Like the snatches of song heard in a crowded club, “Fax Shadow” is a kind of coda to what came before. Chaz’s voice is full of force in “Thanks Vision,” in which the instrumental sound, delicacy under pressure, is carved, stretched, and twisted, with floating voices, a big beat, and a clatter of voices near the end. It is rare—I thought while listening to “Freak Love—that a performer makes you think of the legacies of A.R. Kane, My Bloody Valentine, Prince, the Temptations, and This Mortal Coil.
Category: Music reviews
Classical, Contemporary, Creative (Indie-Classical?): Place, an album by the band Build
It has a slippery groove featuring a beat that glides and stops, glides and stops; and that first part is appealing but not soothing. The second part is quiet, slow, almost tense, with a sprinkling of piano notes, and a heavy, slow bass—until what is ponderous achieves beauty. The third part—the fast tempo of the piano, staccato string rhythm, and jazzy percussion—creates and maintains a tension between rhythms (the way one instrument complements and contrasts another reminds me of jazz, as does the jittery energy).
Chamber Music of Memory and Mischief: Now Ensemble, Awake
The Now Ensemble—Alex Sopp, Sara Budde, Mark Dancigers, Logan Coale, and Michael Mizrahi—are playing music and also playing with our expectations. After a pleasantly quiet beginning, a strong rhythm emerges in “Burst,” and I thought I heard, faintly, the blues in it (its inspirations are Mozart and Ali Farka Toure); it is a merry score for memory and mischief—one can dance to it, or enter a reverie.
With Voice, Will Travel: Susana Baca, Afrodiaspora
Afrodiaspora, Susana Baca’s voice is almost plaintive in “Bendiceme,” a song devoted to the infant Jesus, the kind of Catholic processional tune popular among black Peruvians, and her voice— which begins with a nearly formal firmness and goes high and tender—and that near-plaintive or plaintive tone touches something within the listener. Baca is joined by a chorus, which can seem like a false accent, a cliché—but not here: the chorus is the community and a musical strength; and theirs is an old, possibly timeless, sound, echoing beyond logic.
Shocking Story, Significant Sound: Julia Wolfe’s Cruel Sister, featuring Ensemble Resonanz
In the New York performance of the piece, it was accompanied, as on the Wolfe album, by “Fuel,” a score for a Bill Morrison film “that shows time-lapse images of cargo ships, trucks being loaded, drilling rigs and highways in New York and Hamburg,” with the music described as “all spiraling rock riffs and whirring clusters of notes” (Tommasini, Times, February 4, 2011).
The Different Languages of Moroccan Jazz: Malika Zarra’s Berber Taxi
By Daniel Garrett Malika Zarra, Berber Taxi Produced by Malika Zarra and Francis Jacob Motema Music, 2011 The Moroccan singer-songwriter Malika Zarra has a great voice, and is a confident performer; able to perform the magic of very different conjurers,…
The Boy Wonder as Musician: Bruno Mars and his album Doo-Wops & Hooligans
Bruno Mars creates an imaginative space in which emotion and romance are allowed to roam freely; and self-aware, he also tries to puncture that idealism, to go beyond it. In “Runaway Baby,” a song possibly inspired by the rapid rhythm of 1960s rock and latter day Gnarls Barkley, the narrator warns women about his voracious appetite and theirs: “There’s only one carrot and they all gotta share it” and “I’m not trying to hurt you, I just want to work you,” Bruno Mars sings.
A Golden Girl Returns: Toni Braxton’s Pulse
Toni Braxton’s sound—not simply of emotion, but of authority and maturity—is center stage in the ballad “Woman,” about the status of a woman in a relationship. “I need to be touched, I need to be loved” and “I’m not your friend, who only needs you sometimes,” Braxton sings. (The fat beat in the song calls to mind that in certain songs of two different performers, Michael Jackson and Luther Vandross.) Braxton is great with ballads.
A Male Jazz Singer, A Mindful Man of Elements: Gregory Porter and his album Water
Gregory Porter’s album Water does not do only one thing; consequently, Porter cannot be made into a negative example. In Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer’s “Skylark,” romantic expression is balanced by dignity and restraint; and although the song—inescapably—has much of its customary wistfulness, it seems more rooted, tempered by the real, and the repeated question at the end is one of both doubt and hope. The fast horns, percussion, and singing voice of “Black Nile,” a composition by Wayne Shorter, gives way to scatting.
A True King’s Playthings: Bo Diddley’s Beach Party
In the song, Bo Diddley sings “Baby, you know I love you so, I’ll never let you go,” the kind of recurring and rudimentary declaration of young love that reassures, even as its exuberance promises a certain single-minded trouble. With its thick grooves and hammering rhythm, the music can be heard as rhythm-and-blues with a rock edge, or rock with rhythm-and-blues roots; and that makes it very American. (The song begins as something you can dance to, but its rhythm becomes so dense it is nearly industrial; a prophetic development.) Of course, Bo Diddley is one of the men—with Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Ike Turner—who laid the foundation for rock and roll.