Tag: sting

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:

Old mix: the bang and the clatter (as an angel runs to ground) (summer 1993)

In the summer of 1993, I was on top of the world. Having finished a great Glee Club season and gotten a literary magazine off the ground, I had just gotten a room on the Lawn and was staying in Charlottesville for the summer as an undergraduate assistant in a physics lab. I had just started listening to the funkier side of James Brown and was starting to discover blues, hip-hop and world music. Plus, I now had wheels, in the form of an incredibly fun but unreliable 1977 MGB.

This mixtape, accordingly, was shaped by all these factors, perhaps not least of all by the last. Most of the selections on this mix were chosen because they sounded great in the MGB with the top down. That was certainly true of “Ocean Size,” the opening track. After ignoring Jane’s Addiction for many years, I finally got into them about two years after they had broken up. This was a version of Los Angeles rock I could get behind—something like heavy metal for art students. And the lead-in to Hubert Sumlin’s slashing guitar on the great “Killing Floor” remains a potent link from the first song to the second. I had first picked up the Chess blues sound from a phenomenal box set of Willie Dixon recordings, and then this 1965 Chess anthology of Howlin’ Wolf’s work, which had just been reissued on CD. (It’s with no shame that I note that my first exposure to the title of this track was in William Gibson’s short story “Johnny Mnemonic,” where he borrows the phrase and puts it to an entirely different purpose.)

On the strength of Peter Gabriel’s early Real World compilation Passion Sources, I started to branch out and find other artists on the label. The African artists on the label, such as Geoffrey Oryema and Ayub Ogada. Oryema’s “Piri Wango Iya” is a great introduction to the Ugandan’s sound, featuring only his voice and the traditional Ugandan lukeme (a gourd with plucked resonating metal strips).

I was still working my way through Suzanne Vega’s phenomenal 99.9 Fº, and “Blood Makes Noise” was just the sort of twitchy dance that I could get behind. Likewise PJ Harvey’s “Sheela-Na-Gig,” which even then struck me as a striking reversal of traditional gender politics, with Harvey’s narrator confidently offering herself sexually to a man who flatly rejects her as an exhibitionist and is terrified of being dirtied by her. We hadn’t explicitly covered Freud’s take on what would now be called the Madonna-whore complex when I read him in my first year, but it was a pretty clear illustration.

Then follows, for some reason, “Englishman in New York,” a track which I love by itself but which doesn’t flow very well here. Then “North Dakota.” I never had listened to much country music, but a friend who came to visit that summer left me with an aching heart, and a mixtape featuring this phenomenal Lyle Lovett song. “If you love me, say I love you” sounds like the loneliest thing ever, and it resonates at the heart of this tape once you peel back everything else.

I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to acknowledge or linger in my feelings, but I was more than capable of irony, and PJ Harvey was always there to help, as was the gently mocking narrator of Laurie Anderson’s “Language is a Virus.” Self-mockery always made me feel better, so it was a good transition from there into “What Goes On” and “Numb,” which may have been the first U2 song that made me laugh. Ditto the over-the-top apocalyptic Western of Nick Cave’s track from Until the End of the World, another third-year frequent rotation CD that I was still digesting.

The end of this summer, when I was starting to put this mix together, was a rough one physically, and I was starting to feel ragged and tired around the edges. When I came home at the end of the summer for a few weeks before school started, I realized why — I had contracted mononucleosis, probably as a consequence of the close living quarters in the student apartment that was my home for the summer. (While I was dating someone that summer, we only spent a few days together as she was off doing her own things, so I’m pretty sure I didn’t get the “kissing disease” the fun way.) “Run That Body Down” accordingly became my theme song. It’s a good thing I didn’t know then how rundown a body could actually get…

More feelings avoidance, more loud rock! I still love “Ain’t No Right,” though not as much as I love the downtempo shift that follows it. I listened to For the Beauty of Wynona for the first time with a good friend and neighbor who had good taste in music and confused my feelings (a common theme of my college years). And Lanois’ country-infused guitar had a natural connection, at least in my mind, to the freaked-out electric blues that Miles and his band pulled from thin air on “Honky Tonk.”

My immature late teenage feelings (okay, I was actually 20) loved getting lost in Elvis Costello’s Brodsky Quartet collaboration, and on no track was this more true than on “Who Do You Think You Are?,” a paean for those with a more active imagination than love life. And again, any time I felt actual feelings getting close to the surface, it was time for a shift of gears. I have always loved “Le Bien, Le Mal” ever since borrowing Jazzmatazz Vol. 1 (and the first Digable Planets album) from a neighbor in that crowded college apartment (thanks, Patrick!), but the name of the transition technique between the Elvis Costello track and this is called “discontinuity.” Once I found that groove, though, it was a logical connection to James Brown, whose “Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine” had soundtracked a memorable party a few months prior in an apartment full of physics students, quality porter and stout, and someone’s incredible record collection (including, oddly, Speak No Evil).

I didn’t always know how to end mix tapes then, so there’s no real through line for the last few tracks. But “En Mana Kuoyo” is a fine closer, a brightly percolating groove from Kenya that transported me to another place. I hope it does the same for you.

