Compulsive Reader

The Iowa-born composer Michael Daugherty studied at the University of North Texas, the Manhattan School of Music, and Yale, and he has taught music at Oberlin and the University of Michigan, and worked with national orchestras, and received awards for his work, which includes the musical compositions “Metropolis Symphony” and “Raise the Roof.”  Daugherty has been able to avoid the daily nine-to-five grind that ignores or insults emotion, misuses intellectual energy, represses imagination, and stifles the spirit; and he has had the encouragement, recognition, and support that sustain accomplishment.  Consequently, the public has the benefit of Daugherty’s creativity. 

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Although the previous music advanced the story to exile in the city and a return home, the text for “Chapter 6” notes that the father leaves his field for the city, and years later returns to the now grown son he had helped to rear, and there is—as with many fathers and sons in legend and myth—a bloody meeting between the two.  The album Soundtrack to an Untimely Death by Vagabond Swing, a band of multi-talented individuals, ends with a tribute to Django Reinhardt; a conclusion of trumpet, harmonic voices, and disparate rhythms—light, sultry, jazzy, eastern. 

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The first song on Airtight’s Revenge is “Cake and Eat It Too,” which seems to be about the unpredictable nature of circumstances, and, for me, the mood it creates with a heavy beat and nearly industrial texture is an urban, moody, slumming sound.  Its lyrics—“I walk this thin line of this double life” and “I want to make love until it rains and sleep all day” and “I’m so mixed-up baby”—indicate drama, but the language is not distinctive enough, nor the music seductive enough, for me to have the sense that this is a story I must hear.

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The singer-songwriter Cedric Watson claims the region with his rhythms and song titles—including “Le Sud de la Louisiane,” “J’suis Parti au Texas,” “Lafayette La La,” and “J’suis gone a la Blue Moon.”  The song that shares the band’s name, “Bijou Creole,” is rather spare—with accordion, fiddle, and a simple voice chant—but “Le Sud de la Louisiane” has a dense, low groove and blues twang, and the singer’s voice is very personable, conversational in its rising and falling but genuinely expressive, hearty. 

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(“The rise of folk music and the birth of rock and roll were a direct reaction to the saccharine pop of the 1950s—the soundtrack for a vacuous and repressive decade,” asserts Suze Rotolo in the liner notes of The Village, before citing as beacons the singer-songwriters Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and folk music archivists Harry Smith and John Lomax.)  It is never too late to salute something good, and I doubt it can be done too much: it is always news for someone; and it is gratifying to hear the songs of The Village, featuring Rickie Lee Jones, The Duhks, Lucinda Williams, Sixpence None the Richer, John Oates, Los Lobos, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Bruce Hornsby, Amos Lee, Shelby Lynne, the Cowboy Junkies, Rachael Yamagata, and Rocco DeLuca.

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What emerges is not for everyone, but for the one person—or the few individuals—who will see or hear. It is beauty that does not deny force or thought. (The pretty sounds of the flute of Helen O’Connor are heard with the piano; but, meaning no disrespect, beauty and prettiness—as I have been reminded—are not always the same.) I think that the composition ends with the sense of release, of something let go. The only reason to listen to this music is the music itself; a great reason.

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