PREVIOUSLY…
Remembering Allen Toussaint through His Words on Music
TUESDAY, 10 NOVEMBER 2015
A brief remembrance of New Orleans songwriter, pianist, producer, arranger and singer Allen Toussaint, who died in Madrid on 10 November 2015. Many of his songs are better-known in versions by other artists (e.g., “Southern Nights” by Glen Campbell, “Yes We Can” by the Pointer Sisters), and his sonic signature as a producer is recognizable on recordings like Labelle’s Nightbirds (1974), which featured “Lady Marmalade.” If you don’t already know his music, click through to find out what you’ve missed.
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“I Was Killed When I Was 27”: Catching Up with Sananda Maitreya
WEDNESDAY, 21 OCTOBER 2015
Apropos of my original black eclecticism post, I came across this article/profile of Sananda Maitreya (formerly Terence Trent D’Arby) in, of all places, The New Statesman earlier. Although it functions partly to promote Maitreya’s latest album, The Rise of the Zugebrian Time Lords, in some ways, it’s really just another version of the “whatever-happened-to” genre of entertainment journalism. In it, one will still learn some interesting things about egos, eccentricity, creativity, the recording industry, career trajectories and much more. The quotations from Martyn Ware (of Heaven 17), who co-produced D’Arby’s debut album Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby, are especially illuminating. In any event, because of the way it paints Maitreya as somewhat paranoid and conspiracy-theory–oriented, I doubt that this article will promoted on Maitreya’s own website. It’s a good read nonetheless.
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Mysteries to Me and My Friends: Gregg Alexander Interviewed
WEDNESDAY, 15 OCTOBER 2014
Wait. What’s that? Who’s Gregg Alexander? If you were listening to pop radio in the late 1990s or walked down a street where people were blasting pop hits from their cars, you might have heard this track by The New Radicals, a group that was essentially Alexander. Indeed, had the song not been such a chart success, I would already have written a Perfect Pop Songs entry about it. Although the Hollywood Reporter interview linked here veers at times toward shameless idol worship, in it we learn about what Alexander did before becoming a New Radical, why he disbanded the “group,” and what he’s been doing in the decade and a half since his only hit was released. Click through to find out why he consented to be interviewed and to learn how you might hear more music from him …
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One of Those Perfectly Formed Debuts: Ned Raggett on Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine
TUESDAY, 14 OCTOBER 2014
Although I am growing more conflicted about, if not downright hostile toward, anniversary features like the one I’m including here, this one is notable both for its subject matter and its (mostly) not succumbing to self-congratulatory, nostalgic impulses. What Ned Raggett does here is to explain the contemporary and lingering resonance of one of the most striking debut recordings of the late 1980s. Indeed, in pitched battles about what to play on the store stereo system at Philadelphia’s Discovery Discs, where I worked from 1989 to 1991, no one ever objected to playing this album because it was bad or mediocre, only because it had already been played—in its entirety—on a given day, and sometimes more than once. The goths, the punks, the hip-hop heads—we all found something immediately engaging and deeply powerful in it. Read on to find out why…
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To Capture the Feel of Coltrane: The Biography of the Biographer
FRIDAY, 6 JUNE 2014
Back in 2011, more than four years after publishing a review of Ben Ratliff’s Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, I woke to an e-mail message that made me do a double-take. When I saw the author’s name, I was wondering whether it was really the person I thought it was. During my college years, I was fascinated by the music and life of John Coltrane, so much so that within the span of a few months I had read all three of the biographies then available: J.C. Thomas’s Chasin’ the Trane: The Music and Mystique of John Coltrane, Bill Cole’s John Coltrane, and C. O. Simpkins’ Coltrane: A Biography. On that morning back in 2011, there was a message that appeared to be from Simpkins himself. When I read it, I figured it had to be he, because the writer partly took me to task for a couple of things in my review. Luckily, I was able to answer and deflect both criticisms. One idea I didn’t endorse—that Coltrane was “obsessive” about practicing—was in a direct quote, and the published gloss made clear how my position differed. The other idea was an editing infelicity of the kind that makes writers cringe: the removal of a word, in this case a crucial “perhaps.” Anyway, I never got a reply to my reply (maybe Simpkins was unswayed or just busy), but yesterday I happened upon a piece that tells us a little about the life of the man who presented a more intimate portrait of Coltrane than any other biographer before or since. The author of the piece is Sam Stephenson, the documentarian behind The Jazz Loft Project, and he makes me want to know even more about Simpkins. Click through for more (while I search my archives for the e-mail address) …
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Back to the Dance Floor Darkly with Phantogram
SATURDAY, 22 FEBRUARY 2014
I don’t have time to write a Perfect Pop Songs entry for this track, and its newness—Voices was released just a few days ago—makes me think that making such a declaration might be premature. In any event, this track grabbed and held my attention when I first heard it on the radio a few weeks ago. It’s about as perfect a lead single I can imagine for a band whose music contains elements of everything I’ve loved in other groups’ dance music: deep Moog basslines, hip-hop/trip-hop style drum programming, an off-kilter approach to textural flow and continuity, and dark, emotive vocals. So, that means Phantogram reminds me here of Lamb, Esthero, and Portishead. And the video ain’t bad either. The only downside for me is that the track’s length is too radio-friendly: I can’t wait to hear a good 12-inch mix in a club. Can you?
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The Bass Player … Has to Be the Strongest Musician: Remembering and Learning from Dwayne Burno
WEDNESDAY, 1 JANUARY 2014
Last weekend, I learned of the passing of bassist Dwayne Burno at the age of 43. According to the obituary on the JazzTimes website, last week was the end of the musician’s long struggle with kidney disease (he had a transplant in 2010). I remember Burno as a kind, generous person off the bandstand and a consummate, thoughtful performer—accompanist and soloist—no matter the setting. He appears on countless recordings, from those by veteran and younger jazz artists to those by jazz-sympathetic hip-hop artists like Digable Planets (on Blowout Comb).
In fact, there’s an argument to be made that Burno was outstanding even when he wasn’t slated to perform. On one memorable evening in November of 1994, I saw him in the audience at Bradley’s in New York for a performance by the Abraham Burton Quartet that I jokingly referred to as “Young Lions Night” in my notes. In addition to the band (Burton on alto saxophone, Marc Cary on piano, Curtis Lundy on bass and Gregory Hutchinson on drums) and Roy Hargrove’s manager Larry Clothier, it seemed that every young (male) musician on the scene was in the club that night—Anthony Wonsey, Richie Goods, Don Edwards, Mark Whitfield and Ron Blake were among them. Of course, since it was the 2 a.m. set on a Sunday night/Monday morning and since most of the other musicians had finished weeklong or weekend engagements at other clubs, Bradley’s was the logical place for them to be if they weren’t ready to call it a night. And it was the lateness of the evening that made the date memorable. In the fifth tune of the set, an uptempo burner whose title I didn’t catch, Lundy started to look tired and motioned with his head toward Burno who was seated at the bar. Burno rose, walked over to the performance area, slipped past Cary and took a position directly behind Lundy, covering the latter’s left hand with his own and starting to finger pitches while pushing Lundy to the right. In a span lasting only two or three more beats, Burno had taken over playing bass altogether, and Lundy retired to the bar for a much-needed break. Burno wasn’t simply relief, however: he took the performance up several notches by selectively creating and releasing tension by playing around with the pulse and with pitches and inspiring Hutchinson to intensify matters in similar ways.
In accordance with that memory, I had long been thinking that I should point interested readers to the 2011 interview with Burno on pianist George Colligan’s Jazz Truth blog (which, among other items, also has an illuminating interview with Ralph Peterson, an underappreciated drummer, trumpeter, and educator ). If you care to know, reading the Burno interview will tell you more than most people might have ever guessed about how essential a bassist can be in the moment-to-moment unfolding of a jazz performance. Finally, if you’re at all interested in helping defray funeral and other expenses for Burno’s wife and seven-year-old son, this page will allow you make a donation. Otherwise, click through (and check out part two) to learn more about how a skilled and respected jazz bassist thinks about and approaches his art…
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Just like an Incense That Burns Slowly: Oliver Wang on Buhloone Mindstate
MONDAY, 30 DECEMBER 2013
For reasons I might detail in a future post, I’ve been souring on the notion of anniversary-style commentary on albums. Misgivings aside, though, there was a thoughtful piece on NPR’s Morning Edition today about Buhloone Mindstate, the third album from De la Soul released in 1993. The feature is a cap, perhaps, to a year’s worth of pieces devoted to the year 1993 in hip-hop history. Whether or not you agree with the conceit that a cultural product can be “ahead of its time” (a conceit that is one point of departure for an upcoming post), there’s something to be said for rehearing and reassessing a release that apparently took time to register beyond the world of music critics, especially those perpetually seeking the novel or the challenging. Click through, as always, for more…
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Perfect Pop Songs #5: Tanya Donelly’s “The Storm” (2002)
SATURDAY, 21 DECEMBER 2013
After too much time, there’s finally another entry in the PPS series. This one’s taken from an EP and full-length LP Tanya Donelly recorded for 4AD and released in 2002. Although the song is stylistically consistent with Donelly’s earlier output, especially when she led Belly, there’s something about “The Storm” that grabs me and holds me every time I hear or remember it. Maybe you’ll feel the same way after hearing it…
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More to See, More on the Horizon
MONDAY, 24 JUNE 2013
Now that the academic year has ended and most of my lingering work has been dispatched, I can finally turn my attention back to posting some of the materials I’ve been holding in reserve. Appearing with embarrassingly long-ago-promised posts, there’ll be some additions to the Perfect Pop Songs series and more of my musings alongside tidbits from around the web that you’ve seen more of here lately. So keep your browsers trained on this space, and if you still have a feed reader of some sort, subscribe to this site’s feeds so that you’ll know when new content appears. Finally, if you own a high-resolution mobile or desktop device (like the latest iPhones, iPads, Android phones and some Macintosh computers), you’ll enjoy looking at these pages even more now. All of the images have been updated to look wonderful on those so-called “retina” devices as well as their predecessors. As always, enjoy…