Erykah Badu’s 2008 album New Amerykah, Pt.1: 4th World War is Sly & the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On on bad weed. Like that predecessor, this album aims to take a snapshot of the times, frankly depicting inner city struggles, drug habits, fights for freedom, and personal observations, while striving to be uplifting. Where Riot answered Marvin Gaye’s question by being lugubriously accessible and musically based on funky psychedelia, this one is dense, bleak, and all about hip-hop. Producers 9th Wonder (of Little Brother fame), Sa-Ra, and Madlib figure large in the sound of this record.
Multitracked vocals and dusky, paranoid beats populate many of the tunes. “The Healer” and “My People” showcase bombass Madlib beats, laidback concoctions chock full of blips, Eastern strings, and echoed keys. In these tunes, Badu sings of the power of hip-hop to heal and delivers the message to “Hold on, my people.”
The message in the music continues on “Master Teacher,” produced by Shafiq Husayn of Sa-Ra. The bass and drums pulse like a living, breathing organism. Most of the song features lead vocals interacting with the background vocals in call and responses. A recurring motif in the song is “I stay woke,” which, given the context of the rest of the lyrics, suggests a person’s ability not to be taken advantage of while in search of “a beautiful world.” Over Curtis Mayfield-inspired strings, Badu asks, “What if there was no niggas only master teachers now?” The coda of the tune is a soul-jazz groove that rides the cymbals and electric keys. When Badu shifts the accents in her phrasing, the rhythmic evenness is chopped and reconfigured.
Though the album ends with “Telephone,” a haunting requiem for friend, collaborator, and influential producer J Dilla, its 9th Wonder-produced hidden track, “Honey,” almost operates as a saboteur. Why would Badu make “Honey” the first single? Sure, it’s an infectious, bubbly ditty that says nothing (“Honey you so sweet/sugar got a long way to catch you”) compared to the dark, introverted jams that say a lot. But hey, maybe that’s exactly why.
(Photo credit: Marc Baptiste)
Bill Evans’s Conversations with Myself defies an unspoken Jazz Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Overdub. Evans overdubbed three pianos, one in the left channel, another in the right, and the last sharing both channels. The result is exhilarating; a master musician solely collaborating with himself, crafting moving, often brilliant, performances.
Like most post-bop pianists, Evans was influenced by Thelonius Monk, who created memorable melodies while articulating notes and chords in offbeat blocks. Evans covers two Monk tunes on this set, “‘Round Midnight” and “Blue Monk.” (A third, “Bemsha Swing,” is included as a bonus cut in the album’s reissue.) The melody in “‘Round Midnight” is carried by the left and center pianos, while the right piano hits the chord changes and comps. In the latter part of the tune, the “conversation” the album title refers to becomes clear. The melody is started by the piano in the left channel and completed in the right, and then the pattern is reversed. Knowing that Evans planned and played one piano part at a time sheds significant light on his ability to rearrange and improvise. Hearing this on headphones is nothing short of awing.
Where the Monk tunes display a robust Evans, the greatest song in the album, “Love Theme From 'Spartacus,'” shows Evans at his most fragile. The song begins with sweeping cascades of notes, flowing from the middle piano to the right. The frail three-note melody is played in the right, though throughout the rest of the tune the melody is shared among all three and, as in “‘Round Midnight,” is also started by one and completed by another. Similar cascades of notes end the song, though unlike the beginning where the notes moved from the middle to the right, the notes move from right to left, in effect encircling the listener. The left piano plays the three-note melody in rapid succession across high registers before the tune ends in a sigh.
“NYC’s No Lark” is darker and more aggressive than the pensive “Spartacus.” The song is a lament for and an anagram of one of Evans’s close friends, fellow pianist and heroin addict Sonny Clark. (Evans used anagrams often. His “Re: Person I Knew” is an anagram of Portrait in Jazz and Explorations producer Orrin Keepnews.) The right piano’s dirge chord phrasing is a sturdy bottom for the left’s dissonant, offbeat notes. When the middle piano rises from silence to utter pathos, it clashes with the left piano as the right follows the chord progression.
To experience this album is sometimes overwhelming. After all, one Bill Evans was often heartbreaking, but now there are three. Where Evans’s natural extension of himself was the piano-bass-drums trio, here he individually embodies the trio with three pianos. Though the songs on this album aren’t the first or the last jazz tunes to use overdubbing, they are Evans’s extraordinary feats of emotion, planning, execution, and performance.
It took me about four days to read past the following sentence: “Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves.” The sentence is located in the first paragraph of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. There is so much packed into that statement: the image of the darkest darkness, the threat of danger or violence, the dichotomy between outside and inside, all with McCarthy’s precise and impeccable diction. After I continued past the first paragraph, I found myself consumed by the novel’s carnage-obsessed journey through nightmare landscapes.
The story, based on accounts of the Glanton Gang, follows The Kid, a young man who joins a group of scalphunters in the West of the late 1800s. Judge Holden is Glanton’s right-hand beast: an albino, almost seven foot man, with not a hair on his body, who says all life on Earth exists without his permission until his classification. Much has been written about Holden’s spiritual kinship with Captain Ahab and Iago. Unlike those characters, Holden is indestructible. He appears to exist beyond human limitations in intellect and physical power. His ruthless, violent behavior doesn’t cause his demise. Instead, he flourishes at others’ expense and thrives with every casualty committed.
Holden sets the example for the rest of Glanton’s Gang. They roam the West like a band of ghosts, satiated only by blood. The novel is supremely violent and graphic, but it doesn’t cause revulsion because it is artfully written; terse, unapologetic, and lucid. The descriptions of events and locations, notably the Comanche warrior attack near the beginning of the novel, are visceral assaults on the senses. In Blood Meridian, McCarthy has created a classic of American literature, which chronicles the myths that propelled the nation forward while demystifying its history.
