Music Notes
By 
The big loss in music this week was that of Zakir Hussain, dead at 73. I had a few chances to see the great tabla player here and there but never did. Sigh.
I often find the kind of new visual story the Times does annoying, with small bits of text floating around a different part of the page every time you click down, but I thought it worked pretty well for this brief discussion of the famous 1958 photo “Harlem 1958,” which gathered 58 jazz greats together. Sonny Rollins is the last living musician in that photo and he provides a few words on it. It’s got to be weird for him, though it was 66 years ago…..
I am very unexcited about the Dylan biopic (yawn), but of course it is leading to a lot of decent essays about him, even if we’ve already covered this ground a million times. Anyway, here’s another one if you want it.
Bandcamp has much more interesting end of the year lists than most publication, though granted its limited to albums they host. For a few examples, here’s one for country, one for ambient, and one for punk.
A tremendously bad country Christmas playlist “to blast in your truck” from The Tennesseean. Christ, let’s not play into any stereotypes or anything guys.
Waxahatchee doesn’t have a new album out or anything, but she showed up for an NPR Tiny Desk concert and she’s just fantastic at this point in her career.
The music journalist Stanley Booth died at the age of 82. He authored many books about southern music, as well as key articles on Elvis, among many others.
The appeal of the sacred music tradition to composers, whether religious or not.
I had noticed that there is more live music in airports than there used to be, which I guess is now a thing.
Here’s a question to crowdsource a bit. I’m working up a Best Albums of the First Quarter of the 21st Century and what do you all think should be on there? And yes, I’m counting 2000, the colloquial use of centuries is what we are going with and if the greatest albums of the first century only had 99 years, well, I guess we will all live with this. Plus my top album will be PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, which is a 2000 release. Leave your suggestions in the thread!!
Playlist for the last couple of weeks. I’ve been traveling a lot (please, feel bad for me for my six days in Mexico City…) so my listening is a lot lower than normal. That might not be a bad thing a couple of times a year.
- Wussy, Getting Better
- Devotchka, A Mad and Faithful Telling
- The Magnetic Fields, Distortion
- Gillian Welch, Hell Among the Yearlings
- Silver Jews, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea
- Drive By Truckers, Go-Go Boots
- Joe Ely, Honky Tonk Masquerade
- Bas Jan, Back to the Swamp
- Ralph Stanley, Classic Stanley, disc 2
- Jerry Joseph, Weird Blood
- The War on Drugs, Lost in the Dream
- Kalil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, Open Me: A Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit
- Ray Price, Burning Memories
- Snail Mail, Valentine
- Doc Watson, Riding the Midnight Train
- Reyna Tropical, Malegria
- Nubya Garcia, Source
- William Parker, I Plan to Stay a Believer: The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield
- Iron & Wine, Kiss Each Other Clean
- Tom T. Hall, Homecoming
- Tacocat, Lost Time
- Warren Zevon, Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School
- James McMurtry, The Horses and the Hounds
- Solange, When I Get Home
- Lambchop, The Bible
- Arooj Aftab, Vulture Prince
- Lydia Loveless, Real
- Mdou Moctar, Funeral for Justice
- Shovels & Rope, Little Seeds
- Richard and Linda Thompson, First Light
- The Harmaleighs, She Won’t Make Sense
- Chuck Prophet, Bobby Fuller Died for Your Sins
Album Reviews, almost all 2024 albums as I rush to review my required number of new albums every year:
X, Smoke & Fiction
The old greats still have it, but not by that much. Exene’s voice especially is in decline. But hey, they can still rock and by god I want to be rocking in my late 60s too. Decent set of songs, good sound, its fucking X. Rock on into the dying of the light.
B
Ariana Grande, Eternal Sunshine
LGM’s favorite pop singer has a solid if not exceptionally great release, which is how I’d describe quite a few of her albums. Grande is really a quite good pop singer, and while I find Sweetener pretty close to a great album, I’m not sure she’s ever quite achieved as much greatness as much as she has personal success. Eternal Sunshine, her new release, fits that pattern. It’s an above-average pop albums with the kind of direct discussion of relationships and difficult men that you expect these days (and like most big pop stars today, she likes using the word “fuck” a lot). “we can’t be friends” is the big single here (also like most pop stars, capitalization is a choice these days)” but I liked “Supernatural” the most myself.
B+
Facs, Still Life in Decay
For art rock, this isn’t terrible. That doesn’t mean I actually like it. It’s still music that has a lot of time signature changes for no actual good reason. But while this band has listened to Rush, at least they aren’t Dream Theater. It’s fairly heavy while not being too ponderous. But it is certainly ponderous-adjacent. Like most art rock bands, they take themselves very, very seriously. I do not take them very, very seriously. Still, if you put a gun to my head and forced me to listen to an art rock album, I guess these guys are worth more than a bullet. And at least they have the good taste to keep this under 40 minutes before it gets too intolerable.
