Category: Music reviews

The Uses of Belief: Susan Werner, The Gospel Truth

Love, instinct, doubt, and the wonder of nature: all part of life, all objects of contemplation—do not deny them, do not simplify them, advises Werner. On “Don’t Explain It Away,” Werner’s singing is well modulated, with a nuance that is the exact opposite of what one expects of a rhetorical inclination or tone; and although the album does not sound explicitly rhetorical it is rhetorical.

New Orleans Love: Harry Connick Jr.’s Chanson du Vieux Carré

The Connick song “Ash Wednesday” has more of a sense of adventure than one imagines a religious observance to have, but that may be the atmosphere of the city, and the nature of the album Chanson du Vieux Carré, on which Connick plays piano throughout, an album that has charm and solidity and more of a cinematic quality than most of the other jazz recordings I have listened to in the last year.

How Can A Poor Girl Make It?: Koko Taylor, Old School

Koko Taylor is the Queen of Chicago blues; and as there are apparently no worthier aspirants to the throne, though she is not as famous as Bessie Smith was or as B.B. King is, Taylor is the de facto Queen of all the blues. Koko Taylor’s career spans a half-century.

A Generation’s Work Continues: Neil Young’s Living With War

The false intelligence, the expectation of military success, and the early sense of triumph and victory have given way to death, the bodies returning home with little ceremony, to increasing losses on both sides, to grief and bad memories, all recounted in Young’s “Shock and Awe,” with its propulsive, shimmery percussion, jangling guitar notes, and grief-filled horn, a song in which Young recalls, “We had a chance to change our mind, but somehow wisdom was hard to find.

Dissent is the Highest Form of Democracy: Michael Franti and Spearhead’s Yell Fire!

Yell Fire! is another chapter in Michael Franti’s career, another attempt to do work that expresses his personal sense of the world and his place in it. He is someone who does not quite fit common expectations: he is not selling our own greed and desire for glamour back to us, nor, though young and handsome, is he selling sex to us, or stupidity or hatred. He has invested in mind, sensitivity, and public concern; and his reward will be our awareness and our active—or activist—response.

Here We Are, On Earth Together: Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book

Talking Book is a work of consciousness and distinctive musicality. In liberating his own talent, Stevie Wonder enlarged the possibilities for African-American musical talent, and those inspired by it: with boyish charm and manly confidence, Stevie Wonder explored intimate relationships, and political situations, and he became one of the most significant artists of his generation.