A review of The Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn

She interviewed volunteers and experts, and got to it. It pays to be a food writer, with chef friends in restaurants all over Seattle. Lessons opened with a taste test to demonstrate how the variety within one category of food. Every taste test was a revelation. The most expensive canned tomatoes were not the Best in Show. Salt substitute really is a subsitute, and a poor one. The real lesson: Trust your tastes.

A review of Wherever You Go by Joan Leegant

Life in a war zone is fine for the noble savages, but not for developers from Shaker heights with Harvard-bound sons. It’s easy to dismiss Mr. American Tourist as a hypocrite, but Leegant isn’t choosing sides. Aaron’s partners in crime are equally American (one is from Skokie), sentimental and easily manipulated. Mr. American Tourist may be a hypocrite, but he knows how he wants to live, and he doesn’t need anyone’s approval to do it.

The Use of Quiet Powers: The Very Best of Mariah Carey

So much for failure in love. Mariah Carey’s voice can sound hammer-strong or feather-light, and she uses different parts of her voice in “Breakdown,” which opens with a man’s chanting voice (the voice, appearing in different instances in the song, makes the song nearly a duet, which is odd since most of the lyrics focus on separation). It is a song with texture—layers of sound, and rhythms going in more than one direction.

That’s the Way Love Is: The Best of Marvin Gaye, The 60s

The music listener heard references to family, church, and school in Gaye’s work, those early educators and touchstones, the expected resources for affection and knowledge, and often what must be left behind if life is to be lived fully or honestly.  Leaving them behind meant freedom—and risk, if not trouble.  There is a female choral arrangement in “Pride and Joy,” and it is somewhere between male doo-wop and the call and response of a church choir. 

Emotion and Style, Jazz and Soul: Until Tomorrow by Zara McFarlane

Zara McFarlane’s voice can be really pure or take on a husky quality, and her inflections are subtle, varied, as in “Captured (part 3), a song about the memory of a woman, with a swinging rhythm.  Delivered with syncopation, the lyrics of “Mama Done” suggest something ominous: “she talked herself right into the ground.”  McFarlane’s voice floats in the air in the song “Until Tomorrow,” which seems to be about an impasse in a relationship that time and distance might ease.  Her voice could be a sound alive on the wind, without a body.

The Country Dance Music of Fiddler Joel Savoy: Linzay Young & Joel Savoy, together; and The Right Combination by Jesse Lege, Joel Savoy, and the Cajun Country Revival

They are keepers of a tradition that includes Dewey Balfa, Michael Doucet, Feufollet, Wade Fruge, Doc Guidry, D.L. Menard, Dennis McGee, Steve Riley, and Horace Trahan. Yet Joel Savoy went on to explain that he listened to popular music: “My mom has very diverse taste in music, and we heard all kinds of stuff growing up. She used to make me mix tapes of all kinds of things like Django and Billie Holiday and lots of Cajun stuff—old-timey Cajun fiddlers, even some rock ‘n’ roll.” Savoy learned to play some of what was on those tapes; and, subsequently, he has performed with T-Bone Burnett, Allison Krauss, Steve Miller, and Linda Ronstadt.

An American Bluesman in Europe: Kid Man Blues by Bert Deivert

On the album Kid Man Blues, an album recorded in Sweden, Thailand, Germany, and the United States over a period of years, Bert Deivert does the Paul Jones song “Rob and Steal,” and there’s something very head-down-and-focused about the energy in the song, as if something burning in the music matches the intensity of the scavenging character being described.  Downbeat, haunted, “Come Back Baby” is a moodily dramatic request for a lover’s return, featuring blues-rock guitar (that is, Dulyasit Srabua on electric guitar and John Dooley on electric bass).