His work transcended the cultural barriers of the time. In “Wonderful, Wonderful,” the verses seem to have an Asian, specifically Chinese, rhythm, although the refrain is exultantly western. It is amusing to be reminded of how cultures are always gesturing across borders, and even oceans.
Category: Music reviews
The Young Master: Usher Terry Raymond IV’s album Looking 4 Myself
It has a rampaging rhythm that is both artificial and dominating. Yet, in a masterful composition about separation from a lover and loneliness, “Climax,” Usher uses a beautiful falsetto voice that defies the clichés of masculinity and ugliness dominant in much contemporary music. That song is a work of excellence.
The Solace of Quiet Beauty: kora player Ablaye Cissoko and trumpeter Volker Goetze’s collaboration, Amanké Dionti
The quality of Ablaye Cissoko’s voice is at once light and wise, with a timeless sensitivity, and the soft rhythm of his singing in “Amanké Dionti” sounds like the invocation of a ritual amid a bare, dusty landscape, though one imagines that now such music can be made in a teeming city, the music merely the remnant of an older civilization.
The Work of a Writer and Musician of Expansive Vision: Channel Orange by Frank Ocean
Frank Ocean moves from high life to low life. “I ain’t been touched in a while,” claims the singer-songwriter’s narrator in “Pilot Jones,” and its continuing lyrics point to alienation, slovenliness, and addiction as part of the atmosphere. It is free lyric association regarding an indulgent state that seems more troubled than liberated. FrankOcean, through language, through the texture of music, has found a way to suggest how deep, how mundane, and how overwhelming experience can be.
The Re-(w)Rite of Spring, a jazz work by the Mobtown Modern Big Band, interpreting Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, arranged and directed by Darryl Brenzel
His Rite of Spring remains central; and its forceful jazz interpretation, arranged by Darryl Brenzel, and performed in Baltimore in 2010 at the Metro Gallery by the Mobtown Modern Big Band, is controlled, offering a shimmery, sizzling sound, with varied pacing that sustains attention.
Hallucination and Healing: The Kiowa Peyote Meeting, Songs and Narratives, featuring Winston Catt, Everett Cozad, Ray and Blossom Coza, George Saloe, and Henry Teimausaddle
There is a droning kind of chanting, earthy, intimate, intense. The songs are dedicated to particular times—such as morning and midnight, with prayers for “everybody.” The chants with both male and female voices have a greater appeal than those with only male voices—there is more complexity, and clearly more community.
Eleven Short Stories, music inspired by film, composed by experimental Turkish composer Erdem Helvacioglu
On his album Eleven Short Stories, he has transformed his piano into the most flexible of instruments, augmenting it with odd implements and making it sing with new tones, telling vivid tales. The pianist, guitarist, and composer Erdem Helvacioglu, informed by classical, folk, and popular music, has wanted to bring together emotion and experiment.
Cornelius Duffalo’s Journaling, featuring the work of John King, Joan Jeanrenaud, Huang Ruo, Vijay Iyer, John Luther Adams, and Kenji Bunch
On Cornelius Duffalo’s Journaling, short, repeating patterns begin to expand, double, triple, quadruple in Vijay Iyer’s “Playlist One (Resonance)” then become simple again; and there is plucking, wailing, then great fast rhythm. In his album notes, Duffalo says the Iyer piece “alludes to the tradition of virtuoso variations, complete with fiendishly difficult passages of harmonics, double stops and left-hand pizzicato, while also creating a unique contemporary sound world.”
Abstract, Beat-driven, Cool: Master of My Make-Believe by Santigold, featuring singer-songwriter Santi White
Santi White, ambitious and determined, is a grown-up, a married woman, her husband being snowboarder-musician Trevor Andrew, but she relishes her youthful impulses, perceptible in her album The Master of My Make–Believe, which features an album jacket portrait by painter Kehinde Wiley and printed lyrics too small to read.
Civility, Lyricism, Passion: Barchords by musical project Bahamas, featuring Afie Jurvanen
Drawing on an old troubadour style and also western folk music and the glamour of modern individuality, the singer songwriter is able to maintain an appeal that seems timeless. Afie Jurvanen, for Bahamas, writes about—what else?— existence and love on the album Barchords, called a “gorgeous, full-bodied recording” by the Los Angeles Times (February 7,2012).