Music Notes
By 
I don’t have any shows lined up for January, which I don’t much like. But I did have one exciting musical moment in the last two weeks. I finally watched Les Blank’s film A Poem is a Naked Person, which is a sort of profile of Leon Russell, but really is a more a film about the people and places around the South in which Russell operated. For whatever reason, Russell hated the final product and he wouldn’t allow it be shown during his lifetime. The only time it got shown was if Blank was in the audience and it was for a nonprofit. So it took on something of a legendary status. Now it is available on Criterion.
It’s not a great film really. Blank’s music films are all far from traditional biographies, but this one is pretty disconnected from Russell, for the most part. There are some great moments though. Part of the film is from a live show that is pretty banging. And then there’s the footage from Russell recording his album Hank Wilson’s Back in Nashville. This is probably the most interesting part of the film because he lined up all the Nashville A-Team here. Recording in Owen Bradley’s legendary studio, the band here includes Bob Moore, Johnny Gimble, Melba Montgomery, and all sorts of great people. So that’s cool to see them work. Also, George Jones shows up. While the documentary doesn’t provide explanation to, well, anything, it seems that they probably asked George to play something for them and so sat down with an acoustic guitar and sang an absolutely killer version of “Take Me.”
Too many losses in the last couple of weeks.
I really only have one thing to say about Jeff Beck, which is that his influence feels extremely generational to me. I have never known a single person my age or younger who cared about Beck at all. Everyone knows who he is of course, but in terms of people talking about him, and this includes guitarists I have known, it never happens. Beck really feels like a transformational figure for Boomers, but without much in the way of legs. My assumption is that the reason for this is the lack of really good albums, which I think even his biggest admirers admit is a problem for him. Others may have different experiences, but this is mine.
I have effectively nothing to say about Lisa Marie Presley. She certainly wasn’t a Gen X icon like some said. I mean, sure she’s Gen X, but otherwise, I don’t think anyone ever saw her this way. Obviously, one can’t evaluate her life without reference to her father and that’s tough. She was a moderately talented singer in her own right with a couple of pretty decent albums. Few will prioritize that when remembering her.
Anita Pointer was a huge figure in late 20th century music. The Pointer Sisters were one of the key bands of the 80s and have aged pretty well considering the production values of the time. Never been the biggest Earth, Wind, & Fire fan, but Fred White was most certainly an outstanding drummer. I had never thought about the drumming in Modest Mouse, but I do know that 45 is way too young for Jeremiah Green to die. Finally, there is Freddie Roulette, the rare blues lap steel player, a good combo. Also, Bachman-Turner Overdrive drummer Robbie Bachman died, for those of you fully invested in the butt rock world.
Nice New York Times profile on Margo Price. Looking forward to the new album. And here’s a long interview with her at Vulture.
I appreciate the Times’ attempts to create jazz fans by having jazz musicians suggest 5 minutes of music that will get people into a classic musician. I am not sure though that 5 minutes will even get at the edge of Sun Ra. Not surprisingly, there’s too much of the vocal work here and not enough of his keyboard sounding like a refrigerator on the fritz.
I really do need to see that Todd Haynes documentary on Velvet Underground.
The musician fans of B-52s say goodbye to the band after their 46 year run.
Playlist for the last two weeks. Not too long really, but a lot of real favorites. If these were my desert island albums, I’d live with it.
