Tag: nonesuchrecords

Cécile McLorin Salvant, Mélusine

Album of the Week, August 10, 2024

If you’re going to listen to Cécile McLorin Salvant, and (as you can tell following my reviews of Ghost Song and her earlier albums) I highly recommend it, and you don’t speak French, you have to decide how to approach an album like Mélusine, which is entirely sung in French except for one song in English, another in Occitan (aka Provençal), and some in Haitian Kreyol. My recommendation: just listen. Her phrasing is impeccable; her vocal technique flawless, and she can catch you unawares in French just as she does in English. And then, after you’ve listened, find a good translation of the lyrics, and fall down the rabbit hole.

Mélusine refers to the legend of a woman cursed by her mother to turn into a half snake every Saturday, and the man who, distrusting her request for privacy on her reptile days, batters down the door only to see her become a dragon and fly away. As a metaphor—for the life of an immigrant, for the bitter failure of men and women to create authentic trust —it’s a rich one. This album, with its DNA half in jazz, half in French chanteuserie, seems another example of the metaphor. Also the personnel; the album opens with a pair straight ahead trio tracks with her first trio (Aaron Diehl, Paul Sikivie, and even an appearance by the late Lawrence Leathers on drums alongside Kyle Poole), and continues into more adventurous fare with Sullivan Fortner on piano and a seemingly never-ending set of combinations of Weedie Braimah on percussion, Luques Curtis on bass, Obed Calvaire on drums, Godwin Louis on alto sax and whistle, and Daniel Swenberg on guitar.

The album accordingly ranges across different moods and styles. “Est-Ce Ainsi Que Les Hommes Vivent?,” made famous by Yves Montand, here aches with despair but is given its heart by Cécile’s amazing voice, particularly in the chorus when her tone becomes pure and true. Aaron Diehl’s piano is similarly miraculous ranging from a rocking rhythm to twinkling stars to discordant bells within a few short moments. The band is similarly fluent on “La Route Enchantée,” bringing a subtle rhythm and a not-so-subtle joy to the Charles Trenet song.

Things go further afield on “Il M’a Vue Nue,” literally “he saw me all nude.” The song is given a jaunty cheerfulness by the whistling opening and winking narration, as well as the interchange between the rock solid drums and gently syncopated piano. “Dites Moi Que Je Suis Belle” shifts gears into a more percussive world; accompanied only by Weedie Braimah’s precise djembe, Salvant interprets the Yvette Guibert adaptation of Jules Massenet’s lyric from Thaïs with a kind of yearning demand: “tell me I am beautiful! Say I shall be lovely until the end of time!”

“Doudou,” a Salvant original, carries more than a hint of the Afro-Latin about it and is enlivened by both Godwin Louis’s saxophone and the New Orleans flavored percussion. Salvant has been performing this since 2017 when she premiered it with Wynton Marsalis at Marciac, and there are clearly elements of the original arrangement at play here, but it has an element of lightness and playfulness in this reading, especially in the stacked harmony vocals and seamless shift into a slow four in the last chorus.

With “Petite Musique Terrienne,” originally performed by Fabienne Thibeault, we are alone with Salvant and Fortner, even as the former stacks harmonies on the chorus, joined by a synthesizer line from Fortner on the final “Who will tell us what we’re doing here/In this world that doesn’t look like us?” “Aida” has a similar construction on even slighter lyrics, and here it’s all Cécile on both vocals and keys.

Both songs serve as a kind of prelude to “Mélusine.” We’re in English, but we aren’t in a straightforward narrative. Are we the woman, forever turning into a half-snake in her Saturday bath? Are we the wondering, distrustful lover? The classical guitar doesn’t tell us; the retelling of the Mélusine story in French in the last verse only adds to the mystery of the two worlds colliding.

“Wedo” is all Cécile again, the beat of a children’s song telling the very unchildish Voudoun tale of Ayida-Wedo, the half-male, half-female serpent that with her husband Damballa crossed from Africa to Haiti to bring the religion of the loa to the new world. The song rings out like an echo of “Mélusine,” telling the same story in a different time and language. “D’un feu secret” gives us Cécile in her purest tones, untouched by nasalized French vowels, even as Fortner’s synthesizer brings its squelchiest tones. The secret of Mélusine, she sings, is unknowable: “When we know… it will be well known that I have ceased to live.”

