In articles and reviews, Jurassic 5 has inevitably been described as “old school,” as if that were an undesirable aspiration. Each time the term pops up, it sounds dismissive, and yet the moniker never seems well-enough explained to mean what it should: This is a sextet that can rock the…
It’s easy to imagine the Moody Blues establishing residency at a retirement village in Boca Raton. Their orchestral leanings — more Mantovani than Solti — and the addition of guitarist Justin Hayward and bassist John Lodge sent them away from the R&B of their earliest days and helped them find…
The mock primitive factor (hereafter referred to as mock prim) in blues is very high. Mock prim is that racial/racist double bind that says the best black music is that which is made by African Americans living in the rural South, preferably in Mississippi. Mock prim values the purist element…
America on the Fourth of July. Can’t get much more perfect than that, huh? In an age where synergy has become synonymous with success, where capitalism is just another word for something more to sell, anyone with aesthetic sense contrary to the bottom line is just another bitter crank who…
And then Lou Reed says, “I love you.” It’s his way of answering a question that could, in truth, be interpreted as a vague compliment — something about how his albums have never conformed to fad or fashion, something about how Lou Reed albums always sound like Lou Reed albums…
Among the most enduring and wrong-headed myths surrounding the Seventies work of country legend George Jones is that his producer at the time, Billy Sherrill, squandered the talents of the music’s greatest singer, outfitting him with overproduced ballads, silly novelties, and an overall slapdash mentality that sacrificed art for commerce…
Paris, Miami, New York City, Los Angeles. You’d expect to find enclaves of African musicians there. But Portland and Seattle? You bet, and it’s not even a new development. Ex-Ghanaian Obo Addy came to Portland in 1975 and his countryman Kofi Anang settled in Seattle three years later, to cite…
North American audiences tend to romanticize (when we don’t simply trivialize or dismiss) both art made by women and art made by Latin Americans, particularly commercial art. While virtually all popular music, especially Latin-American music, trades in romance, it would be a great disservice to the unique Brazilian Divas performance…
The term mantra brings to mind many things to many people. Most think of it in the Hindu sense, in which a mantra is a series of words repeated continuously by a praying or meditating believer. Others remember the goofy scene in Woody Allen’s movie Annie Hall, when at the…
Recent albums by Alan Jackson, Brad Paisley, and Trisha Yearwood have all hinted that commercial country music may finally be resolving its current pop sheen with its twangy hard-core past. No one, though, has negotiated this conflict as persuasively as Lee Ann Womack does on her third release, I Hope…
Is it possible to love the way a band sounds on record and at the same time loathe its audience and the milieu it inhabits? That is the dilemma when it comes to Medeski, Martin & Wood and the reek of hippie jam band that accompanies them. So far I’ve…
O Fortune, like the moon, you are changeable, ever waxing and waning. — Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana Faceless strawmen and shimmering goddesses flex their knees and fix their hair in the foyer between the front lobby and the auditorium of Havana’s Amadeo Roldan Theater. The dancers and musicians of the…
My first exposure to the music of Tito Puente came, as I’m sure most gringos would admit, via Carlos Santana. “Oye Como Va,” the massive hit single from Santana’s 1970 album Abraxas, boomed constantly from both sides of the radio band in my hometown of Memphis, its incessant Latin rhythm…
Six years ago, when the band known as Ed Matus’ Struggle (EMS) settled on its curious moniker, the whole thing felt like a joke. “There’s a lot of cheesy names out there,” notes guitarist Juan Montoya. “So we just named ourselves after someone we knew.” The real Ed Matus, another…
From the opening blast of distorted electric guitar that kicks off Start with the Soul, Alvin Youngblood Hart both distances himself from the blues purism of his first two albums and redefines the whole damn genre in ways even Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robert Cray never pulled off. That first…
The cover of the box set Dinner on the Diner boasts, “two CDs and 64 pages of recipes, photos, and travel adventures …,” and, sure enough, the first page of the liner-note booklet I flipped to contained instructions for Sea Bass/Salmon Baked in Salt from Mary Ann Esposito. Later pages…
Kirk Franklin may be acknowledged by some as the most important gospel artist of the Nineties, but his influence and his connection to pop history stake a claim for him as one of the most important artists in pop history, period. First, his mission to take the acceptance and challenge…
By recent definition “modern rock” is practically an oxymoron. With pretty teen groups and scantily clad Lolitas clogging the airwaves and charts, “rock” has become about as old school as they come. The age of the average audience member, upward of 22, clearly is outside Rolling Stone’s target demographic, and…
It’s got all the right ingredients for a huge disaster. Os Amores Libres by Galician piper Carlos Nuñez mixes up northern Spanish, Celtic, Moorish, Romanian Gypsy, flamenco, and Sephardic music. It amalgamates Jackson Browne with the Sufi Andalousi Choir of Tangiers, barricades Gypsy band Taraf of Caránsebes inside an Irish…
Its ideology was patently stupid and misanthropic, its cartoon gimmickry was just silly, and its eventual embrace of synthesizers produced some of the least funky dance music every released. But for a few years in the Seventies and early Eighties, Devo was a goofy, intriguing, and occasionally inspired quintet that…
On a crowded bus in Buenos Aires, a gaggle of teenage girls huddled in the back, giggling and gossiping as teenage girls everywhere do. Their exuberant youth was too much for a cynic in his early twenties, who stood clutching a pole in the aisle. He couldn’t resist baiting the…
Begin with a bouillabaisse of Zappa, Beefheart, and the Residents, add a liberal dose of Spike Jones’s comedy, and then throw in the best bits from sound-effects records you’ve borrowed from the library. That’s the recipe for entertainment — Mister Entertainment to you. Mr. Entertainment is Steve Toth, who’s prepared…
