Wednesday, January 27, 2010

And just like that it’s 2010, huh?  I hope everyone had an enjoyable New Year’s.  I myself rang in the new year holed up in a bar in Shanghai with a DJ spinning 80s-ish jams (read: New Order, Blondie and The Go-Gos) and made a few resolutions.  The ones I still have faith in accomplishing include:

- Listen to more local music.

- Listen to more jazz music.

- Eat less P. Terrys and run a marathon.

I’m shooting for two out of three.  So, naturally, this will be a year of more posts on local music, and possibly some adventures into both the jazz scene and good records I pick up.

Asia impressed me in the jazz department; dark jazz clubs catering to Shanghainese and foreigners ("Laowai" to the Shanghainese) were one of the highlights of that city to me, and jazz shops in Seoul’s Hongdae and Tokyo’s Shinjuku not only carried enormous numbers of both popular and harder to find albums (crammed into tiny retail spaces, mind you), but organized them all by instrument.  What a relief from Waterloo’s "We’ll just throw it in the Rock, R&B, and Hip Hop" scheme!

But alas, I digress.  Let’s start with some two great new releases (well, one of them is old news, and one is due on in February, but they’re both new to me).
 

The first is Thief and Rescue, the first solo album by Lee Barber. Loosely based on the destruction wrath on New Orleans, the material combines both direct and metaphorical references to the storm itself, with a darker sense of personal loss and bewilderment categorical of the human mind in general.  We see the characters interact with the storm both literally, as in The Broken Cup ("In the morning there’ll be signal flags / chrome yellow, red and blue / but tonight we’re down at the broken cup / and we’re waiting here for you."), and within the scope of the storm as a more emotional turbulence, as in, well, the entire album.

The imagery throughout is stunning, both in its ability to trace the effects of the physical world on human emotion (see "It smells like Sherman’s ghost down here / someone’s poisoned the squirrels," in 1000 Miles, which contains a wealth of other excellent lines) and a general sense of the variety of emotional turbulence. Take the nostalgic lines "My sister's laugh, my brother's grin / my mother's hands are good to me / my father weeps, I cup my hands for water," which both convey your classic longing for the past, but hint at a deeper turmoil.

That deeper turmoil is difficult to define, though the sum of about 150 excellent images throughout the album do a fairly effective job of approximating it.  Where the lyrics leave off though, the music fills in the gaps with a warm breath of guitars, horns and woodwinds, all used just sparingly enough to accent each push through the shallow darkness that lingers in the foreground.  The arrangements are subtle, but oddly, the more you follow the lyrics the more you realize the music is the perfect accompaniment to the depths of their despair and flittering of hope.

Needless to say, I think this album is excellent and would highly recommend it. (Hell, Darla, the duet with Will Scheff, even has a little jazz to it: "The trombone comes in late / he leans hard on the eight while he’s draining the spit from his horn.")  Although it came out last year and seemed to top a few Best of 2009 lists, I never really listened to it until 2010.  I even missed that Will Scheff was on it until I ran into his voice on Darla.  Regardless, here’s to Lee Barber for starting my year off on the right foot. If you haven’t already heard the album, I suggest it as a good starting point for 2010.

:Lee Barber - Broken Cup:

Our second album is from one of Austin’s staple-crops, Bill Baird, aka "Sunset" (formerly aka "{{{Sunset}}}", but what do I know). A number of questions always come to mind when I listen to Sunset albums. More specifically:

 - Are Bill Baird & Co. insane?

- Are Bill Baird & Co. geniuses?

- And are the two mutually exclusive?

Now, if you follow anything I write, you’ll know I talk about Sunset a lot.  But that’s because of those questions above.  Sunset is one of a few bands in Austin able to distinguish themselves with a unique sound - that is, when you hear Sunset, you know it’s Sunset.  Leaving aside the many singer-songwriters don’t differentiate themselves on lyrics, there are far too few bands which, like Sunset, not only define that sound, and continue to explore new developments for it.

So sure, the band in some sense are geniuses, locking in that one unique sound, but insane in the sense that you never know what new direction the band might try (some good and some bad, granted).  But that’s the glory of Sunset: they’re beyond the point of "refining their sound" and well into the real challenge of managing the sound and exploring the range of new possibilities.

One of those new possibilities is Gold Dissolves to Grey. Much more compact than the sprawling Golden City, but more concise than the meandering jams of Bright Blue Dream, the new album is a perfect introduction to Sunset for new listeners, and an interesting addition for us avid fans. In some sense, there are a lot of similarities, such as the multi-instrumental melodies that range from zany to downright catchy, whether they mean to be or not. And of course, Baird’s unique voice is as much an instrument as any of the hundreds that show up all over the album.

But to a large extent the album is much more accessible than were the two big Sunset albums of last year. Take Civil War or Garden of Eden which in Baird’s own unique way channel a much more precise instrumentation, the former a country-western flavor, and the latter a ragtime-esque clarinet.  Each sees Baird bringing his signature off-the-wall lyrics to the table: "Once upon a time, mankind was all a bunch of apes / we all had furs and we all ate steaks!" is typical of the kind of demented children’s book attitude towards evolution/creationism that Garden of Eden takes, and "Oh the Mason-Dixon line, well I guess that’d be my spine," should give you an idea of Civil War’s metaphor between the American Civil War and Bill Baird’s body and soul.

Our Dreams Did Weave A Shade which features a duet with a female vocal part and a much more straightforward arrangement adds to the surface trend toward accessibility.  There are moments where it seems the arrangements will fester off into long instrumental pieces, but typically the album features Baird’s vocal parts much more prominently, hence the accessibility, if you want to call it that.  Behind the scenes, though, it’s still very much the odd interworkings of Bill Baird, unpredictable as always, dependable as ever.

:Sunset - Civil War:

And those are the two albums that have kicked off 2010 for me.  I hope the albums you've picked up this year are deserving of the potential associated with the new year, and I certainly hope these new suggestions add to that potential!

To round off the post, I’ve got a quick jazz number for those who are interested.  A year or two ago, one of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami, writing in The Believer, spoke highly of this Thelonious Monk album, 5 by Monk by 5.  I saw a copy of Monk live in Tokyo in a store in Seoul, but resisted buying it because it was $40.  Needless to say, I went back home and bought 5 by Monk by 5 to try to make myself feel better.  I hadn’t heard it before, and I can say it was a good recommendation on Murakami’s part.  So I’m passing it along to you. (By the way, that’s Thad Jones, who spent his early days with the Count Basie Orchestra, soloing on cornet in the back half.)

:Thelonious Monk - Jackie-Ing:

See you in February with a new batch of CDs.
 

- John Michael Cassetta -



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