Lou Rawls – Anthology (Capitol)
After Mary Greenfield hipped me to Lou’s great version of “St. James Infirmary,” I had to get it. I found it on this two-CD compilation of his 1962-70 time on Capitol. (It took awhile to arrive; after he died, the distributor ran out.) How good a singer was Lou? He stands up to Aretha Franklin on “Soul Serenade” and up to his pal Sam Cooke on “Bring It on Home.” The long spoken intros to the concert recordings are tremendously involving and fit his suave personality perfectly.
Suzanne Vega – “Wooden Horse (Caspar Hauser’s Song)” (A&M)
In the past few years, I’ve been doing a lot of psychology editing, and have become a little more familiar with it than I had been. The other day I had the urge to listen to this song (from Vega’s sophomore release, Solitude Standing—the one with her big hit, “Luka”) about one of the most famous cases in psychological literature. Caspar Hauser was a nearly feral child who appeared in Nuremburg in 1828 whose only words at first were, “I want to be a rider like my father” (quoted by Vega) and, in response to all questions, “don’t know.” He was fascinated by horses, including toy horses; on some level, he seemed unable to distinguish toys from real horses, as he fed the toys and gave them water. It’s this that Vega focuses on with the refrain “What was wood became alive.” His simpleness, an inner emptiness filled only by this one joy, is made starkly clear. But Hauser was attacked by an unknown assailant in 1829, and assassinated in 1833, and this mysterious aspect of his life is also touched on with remarkably accepting foreboding.
Robert Wilkins – The Original Rolling Stone (Yazoo)
I finished my piece celebrating the 110th anniversary of Wilkins’s birth on January 16, 1896, which as I mentioned last week led me to listen to this a lot. I won’t repeat myself, but if you’d like to read a big long piece on the man whose song the Rolling Stones stole and renamed “Prodigal Son,” it’s
here.
Brian Eno – Ambient 1: Music for Airports (EG)
A customer came in the store wanting some quiet, mellow music to play in an art gallery. This was an obvious recommendation. This highly influential 1978 album kick-started the Ambient genre Eno had created a few years before. Similar to Minimalism, but with considerably less insistent rhythms, these pieces repeat simple motifs against each other, with the separate parts overlapping at different points. The intent was to produce soothing background music more interesting on observation than mere Muzak. Eno constructed it in the studio using tape loops, but there’s also been an instrumental realization by a classical ensemble.
Billy Joel – “And So It Goes” (Columbia)
James and I were discussing Billy at the store recently and this was my main weapon in the Piano Man’s defense. I came home and played it five times in a row, marveling at its perfection. The final track of his next-to-last pop album, Storm Front, “And So It Goes” is one of popular song’s finest mature looks at love, finding Joel at his most reflective and un-egotistical, perfectly parsing the vulnerabilities of opening oneself emotionally but accepting the risk for the sake of having a chance at love. Perhaps too thoughtful and low-key (it’s entirely a solo track, with only piano and synthesizer accompaniment) to completely captivate the pop mainstream, it only reached No. 37 on the singles chart. So it goes.
Herbie Nichols – The Complete Blue Note Recordings (Blue Note)
Nichols’s cult following continues to grow, but apparently the word hasn’t reached Williamsburg, because we’ve had this set since the day we opened and in almost two years nobody’s bought it. Hurry in, because we’re about to give up and send it back to the distributor. Nichols only made four albums, all trios, before his death of leukemia in 1963 at the age of 44, and this box contains three, complete with a wealth of alternate takes and unissued songs. Nichols’s piano style suggests Thelonious Monk’s, though Nichols could be more virtuosic—some of his right-hand runs suggest Bud Powell. Nichols and Monk also had similar harmonic languages and sometimes-angular melodies, but Nichols had his own sound and style. There are many memorable tunes here, and “The Gig,” were it not Nichols’s most complicated form, could easily be a jazz standard. The ebullient drummers, Art Blakey on two sessions and Max Roach on three (the bassists are Al McKibbon and Teddy Kotick), help bring out the inner joy of his music and provide the interplay the pianist delighted in.
Ali Farka Touré – The River (Mango)
Touré is proof of what a two-way street cultural influences can be. Nearly 60 years old now, he’s lived practically all his life in his hometown in northern Mali, but he plays electric guitar and shows a blues influence (John Lee Hooker, with whom Touré has played, and Lighting Hopkins). However, the African elements of his music remain strongest, with the elliptical rhythm patterns and modal guitar accompaniments to his vocals (in many tribal languages) matched to traditional songs. This is powerfully hypnotic music.
Sonny Sharrock – Black Woman (Water)
The late Sonny Sharrock, America’s first free-jazz guitarist, made his debut album with New York free jazz all-stars including pianist Dave Burrell, bassist Norris Jones (AKA Sirone), trumpeter Ted Daniel, drummer Milford Graves, and more. It notably features the Patty Waters/Yoko Ono-esque vocals of Linda Sharrock (Sonny’s wife), with fierce wails and screeches as aggressive as Sonny’s guitar playing. Of course, despite a few pop elements, this eccentric musical grab-bag (which also touched on country blues with the first appearance of Sonny’s “Blind Willie,” here played solo on acoustic guitar) was too far-out even for 1969. I was happy to see this classic freak-out reappear on the reissue label Water.
Alfred Schnittke – Psalms of Repentance (ECM)
You might have some trouble tracking down this one. I sold one at the store and then was unable to restock it – it looks like ECM let it go out of print. The late Alfred Schnittke wrote Psalms of Repentance in 1988 to commemorate the 1000th anniversary of Christianity in Russia, setting Old Russian texts—neither liturgical nor Biblical Psalms, but rather the distinctive tradition of the penitential psalm. He captured the spirit and sound of Orthodox chant with dark, brooding intensity, emphasizing the stark anguish of the sinner. Frequent stepwise motion recalls chant; at times, the men’s voices are alone, making the sound even grayer, and sometimes they produce a low drone effect. Piquant dissonances are harsh and grinding or lush and soothing by turn. Tõnu Kaljuste leads the Swedish Radio Choir in a polished and passionate reading. Try to find one before they’re all gone.
Otis Rush – So Many Roads (Delmark)
I’m tired of rock critics (Robert Christgau did it in The Village Voice last month) ranking Buddy Guy second only to B.B. King among living blues guitarists. As long as Otis Rush is alive, Buddy’s not even the best in Chicago – and Otis is a much better singer on top of that. Rush had a hit in 1956 with his first recording, “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” but ever since has been plagued by bad luck (record companies sitting on excellent albums and other labels going out of business) and bad decisions (and, perhaps, a bad personality, although with everything he’s gone through, you can’t blame him). Rush’s style has stayed pretty much the same through the years, untainted by trends (a problem with Guy, who’s been chasing the rock audience for decades). Recorded at a 1975 Tokyo concert, this Delmark album catches Rush at peak form, bringing the deepest Delta blues halfway around the world on the best of his many live releases.
