Music Notes
By 
So it’s extremely unusual that I don’t pick the shows I am going to see. My wife is not a huge music person. She has her favorites and that’s why I spent a lot of money to get really good Jason Isbell solo tickets that I highlighted in the last Music Notes post. But mostly, she’s a Latin dance person and, well, whatever, that’s cool but not so much my thing. Well, as I have mentioned, she is in Mexico most of the year and it was my spring break last week and so I went down to see her. She wanted to go to see the rare big touring act going through Oaxaca–Don Omar, the King of Reggaeton. Now, I don’t particularly like reggaeton. This is not a show I would ever go to on my own. But she wanted to, so sure. I still didn’t care one way or the other about the music after seeing it. But the spectacle, now that was a hell of a thing. I never pay the money to go to big time pop shows. It’s so expensive these days (in part because unlike the past, lots of older people are into current pop too and they have money to pay for pricey tickets) and in part because most of it I don’t like so much that I would pay for it. Like, I’d love to see Beyoncé, but I don’t think I’d pay Beyoncé prices to see her. And this tracks into Mexico. We had very good tickets, but not the very best and they were about $100 American, which is a lot of money for Mexicans. Anyway, for a rapper and a DJ, there was a lot of production here. You had about a dozen dancers with very tight moves. You had a light show beyond anything. You have freaking fireworks at the end of the show (it was in the baseball stadium). Like, this has to cost at least $100,000 a show to put on. But hell, he’s got to have the money. When I flew in, the plane parked next to Don Omar’s private plane, about as subtle a plane as Donald Trump’s. So as an experience, it was pretty fascinating. Also, I am soooooo tall for southern Mexico. At a bit over 6 feet, I felt like Bill Walton at a Dead show. It was kind of weird.
I also saw the opening night of the Patterson Hood tour, with Lydia Loveless opening and playing bass in his band. He also has Gonzalez and Morgan from Drive By Truckers on keys/guitar and drums, as well as a true multi-instrumentalist, who played guitar, keys, clarinet, sax, and flute. This project is a bit artier than a DBT album and at one point, Gonzalez was doing some mellotron thing and the other guy was on flute and I was like, am I at a King Crimson show in 1971? But only for a second because this is still all about the songs and stories. In fact, this project works better live because Hood can tell those stories and because the band sounds great. I don’t know how great Loveless is on the bass, but the joke among DBT fans is that you can never hear the bass live or on the album anyway. I did like how Hood only played two DBT songs–“Heathens” and “A World of Hurt.” The rest was most of the new album, some from his other solo albums that were really fun to hear, and then a cover of Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” As for Loveless, she’s so great. This was my 5th show for her and whether she’s opening solo or playing with a full band, she’s fantastic. If there was any justice in the world, “Sex and Money” would have been a big hit for her. In fact, she said she hoped it would be. But in the 21st century? Good songs don’t become hits, not rock and roll songs.
OK, I need some help my friends. Big Ears is next week. What should I see? I have an agenda but it’s tough! Let me give you an example. The first two hours of the first night of the festival force some absolutely brutal choices. I could see Yo La Tengo, merely one of my favorite bands of all time. I could see the songwriter Marissa Nadler, who I love. I could see the 90s guitarist/producer/NYC insider Kramer, who I had forgotten about but which I know will be really interesting. I could see Sunny War, who I don’t know super well but have heard great things about. I could see the Black activist poet Fred Moten playing with the bassist Brandon Lopez. I could see Hank Roberts, best known as the cellist who frequently plays with Bill Frisell. Each and every one of these acts are more or less at the same time. Yikes!!!! I really don’t know what I am going to do here. Big Ears forces some tough choices on you! Not all time slots are this tight; in fact, the second half of the Thursday lineup is a bit whatever to me. There’s some stuff I want to see, but I was never a Low guy so Alan Sparhawk isn’t calling out to me much, for example. Well, everyone at this festival has time slots that are overwhelming and others that are less so. It all depends on taste. Anyway, who would you see on the lineup? And since we have so many great jazz writers and critics in comments, I’m really looking forward to your advice, not only at my early time slot, but throughout this astounding lineup.
Alan Jackson is playing his last concerts. This is good because not only is his music terrible, but when my parents visited me in east Tennessee back in 1999, we were going to visit the Smokies and we got stuck in horrific traffic because he was playing an outdoor show at his venue in Pigeon Forge, one of the worst places on the planet.
Tool decided to get into the destination tourism festival grift and did about as well as most of these grifters, getting booed for not living up to their promises. Terrible band anyway.
The great Raul Malo is fighting cancer. Let’s hope for the best for him and his beautiful voice.
Jesse Colin Young died, a quintessential 60s musical figure.
This week’s playlist:
- Neil Young, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere
- PJ Harvey, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
- Jason Isbell, Reunions
- Willi Carlisle, Critterland
- Willie Nelson, Shotgun Willie
- George Jones, A Picture of Me (Without You)
- Tammy Wynette, Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad
- Allison Miller, Glitter Wolf
- William Elliott Whitmore, Silently, the Mind Breaks
- Velvet Underground, White Light/White Heat
- The Beths, Future Me Hates Me
- Frank Ocean, Channel Orange
- The Dillards, Back Porch Bluegrass
- Nick Drake, Pink Moon
- Johnny Cash, American II: Unchained
- Miles Davis, At Fillmore: Live at the Fillmore East, disc 1
- Myra Melford Trio, Alive in the House of the Saints, disc 2
- Gregory Alan Isakov, Evening Machines
- The Louvin Brothers, Tragic Songs of Life
- Mount Moriah, Miracle Temple
- Jane Weaver, The Silver Globe
- Joseph Jarman, Song for 1966
- Fred Frith Trio, Another Day in Fucking Paradise
- Townes Van Zandt, self-titled
- Alejandro Escovedo, Room of Songs, disc 1
- Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Navigator
- Bobby Previte, Just Add Water
- Ches Smith, Hammered
- William Parker & Hamid Drake, Volume II: Summer Snow
- Roscoe Mitchell, Distant Radio Transmission
- Old 97s, Too Far to Care
- Eric Dolphy, The Illinois Concert
- Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, The Tiffany Transcriptions, disc 4
- Tom T. Hall, I Wrote a Song About It
- Craig Taborn, Chants
- Miles Davis, At Newport, 1958
- William Tyler, Goes West
- H.C. McEntire, Eno Axis
- Ed Askew, Imperfiction
- Thievery Corporation, Radio Retaliation
- Mabe Fratti, Se De Vesdi Aqui
- Drive By Truckers, It’s Great to Be Alive
- Margo Price, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter
- Jade Jackson, Gilded
- Mdou Moctar, Afrique Victime
- Empress Of, For Your Consideration
- Buddy Tabor, Edge of Despair
- Frank Zappa, Hot Rats
- Willis Alan Ramsey, self-titled
- Johnny Cash, The Essential Johnny Cash, disc 1
- Doc Watson, Doc and Son
- Art Ensemble of Chicago, Tutankhamen
- Grateful Dead, American Beauty
- Tom T. Hall, We All Got Together And…..
- Sarah Jarosz, World on the Ground
- Big Thief, Masterpiece
- Greg Brown, Dream Cafe
- Boygenius, self-titled
- Dave Alvin, Romeo’s Escape
- Death Cab for Cutie, Plans
- Terry Allen, Salivation
- Natalie Hemby, Puxico
- Run the Jewels, RTJ 2
- The Paranoid Style, Rolling Disclosure
- John Moreland, Live at Third Man Records
- Sleaford Mods, UK Grim
- Fred Moten/Brandon Lopez/Gerald Cleaver, Moten
- Mitski, The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We
- Charley Crockett, $10 Cowboy
- Cat Power, Sun
- Louvin Brothers, Tragic Songs of Life
- Drive By Truckers, The Big To Do
- Bradley Walker, Highway of Dreams
- Ennio Morricone, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
- William Parker, Hamid Drake, Rob Brown & Lewis Barnes, Wood Flute Songs, disc q1
- Laura Veirs, Phone Orphans
- Terry Allen, Bloodlines
- The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Gilded Palace of Sin
- Will Johnson, Hatteras Night, A Good Luck Charm
- Buck Owens, I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail
Album Reviews:
Rodney Crowell, The Chicago Sessions
As one would expect from Crowell as an older guy, an album of good songs, none of which quite get to great, but which are more than worthy. Pretty good production choices from Jeff Tweedy here too. But Crowell is such a warm, welcome figure in country music that you hope he goes on forever.
B+
Vagabon, Sorry I Haven’t Called
OK R&B-inflected electro pop. But not much better than OK. She’s an alright songwriter, but I found the arrangements to be pretty predictable and this really is just another of a lot of the same in the completely acceptable but interchangeable world of modern pop.
C+
Silvana Estrada, Marchita
This 2022 debut by the Mexican singer of Venezuelan descent gets compared a lot to the old jazz vocalist standards. That’s there, sure, and Estrada acknowledges the influence of Holiday and Fitzgerald and others. But to me, she sounds more like a fado singer, both in terms of the picking of the cuatro and guitar that backs her and her sorrowful way of singing, even if she’s working in Spanish and not Portuguese. It’s easy to fall in love with something like this and there’s a number of Latin American vocalists I’ve really learned to enjoy doing older styles of music. Is it because my Spanish isn’t very good and so I find it charming? I don’t know, but suspecting your own motives is always a good place to be in life. Either way, I certainly enjoyed this, not everyday listening kind of enjoyment, but having in the library kind. And that’s pretty good given all the albums I could buy.
A-
Cautious Clay, Karpeh
Groovy bit of modern R&B. This guy has made a lot of money on his work being sampled in Taylor Swift songs and getting hired to remix Billie Eilish songs for alternative releases and the such. Gives you a sense of his fans and why he’s pretty good. He knows how to put together a catchy fun song, that’s for sure. This isn’t really hit material on its own. It does almost feel like something that producers would fall in love with it to borrow from for other’s hits, actually. That’s not an insult. It’s just that kind of album. It’s a Blue Note release that is about his family (Karpeh is in fact his given last name) and he brings in big names such as Arooj Aftab and Julian Lage to work with him. He’s a musician’s musician, basically. And I like it too.
A-
Fran, Leaving
OK, I have a confession to make. Everytime these days I see some newer artists using some twee alternative name for their stage name, I immediately feel suspicion that among other things, the whole project is going to be a put on. But I thought Fran, the stage name for Maria Jacobson, is good stuff. She’s a very good songwriter with a good sense of how to put together these songs musically. Aimee Mann is one obvious comparison. Laura Gibson is another. So is Kate McGarrigle. Maybe I like that last one the best, the confessional relationship songwriter who knows her folk and country and soft rock and who is questioning everything in the world, starting but very much not stopping with God. Solid work.
A-
As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics.