Category: Music

Via Mandy, a UVA friend, I found this YouTube video of Paul Potts, a broken-toothed contestant on “Britain’s Got Talent” who murmurs when asked why he’s in the competition, “To sing opera.” And then proceeds to tear the house down:

I mean, and please excuse my French, but: holy shit.

This is the dream, if you are an amateur musician; for a vocalist, this is the prototypical origin story. It’s how you decide you are going to pursue this for the rest of your life. (As I confessed a while ago.) And he does it. Makes the female presenter take heavy sighing breaths and cry, makes the audience jump to their feet, makes Simon gush like a schoolgirl.

And not only does he pull off this performance, which would have been cool enough; he goes on to win the whole shebang. And: sing for the Queen, record contract with Simon Cowell, get money to pay off his debts. Even get his teeth fixed.

Sometimes the good guys win. But apparently only in Britain. Lucky bastards.

(And, um, it’s OK to be just a little jealous of him, right?)

For a more reasoned response to the whole thing, SJ Reidhead has a good piece on Blogcritics.

Updated 9/26/2007: Had to update the YouTube link. You’d think that the rightsholder would treat this amazingly successful clip as promotion rather than yank it, but no…

Nice crop of reviews and other music related pieces today:

• Blogcritics has an appreciation of John McLaughlin that suggests that the British guitarist should be accorded a prime mover place in the formation of jazz fusion.
• The New Yorker profiles Spoon, placing it within a tradition of doing more with less.
• Pitchfork has an article on Bill Evans that puts him at the center of all 20th century piano work, both jazz and classical.

iTunes Plus, the DRM-free version of the iTunes Store, launched yesterday with kind of a big bang—Paul McCartney’s full catalog. The promised Upgrade My Music feature launched too. I didn’t really know what to expect there, so I was kind of astonished to see that the list of my purchases that were eligible for upgrade included twelve albums worth of music. I decided to go ahead and make the move to the high resolution downloads.

Now I’m kind of wishing I hadn’t—or at least that I had waited until a few days after the service launched. That’s a lot of 10 MB downloads, and they have a tendency of taking a really long time. Three of the downloads stalled the entire queue last night, so it looks like I will have to babysit the downloads for a few days. Fortunately restarting iTunes appears to have cleared whatever blockage was causing the problem.

One interesting unanticipated feature of the upgrade was spotlighted by CNet, who point out that the upgrade feature provides a way to retrieve a previously purchased but lost song for only 30 cents.

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of Jeff Buckley into the Mississippi River, and into legend. At the time, the death of the 30-year-old singer felt like a body blow, and ten years haven’t dulled the impact; if anything, the feeling of cosmic unfairness has deepened over the years. So the new anthology So Real: Songs from Jeff Buckley comes at a time where many of us were pondering Jeff’s legacy anyway, and it is that rarest of things, a greatest hits that illuminates and surprises rather than simply summing up. There is no way that I can write a review that does justice to this in a linear way; there are too many connections striving to be made. I will include these as asides throughout the review.

• Number of Jeff Buckley albums and EPs released in his lifetime: 2
• Number of albums, EPs, live albums, DVDs, greatest hits compilations, box sets, and deluxe editions released after his death: 7

The compilers of the collection, Mary Guibert (Jeff’s mother) and Tom Burleigh, had a challenge: How do you do a greatest hits album for an artist who only had one album before his untimely death? They chose an unconventional path: include half the debut album, Grace, together with selected b-sides, studio work released posthumously, and released and unreleased live recordings. It could have sounded like a shambles; it’s a testament to Jeff’s artistic brilliance and consistency that it sounds like a coherent whole.