“Le temps est assassin,” originally performed by Véronique Sanson, is performed as a straightforward ballad singing an unstraightforward lyric: “Sometimes I feel the mysteries of all these things I can’t get my head around… I say that time is an assassin, and I don’t want anything anymore.” The death of desire and the duality of Mélusine and Aida Wedo flying—out the window, from Africa to Haiti—entwine together in “Fenestra,” which returns to the gently calypso-flavored rhythms of “Doudou,” finally begins to dig into the mysteries: “As for the women who seduced their angels, they will become sirens.” And the different strands of the record entwine into a single syncretic whole as we embrace the rhythm, the brilliant piano, the Haitian folk tales, the older European legends, all together given voice by Salvant.

The ending gives us a pair of mysteries: “Domna N’almucs,” originally by Iseut Da Capio, the voices of two Occitan noblewomen in dialog from medieval times (a scholarly paper talks about the substance of the exchange, with one woman asking the other to forgive her lover), accompanied by a subtle wash of synthesizers. And “Dame Iseut” returns us once more to the islands for a brief epilogue in Haitian Kreyol.

Cécile McLorin Salvant, at the beginning of her career, told stories through song. Now, after Grammy awards and a Genius Grant, she takes us on journeys across musical styles, time and space, personal and mythic, all in that magnificent voice. I’m looking forward to the next one when it comes out. But next week we’ll close out (for now) this series on jazz vocalists with one more from Kurt Elling.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Cécile McLorin Salvant, Ghost Song

Album of the Week, August 3, 2024

When I saw Cécile McLorin Salvant live for the first time, in February 2020 at Jordan Hall, I thought I knew what to expect based on her last few albums. I had heard The Window and Dreams and Daggers, as well as her 2015 recording For One to Love. I figured we were in for a night of standards, brilliantly and sometimes hilariously interpreted. Then at one point in the middle of the concert, Sullivan Fortner stepped back from the piano and Cécile took the center of the stage, and began singing an unaccompanied Appalachian ballad. We were suddenly in a very different place.

Jordan Hall in February 2020, before Cécile McLorin Salvant and Sullivan Fortner took the stage.

Between that Jordan Hall concert and the release of Ghost Song, a lot happened. Cécile was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in October 2020. She left her longtime home at Mack Avenue Records, where she had recorded since winning the Thelonious Monk competition in the early 2010s, for Nonesuch, which in the 2000s had built a stable of jazz artists that included Brad Mehldau, Joshua Redman, Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, Makaya McCraven, Ambrose Akinmusire, Mary Halvorson, and others. And of course there was the pandemic, which complicated everything.

In the end, Ghost Song is a richer, stranger album than anything Cécile had released to this point. In addition to appearances by both Sullivan Fortner on piano (and co-producer) and Aaron Diehl (on piano on two tracks and organ on “I Lost My Mind”), as well as bassist Paul Sikivie (who appears only on the first track), there is also percussion, lute, theorbo, flute, and even a children’s choir. And the content is a mix of jazz standards, originals by Salvant, pop songs, and the aforementioned Appalachian murder ballad.

The opening track of the album is a good example of the stylistic dislocation that Salvant achieves. Her opening unaccompanied melisma could at first be as old as medieval times; there is more than a little Hildegard von Bingen about the line. But there is also a strong influence from traditional Irish sean-nós singing, and by degrees as we come out of the echo of the church and closer to the singer, we realize that she is telling a story that another has told. If you’re like me, it might take until the chorus of “Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home” to recognize Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.” That Salvant pulls together so many different threads right at the very beginning is a “shots fired” moment, strongly laying claim to a new territory over which her incredible musicianship can roam.

And roam it does. We pivot directly into “Optimistic Voices/No Love Dying,” a medley of a Harold Arlen/Yip Harburg tune that crosses over into patter territory and is usually not included in musical summaries of The Wizard of Oz. There’s an almost imperceptible turn, and then we’re in traditional R&B territory with Gregory Porter’s “No Love Dying,” which Cécile performs as a straight ahead ballad.

And then comes “Ghost Song,” an original song by Cécile that combines a straight-up blues verse with R&B stylings on the chorus, as well as something more. It feels a little like the way Nina Simone described “Mississippi Goddamn”: “This is the theme to a musical but the musical hasn’t been written … yet.” The children’s chorus that enters at the point of the chorus further scrambles the brain. At this point it feels like anything could happen. And in “Obligation,” another original, seemingly it does. “What happens when the foundation of a sexual encounter is guilt, not desire?/Obligation!/Promises lead to resentment!/I’d let you touch me if only it would stop your pushing/And get you leaving/Is that desire?” We’re a long way from the Cécile who apologized to her mother after singing the Bessie Smith ribald ballad “You’ve Got to Give Me Some.”

