again as soon as he woke up in the morning. Apocryphal to be sure, but probably not without reason: he worked hard all his life, yet still remained basically penniless.

Schubert also died at the revoltingly young age of 31, which is less than twice my age. Mozart, by contrast, was 35.

Here's Hilary Hahn doing a rockin' solo version of Schubert's song "Der Erlkönig" (The Elf-king). It's even cooler if you've heard the original piano/voice version, which I recommend you do.



(More posts will come bit by bit as I try to get back in the swing of blogging. It's been a ridiculously busy summer.)

It All Has To Do With It

On my birthday I bought myself a new CD (with my parents' money, it should be admitted) of tenor saxophonist John Coltrane's suite A Love Supreme. I have heard from numerous sources that this is one of the best jazz albums there is, and I figured it would be a good place to jump into Coltrane's oeuvre (as it is considered his masterpiece) and into the area of modern jazz in general (a field which I am not terribly well acquainted with). The album is in four parts, features four musicians, and is a little over half an hour long. In the first 24 hours after I purchased it, I listened to it three times. Now I try to keep my music reviews objective, to be informative about the qualities of the music rather than just give a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down," because other people with different musical sensibilities than mine may like music that I dislike and vice versa. In the case of A Love Supreme, however, I am pretty much inclined to say that anyone who dislikes this music is a complete philistine. I'm not even sure how or where to begin to talk about something this phenomenal.

According to Coltrane's own liner notes, he had a profound religious experience in 1957 which finally manifested itself seven years later in the highly spiritual and swiftly written music for A Love Supreme (the album was in fact dedicated to God). In 1965, with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums, at one of the definitive sessions in jazz history, the suite was put on record. It is a work of undeniable genius and the session was intangibly magical. Brilliant improvisation from all four participants becomes practically an expectation as you listen.

At various points, A Love Supreme is deceptively accessible or stupefyingly complex, so powerfully swung that you want to dance or so multirhythmic that the room spins, based on straightforward scales or on bizarrely uprooted chromatic scales. An incredible variety of textures is present throughout: solo bass, solo drums, lilting accompaniment supporting a careening Coltrane solo, all-out no-holds-barred polyphonic chaos from all musicians, delicate interweaving between two or more musicians, even a brief multi-tracked septet at the very climax.

It is the most thematic piece of non-classical music I have ever heard--so thematic, in fact, that I question labeling it as non-classical. Part 1, "Acknowledgment," opens with a forceful and distinctive bass line (covered by disjointed, atonal piano chords) that is utilized everywhere: first intermingled to brilliant effect in Coltrane's opening solo, then sequenced obviously and almost randomly on the sax through what seems like every key, then appearing in Coltrane's brief, weird chant of "a love su-preme, a love su-preme." This theme and others from the acidic Part 1 reappear in the more frenetic and thrashing Part 3, "Pursuance" (aptly titled for what amounts to a musical chase), which appears after the well-juxtaposed, more relaxed, and more "traditional" (if that's possible) Part 2, "Resolution," which sounds more like a jam tune but is also incredibly thematic, featuring a "head" which falls through various strange chords but resolves logically. After the agony of Part 3 comes the gentle, seemingly pulseless, minor pentatonic Part 4, "Psalm," in which Coltrane "reads" a religious poem he wrote (included in the liner notes) by playing its ebb and flow on his saxophone, with its recurring, plangent "Thank you God" theme.

This album is fabulous and deserves many repeated listenings. I am chomping at the bit to hear more Coltrane as well as the Turtle Island String Quartet's recent Grammy-winning cover of this album.

Safe is Not a Compliment

Last night on PBS there was a show about Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, head of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg (formerly the legendary Kirov) as well as principal conductor for the London Symphony Orchestra and others. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that he also conducted the orchestra for the Metropolitan Opera's staging of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, featuring the stellar Renée Fleming, which my dad and I saw in the spring of last year. Now I wish I'd been paying more attention to the orchestration.

Gergiev is a perpetually grizzled and sweaty conductor of fifty-five and a virtual rock-star of the modern classical music world. His schedule is insane: he conducts nearly a gig a day (though I suspect that the intelligentsia do not refer to classical music concerts as "gigs"), indicating that he is constantly in high demand, and he dedicates fantastic amounts of energy to each. The stereotype of the wild-haired maestro who looks like he's about to give himself an aneurysm from his furious baton-waving is fully expressed in the person of Valery Gergiev. He grits his teeth and swings his huge hands to and fro, with his distinctive bangs quivering below his bald scalp, then squints and forms his mouth into a cooing shape as he delicately guides the orchestra into a more placid section, as if in rapture at the divine beauty of the sounds he is indirectly creating.



I know too little about twentieth-century classical music, or even about the idiosyncrasies of individual conductors, to say "Oh, well, he's better than Salonen but inferior to Bernstein" with any kind of authority, but even I could tell that Gergiev's music was fantastic--and I'm not just going off of the fact that he was considered enough of a legend to be featured on "Great Performances." This was some great classical music. His performers raved about his ability to hear anything, to labor patiently at minutiae, to connect with the orchestra and the audience. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, a piece with which I have (surprisingly) a passing familiarity, was shown at various stages of development under Gergiev's Fearless Leadership, from first rehearsal to performance, and it was apparent that the work had gelled marvelously in his hands. Even with my old TV's decidedly sub-perfect sound quality, I felt my spine tingling as they moved through the famous, dramatic, explosively arrhythmic sections.

Perhaps most interesting to me, being as I am a non-classical musician and a member of the Great Unwashed, were Gergiev's more generally applicable comments about music. "Modern orchestras are generally very good," he said, and I am paraphrasing, "but that is not the same as interesting." (An analysis which could easily be applied to many bluegrass or rock bands.) "They can play well enough that everyone agrees they are very good--but that is playing safely, and safe is not always a compliment."