C+
Willie Nelson, The Border
Willie’s 90 year old voice is more a growl than the classic singer he once was. Who cares. He can still deliver a song with a ton of character. “The Border” is a great Rodney Crowell song and Willie does a perfect cover of it. Oh, by the way, this is Willie’s 75th studio album!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That’s insane, even though the old days of country music meant everyone was releasing 2-4 albums every single year, usually half-baked since who had that many new songs to record?
Willie’s old man albums have been shockingly consistent. None of them are really great. All of them are good. Probably all of them are better than anything he released in the entire decade of the 1980s.
B+
St. Vincent, All Born Screaming
Somehow I’ve enjoyed every St. Vincent album more or less over a pretty long career without every loving her work or seeing her live. Like always, some of these tunes completely slap, like “Broken Man.” The closer “All Born Screaming” is also pretty fantastic. She’s still ice cold to me–the emotional distance between her and her listeners seems only to grow. Maybe it’s because she grew up rich, I don’t know. But damned if she can’t write a song and play a lick and craft a sound that sticks.
A-
Gillian Welch/David Rawlings, Woodland
I am happy to finally just see these long-time partners record as one instead of an album for one or the other. Seeing them together at Newport switching off songs was just super too. But I can’t say as this is the most successful songs they’ve ever written. There’s some good ones, sure. There’s a nice tribute to Guy Clark and there’s “The Day the Mississippi Died” is excellent. But at least after a couple of listens, this hasn’t really hit me the way the best of Welch’s albums do. The Rawlings albums tend to hit me about like this, actually, good but not great. That’s how I feel here.
B
Old 97s, American Primitive
I guess Old 97s are never going to make anything like a great album again, but that’s OK. They just continue to churn out solid songs about love and loss that range from straight ahead rock and roll to the occasionally openly country tune. Some of the tunes are better than others and there’s nothing with guys who have been in the same band for over 30 years now just plugging away with a bunch of decent songs that might not make one forget “Four Leaf Clover” or “Barrier Reef” but which are certainly far better than anything the Rolling Stones were recently when they were in their late 50s. Or since.
B-
Kris Davis, Run the Gauntlet
Everytime I wonder whether there’s really anything more to say with the standard jazz piano trio. someone comes along–Vijay Iyer or Craig Taborn–and tells me there is. So it is with the new Kris Davis Trio album. I particularly wanted to hear this because she is performing this trio at Big Ears in the spring, where I will be for the third year in a row. And it’s very solid work, one of the 5 or so best albums I’ve heard in 2024. With Robert Hurst on bass and Jonathan Blake on drums, Davis creates a bop-based set that moves the music forward rather than sounding like a 60s Herbie Hancock album. She works so great in the gray zone between composition and improvisation, giving her bandmates plenty to do while ensuring the action is really hers in the end. I’ve become a big Blake fan in the last year too and loved his work here. A nice album.
A-
Twenty One Pilots, Clancy
I am on the negative side of this somewhat divisive album. Some have said it is one of the great albums of the year. Me? I find it just utterly blah. This is earnest while being incredibly cloying, rocking while engaged in all the cliches, and with touches of some very white hip hop. This is a bit like if Coldplay was slightly more interesting. Meh. I guess it’s relatively inoffensive. I’d rather it be relatively offensive.
C
Meshell Ndegeocello, Red Hot & Ra: The Magic City
Well now, this is a fascinating album. It’s a complicated tribute to Sun Ra from the long-time great Ndegeocello, at this point a legend herself. But this isn’t really her album so much as it is a collective of great–herself, Marshall Allen, Immanuel Wilkins, Darius Jones, a bunch of other people. It brings back some of Ra himself too, mostly his weirdo philosophy (and let’s be clear, the Arkestra was a cult, as other jazz musicians such as Rashied Ali stated themselves). Some of this are his works. Some are original compositions. Some are fairly straightforward. Some are really difficult works. It’s not an easy album to describe. It is worth your time.
A-
Kacey Chambers, Backbone
Chambers was huge in the early 2000s and then kind of fell from the public eye a bit. Wasn’t her fault. She was in Australia, sure, but that was her home and hadn’t stopped her before. But America stopped paying attetnion. Too bad. What I love about her is how un-Nashville she is. It’s not that she’s anti-Nashville. She just doesn’t care. She’s basically an Australian folk singer with country influences. Like most folk-country people, not every song is gold and that’s the case here. But the worst songs would be great around an outback campfire and the best are fantastic. I loved “The Divorce Song” with its chorus “We couldn’t survive as the marrying kind/but we do divorce pretty good.” Even better, she sang this with her ex-husband, who also helped her write it. I mean, how great is that? Check out the rest of her work too.
B
As always, this is an open thread to discuss all things music and art and none things politics.