(Photo credit: James W. Minette)
It’s hard being the greatest band in the land. Haters of rock journalism enjoy indicating the critics’ penchant to pour praise on Radiohead for anything they do. But if anybody salivates at the idea of a new Radiohead record more than the critics, it’s the fans. But are the universal excitement, hype, and praise deserved? Are they really that good? Well, yes.
In a move that sent all major record companies to primal scream therapy, Radiohead originally released their seventh studio album In Rainbows on a pay-what-you-will basis on their website. The reason why Radiohead can get away with something like this is because of the unanimous critical and fan fervor. Plus, the record doesn’t suck. For a band obsessed with dehumanized tech sounds that symbolize in ambience and mood the usurpation of the soul by HAL 9000, they made In Rainbows remarkably warm. Its warmth is typical of R&B: melodic rhythmic constructions, lyrical meditations on love, and all possible configurations of groove.
“All I Need” rides a simple bass and drum pattern that if sped up could be a Kanye West sample. For all of Thom Yorke’s directness (“I am an animal trapped in your hot car”), the yearning chorus ends with unease: “You are all I need/Lying in the reeds.” When drummer Phil Selway moves to the crash cymbal, the drifting keys and guitars boil the glockenspiel to harmonize with the bassline, and Yorke sings “S’all wrong/s’alright” interchangeably. The tension the band created for the duration of the song exploded in an escalation to despair.
Where other tunes, such as “House of Cards” (“I don’t want to be your friend/I just want to be your lover” take that, Prince!) also have R&B leanings, lyrically, the album delves into postmillenium dread – something Radiohead know a lot about. Most of this sentiment is communicated through Yorke’s repetition of short phrases or words, such as “Off again, on again,” “I seen it coming,” “I’m a lie,” “Denial,” and many others. Yorke also does this in previous albums, notably Hail to the Thief. It reminds me of John Coltrane practicing scales over and over, searching for new meaning in the same sounds.
The album ends dourly with “Videotape,” whose narrator is content with dying as long as his YouTube suicide note is captured for posterity. Just like Radiohead to be downers. Just like Radiohead to be the best.
(Photo credit: Lee Jenkins)
For the December 2007 issue of Spin Magazine, I wrote a review of Meshell Ndegeocello’s seventh studio album, “The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams.” The review appeared online in January 2008.
(Photo credit: Michel Vonlanthen)
I was in high school, borrowed Kind of Blue from Carlos, sat on the bed, put some ear goggles on, and gave it a spin. I recall tears peeking out the corners of my eyes and a Gordian Knot in my gut during “Blue in Green.” It wasn’t Miles’s muted horn or Trane’s melodicism that got me. It was the piano and Bill Evans. “Blue in Green,” an Evans number, is a ten-bar, circularly structured tune, ripe with emotional devastation. But it wasn’t the notes. After all, everybody has access to the same notes. It’s what’s behind them, the unquantifiable quality that colors the music, that makes a note or chord we’ve heard hundreds of times sound as if no one in the history of music has ever played it before. That’s the power of Bill Evans. Once harnessed and armed with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, Evans was ready to take on jazz history and conventional jazz theory.
The idea was simultaneous improvisation. LaFaro was not going to walk while Evans soloed and Motian rode the cymbals. He was going to craft answers in response to ideas in Evans playing, in effect creating a variegated, dynamic improvisation with no one just blowing.
The trio’s apex was captured in one day, June 25, 1961, during five sets at the Village Vanguard. Many of these tunes were in Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby, two of the most beloved live jazz records. This three CD box set collects all of the tunes performed that day and organizes them by sets. In the evening’s first set “Gloria’s Step,” Evans and LaFaro’s playing is so inextricable it’s as if both beings shared a brain but had two separate bodies. As far as swinging goes, the tired cliché “Bill Evans only plays ballads, he can’t swing” is absolutely discredited. For proof, check out “Milestones” in the evening’s second set. His melodic lines and phrases are layered with LaFaro’s interpretations of the same chords in swift moments of harmony. Ten days after the trio’s luminous day the Vanguard, LaFaro died in a car accident, leaving behind a legacy that had yet to be fulfilled. Though distraught by his friend’s death, Evans career moved forward, often working in piano trios, searching for the spirit of ’61Vanguard date until his untimely death to drugs and a failing body in 1980.
(Photo credit: Henry Kahanek)
Early in The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler’s brilliant, Lombard Street-plotted mystery, private detective Philip Marlowe describes himself. “I’m a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich...I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things…when I get knocked off in a dark alley somewhere…nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.” What Marlowe left out is that he is a romantic who values loyalty, love, and friendship, but who is incapable of displaying those without a good dose with cynicism and acidic humor. These qualities are palpably present in this novel, Chandler’s sixth of seven to feature Marlowe.
The detective’s refusal to abandon the memory of his friend Terry Lennox exacerbates his drinking and relationship with the cops, but people still seek him out for jobs. After encountering a cast of characters that include a publisher, a nymphomaniac, a gangster, an alcoholic novelist, and an obsessed-wife, Marlowe finally learns the truth about Lennox. Like Chandler’s best known novels, The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, his typically serpentine plots aren’t the point in his novels. It’s the dialogue, the pacing of the story, the crisp descriptions, and the beautiful similes. Not a mere mystery stylist, Chandler explores the depths of post-World War II depravity with an unflinching lens, Marlowe, who takes punches with a wink, a smile, and a snide remark, who ultimately uncovers lies and liars, who has no regard for those concealing truths. Once Marlowe has finished his work, the world remains corrupt and vicious, filled with people who feel they can get away with anything. But Marlowe isn’t here to save the world; he is here to be its unrelenting conscience.
(Photo credit: Random House)
