Wednesday, January 18, 2006
CELEBRATION
Sheila Jordan and Cameron Brown
Talk about your high-wire acts. On her latest recording, released in August, singer Sheila Jordan has only the robust acoustic bass of Cameron Brown to support her. On "Celebration," recorded live at a New York club, she shows a nimble, daring vocal style and an open, inventive spirit that makes every song an adventure.
Now 77, Jordan has a quiet, almost underground reputation as a vocalist revered by jazz musicians -- her first performance accompanied only by bass was with Charles Mingus in the 1950s -- yet is all but unknown to the wider public. Despite a hard life -- drink, drugs, divorce and decades of popular neglect -- she still has a remarkably lithe voice. She sounds youthful and bright, a little like a more sophisticated Rickie Lee Jones.
Jordan has an innate sense of swing that makes any instruments besides Brown's steady, tuneful bass superfluous. Jordan may be something of an acquired taste -- especially with only a bass to accompany her -- but she has a warm musical presence that makes you want to join her on her musical excursions, from Duke Ellington to Fats Waller to Oscar Brown Jr.
The disc contains three time-shifting medleys that allow Jordan to scat, to glide into her upper register and to alter the tempo until she ends up with the vocal equivalent of dancing on the ceiling. When she brings Jay Clayton to the microphone, the two singers tear into Dizzy Gillespie's "Birk's Works" like a pair of dueling saxophonists. After an intricate bebop passage, a joyous Jordan rightly observes, "Was that hip or what?"
-- Matt Schudel
SPELLED IN BONES
The Fruit Bats
The Fruit Bats are technically a group, but they're really a constellation of musicians circling one central figure, lead singer Eric Johnson. The Bats' latest CD builds on the 2003 release "Mouthfuls," and it boasts the same kind of dreamy, folk-inspired pop rock Johnson has written since the start of the decade.
"Spelled in Bones" builds slowly, becoming increasingly compelling as it progresses, and taking off with "Canyon Girl," its fourth and perhaps catchiest number. The song is infused with a sense of recklessness and escape, complete with lilting guitars and lyrics that declare, "But cover me, 'cause I'm going in/And I won't return back to the run of the mill again."
Johnson -- who moved from Chicago to Seattle, where he recorded this album in 2004 in band member Dan Strack's basement studio -- delves into the natural world with this CD, sounding a touch like Henry David Thoreau as he exhorts in one upbeat tune, "Let your pollen lie on the legs of bees/Through the pines, through the briars/And down to the briny sea."
While he initially intended to write a darker CD, most of the songs sound as if Johnson and his crew are about to embark on a cheery, slightly psychedelic road trip.
Johnson includes one little homage to Prince, as he has on every one of his records. This time it's the words "raspberry beret," which don't quite make sense in the context of the song in which they appear, "The Earthquake of '73."
But as Johnson's voice, with its echoes of George Harrison, spins its tales of love and angst, you can gloss over the details.
-- Juliet Eilperin
ANDREW BIRD & THE MYSTERIOUS PRODUCTION OF EGGS
Andrew Bird
Truth be told, the production of eggs isn't terribly mysterious. It is, however, sublimely strange, as is Andrew Bird, whose method of creation pairs the aura of Olde Tyme America with the just slightly shy of ironic tinge of the contemporary.
Combining these opposite but oddly complementary poles of inspiration, expert violinist, whistler and all-around multi-instrumentalist Bird has released his strongest record yet, an album whose intriguing ingenuity -- chiming percussion and quivering whistling that sounds like a musical saw on "Sovay," plucked string ostinatos and twangy guitar noir on "Banking on a Myth" -- draws you into an alternately appealing and perplexing melange of straight melody and sideways wordplay.
At his best, Bird conveys deep meaning with whimsical lyrical flourishes, with songs such as "A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left," a peek into darkness and death as if told by Dr. Seuss, or "Fake Palindromes," which adopts the strange cadences of sentences that seemingly read the same forward as backward to evince a certain quirky menace. "My dewy-eyed Disney bride what has tried/swapping your blood with formaldehyde?/Monsters?" sings Bird, following a soaring rock-and-roll start.
His delivery is sad, tired and resigned, as if what he's singing about makes sense. Or like he knows something we don't and probably should, given the queasily celebratory uplift of the song's kicker of a last line: "I'm going to drill a tiny hole into your head."
-- Joshua Klein
DIMANCHE A BAMAKO
Amadou & Mariam
Let's face it, world music is usually too much work, more about chin-stroking than head-bobbing. But while the Malian duo of Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia employ a mixture of influences dizzying enough to send music nerds into cardiac arrest, you don't need an ethnomusicology degree to enjoy their music (though some high school French might help).
Bagayoko is a West African legend, having played guitar in Les Ambassadeurs, Afro-pop innovators who deftly wedded Latin American and local rhythms. Now based in Paris, he and wife Doumbia have expanded that culture-splicing approach considerably. Hints, and sometimes outright steals, from indie rock (on "La Réalité"), hip-hop ("Sénégal Fast Food"), ska ("Taxi Bamako") and even, heaven help us, Blue Oyster Cult ("La Fête au Village") permeate the album, blending with Malian percussion and extremely deep bass.
Producer Manu Chao keeps the kitchen-sink approach from feeling cluttered by charging acoustic guitars and R&B beats with timekeeping, while Bagayoko's and Doumbia's engagingly off-key vocals -- fans of such singers as Astrud Gilberto and Blossom Dearie will find much to admire here -- explore politics both micro ("M'Bife," a love letter from Doumbia to her husband) and macro ("Politic Amagni," which makes a case that politics and violence are often indistinguishable).
Still, the overall mood is joy. The album's title refers to the traditional day for weddings -- Sunday -- in Mali's capital, and one suspects that Amadou & Mariam feel that if anyone's not up and dancing quickly, they've failed as hosts. They, and you, have nothing to worry about.
-- Andrew Beaujon
View all comments that have been posted about this article.