Full track listing below:

  1. Ocean Size – Jane’s Addiction (Nothing’s Shocking)
  2. Killing Floor – Howlin’ Wolf (The Real Folk Blues)
  3. Piri Wango Iya – Geoffrey Oryema (Exile)
  4. Blood Makes Noise – Suzanne Vega (99.9 F°)
  5. Sheela-Na-Gig – PJ Harvey (Dry)
  6. Englishman in New York – Sting (Nothing Like The Sun)
  7. North Dakota – Lyle Lovett (Joshua Judges Ruth)
  8. Rub ‘Til It Bleeds – PJ Harvey (Rid Of Me)
  9. Language Is A Virus – Laurie Anderson (Home Of The Brave)
  10. What Goes On (Closet Mix) – The Velvet Underground (Peel Slowly and See)
  11. Numb – U2 (Zooropa)
  12. (I’ll Love You) Till The End Of The World – Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds (Until The End Of The World)
  13. Run That Body Down – Paul Simon (Paul Simon)
  14. Ain’t No Right – Jane’s Addiction (Ritual De Lo Habitual)
  15. Still Learning How To Crawl – Daniel Lanois (For The Beauty Of Wynona)
  16. Honky Tonk – Miles Davis (Get Up With It)
  17. Who Do You Think You Are? – Elvis Costello And The Brodsky Quartet (The Juliet Letters)
  18. Le Bien, Le Mal – Guru Featuring Mc Solaar (Jazzmatazz Volume 1)
  19. Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine – James Brown (Funk Power 1970: Brand New Thang)
  20. I’ve Been Tired – The Pixies (Come On Pilgrim)
  21. Jane Says – Jane’s Addiction (Nothing’s Shocking)
  22. Stay (Faraway, So Close!) – U2 (Faraway So Close)
  23. Every Time I Go Around Here – Frank Black (Frank Black)
  24. En Mana Kuoyo – Ayub Ogada (En Mana Kuoyo)

You can listen to (most of) the mix on Apple Music:

Old mix: We have no heads

Sometimes my early mixes are what might charitably be described as “all over the place.” (Heck, sometimes my late mixes are too.) This one, which was assembled sometime around May of 1993, definitely fits that description.

There comes a time in every young music head’s life when they discover Tom Waits. For me, that was clearly happening right about the time this mix was made. It was fortuitous that Apollo 18 by They Might Be Giants had come out about six months previously, as the frenetic energy of the opening track plays nicely with “Goin’ Out West.” (Side note: because I bought a lot of my CDs through music clubs at this stage in my life, I was almost always late to the party when a new album was released. If I recall correctly, it could be a few months before a new release was available in the mail order catalog. —And yes, mail order catalog, because this was right before the Internet began to eat that business model.)

Between those two tracks is “Frelon Brun,” from Filles de Kilimanjaro. I had just picked up this CD, having fallen in love with the title track, which appeared on Miles’ The Columbia Years anthology (another box set I snagged at a discount). “Frelon Brun” is probably the most rock-oriented of the performances on that album; for one, it’s the only track that is under 6 minutes long. It’s funky and powerful and fun. On this album it punctuates the ferocious energy of the tracks on either side.

Side 2 opens with Ayub Ogada’s “Obiero,” a track that appears in slightly different forms on both his own En Mana Kuoyo and Peter Gabriel’s Plus from Us anthology; it’s the latter that appears here (and coincidentally helps to date the mix, since Plus from Us was released on May 16, 1993). That’s followed by “Rain” by An Emotional Fish, which was on the Spew 2 promotional compilation (which I’ve since lost), alongside King Missile’s dryly hilarious “Detachable Penis” (which also appears on this mixtape). And then comes “Traditional Irish Folk Song,” from Denis Leary’s comedy album No Cure for Cancer. Like I said, charitably described as all over the place.

This mixtape also memorializes the beginning of my interest in PJ Harvey, having picked up Dry based on word of mouth from the crew in the basement of Peabody Hall, i.e. the publications staffs of the Declaration and The Yellow Journal. I was still digesting the Talking Heads, having picked up the Sand in the Vaseline compilation earlier that year. And, having bought Neneh Cherry’s great Homebrew on a whim earlier that spring, I discovered the seductive pleasures of “Peace in Mind” by blasting the album out my Monroe Hill window one Sunday afternoon as we played an impromptu volleyball game.

  1. Dig My Grave – They Might Be Giants (Apollo 18)
  2. Frelon Brun (Brown Hornet) – Miles Davis (Filles De Kilimanjaro)
  3. Goin’ Out West – Tom Waits (Bone Machine)
  4. Ten Percenter – Frank Black (Frank Black)
  5. The Unbreakable Chain – Daniel Lanois (For The Beauty Of Wynona)
  6. Cain & Abel – Branford Marsalis Trio (The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born)
  7. I Want To Live – Talking Heads (Sand In The Vaseline Popular Favorites 1976-1992)
  8. Plants And Rags – PJ Harvey (Dry)
  9. Summertime Rolls – Jane’s Addiction (Nothing’s Shocking)
  10. Don’t Worry About the Government – Talking Heads (Talking Heads: 77)
  11. Heavy Cloud No Rain – Sting (Ten Summoner’s Tales)
  12. Trout – Neneh Cherry (Homebrew)
  13. Obiero – Ayub Ogada (Plus From Us)
  14. Butterflies – Toad the Wet Sprocket (Fear)
  15. Traditional Irish Folk Song – Denis Leary (No Cure For Cancer)
  16. Rain – An Emotional Fish (Junk Puppets)
  17. I Wish You Wouldn’t Say That – Talking Heads (Talking Heads: 77)
  18. Who Are You – Tom Waits (Bone Machine)
  19. Pets – Porno For Pyros (Porno for Pyros)
  20. Detachable Penis – King Missile (Happy Hour)
  21. Brackish Boy – Frank Black (Frank Black)
  22. Happy And Bleeding – PJ Harvey (Dry)
  23. I Don’t Wanna Grow Up – Tom Waits (Bone Machine)
  24. Peace In Mind – Neneh Cherry (Homebrew)
  25. Epilogue (Nothing ‘Bout Me) – Sting (Ten Summoner’s Tales)

You can listen to (most of) the mix via Apple Music here: