They like the gray area. Like a pitcher who paints the corners of the plate with a late-breaking curve ball, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen (Steely Dan to us) avoid giving you anything you can hammer. Plenty of critics and pundits have the purple thumbs to prove that while their…
For Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman — known to their fans as Dean and Gene Ween, respectively — Ween’s new album, White Pepper, was a long time coming. The duo released a double live album, Paintin’ the Town Brown: Ween Live ’90-’98, last year, but it was a quickly assembled…
Rikki Rockett knows he’s in a band that has become the Rodney Dangerfield of rock. Poison gets no respect. Although the much-maligned “hair-metal” movement of the mid to late Eighties suffered near extinction at the beginning of the following decade, when Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and the grunge elite rolled into…
In May 1997 singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley put on his best thrift-store suit and got a friend to drive him to the Memphis Zoo. Buckley, an ascendant alternative-rock icon and reluctant heartthrob, had decided to apply for a job as a zookeeper. The 30-year-old Buckley had temporarily relocated from New York…
Alternately dissonant and melodic, cacophonous yet inarguably tuneful, Chapel Hill’s Archers of Loaf were one of the greatest guitar bands to emerge from the indie-rock underground of the early Nineties. Taking cues from their hometown comrades in Polvo and the six-string battles between Television’s Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, Archers…
On the minus side, the self-titled first American release by Uzbekistan’s pop songbird Yulduz Usmanova could have been produced by the World Trade Organization. The hungry, spinning, microtonal singing of Usmanova comes together with gritty backing vocals by South Africa’s The Family Factory in a buttery blend of synthetic textures…
When Pepe Horta opened a second Café Nostalgia just more than a year ago on Miami Beach, the swanky new digs stood out, even amid the flash and glitter of the SoBe scene. But the sumptuous glamour could not prevent a pang in the hearts of many of the regulars…
When attacking the music business, one need not even break a sweat. After all, how hard is it to land a punch or a thousand upon a bloated carcass that can no longer move? In the not-so-distant future — maybe a decade from now, or a year from now, or…
Omara Portuondo is the latest (and last) of the featured members of the Buena Vista Social Club to record a solo album, and it is a brilliant crescendo to the series that began with the collective’s 1997 Grammy-winning debut. It is not surprising that on this rhapsodic CD Portuondo shows…
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…