• Number of tribute songs to Jeff Buckley listed on Wikipedia: 51

In one form or another, eight of the ten songs that formed Grace are on this disc, four in their studio version (“Last Goodbye,” “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over,” “Grace,” “Hallelujah”). The compilers chose alternate versions (that previously appeared on the Grace Legacy Edition of a few years ago) for “Eternal Life” and “Dream Brother,” a live version of “So Real” that was previously only available on a promo single, and the hypnotic version of “Mojo Pin” from Live at Sin-É. From Buckley’s posthumous Sketches for My Sweetheart, the Drunk, we get “The Sky is a Landfill” and the sultry “Everybody Here Wants You,” and the driving “Vancouver.” The delicate “Je N’en Connais Pas La Fin” (also from Sin-É) also appears as a bridge to the closing three songs.

• Brilliant collaborations left off the album: “Fireflies” and “Southern Cross” with Patti Smith, “Faith Salons” with Brenda Kahn, “All Flowers (in Time Bend Toward the Sun)” with Elizabeth Fraser, “I Want Someone Badly” with Shudder to Think
• Never-heard collaborations and covers mentioned in the liner notes: “Kashmir,” “Shombalor,” “Cobra” (John Zorn cover with Mike Doughty)

The remaining two songs are where this collection sets itself apart from a “greatest hits” mentality into the realm of the fan compilation. “Forget Her,” a Grace-era b-side that also appeared on the Legacy Edition, has long been one of my favorite Jeff Buckley songs. A straight-driving impassioned blues with little of the Middle Eastern meets Zeppelin flavor of his debut, it has the dual distinction of being more singable and more direct than most of his early output, presaging the slow jam of “Everybody Here Wants You” and other late tracks.

• Age of Jeff Buckley on May 29, 1997 when he drowned: 30
• Age of Tim Buckley, Jeff’s father, when he died of a drug overdose on June 28, 1975: 28

The final track, a never-before-heard live performance of the Smiths’ “I Know It’s Over,” wraps the compilation in the mystery of Jeff Buckley’s passing, what Mike Doughty calls in the liner notes his “effortless ability to become a myth, a legend.” Where the Mystery White Boy live recording included “I Know It’s Over” in medley with “Hallelujah,” here that striking first lyric, the finest line that Morrissey ever wrote for Jeff Buckley, stands on its own and makes you catch your breath with the unfairness of it. Because the rest of the collection is a testament to his brilliance and range as an artist, performer, and songwriter, the ending hurts all the more ten years on. At least we have more to remember him by now than we did then.

Lyrics in Jeff Buckley originals and covers that presage his death by drowning:

• “This body will never be safe from harm” (“Mojo Pin”)
• “As their shoes fill up with water” (“Lover, You Should Have Come Over”
• “Asleep in the sand with the ocean rushing over” (“Dream Brother”)
• “Just like the ocean, always in love with the moon/It’s overflowing” (“Opened Once”)
• “Stay with me under these waves tonight” (“Nightmares by the Sea”)
• “Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head” (“I Know It’s Over”)

Buckley fans are nothing if not opinionated. So Real comes close to meeting my high standards for a single-disc compilation, though there are a few changes I’d make–as a fan, I’ll always want more rarities. What would your greatest hits of Jeff Buckley look like?

At Art of the Mix, a new one somewhat in honor of my sister’s graduation this weekend from seminary: empty as a pocket with nothing to lose. Somewhat in honor because it didn’t start out that way, but between the gospel and devotional music in the first half and the general promise at the end it seems like a good fit. Congrats, sis.

Bebel Gilberto, whose music hovers the blurred boundaries between bossa nova, salsa, and trance music, has come a long way from her first album. Tanto Tempo came out of nowhere to establish Gilberto as a fresh voice in the global musical culture, with its catchy blend of traditional Brazilian sounds and global dance music. The subsequent remix album positioned her within the electronica tradition alongside such vocal muses as Beth Orton.

Subsequent albums, though, have backed away from that dance focus somewhat. The second, self-titled album, was less cool and perhaps more approachable, with greater focus on songcraft and more memorable songs. The third album, Momento, continues to seek a different path. At the end it finds, not masterpiece territory, but a very pleasant place to relax for a while.

