Theodore Gracyk ~ Music I'm Listening To

XTC: Skylarking (Geffen 1986, Expanded CD Caroline 2002)
The garden is in bloom and the lawns are lush and need mowing more than once a week. It's time for Skylarking, an album about lying in the grass, tilling the soil, and all that nostalgic British Romantic longing for Thomas Hardy's poor peasants. While I have no such Romantic longing, the opening four songs are about as perfect a sequence as you'll find anywhere: "Summer's Caldron" to "Grass" to "The Meeting Place" to "That's Really Super, Super Girl." Produced by Todd Rundgren, it's the best Donovan album Donovan never made. In retrospect, I have mixed feelings about "Dear God," the song that got attention back when the album was new. Shouldn't they have been singing to Zeus or Bacchus?
06/05/09

Fathers and Sons (Chess 1969, MCA Expanded CD 2001)
I just saw the film Cadillac Records, about Chess Records and the Chicago blues, and I didn't much care for it. In particular, I despised the plot construction that implied that, had it not been for ENGLISH blues fans and musicians, Muddy Waters would have died in obscurity. What the film didn't want to show was his relationship with white boys here in the USA. Fathers and Sons is a beautifully recorded Muddy Waters album in which he performs many of his best songs, in both studio and live settings. He's supported by a mixed race band of older bluesmen (the "fathers") and hot-shot white boys who learned from them (the "sons"). And far from ending his career, it was the start of a genuine comeback.
05/28/09

Nigel Kennedy: Kennedy Plays Bach (EMI 2000)
Because he sells a lot of records, the pawn shops always have Kennedy discs available. I didn't buy it because it's him, but rather to get the Concerto for oboe and violin in D minor. He's supposed to be a "rebel" in the world of serious music, but barely is. It's like Arland Specter, a rebel with seniority the United States Senate. I do like the zippy tempos, and the Berlin Philharmonic is just sonic sugar, an aural cotton candy. It's perfect background music for grading final exams for my modern philosophy course. You've got Bach, soundtrack for the rational dimension of the Enlightenment, and you've got the solo instruments for the rise of the individual. Or something like that.
05/15/09

Bill Evans Trio: Portait in Jazz (Riverside 1959; expanded 2001)
Or, portrait of the young artist after a stint with Miles Davis, including "Blue in Green," a tune he wrote with Davis (or, perhaps, for which Davis took half the credit). Having not listened to Evans in a while, I am forcefully struck by the similarities to Thelonious Monk. Granted, Evans is less radical and more melodic; it's sort of Monk-polished. Besides Evans' way with a standard -- Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart -- there is the amazing bass support of Scott LaFaro. Evans wanted the freedom of free jazz, minus the cacophony, with each player free to simultaneously improvise. While Paul Motian's drumming is relatively straightforward, LaFaro is an inventive foil for Evans, providing an alternative, interesting focal point during passages of each performance.
05/13/09

Bob Dylan: New Morning (Columbia 1970)
Columbia, or Sony -- or whoever the corporation is these days --continues to release remastered Dylan discs. As before, there are no "extras." This might be one of Dylan's two or three most amiable albums, full of (seemingly) happy songs. But scratch the surface and the major themes are dislocation (he's constantly moving on to somewhere else, such as Utah, or the Dakotas), religious faith, and nostalgia (except for the term "dude," "Winterlude" might be a Hoagy Carmichael song). Most of the arrangements are rooted in piano, giving it a unique feel for a Dylan album. His own playing on "Sign on the Window" supports one of his best melodies, simple words, and great singing.
04/24/09

John Cale: Music For A New Society (Warner 1982)
"Damn life, damn life" he sings over a piano that haltingly plays the melody from the "Ode to Joy." There's no joy here, so it was the perfect soundtrack to recent events, trying to keep a handle on things while the social structure started to fall apart. (For you, that may mean the economy. For me, it meant the local river forcing an evacuation.) From "natural" bonds (a mother and her children in the opening song) to international ones ("Chinese Envoy"), Cale's lyrics and music explore the darkest emotions. Frayed emotions are frequently heightened by sonic distortion, and the few serene moments are welcome respites.
04/13/09

Various Artists: Keep on the Sunny Side: Bluegrass Salutes The Carter Family (CMH 2003)
I'm not so deep into bluegrass that I recognized all the names of the performers of these nineteen songs. (Who's Joe Maphis? He's darn good on that guitar.) While I wonder if this music would sell a few more copies if the album graphics weren't so horrible, I do appreciate the oddly informative liner notes, which trace the histories of the various songs. I've always like "Cannonball Blues," but now I marvel at the strangeness of its perspective (President McKinley has a premonition of his assassination and bids farewell to his "honey babe"). Yet there's not much info about the performers. Is that Missy Raines I like on "Pawn You My Gold Watch and Chain," or Martha Adcock?
04/13/09

Linda Thompson: Versatile Heart (Rounder 2007)
With the disappearance of record stores, learning about new records has become a hit-or-miss process. I don't know how I stumbled across the existence of this one, but I did. She has few equals when it comes to performing a ballad, and there are some fine ones here, especially Rufus Wainwright's "Beauty" -- the opening line of which, "Beauty, you make me sad," describes her own accomplishments. The other standouts are Waits and Brennan's "Day After Tomorrow" and her own "Go Home" and "Whisky, Bob Copper and Me." The arrangements are primarily acoustic, and I was delighted to find that the closing arrangement (of a lovely tune by her son Teddy) is by Robert Kirby, of Nick Drake fame.
03/12/09

Van Morrison: Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl (2009)
There's an ancient rule in aesthetics: only a direct encounter with the object can reveal its value. Here's confirmation of that rule. In theory, this should be wonderful. In practice, not so much. Astral Weeks is a unique record (and I wrote about it in my most recent book). Recreated live, the arrangements hew so closely to the record that it feels embalmed. What ruins it for me, though, is the singing. If you don't have them memorized, I dare you to tell me the words to the first three lines of the opening song, "Astral Weeks." He sounds like he's singing through a mouth full of porridge. Nor am I a fan of the change in song sequence. And he did better versions of "Listen to the Lion" and "Cypress Avenue" on his 1974 live album, It's Too Late to Stop Now.
03/09/09

Graham Parker: Squeezing Out Sparks (Arista 1979, expanded 1996)
Those are sparks shooting out of his head, a nice metaphor for the way his anger erupts into song. The expanded CD follows the original album with the same again, except live (a little faster and less polished, with some over-amplified backing vocals). I love both versions. I know that some people are put off by "You Can't Be Too Strong," which is frequently cited as a pro-life diatribe. Really? Since when is empathy a political stance? It seems perfectly in keeping with the anti-Americanism of "Discovering Japan," one of Parker's nastiest and best songs. Of all his records, this one does the most justice to the guitar playing of Brinsley Schwarz and Martin Belmont.
03/03/09

David Bowie: Hunky Dory (RCA 1971)
A snatch of one song, "Queen Bitch," features prominently in the film Milk, leading me back to this album. It's one of Bowie's early albums and yet one of the last that I came to know. It features the full Spider From Mars band, used to such good effect on the next three albums, yet the sound is dominated by Rick Wakeman's florid piano work. The songs include three of my favorites: "Oh! You Pretty Things," "Life on Mars?," and "The Bewlay Brothers." And now that I'm no longer disappointed by the relative lack of rock and roll, what used to sound like "filler" sounds tuneful and meditative. A blueprint for Morrissey's career?
2/15/09

Cassandra Wilson: Belly of The Sun (Blue Note 2002)
She's unusual in that she's never made a bad record. This one's a bit more blues-based, largely due to the presence of "You Gotta Move" and "Hot Tamales." The former isn't all that different from the Rolling Stones' version. Many versions are cutesy and thus annoying. Her version is the first since Robert Johnson's that I enjoy. Beyond that, we have her usual mix of a few original songs and a bunch of standards. Not jazz standards, of course, but songs that you might know if you're visiting my web site. In this case, her failure to do anything special with The Band's "The Weight" is balanced by what she does with Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm" and the old pop hit "Wichita Lineman."
1/13/09