In terms of unexpected covers on a Cécile McLorin Salvant album, a song by Sting would seem to be near the top of the list. But “Until” is one of those highlights from Gordon Sumner’s more mature songwriting phase and highlights the melodic and observational skills of the writer as he was nearing the 25th anniversary of his major label debut. The song, written as a soundtrack ballad for 2001’s Kate & Leopold, owes more than a small debt to Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle,” but the brilliance of the melodic line is such that you are inclined to merely nod your head at the allusion. And Cécile and her band do spectacular things with it, especially the mildly unhinged instrumental interlude for piano, flute and banjo that separates the two readings of the chorus, and Cécile’s hypnotic singing of the final lines of the chorus on a single note.

“I Lost My Mind” is a slightly different thing again. A Cécile original, it seems to open as a mid-1950s reverie, somewhere in Cole Porter ballad territory perhaps, before the turn happens and the pipe organ enters, playing as though evoking Philip Glass’s ghost, as a chorus of Céciles sing in harmony: “I lost my mind/can you help me/find my mind.” It’s more than a little eerie, and the tension builds as Cécile calls wordlessly above the din, until once more things turn and we are hearing what seems to be a French organ symphony, til that too cuts out and we are left in silence.

“Moon Song” is a considerably more traditional original, with Cécile singing a song of unrequited yearning accompanied only by the piano trio. The melody and arrangement are a moment for breathing deep and reveling in Cécile’s immaculate phrasing. We get another moment of respite next, with the piano original “Trail Mix”—but here it’s Cécile herself at the keys, giving us a tune that seems to follow a team of mules that refuse to walk in time with each other down a bumpy dirt road. She has written about the track: “I was messing around on the piano and Sullivan Fortner heard me and said, ‘You should record that.’ It was a green light from one of my favorite musicians, and even though I’ve never recorded a song where I’m just playing the piano, it ended up being fun and it lightened the record up a little bit. It is me pushing myself to do something that I’ve never done before, and if this album is a diary, then it would not be complete without ‘Trail Mix’ in it.”

Cécile has made songs from Kurt Weill, including “The World is Mean,” otherwise known as the first-act finale from The Threepenny Opera, staples of her live shows. Her performance on the recording has all the hallmarks of her genius for interpretation—the rapid-fire diction, lyrical intensity and total absorption into the character, here tinged with more than a little humor. The band gives it closing number intensity right up to the end, when it seems to segue seamlessly into “Dead People”—no small feat given that the latter song is an out-of-time melancholy love letter that seems to be almost out of love. Here Salvant set a love letter from Alfred Stieglitz to Georgia O’Keeffe to music, wanting to memorialize the vivid visual writing as well as to pay homage to both artists.

Cécile’s “Thunderclouds” might be the most direct acknowledgment of the pandemic on the record, as she seeks conscious gratitude for even the frightening and difficult things in the world. “Sometimes you have to gaze into a well to see the sky,” she repeats over and over on the bridge. The track ends with a brief coda from the children’s chorus, this time singing in French.

Then we arrive at “Unquiet Grave.” A song of the living seeking the dead in a graveyard, it feels as ancient and fresh as any other Child ballad (the text is Child #78) and is sung fully a cappella, shifting from full and present to a voice being enveloped in ghostly echoes, as the dead love tells her grieving living paramour: “The stalk is withered dry, my love/So must our hearts decay/So make yourself content, my love/‘Til death takes you away.” It is the mirror image of “Wuthering Heights”’ tale of the ghostly lover who comes back to haunt Heathcliff, and apparently the two were originally recorded as one song. Salvant has said that it was important that the album end with the entreaty that the living should forget the dead and continue to embrace life.