My perspective on Momento is summed up rather neatly by a positive Amazon review of the album, which begins, “I discovered Bebel’s music at the coffee shop…” For background mood music, the album is darn near perfect: impeccably produced, constantly keeping dynamics and tempi just under the liminal threshold. But if you’re looking for something world-changing, move along; this is no Radiohead album. Instead, it’s music for a pleasant afternoon. Which, frankly, there is not enough of in the world at present.

I find it difficult to disengage my critical faculties even when an album is so precisely targeted, though, so I must share the bad news: Bebel’s performance is not so much cool as sleepy. On her self-titled second album there were moments alternately playful (“Baby”) and dramatic (“Aganju”) that showcased the interpretive range of her vocal instrument. Only “Caçada” steps above an emotional mezzoforte, and that largely on the strength of the superb backing band. The other performances are pleasant enough, but curiously affectless.

Where an artist like Sadé might build a career out of flat vocals, it is frustrating coming from Bebel. Thanks to her superb first two albums, we know she can give more. Here’s hoping that she digs a little deeper next time around and gives us a release that is not just pleasant, but essential.

Also posted at BlogCritics.

Oy indeed. If I have too many more weeks like this, I’ll plotz.

1. Dave Brubeck, “Her Name is Nancy” (So What’s New?)
2. Little Milton, “Grits Ain’t Groceries” (Oxford American Southern Music CD 2003)
3. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, “In This Home on Ice” (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah)
4. Tori Amos, “Angie” (Crucify EP)
5. Rob Wasserman, “Freedom Bass Dance” (Trilogy)
6. Justin Rosolino, “Sweet Day” (Music (The Live Recordings))
7. Moby, “The Sky is Broken” (Play)
8. Sleater-Kinney, “Living in Exile” (The Hot Rock)
9. Sting, “We Work the Black Seam” (The Dream of the Blue Turtles)
10. They Might Be Giants, “Hypnotist of Ladies” (Apollo 18)

Christopher O’Riley is on a roll. Recently he has parlayed his successful public radio gig into a public television gig; he also has two Radiohead transcription albums and one Elliott Smith transcription album under his belt. Now comes his latest transcription album, Second Grace: The Music of Nick Drake. And for better or worse it’s of a piece with the albums that preceded it: technically brilliant, undeniably deep in its understanding and love of the source material, but somehow less than compelling in overall execution despite some bright points.

The disappointment of this album is that the material O’Riley had to work with was so rich. Nick Drake, who has been wearing the “undeservedly obscure” label for so long that he’s in danger of overexposure, produced both orchestral chamber-pop of high complexity and stark, isolated solo recordings before his untimely death after just three albums (official cause: overdose of antidepressants). The great thing about a Nick Drake song is that he could take that voice that ranged from low murmuring (“From the Morning”) to high keening (“Black Eyed Dog”) and his amazingly proficient acoustic guitar work and make songs of all flavors and descriptions come alive.

But–and here is my bone with all Mr. O’Riley’s pop transcriptions to date–in his hands all Nick Drake’s songs sound alike! Almost every track features the same curse: O’Riley’s technically impressive transcriptions swamp the songs in complexity. Two years ago, I wrote of “Hold Me to This” that O’Riley’s approach “too often … yields a harmonically accurate overload of undifferentiated hemidemisemiquavers.” Translated into plain English, I mean that the songs are occasionally in danger of losing their rhythmic integrity under the onslaught of rolling chords.

Exhibit 1: “Pink Moon.” Made famous twenty years late in a Volkswagen commercial for its wistfulness, here it sounds hurried, busy, and way too cheerful. One supposes that the latter is unavoidable given the beauty and simplicity of the underlying melody; it is, after all, Drake’s words (“And none of you stand so tall/Pink moon gonna get ye all”) that carry the substantial menace of the song. But isn’t this the job of the performer of a transcription: to bring across that unspoken menace through the performance, to compensate for the missing lyrics?

Is there a bright spot in this bleak adaptation of Drake’s music? Generally adaptations are difficult anyway; as Charles Schulz once observed, reading classic literature that has been “adapted” for children is “not unlike drinking diluted root beer.” The good news is that the bones of Drake’s songs are underneath, and what good bones they are. And in places they come through: “Fly,” where the bass voice of the piano carries the melody to good effect, is a good early example. “Harvest Breed”’s unusual chord progression carries through the trappings of the arrangement to grab the listener. And “Three Days” builds suspense through its gradually thickening chromatic language.

Probably the most successful reworking on the album is “River Man,” where O’Riley lets the driving rhythm (in the liner notes he cites Dave Brubeck as an inspiration here) mingle at something like a meditative tempo with an increasingly discordant accompaniment. The bridge is delightful, a storm across the river valley. The second verse introduction after the bridge, where the introductory chords dip down to a minor fourth below the tonic, starts to carry the appropriate amount of menace. I will go so far as to say that here O’Riley may actually best Brad Mehldau, who consistently has gotten to this repertoire first (recording “Everything in Its Right Place,” “Exit Music (For a Film),” and “River Man” several years ago); his version of the song is more complete and holds more emotional range.

So there are some bright points on the album; overall, though, it is too reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln’s supposed observance, “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”

I close by noting, as I did in my review of “Hold Me to This,” that the listening experience is greatly helped by turning the volume way up. Listening to the playback at an appropriately high volume level helps to bring out the subtleties of the recording and hold somnolence at bay.

This review was also published at Blogcritics.

I turned on the iPod this morning, and the song that was playing was Lyle Lovett’s “Since the Last Time”:

I went to a funeral
Lord it made me happy
Seeing all those people
I ain’t seen
Since the last time
Somebody died

And I decided, you know, I should really listen to something else this week.

1. The Black Keys, “No Fun” (The Moan)
2. Peter Hurford (J.S. Bach, composer), “Toccata and Fugue in D minor (“Dorian”) (Great Organ Works)
3. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Stone Free” (Are You Experienced)
4. The Police, “Invisible Sun” (Ghost in the Machine)
5. Romano Zanotti, “Michelemma” (Chansons Napolitaines)
6. Me’shell NdegeÓcello, “Deuteronomy: N*ggerman” (Peace Beyond Passion)
7. Lee Ranaldo, “The Bridge” (East Jesus)
8. Kronos Quartet (Osvaldo Golijov, composer), “III. Colmo. Sospeso-Allegro Pesante” (The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind)
9. Boss Hog, “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” (Suburbia Soundtrack)
10. Belle and Sebastian, “You’re Just a Baby” (Tigermilk)

The holiest of the church seasons has really sneaked up on me this year. It doesn’t help that it snowed another three inches earlier this week, making it feel extremely unlike April. Today, though, with the office quiet, I simply started taking this Random 10 in midstream, and was delighted to find a number of selections from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion—topical, what? There will be repeat artists, because I left it on Shuffle by Album.

1. Tears for Fears, “Year of the Knife” (The Seeds of Love)
2. The States, “Parade” (Multiply Not Divide)
3. Wilhelm Furtwängler, Vienna Philharmonic (J.S. Bach, composer), “Blute Nur, Du Liebes Herz!” (Matthäus-Passion)
4. Wilhelm Furtwängler, Vienna Philharmonic (J.S. Bach, composer), “Ach, Nun Ist Mein Jesus Hin!/Mit Chor: Wo Ist Denn Dein Freund Hingegangen?” (Matthäus-Passion)
5. The Tallis Scholars (Manuel Cardoso, composer), “Magnificat (Secundi Toni 5vv)” (Cardoso: Requiem)
6. The Reindeer Section, “The Day We All Died” (Y’All Get Scared Now, Ya Hear?)
7. Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Touré, “Gomni” (Talking Timbuktu)
8. Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Touré, “Amandrai” (Talking Timbuktu)
9. Lou Reed, “Lisa Says” (Between Thought and Expression)
10. Lou Reed, “Rock and Roll Heart” (Between Thought and Expression)

Courtesy BBSpot: the RIAA Lawsuit Decision Matrix.

Hee.

I think they left a few things out, though. Like:

• Is the defendant a minor?
  • N: Go to “Sue, but use the dumb lawyers.”
  • Y: Can we sue the disabled grandmother?
    • N: Go to “Sue, but use the dumb lawyers.”
    • Y: Go to “Really? Awesome.”

Fidelio was pretty darned good today, and Friday was OK too. At least judging from the Globe’s review:

…prior to last night’s performance, it was announced from the stage that Brewer herself had been fighting a cold, though she would still be singing. In the end, Brewer proved more than up to the task. One could detect some tentativeness in her Act I singing but she gained strength and confidence as the evening wore on; she gave a brave and affecting performance.

Her character is the opera’s heroine, Leonore, who disguises herself as Fidelio in order to rescue her unjustly imprisoned husband Florestan, sung with fine ardency and vocal strength by Johan Botha.…

It was an exceptional evening for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, who distilled the collective yearning of prisoners for freedom into a sound of great force and even greater tonal beauty. The orchestra’s playing in Act I was less fastidious than usual, but with Levine’s sense of this score’s pacing and architecture, the music ultimately built to a deeply satisfying and duly triumphant finish.

Which is to say, the opera has a kick-ass finale. I will note, however, that devoting only one line to Botha’s performance is pretty criminal. The first phrase he utters in his solo aria, “O Gott,” is spectacular in its despair and vocal power, and it gets better from there. And that chicken soup that Christine was having? I, like just about every other member of the chorus, want some, if it has that effect on people.

And that line about the TFC having a “sound of great force”? Translation: if the men in this group ever decided to form a full-time men’s chorus, judging from the way the group sounded during the first half, no force of nature could stop us.

Artist: Robyn Hitchcock
Album: Jewels for Sophia

People flocked like cattle to Seattle
After Kurt Cobain
And before him the rain

Hendrix played guitar just like an animal
Who’s trapped inside a cage
And one day he escaped

Do you want to pay for this in cash?
Viva! Seattle Tacoma, viva viva Sea-Tac
Viva! Seattle Tacoma, viva viva Sea-Tac
Viva viva viva viva viva Sea-Tac
They’ve got the best computers and coffee and smack

Coming and going it has to be Boeing
The best form of defence is blow them up
In a regular cup

Have an espresso. You will? Oh I guess so
I feel my heart is gonna start to jump
’Cause it’s wired to a pump

And the Space Needle points to the sky
The Space Needle’s such a nice guy
But he never knows…
Viva Seattle Tacoma, viva viva Sea-Tac
Viva Seattle Tacoma, viva viva Sea-Tac

All the Norwegians, man, you should see them
Out in Ballard looking soulful at the pines;
And also the swedes

All of the groovers came from Vancouver
And some of them came up from Oregon
In case you don’t know

But the Space Needle points to the sky
The Space Needle’s such a nice guy
But you never know…
Viva Seattle Tacoma, viva viva Sea-Tac
Viva Seattle Tacoma, viva viva Sea-Tac
Viva viva viva viva viva Sea-Tac
They’ve got the best computers and coffee and smack

Viva Seattle Tacoma, viva viva Sea-Tac
Viva Seattle Tacoma, viva viva Sea-Tac
Viva Seattle Tacoma, viva viva Sea-Tac
Viva Seattle Tacoma, viva viva Sea-Tac

Long live everything in Washington state
Including everybody
May they live to a million years
May they reproduce until there’s no room to go anywhere
Clustered under the Space Needle
Like walking eggs with arms and legs

Alright, we can probably stop

As in, boy I’m mighty thor after blowing all the thnow off my driveway. Ouch. You know, though, if I’m complaining after a mere six inches of frozen precipitation, it really has been a mild winter.