- Wussy, Funeral Dress
- Sir Douglas Quintet, Live from Austin, TX
- Bikini Kill, Pussy Whipped
- St. Vincent, Masseduction
- Willie Nelson, And Then I Wrote
- Old 97s, Fight Songs
- Van Morrison, Moondance
- Conway Twitty, Clinging to a Saving Hand/Steal Away
- Living Colour, Vivid
- Mal Waldron, The Opening
- John Coltrane, Meditations
- Tom Waits, The Black Rider
- Jeremy Ivey, Waiting Out the Storm
- Irving Fields Trio, My Yiddishe Mama
- DJ Spooky & The Kronos Quartet, Re-Birth of a Nation
- The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Brazil
- Outkast, Idlewild
- Torres, Sprinter
- Venezuela 70 : Cosmic Visions Of A Latin American Earth: Venezuelan Experimental Rock In The 1970s
- Thievery Corporation, Radio Retaliation
- Jane Weaver, Flock
- Daniel Carter, William Parker, & Matthew Shipp, Seraphic Light
- Run the Jewels, RTJ4
- Snail Mail, Lush
- Billy Joe Shaver, Old Five and Dimers Like Me
- Tomeka Reid Quartet, Old New
- Matthew Shipp String Trio, Expansion, Power, Release
- ¡Conjunto! Tex-Mex Border Music, Vol. 3
- Chris Knight, self-titled
- The Stooges, Fun House
- Guided by Voices, Bee Thousand
- Sudan Archives, Natural Brown Prom Queen
- James McMurtry, Just Us Kids
- Jason Isbell, Sirens of the Ditch
- Emmylou Harris, Blue Kentucky Girl
- X, Wild Gift (x2)
- Jimmy Martin, Tennessee
- Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home
- Otis Redding, Otis Blue
- Amanda Shires, Down Fell the Doves
- The Louvin Brothers, Tragic Songs of Life
- Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys, Hills of Home
- Julia Jacklin, Pre Pleasure
- Yo La Tengo, There’s a Riot Going On
- Merle Haggard, It’s All in the Movies
- Patsy Cline, Showcase
- Kris Kristofferson, Third World Warrior
- Billie Eilish, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
- Bonnie Prince Billy, Summer in the Southeast
- Van Morrison, Hymns to the Silence, disc 2
- John Prine, Sweet Revenge
- Willie Nelson, Phases and Stages
- Wayne Hancock, A-Town Blues
- Midlake, The Trial of Van Occupanther
- Wussy, Forever Sounds
- Miles Davis, Black Beauty: Live at the Fillmore West, disc 2
- Jaimie Branch, Fly or Die
- Drive By Truckers, American Band
- Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Brooklyn Babylon
- Merle Haggard, Down Every Road, disc 2
- Chris Lightcap’s Bigmouth, Epicenter
- Wussy, self-titled
- Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street
- Mitski, Bury Me at Makeout Creek
- Rosalie Sorrels, Borderline Heart
- John Luther Adams, Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing
- Caitlin Cary, While You Weren’t Looking
- Floating Points and Pharoh Sanders with the London Symphony Orchestra, Floating Points
Album Reviews:
Weyes Blood, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow
Linda Ronstadt throwback work here, which I don’t say too dismissively. After all, for all the throwbacks to soft rock of the 70s LA scene that are popular with musicians in their 20s and 30s today, you can do a hell of a lot worse than referencing Ronstadt, though with a lot more harp. I don’t know that this quite deserved its place so high on so many Best of 22 lists, but it’s fine for what it is. Pretty good lyricist and Mary Lattimore’s harp is always welcome. It’s certainly atmospheric in the best way and for me that pulls this over the top into something pretty worthy and beyond what could be basically a tribute album.
B+
Naima Bock, Giant Palm
Very floaty English style folk-rock, sort of like you might have heard in the late 60s, but it’s hard to grab ahold of much here. It’s so floaty that it often just feels like someone strumming a guitar and semi-singing along. Occasionally something happens like a saxophone shows up and the proceedings pick up a bit. Even the Bandcamp description of this album talks about how she had these compositions and they just didn’t take shape and then they did with her producer. Well, maybe. But they still feel pretty shapeless to me.
C
Jerry Joseph, Weird Blood
One of my very favorite contemporary songwriters, Joseph may not be the smoothest singer, but he brings a punk post-Mormon mentality to music and politics. I’ve known a lot of ex-Mormons in my life and I love them all because no one is more immune to bullshit and angrier about the bullshit than these Jackmormons. In fact, Joseph’s old band was the Jackmormons. And he represents this; a man who has no pretension, would fly into Afghanistan to teach guitar to girls in semi-secret camp locations, and then come back and write songs about the hell of current politics or Confederate statues or whatever other horrors of the modern world need addressing. I mean, this is an album, from 2017, with a song about the vigilante group that murdered Frank Little back in 1917. Celebrate the centennial! His line in that song, “We are leaving nothing here but graves” could be the title for a history of the United States.
A
Marcus King, Young Blood
I know that blues heads really love King, but I dunno. He basically sounds like a cut rate Gregg Allman to me. I mean, it’s fine. There should be room for new blues artists. I’m just not hearing anything here particularly interesting. Now, I like genre music. Country music is nothing if not genre music. You expect certain conventions. Blues is a bit more complicated here because the rock/country style is hardly the only way this music gets played, but today it’s the most common and it’s the lane that King occupies. So when you are dealing with genre music, what matters? To me, it’s a combination of slight adjustments to the sound and the lyrics. King’s sound adjustments are just turning up the rock and roll and the solos, which in the year of our lord 2023 has a very limited upside. And the lyrics are just standard “my woman left me” stuff. That’s fine (and in fact, he indeed wrote the album after his woman left him), but again, you look for the variations of the theme that make it interesting. And I’m just not hearing it. Dude can shred a guitar and that’s clearly enough for those blues fans who love him. For me, it’s just kind of whatever. It’s entirely listenable to anyone who grew up on 70s rock, which includes me, but that’s different than it being good. Even positive reviews of the album qualify it by saying there’s really nothing new here and that his major contribution is playing loud. OK then.
C+
Arctic Monkeys, The Car
I’ve never really gotten Arctic Monkeys. When they first came to popularity in the second half of the 2000s, I wasn’t really listening to music like this and ever since, they’ve never really struck home with me. Other than the lead singer doing a clear David Bowie impression in his voice, this is just a whatever album of solid indie rock that doesn’t interest me very much. Like, it’s fine, but I still don’t get the appeal of this band.
B-
Hieroglyphic Being, There is No Acid in This House
I liked this more than I thought I would. It works for me as sophisticated and hip background music. I don’t think I’d listen to it in any other way, but there’s a function and purpose to it that I can appreciate. The world is house and trap is not my world, but sometimes we can access these other worlds, even without acid in the house. Maybe it’s the heavy jazz influences that are speaking to me here.
B
Anderson East, Encore
Solid country soul from 2018 with a voice very similar to the late Jimmy LaFave, but think of East as like a poor man’s Chris Stapleton, both in terms of vocals and lyrics.
B
Whit Dickey Quartet, Root Perspectives
Hell of a blowout here and when people like Whit Dickey and Matthew Shipp are blowing out, you pay attention. Brandon Lopez is on bass, Tony Malaby on sax. Hell of a quartet. If anything, Dickey is underrated in the modern jazz world. He plays with everyone in the scene, has recorded with Shipp or William Parker dozens of times, is widely considered one of the great contemporary jazz drummers, but then no one names him as one of the key musicians of modern jazz. Don’t quite get that. This set is a great counter to the idea that we don’t need to center Dickey with the others like Shipp and Parker and Halvorson and Moran.
As happens in the jazz world, there’s nothing from this album on YouTube, but Dickey and Shipp and others have worked together in so many other forms that here’s an example for you.
A
Cardi B, Invasion of Privacy
Figured I’d better finally hear this 2018 Cardi B album! And yeah, it’s as awesome as everyone says. Sometimes, you just have to bow to the gods. Especially when they sing about their pussy being so good that they call out their own name during sex.
A
Robert Finley, Sharecropper’s Son
Oh my, rural Black electric country. Some would call this blues, but the categorization is meaningless. This is good solid American electric folk-blues-soul-country music. Somewhat amazingly, to me anyway, Finley, who is in his late 60s, was discovered on America’s Got Talent, which I routinely refer to as America Lacks Talent since my parents were/are addicted to this show. It served its purpose as riling them up a bit, but I never thought I’d actually discover someone I really like through this show. This is an album about loss and recovery. Finley lost his sight several years ago, which of course defines his contemporary existence. On top of this, he’s suffered from divorce, from house fires, from all kinds of fun stuff. Dan Auerbach produced and it’s very good American music.
A-
Hermanos Gutierrez, El Bueno y el Malo
These guys can certainly play a guitar set that makes you feel like you are in the desert. Confess I was somewhat surprised to find out these brothers are actually half-Ecuadorian and half-Swiss. But whatever. They have a nice act here. I confess that I think they would work better in a larger band with some vocals, but in terms of atmosphere, they can provide it pretty well. Think a bit of William Tyler with a bit of Calexico. Very listenable, though not maybe my very favorite thing.
B
Kendrick Lamar, Untitled Unmastered
I don’t generally pay much attention to odds and sods collections or unreleased tracks, but if it’s Kendrick, eventually you to do so. These mid-10s cuts released several years ago are indeed odds and sods. Some are not really ready for prime time, some could use some editing, some would be great in snippets. But either way, what you feel here is an author and musician deeply committed to social justice in his lyrics and one who also sees the entire world of music as his template. The nods to free jazz and funk make even the weakest tracks here more than listenable and for that matter “weakest” is not an appropriate word for what is a completely good album.
B+
As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics.