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Rachel Magoola
Songs From the Source of the Nile
ARC Music EUCD1973
Happy as only a sub-Saharan African release can be, this CD also has a modern, pop feel, thanks to use of small combo arrangements and familiar instruments. Ms. Magoola has been a big name in Ugandan music for a decade and a half, first with the Afrigo Band, then solo. This ARC release is sort of a “best of” collection from her four solo releases. Unlike most releases on this label, “Songs From the Source of the Nile” is not educational, but fun, not something for academic libraries, but for CD players in convertibles on the way to parties.
Ms. Magoola's strong suit is pop arrangement of traditional tunes and themes. Songs include “Asante,” which is “thank you” in Swahili. “Mimi nataka lala que,” I think, means “let me take a little nap with you,” in Swahili, but is not a song on this record. The song list does, however, include, “Jangu Eno,” meaning “come on over here and I touch you and feel you.” With a language that concise, some very intricate stories can be told in the length of a song.
Horn section work is particularly crisp and upbeat throughout this record. Those interested in world music trends will be interested in the doubling of vocal tracks by Ms. Magoola ... these days, with the Internet and with music professionals' awareness of global innovation, this is the sort of thing that can start in Uganda and end up on a Celine Dion record a year later.
Really a release to seek out in the “World” section of your local music store and take home at the first opportunity.
Anthology
A Celebration of New Orleans Music
Rounder 11661-2185-2
There's nothing good enough about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to celebrate. If you didn't know about the exuberant, funky New Orleans roots of some of the best characteristics of modern American popular music before that disaster, then you can't possibly care enough about music to read this far into a review or thumb through the anthologies in a record store and end up buying this, anyway.
A lot of people have specific preferences in modern American popular music and CD collections based largely on tunes they met on the radio, however, and New Orleans music hasn't gotten much airplay nationwide in many years. Let this reviewer point out, therefore, that your CD collection will improve and gain depth if it contains something other than secondhand radio music. This anthology, including tunes by Crescent City royalty including Jelly Roll Morton, Irma Thomas, Professor Longhair and Harry Connick, Jr., is a good place to start.
It will find a home on your sound system during every party you have for years to come. It will end up in your car CD player when you're on the way to a friend's house or a reunion with comrades from your youth. You will be glad to have it.
Kathleen Edwards
Back to Me
Zoe Records ZOE01143-1047-2
Mature, power rock that's a cousin to modern country. Kathleen Edwards does something on these eleven songs that rock artists don't do as often as they used to – she creates a larger than life persona. This woman has been hurt more than you even can be hurt. Furthermore, she'll hurt the next bastard who deserves it more than you could hurt him. She's more beautiful, her feelings are deeper, her voice is louder ... it's an act that helps listeners hear better stories. It is something to seek in one's supported artists.
Ms. Edwards is not afraid to live, write and communicate in that wacky gray area where thought and feeling merge and blur. Her songs catch those moments before an impulse coalesces and defines itself into one of those things. They balance along the zing that may turn out to be neural signals or synapse sparks, but that, for this mini-micro-nanosecond, are still just zings ... impressions. Here again, as in her persona, she is doing something rock artists don't do as often as they used to.
A big, powerful record from the trenches of rock purpose and integrity.
Tracy Bonham
Blink the Brightest
ZOE Records ZOE01143-1085-2
The singing's a little girl whisper, sometimes skipping and tripping up to that rubbing one's wet fingertip along the rim of a champagne glass tone, naïve song themes and the hurt that naivete always brings, pop version of beat poetry musical arrangements. A couple of very nice musical builds from thin acoustic guitar strums up to powerful, almost orchestral ensemble climaxes. Well done in all ways, from performance to production. Would not be surprised to hear a lot more about this young lady as time passes.
Bruce Cockburn
Speechless
Rounder Records 11661-3250-2
Well regarded and for good reason, Bruce Cockburn's guitar work is thoughtful, delicate and introverted. This instrumental release takes the listener on a tour of the inside of a nice guy's head. Good for rainy Sunday morning newspaper / coffee kinda trips. Probably better than what your local public radio station is playing.
Not really part of any major style. Sort of flamenco at times, or jazz, or blues, but not settling into any general classification for long.
The Grascals
The Grascals
Rounder Records 11661-0549-2
This is a killer release. Straight, authentic, sincere bluegrass all the way through, but a clear argument that this roots genre contributed to rock and roll. Okay, maybe not all the way through, because the “Viva Las Vegas” with Dolly Parton guesting might not be acceptable to extreme bluegrass purists.
Harmonies are good, song choices are marvelous and the mix, with banjo way out front, is robust. Arrangements are intricate, pretty, and fully aware of the strengths of the Grascals' individual instruments. The awards and recognition these guys are getting worldwide now should come as no surprise. They are great.
Harry Connick, Jr.
Occasion
Marsalis Music/Rounder Records 11661-3313-2
Harry Connick, Jr. and Branford Marsalis, with thirteen romantic jazz pieces, done New Orleans jazz style, which means with freedom, swing and joy. They keep up with each other, and there are some nice passages in every song. Too smooth and too small to be exciting, but good. Were this a demo tape for a duo available for private parties and weddings for $200 - $600, it would get that duo a lot of work, and they'd get a lot of tips, too. With musical stature comes a point where “good” isn't good enough. Harry Connick, Jr. and Branford Marsalis achieved that stature long ago. This good record isn't good enough for them. That's why you can't really get them to come play a private party for $200 and tips.
Julian Fauth
Songs of Vice and Sorrow
Electro-Fi Records 3391
He knocked this reviewer's socks off. I heard another John Mayall, and those of us who get off on following the boogie / barrelhouse piano player's route to today's blues are jonesing for that. I actually did something I haven't done in years – I contacted the artist for a brief interview. Mr. Fauth simply suggested that he had, probably, shared influences with John Mayall. Of course, I have to take his word for it. We all know (well, you do now) that Newton and Liebnitz independently invented differential calculus at about the same time without being familiar with one another's work, and the same thing can be said of Darwin and Wallace on the Evolution thing. Julian Fauth says that, without any desire to emulate John Mayall, he merged strong, jangle piano and field holler vocals, built around lyrics depicting an urban mythos of midnight mist and loneliness, somehow spiced with humor and flirtations with much deeper blues and jazz than one would expect of a bandstand act, This reviewer is very happy that he did so.
Accompanied by some known and gifted folks like Paul Riddick, whose 2005 “Villanelle” release generated so much positive attention, Fauth makes every tune here his with distinctive intensity. This is a heavy left hand cat, constantly inventive so that, while meter is maintained, no two verses are played in quite the same way. “Winter of '99” is as cool a tune as one is likely to find. One cannot overpraise this release.
Anthology
Blues Guitar Women
Ruf Records 1110
Themed anthologies ... some labels are nuts about them, even if the themes are a stretch. This is a stretch. C'mon, folks, give me a break --- do they sell different guitars to female players? Do you go to the music store for a set of woman's guitar strings? Do they plug in differently? This reviewer has always had a problem with that whole “plays like a girl” thing.
That being the case, I hoped for some other, more real bond between the songs. Maybe the lyrics would reveal a commonality of blues between these 29 cuts. Maybe there would be some subtle revelation that a woman's loneliness or jealousy is different than that of a man. None of that came to pass.
It's a good record because the tunes are well chosen. We're looking at some of the best songs recorded by a respected, popular bunch of artists. Women, shmomen, guitar, shmuitar; this is just good music. Were it all electric or all acoustic, it might be a more comfortable listen, which might also be the case were the acoustic stuff on one of the two discs and the electric on the other. There's an attempt to group “contemporary” blues on one disc and “traditional” blues on the other, but it's not really a smooth distinction.
So it's a good record for reasons having nothing to do with its title or theme. It's not as good as records by some of the individual artists it includes. There are records by Algia Mae Hinton, Rory Block, Gaye Adegbalola, Alice Stuart, Sue Foley, Memphis Minnie, Sue Foley, Ellen McIlwaine, Etta Baker and Jessie Mae Hemphill in this reviewer's collection and in most good record stores that are better than this anthology. Good, but not great.
Billy Boy Arnold
Consolidated Mojo
Electro-Fi Records 3392
Billy Boy Arnold has sounded better on other recordings than on this one from '92. There's a mismatch between him (he's the blues element on Bo Diddley records, by the way, the harmonica player that provided the roots connection to Maxwell Street, Chicago, where Bo Diddley did the dozens, and if you don't know what that means, buzz me at 910-343-9447) and the band. It's a nice idea by producer Mark Mummel, who is, himself, a guy I encourage my harmonica students to want to grow up to be, but the band's just wrong.
Around '92, savvy, hungry folks like guitarists Rusty Zinn on the West Coast and the King Bees on the East Coast started specializing in backing established, aging stars like Billy Boy Arnold. There was no problem in clubs. It was a wonderful thing, without which the serious blues revival we all benefit from to this day would not have happened. The club owners made no mistakes. They filled their rooms with an older, heavier drinking crowd. That's the blues – It's how the Rolling Stones continued to think live performance after the Beatles realized they had to live in the studio.
The thing is, there's a difference between the bandstand and the studio. It's the difference between “kick ass” and permanent. I'm sorry; this record is not permanent.
The
Royal Sessions
The Bo-Keys
Yellow Dog Records YDR
1061
www.yellowdogrecords.com
Soul blossomed early and spectacularly in Memphis, so much so that big labels frequently sent their most promising artists there to record(Wilson Pickett received and waxed "In the Midnight Hour" there, for instance). It wasn't New Orleans, but it was big. Now we've got a soul revival going on, showing itself via early disco singles reappearing in sleazy bar jukeboxes and in more enjoyable, hipper fashion on underground radio, in private homes and on bandstands. That should make reasonable listeners think of Memphis again. Well, here's a centerpiece modern Memphis soul release. Largely instrumental, heavy on overdriven organ and enthusiastic horn sections as part of the rhythm section, it is the music about which Rufus Thomas commented several decades ago, "It will make you want to do something nasty, like rub chicken grease all over your clean, white shirt."
There's very little that jumps out as spectacular or innovative here. There's not supposed to be. Deep Soul documents the ghetto streets that are, or at least were, common to all big American cities. It's one story, sold by a composite character incorporating the perspectives of a lot of recording artists and songwriters from Memphis, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Chicago, and even a little input from the sugar chiffon soul crowd in Detroit. When it seemed that they'd said it all by the mid-seventies, the music started to fall on deaf ears, and then the music metastasized into disco, and a lot of us started to wish for deaf ears, but that's another story. The story here is that those streets still have the same rhythm, and there is more to say and more to explore about it, and the mainstream soul groove still works, and these ten cuts ("Coming Home Baby," "Deuce and a Quarter," "Seven and 7," "Spanish Delight," "Under the Table," "Back at the Chicken Shack," "Doin' It to Death," "I Remember Stax," "My Country Loves Me" and "Bling Bling") are guaranteed to happen for you. Treat yourself well. Find and buy this record.