To celebrate, then, ten semi-random songs about snow, winter, and spring:

1. Red Garland, “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year” (All Kinds of Weather)
2. Tom Waits, “You Can Never Hold Back Spring” (Orphans)
3. The Bangles, “Hazy Shade of Winter” (Bangles: Greatest Hits)
4. Galaxie 500, “Snowstorm” (On Fire)
5. London Symphony Orchestra, Aaron Copland, dir., “Appalachian Spring: 1. Very slowly” (Copland Conducts Copland)
6. Bill Evans, “Spring is Here” (The Last Waltz)
7. Arab Strap, “Chat in Amsterdam, Winter 2003” (The Last Romance)
8. Yo La Tengo, “Winter A-Go-Go” (Summer Sun)
9. Mediæval Bæbes, “So Trieben Wir Den Winter Aus” (Salva Nos)
10. David Byrne, “Winter” (Music from the Knee Plays)

And for the record: 35 songs with winter, 8 with spring, and a surprisingly small 9 with snow. This is probably just because I deliberately excluded Christmas songs from the count.

Back in 2001, in the first week of my blog, I went to see a show by Josh Haden’s former band Spain at the Crocodile Cafe in Seattle. I was really into Spain at the time, and soaked up the whole atmosphere: the hushed reaction of the crowd, the tight performances of the band, Josh Haden’s eyes-closed, stone-still performance with his bass at the vocal mic. But the reaction of my friend—a sarcastic request for “another mellow song!”—made me realize that Spain lived or died by how convincing you found its blend of slow, quiet, blues and country-inflected late night bar music and heart-on-sleeve sincerity. Certainly the band’s best moments—the song “Every Time I Try,” snagged by Wim Winders for the soundtrack to his film The End of Violence; their superb swan song “I Believe”; and their entire first album, The Blue Moods of Spain, all revolve around that formula.

Over time, though, their work began to feel just a little like it was a formula. And the more the sound drifted toward country, the more I felt like Josh’s heart wasn’t in the songwriting. The songs were still simply beautiful—“Mary” is an aching melody that has been stuck in my head for days at a time—but the lyrical content seemed less broad in intention or scope than it had on the first few albums.

Turning, then, to review Josh Haden’s first proper solo album, a self-released affair called Devoted, one must ask: are the songs still slow? Is the country twang still there? Are any of them not love songs? In other words, what’s new?

The answer: Josh Haden found Dan the Automator.

Yes, the songs are still slow love songs. Having set a landmark with his song “Spiritual” (and really, having a song from your first album covered by Johnny Cash has to count as a home run), Josh doesn’t dwell overlong in that starkly religious land, though the closing “Salvation” returns to the territory in a pan-religious way. There is a powerful religious subtext, though, to almost every other song on the album, whether it’s “only love will set you free” in “Discontent” or “take my hand and never go astray” in “Show Me the Way.” This is perhaps to be expected given Josh’s position on the purpose of music: “Why waste my time with music that doesn’t help to bring me to a deeper understanding of life?”

And, again, thanks to Dan the Automator’s beats and some quirky keyboards from John Medeski (of Medeski, Martin, and Wood), the sound is totally different from Spain, even with the continued presence of guitarist Merlo Podlewski: less bluesy, less organic, brighter, flatter, more trancelike in places (indeed, at times Josh’s performance recalls another singer-songwriter who hooked up with a beat-focused producer, Beth Orton). Not all the experiments are successful. The upbeat “Drifting” is spoiled by an uncertain-pitched vocal and a beat that feels canned, and the harmonies on “Want You So Bad” are likewise wobbly. But balancing out these low points are some real gems: the apocalyptic imagery of “Hallelujah,” the dark seduction of “Love You More,” and even the Spain-manque of “Light of Day.” In fact, some of the strongest moments on the disc are the ones that sound most like Josh’s old band.

Which, I suppose, begs the ungenerous question: why change at all? But songs like “Show You the Way” and “Devoted” blend the plaintive songwriting of Haden’s older canon with a fresher musical palette, and maybe that’s the value of this recording: helping to distill the essence of Haden’s songwriting in the absence of the sonic hallmarks of the old band.

This review also published at Blogcritics.