Review: Sakamoto Brings the Noise

If you find yourself in possession of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s new album Out of Noise, here’s my advice: Get on a train.

A deluxe edition of Out of Noise is being released in the US by Decca (dropping 28 September) with a companion CD, Playing the Piano, which came out last year. Playing the Piano contains a dozen solo piano versions of earlier Sakamoto compositions (“self-covers,” he calls them, including themes from The Last Emperor, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, and The Sheltering Sky) performed by Sakamoto himself. Despite a bit of banging and pounding here and there, it’s all pretty easy on the ears.

Out of Noise is another matter. The new disc also features a dozen tracks, all exploring the hazy area where noise morphs into music, and music disintegrates into noise.

All of which makes Out of Noise more of a challenge for the ear. I don’t think I helped myself much by loading both Playing the Piano and Out of Noise onto my iPod and attempting to listen to both at a go. Playing the Piano ends with Bolerish, from the soundtrack of Brian DePalma’s Femme Fatale. Out of Noise opens with hibari, a solo piano piece as peaceably formal, at first, as anything on Playing the Piano. But soon the rhythm seems to stutter and notes begin to enter the chords at odd angles. After an hour of flowing melody, I found myself in choppy waters and wanting to crawl ashore.

Out of Noise is a different experience taken on its own terms, something I discovered by chance a few weeks ago on the 7:30 train from Seattle to Portland. As we clicked through a foggy landscape of back yards and parking lots and blurring trees, I started hibari and found it transformed into a meditation exercise. Indeed, “meditation exercise” seems like the best way to describe Out of Noise, one that has the world around us as it’s object.

A few of the tracks feel formally composed. hwit and still life feature the pristine bowing of early music group Fretwork, and to stanford is another solo piano composition, but most feel more like soundscapes where human elements (guitars, voices, etc) are more likely emerge and recede. The most affecting of these, glacier, incorporates recordings of Sakamoto’s 2008 trip to Greenland with Cape Farewell’s Disko Bay climate change research expedition. Sakamoto has involved himself in ecological issues in recent years and it’s hard not to feel, especially in this piece, a painful sense of the climate we know and depend on melting away.

[Here's a video of glacier, complete with climate change factoids]

Curiously, a neighbor's barking dog or a passing truck fit into the flow of this music in a way they wouldn't in a Haydn symphony or even a Philip Glass arpeggio fest. (The first time through firewater I had to pause it to make sure that the barking I heard was indeed the cocker spaniel down the street. Later, I almost missed the pooch.)

It’s inspiring to see a master like Sakamoto continue to stretch himself with new challenges and new collaborators like Christian Fennesz, Keigo Oyamada, multi-instrumentalist Skuli Sverrisson. That said, Sakamoto the composer, Sakamoto the ordering intelligence, is who emerges through all the noise.

Not everything works, at least for me. The track in the red includes samples of human voices--most prominently an older black man’s saying things like, “I just feel like, you know...” and “...a little lost, but...” against a gently pulsing background of ambient noise and a keyboard. Sadly, the intent here is too obvious and isn’t taken far enough. It’s hard not to hear an echo of Primitive Radio Gods’ more overt Phone Booth. Likewise, the Reichian jibber jabber of composition 0919, which closes the album, sounds like something one robot would create to annoy another robot and made me want to break plates, and not in the happy Greek way. Strange too, that minimalism should feel like such a throwback at this point.

It’s also inspiring to see Sakamoto sticking to the album concept for Out of Noise, with the separate pieces arranged deliberately and flowing on a set course. It’s inspiring to see any artist do that, although it also feels quixotic to do so in the track-skipping musical landscape we live in. Yet another climate to be saved.

New: Ghosty's "A Mystic's Robe" EP

Just finished listening to Ghosty's new three-song EP "A Mystic's Robe."

TNLD verdict: two thumbs up (one for each hand, see?). It's everything you depend on from the Kansas City band: Peerless pop construction, beautiful harmonies and tasty lyrics. My only complaint would be that there isn't more.

It's available for streaming or download now. Do yourself a favor and lend your ears.

Related post: TNLD interview with Ghosty's Andrew Connor

Review: Nils Lindberg and Margareta Bengtson - As We Are

As We Are (2008, Prophone) starts with a 19th Century meditation on death ("Remember," a setting a poem by Christina Rosetti) then moves on through the blues, folk tunes from Finland and Sweden, bossa nova, Hoagy Carmichael and Ellingtonian vocalese before arriving at Shakespeare. Talk about your strange meadowlarks.

There's something otherworldly about the whole enterprise, as if Nils Lindberg (composer, arranger and pianist) were a Martian who spent a his childhood listening to radio waves from the next planet over, picking up jazz and classical and all those popular tunes broadcast before 1960 and then deciding to have a go at it himself. While those signals might have left this world in discreet streams, what Lindberg sends back to earth is all mixed together, as if the boundaries between genres don't matter. As it turns out, Lindberg is from Sweden, where, thankfully, they don't. The result is as crisp and classic as a restored black & white movie and as new as next Tuesday.

Chief among Lindberg's co-conspirators on this project is singer Margareta Bengtson, who appears on 11 of the 13 tracks. Bengtson's Nordic cool may be a million miles from Ella Fitzgerald in style but they both share a gift for putting the across the lyric with great feeling, while avoiding the "watch me, watch me" embellishment that many singers use to prove that they're singing jazz, as if you didn't know. But Bengtson is also no slouch when it's time to bust out the scat chops.

What Lindberg and Bengston achieve on As We Are is a remarkable melding of jazz song and art song that I suspect would have pleased a chamber jazz proponent like Billy Strayhorn no end. Only the tune "Santa Barbara" comes off a little cheesy, but it's a pleasant cheese and entirely in keeping with the city that inspired it (see/hear for your own self).

• Note on purchasing - Much as I commend this CD to your listening ears, it isn't sold on Amazon, CD Baby or any of the usual suspects. The Prophone link above will eventually get you to a purchase link, but it's a long and winding road that leads nowhere. Several sketchy bit torent avenues turn up on searches but those always make me feel dirty. I'll try to update this post if I find a solution.

Further linkage
Nils Lindberg (official site | wikipedia) is as celebrated in Sweden for his work in jazz settings as he is for his classical compositions, film and TV scores, as well as settings of Swedish folk music.

Margareta Bengtson's myspace page - includes the opening track "Remember" as well as a sprightly version of Annie Ross's "Twisted."

Review: Andy Scott - Don't Tempt Fate

Making a good cream puff is hard. Sure, you can buy them by the frozen bucketful at Costco. And while you're there you can also buy a cushy leather sofa and that big flat screen television you've had your eye on. Then you can go home, put on your sweat pants and eat that whole bucket while you watch all those Friends episodes on DVD and mourn the fact that you never moved to New York like you told all your actual friends you were going to back in the 90s.

Someone who won't be joining you on the couch for your pity party is Andrew Scott Rosen, who left Cleveland behind for a music career in New York. For a while he left that name behind, too, putting out two albums out under the name Goat ("Great Life" made it onto the soundtrack of "I Know What You Did Last Summer" and some car ads). But that's the great thing about moving off to the big city: reinventing yourself. (Remember how you were going to change your name to Schuyler Della Verite when you got to New York and wear all in those vintage duds you bought at the DAV thrift store? Well, did ya ever, steampunk? Did ya?)

And now he's gone from Goat to Andy Scott and he's just released a new album, "Don't Tempt Fate." Where Goat was a puckish pop artist with eclectic influences that included jazz and cabaret, Andy Scott is a straight up cabaret jazz artist. It's a move that really works for him, so I hope he sticks with it.

Getting back to baked goods, "Don't Tempt Fate" is as fine a cream puff as you are likely to find. All ten songs are smartly written and the arrangements expertly crafted, something to be lauded from the highest Upper East condo in these days of sampling and mishmashups. And this attention to craft is enhanced by the great musicians backing Scott throughout, including the venerable Victor Lewis on drums and Sam Yahel on keyboards.

Sadly, there's also an air of playacting hanging about the project. It's there right from the start with title track, a duet featuring Madeliene Peyroux. I've never been a fan of Peyroux, who has always struck me as Billie Holiday without the Strange Fruit. Andy Scott, on the available evidence, is Randy Newman without the Bad Love. I suspect they're both stronger singers than they let on.

Critics have dropped the name Hoagy Carmichael in connection with this CD and Andy would do well to study Carmichael's knack for allusive specificity. Carmichael may have a kid from Indiana but could make you believe that he had Georgia on his mind or that a skylark could hear the music of the night. By contrast, many of the lyrics on "Fate" have a borrowed quality that keeps them from rising much higher than a commercial jingle.

Andy escapes this trap on the album's penultimate track, "Who Doesn't Call" (see spanky video below) where the elusive becomes the point, in the process taking on an existential dimension. He strips the accompaniment down to an acoustic guitar and the result reminds me favorably of classic Leon Redbone (born Dickran Gobalian, supposedly). It also gave me hope that the next time out Andy Scott will offer us a whole meal and not just dessert.


Video: Who Doesn't Call, with animation by Andy Cahill


Further Clickage

Andy Scott on MySpace

MilkRocks.com - The music of Goat

Amplifier Magazine - Interview with Goat

Review: Willie and Wynton and the boys

The gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt made only one tour of the United States. He spent three weeks in November 1946 on the road with Duke Ellington's band, performing for the first time in Cleveland before making stops in Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Kansas City, and Pittsburgh before returning to New York for two shows at Carnegie Hall (or almost two - the famously erratic Reinhardt ran into an acquaintance on his way to the concert hall and instead spent two hours at a cafe instead).

The tour was at best a moderate success. (Check out Paul Vernon Chester's account in which he reports that Reinhardt was shocked to discover that Ellington and the members of his band wore underpants of a floral design - although he made sure to picked some up for himself before returning to Europe). Only one obscure recording of the show in Chicago documents their performance chemistry. Still, the event remains on the short list of shows that most jazz fans would have given their right arms to have seen.

I thought of Duke and Django's American adventure last year when I happened on a review of a concert featuring Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. Jazz purists will rattle their dentures at the comparison, but the echoes are there: Nelson, while no gyspy virtuoso, shares Reinhardt's instinctual approach to music and love of swing and the standards that populate much of the jazz songbook. Marsalis, for his part, has made no secret of his desire to inherit Duke the mantle of as both a composer (and snazzy dresser). And I'd have given my right arm to have seen this show.

When the shaggy country star joined the elegantly tailored jazz czar on stage in New York in January 2007, they came together on a program of music from the genre where both styles meet: the blues. The evening apparently got off to a rough start, but five songs in Marsalis's band (drummer Ali Jackson, bassist Carlos Enriquez, pianist Dan Nimmer and saxman Walter Blanding) and Nelson finally found their groove.

That groove is what's on display in the new Blue Note release "Two Men with the Blues," which drops officially on July 8. Nelson is clearly the visiting team here (he gets moral support from his longtime harmonica player, the awesome Mickey Raphael) but he's almost like Jackie Chan's character in the Drunken Master movies in that it's precisely his idiosyncratic (and at times just plain off-kilter) approach that becomes his strength. Marsalis and his men are clearly enjoying the challenge of adapting to the bearded outlaw's at times Zen-like disregard for the beat. On "Stardust" in particular, he's at times so far and so comfortably off the beat that you can feel the rest of the band trying to adjust. The result is kind of a group moonwalk with Willie in the lead.

All this disorder leads to some really fresh and engaging solo work form Marsalis, who I often find a little too calculating in his approach. His vocals on "My Bucket's Got a Hole In It" and "Ain't Nobody's Business" are also a treat. The setting also allows the jazz roots of Nelson's guitar solo technique, always laying there latent, to come to the fore. (As a footnote, the recording also makes clear how integral Mickey Raphael's harmonica is to the Willie Nelson sound. His presence on the band stand is as understated as ever but just as tightly wound into the larger context.)

The essential pleasure of "Two Men with the Blues" is listening to this meeting of city and country styles as the players work it out. It's actually less of a concert than an especially productive jam session. I'll dare to hope that they both Wynton and Willie carve some time out of their rampant touring schedules to see what else they might be able to come up with. And if not, we'll always have this one night in New York to remember.

Free download
Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis - Bright Lights, Big City (mp3)

Linkage
www.willieandwynton.com

Rudder: Steady as she jams

My friend Happy over at PlasticSlacks once espoused a theory that hippies may be jazz's last hope. He could be right and one fine day a chronically underfunded (not to mention bitter) cultural studies professor at an obscure college in the nation's midsection may use the band Rudder as evidence to support this line of argument.

I put Rudder's debut release (the aptly named Rudder on upstart 19/8 Records) on my 2007 favorites list for the simple reason that I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it the way you enjoy something deep-fried at the fair, with a wet-nap afterward and maybe some AlkaSeltzer and definitely a promise to start eating more veggies come Monday.

And since my list was free of modifiers, I sidestepped the buzz-kill question, "Yeah, but is it jazz?" My answer to the question is usually "Who effing cares?" But since I've brought it up, what about it?