More than any other recording in her catalog to this point, Ghost Song showcases the astonishingly fearless side of Cécile McLorin Salvant’s artistic identity and presents a cohesive artistic statement that blends ghost stories, personal narrative, covers and originals into a potent brew. She wasn’t satisfied to leave it here, either; next week we’ll go even further afield with her on her most recent recording.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Kronos Quartet, Pieces of Africa

Album of the Week, March 18, 2023

Coming from the austerity of Black Angels, you might be forgiven for thinking of the Kronos Quartet as a Very Serious Ensemble™. So the opening track on Pieces of Africa, the driving “Mai Nozipo,” might come as a shock. There’s not much austerity here. Instead, there are Ngoma drums and shakers (hosho) from Zimbabwe, played by the composer Dumisani Maraire, and a melody, in a major key, that seems as much driven by the rhythm as floating above it. But Pieces of Africa wasn’t a departure for Kronos; it was the logical outcome of their practice of commissioning new works for string quartet—and the growing accessibility of “world music” as a viable market segment.

All of Kronos’s recordings on the Nonesuch label, where they rubbed shoulders with late 20th century giants like Steve Reich, championed new music and new composers. This was partly born from ideological bent and partly from necessity, given a gap in the market between the existing repertoire for string quartet and Kronos’ aspirations. On their second album for Nonesuch, titled White Man Sleeps, the title work was a commission by South African/Swiss composer Kevin Volans, who sought to reconcile the music of Black South Africa with European 20th century compositional forms. Only the first and fifth movements of the quartet appeared on the album, however. But in the year following Black Angels the quartet released a series of “CD singles” of individual compositions, including Volans’ String Quartet No. 2 “Hunting/Gathering.” One supposes the renewed collaboration may have spurred the idea of recording the entirety of “White Man Sleeps,” which found its way onto the album.

Kronos founder David Harrington has also commented that the piece had roots in his tenth grade music class, when he heard recordings of music from Ghana that touched him and inspired the thought that “I really want my violin to have that kind of a sound someday.” He built relationships with other African composers over the years, resulting in the works on the album.

Indeed, the Volans quartet is something of an outlier on the album. Most of the works here are more like “Mai Nozipo”: melodic, joyous, rhythmic, and written for quartet augmented with other sounds including percussion, African string instruments, and voice. The second work is in a minor mode but no less buoyant for that, and features the first vocals, by the Moroccan composer Hassan Hakmoun and his party.

The third, “Tilliboyo,” is a work that I have some personal history with. Written for kora and string quartet by Gambian composer Foday Musa Suso, it’s a meditative but quietly bright work that burbles along on the strength of the interaction between the plucked lower strings and kora and the bowed first violin melody. I have, at various times, put it on mix tapes and used it as radio intro music for a radio commercial on WTJU asking community-area writers to send in their poetry and prose to the literary magazine I was trying to get off the ground, Rag & Bone. The fourth track, Ugandan composer Justinian Tamusuza’s “Ekitundu Ekisooka,” continues in a similar optimistic vein, but with a stronger rhythmic drive.

“Escalay (Waterwheel),” by the late Nubian Egyptian composer Hamza El Din, is a horse of a different color. Beginning with a slow introduction on the lute, first solo then accompanied by pizzicato strings, one hears the water start to drip slowly into the raceway of the mill, before the tempo picks up and a driving theme enters in the cello. The violin plays a meditative exploration of the theme above the other strings as the piece stretches into a long coda (this is the longest single track on the record, at over twelve minutes). The effect is trance-inducing and almost minimalist. It’s another work that found its way onto mix tapes, despite its length, as is the following song, Obo Addy’s “Wawshishijay (Our Beginning)” (which featured on my 1992 mix “Sing into my mouth”). “Wawshishijay” includes polyrhythms on various percussion instruments played by the composer, and a sung chorus in the second “verse.”

“White Man Sleeps” follows (on the CD track list, which I believe to be the original sequence), and what is immediately apparent in the first movement is Volans’ affinity for the minimalist composers. If you’re not prepared for the high repetition of the theme in the violins at the end, it might drive you to distraction. But the second and fourth movements have more traditional melodies and are almost surprisingly sweet after the austerity of the first movement. The third and fifth movements return to the more minimal statements, here played in the lowest strings. At the time, I found it the least compelling music on the album, but now the second movement in particular strikes me as standing alongside some of the strongest melodic statements for string quartet that Kronos ever made.

The final track (in the CD sequence; on the LP it closes out side three) is the hymn-like singalong “Kutambarara (Spreading),” again by Maraire. This one is truly the summation: polyrhythms in the percussion and mbira, lead vocals by the composer, a full on African choir. What it doesn’t have is much of a soloistic presence from the Kronos Quartet, who are here strictly to provide the chords and carry a constant rhythmic pulse. They seem pretty happy to be along for the ride, though, and inevitably this was another track that my 20-year-old self splashed onto mix tapes.