All four member of Rudder have jazz bona fides they could trot out, particularly saxophonist Chris Cheek, and the Gracenote database classifies the CD as jazz when iTunes loads it. But I can easily imagine a group of blue-haired jazz brunchers reaching for the nitroglycerin at the opening strains of almost any train. There is also enough bass groove here make Bootsy Collins smile (and lead out-jazzers to pull their berets down over their ears).

The band's MySpace page lists their genre as "Electro / Nu-Jazz / Jam Band" and "metalic hokey-pokey" all of which seems apt. It also proves that the digital age is leading us beyond genre and out into an uncertain world for die-hard catagoricals. So be it.

Meanwhile, Rudder's album is climbing the jam band charts, something I didn't even know existed. They've also launched a campaign to get themselves included on the next Dave Matthews Band tour. It remains to be seen whether these talented sidemen will remain together as a group or return to their Ronin ways. In the meantime, we can still lick our fingers over Rudder. Far out.

Gazarek and Nelson

I've featured vocalist Sara Gararek here before. She's a young jazz singer developing a fine set of chops. And in case you want to verify that for yourself, she's recently posted the video of "Let's Try This Again" above on YouTube. (As a grouchy side note, the video is also proof that it takes more than software to maintain visual interest.)

Gazarek co-wrote the tune with Josh Nelson, the pianist for her touring combo. Next week, 24-year-old Nelson releases his first CD as a leader, "Let it Go" (Native Language Music). It features a raft of original compositions and support from drummer Matt Wilson and tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake. I think Nelson is mature beyond his years and definitely one to watch.

Balkan Beat Box - Nu Med

Good news for musical line crossers and their fans: Brooklyn's Balkan Beat Box has a new tune collection (Nu Med) pointed at the world and ready to drop May 14.

I'm looking forward to the new CD because their self-titled debut was one of my favorite CDs of 2005. The group mixes modern beats with more traditional music from Points East. Best of all the music features musicians playing actual instruments. The result sounds like the world hippest bar mitzva band ever.

JDUB, their record company, says this about them:

...Balkan Beat Box is out to prove that all the world is indeed a stage -- and that we are all gypsies.

Listen up for yourself

• Download an mp3 from the new CD the

• Hear more at the band's MySpace page

What Boots is Doing

This should be worth a listen: The "Yakety Sax" man himself, Boots Randolph is putting out an album of jazz standards.

At 79, Boots Randolph has played with everybody from Elvis and Buddy Holly to REO Speedwagon. And he's put out scores of albums, covering pop, country and gospel. So why not serve up some standards?

The track list includes tunes by Charlie Parker (Billie’s Bounce), Mink ('Round Midnight) and Basie (Stompin’ at the Savoy), plus (the inevitable) Nature Boy and, just for grins, Take Me Out to the Ballgame.

A Whole New Ball Game drops on June 12 from the good folks at Zoho.

Speaksing of Yakety Sax, I think it's good to be reminded that there was a time when a instrumental could become a mega-smash-hit. Yakety Sax hit the charts in 1963 and stuck around for a year, in the process working its way into the culture. The song remains a comic safety net for every one from Benny Hill to The Daily Show.

Here's a live performance featuring Boots, Chet Atkins and Ray Stevens (and introduced by a vaguely reptilian Ralph Emery).

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Speaking of Benny Hill, this video must qualify as one of the most sacrilegious (and hilarious) uses of Yakety Sax. Apologies in advance.

Newness: Michel Camilo "Spirit of the Moment"

Michel Camilo Spirit of the Moment (TelArc)

Free mp3s are yours for the having at Camilo's website.

Metheney/Mehldau Quartet

Wishes sometimes do come true.

Last year, Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau put out Metheney/Mehldau (on Nonesuch). It consists primarily of guitar-piano duets. It is for the most part introspective, whispery lush and lovely.

But my favorite tracks were the two featuring the remaining two thirds of The Brad Mehldau Trio, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard. I remember wishing at the time that there was a whole album of that stuff. And now there is.

I just got a hold of Quartet today. On the strength of one listen, I can say that I approve. The addition of the rhythm section adds a welcome energy and draws both the pianist and the guitaist away from their noodling instincts.

The Quartet starts a 27-city North American Tour today. Oh, how I wish I lived in one of those cities.

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For more insight on the Metheney/Mehldau melding, check out this notorious interview from WYNC's Studio 360, which includes Mehldau's long-awaited dissing of Bill Evans. Familiarity and comparisons apparently breed contempt.