Granted that I was always a little weird about putting whatever genre I wanted onto a mix tape, but that fact that I’ve used that phrase about multiple tracks on a string quartet album suggests there is definitely something unusual about this one. The listening public thought so too: it became the first album to top the Billboard charts for both classical and world music recordings. I haven’t bought much Kronos on vinyl; they were already firmly into the CD age at their beginning. But the fact that this album was reissued a few years ago speaks to its appeal. It’s a jubilant record from start to finish and one well worth spending time with.

You can listen to the album here:

Kronos Quartet, Black Angels

Album of the Week, March 11, 2023

I’ve written about my experience finding Black Angels before, in the year of the 30th anniversary of the release of the album. Everything about what I wrote then remains true now: the searing intensity of the performances, the indelible impression it made on my memory. But how did Kronos get into the place where they made this recording?

It starts with the title piece. David Harrington has said that a 1973 performance of George Crumb’s quartet in protest of the Vietnam War was his inspiration to found Kronos, and you can hear his love for the work in the intensity of the performance. You can also hear something else: the degree of studio engineering it took to realize the experience. “Black Angels” features amplified string instruments, a gong and other percussion instruments as well as chanting and other sounds, and the recording brings all the unusual sound to the fore and, well, beats the listener about the head and shoulder with it. It’s inescapable and haunting, and the quiet opening of the middle movement is as powerfully contemplative as anything on record. The middle movement also features the chanted “Ein, zwei, drei, veir” (here pronounced fear) and a moment of contemplative requiem performed by the lower strings, with the high strings sounding horror-movie scratches above. The final movement features the “God music” in which the quartet is joined by music from crystal glasses.

Which makes the transition into the next work, a studio version of Thomas Tallis’s 40-part motet “Spem in Alium” rearranged for overdubbed string quartet, slightly less bewildering than it appears on paper. I talked a lot with singer friends about this performance when I was in college; the concept of a string quartet playing 40 different parts from one massive score was as novel to us as, I suspect, the existence of the motet itself. (I grew up on classical radio, but even our relatively cerebral channels WGH (and subsequently WHRO) played very little repertoire that was older than Bach.)

Is the Kronos adaptation of the motet successful? I’d have to say it’s mixed. Certainly the depth of sound from the overdubbed strings is powerful, but nowhere near as impactful as a performance with choir. The studio magic that Kronos employed did not extend to creating the spatial illusion of being surrounded in a cathedral with eight vocal quintets, which is much of the “shock and awe” of the original motet. But it does powerfully convey the sense of colossal loss that seems to underlie so many of Tallis’s works, as a crypto-Catholic at the court of the King of England.

“Doom. A Sigh” is in another space entirely, but maintains the thread of lament. Here the quartet seems to play mostly ambient or electrically amplified sounds, accompanying field recordings of folk songs from Hungary made by the composer István Márta that speak of the loss of the nation’s traditions under Communist rule.

The performance on Black Angels rarely lapses into irony, which makes the one exception, Charles Ives’ “They Are There!,” all the more striking. Accompanying a recording of Ives playing and singing his own composition, the effect of the piece appears to be to skewer the patriotism of the call to war that appears in the text of the work. One interpretation is that Ives, a pacifist, could “get fightin’ mad about his pacifism.” As a teenager coming out of the Reagan years of the Cold War, I tended to interpret Ives’ performance, recorded during the height of World War II, through a heavy lens of irony, keenly aware as I was of the cost of the massive military machine that kept the state of war simmering for more than forty years. Now that we know the cost of the fascism that the troops were fighting at the time, and have seen its resurgence in the last ten years, the ironic reading feels less true for me.

The record closes with a performance of the Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8, which has been variously interpreted as being dedicated to the victims of fascism (a dedication endorsed and perhaps applied by the official Soviet regime on the quartet’s publication in 1960) and to an overwhelmed soul who contemplated suicide. The work pulls together all the threads from the other works, including threnodic passages that point back (forward?) to “Black Angels,” the requiem-like sadness of the opening movement, and an overwhelming sense of dread and loss.

The overall impact of Black Angels can be overwhelming, but it is highly recommended. After several albums of commissioned works, it earned the quartet many awards and nominations, and put Kronos firmly on the map as an essential, innovative ensemble, a reputation that the quartet would continue to re-earn through the following decade. That’s especially true with the album that we’ll review next week.

You can listen to the album here: