DAVID GREENBERGER is the editor and publisher of "The Duplex Planet". An artist and musician, he also writes on music for "Pulse", "Spin", and other publications. His essays are regularly heard on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered".
JAD FAIR & YO LA TENGO Strange But True (Matador)
DUMP Women In Rock (Shrimper)
It's been well over a year since Yo La Tengo's last album, I Hear The Heart Beating As One, and somewhere in between their constant touring these couple of new releases were fashioned and now issued. The common ground shared by Jad Fair and Yo La Tengo is their confident adherence to allowing the chips fall where they may. Where the former has created a vast discography which gives free range to his poetically sound impulses always favoring impulse over artifice, the latter favor subtly undulating landscapes which contrast density and openness, darkness and light. For this collaboration the 22 songs feature perfectly rendered little stories written by Fair's brother David and loosely based on tabloid news stories. Strange But True may be the best children's book of the year, cloaked within the highwire balancing act of improvised song structures. When bass player James McNew joined Yo La Tengo early in the decade, after which brought continuity and unified focus to all that has followed. McNew's side project is his one-man band, Dump. This five-song EP contains two gorgeous classics, "The Words Get Stuck In My Throat" and "A Plea For Dump," and is further proof that lo-fi can bring glorious results only if you've got the songs, skills and sensibilities to correctly utilize the minimalist tools.
ANDY BEY Shades of Bey (Evidence)
Things are again looking good for jazz singer-pianist Andy Bey. He started as a child star of sorts in the fifties -- even singing with Louis Jordan at the Apollo theater at the age of twelve. By the age of 18 he was performing and recording, as well as touring Europe, with his sisters. Their trio was billed as Andy and the Bey Sisters. Disbanding in the mid-'60s, he continued to work in numerous settings, as featured vocalist with Horace Silver throughout the '70s, and pianist for Sonny Rollins, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Max Roach and others. Until two years ago, Bey's last recording as a leader was the critically lauded Experience and Judgment on Atlantic in 1974 (hard to find even then). The '90s found him teaching jazz singing in Austria. Shades of Bey follows Ballads, Blues & Bey and is a celebration of what confidence, restraint, experience, taste and a four octave range can do. This is the voice of a quintessential jazz singer, infusing each song with his character and melodic variations. But Bey's choice in material is a smart, even daring mix that finds the common human denominator between Billy Strayhorn ("The Last Light of Evening (Blood Count)," his last composition) and Nick Drake ("River Man"). The small ensemble arrangements find the intimate heart of each piece, with strings adding a subtle atmospheric layer on the two Brazilian numbers. Throughout, Bey's singing dances around and through the instruments like a colorful fish in a reef. His easy slide into falsetto on Earl Coleman's "Dark Shadows" is dazzling and completely free of grandstanding, as if he had nowhere else to go emotionally than to those higher notes. By turns soul stirring and proud, Andy Bey embraces both intimacy and flourish with equal grace.
PLUSH More You Becomes You (Drag City)
Plush are a Chicago band who've released only two singles previously. Though billed with a band name, this time out it's a solo effort. The ten songs that comprise *More You Becomes You* were recorded a couple years ago by band mainstay Liam Hayes alone at a piano. The whole thing clocks in at slightly less than a half-hour of total playing time, but it's absolutely the right length. The delays in releasing this album seem to have to do with the recording's original impetus, which was to get these songs down on tape. Whether this was meant to document or to function as demos for something else is not stated. Adorned with nothing more than a plaintive singing voice (which is replaced by a lone horn on an instrumental), there's a feeling of listening in on something quite private, but at the same time its beauty serves as a very public entry point; lush melodies are not a mark of the hermit urge. These 28 minutes are charged with a beautiful melodic fragility, not unlike Dennis Wilson's underrated efforts. Production touches are minimal -- the shadowy presence of an organ, short leaps into more expansive space via reverb and echo -- but deliberate and appropriate. The feeling of a real time performance of fresh songs is presented and maintained throughout. There's a moment in one, "(I Didn't Know) I Was Asleep," when Hayes' voice cracks and he breaks into a laugh. This album is loneliness at its most friendly.
TINA LOUISE It's Time For Tina (Tainted Records)
Before landing on Gilligan's Island as Ginger (1964-67), Tina Louise had nearly a decade of prior work on stage and screen, including the musical Li'l Abner in the former category and God's Little Acre in the latter. This reissue of her 1957 album is a B-grade outing which finds her sashaying her way through a dozen more-or-less standards. She's something like a sub-Julie London. However, where Julie managed to take a limited range and approach and create a medium-sized body of work with varying merit (in no small part due to the choices made in production, arrangement and song selection), Tina wasn't able to make her fifties bombshell persona much of anywhere. She moves along quite pleasantly, but solely on the strength of each song. Tina Louise is as good as thousands of other lounge singers who never recorded but made their living singing throughout the hinterland. Heck, I was at a wedding last month that featured a singer who was easily the equal or better of Tina, but she didn't have me pondering the significance of a CD reissue of a 40 year old album. There's a reason why this was her only album, charming as it is. But, as they say, charm is a dime a dozen. For those wishing to celebrate the fifties as a decade of surface appearances, this is a suitable soundtrack. Of note: Coleman Hawkins is one of the album's featured players.
SEX-O-RAMA 2 (Oglio Records)
Imagine this scenario: You're invited to dinner at the house of a friend who's a professional chef of great renown and wants to debut some new creations for you. You get there, but your chef friend isn't home. Instead you're greeted by his nephew from Toledo who invites you in and leads you to the kitchen. Dishes clearly haven't been washed in several days, stacked as they are in one side of the double sink. The other side is filled with brackish water, murky and laden with unidentifiable detritus. Knowing you were coming over to eat and that his uncle was called away unexpectedly, he made sandwiches. A tray of bologna-and-nothing-else sandwiches sit on the counter. He picks it up, but, apparently tipsy for one reason or another, the sum of the tray's cargo slides off and into the sink. Splashing beneath the surface for just a moment, the former sandwiches bob to the surface as their component parts. Notable musicians from Mike Bloomfield to Mitchell Froom to Gary Windo have composed music for porn films. There's a reason that that corner of their work is rarely if ever heard: it was a paycheck and little more. Sex-O-Rama 2 confirms this and further dilutes the proceedings by dint of none of the selections being original soundtrack music -- it's all recreated anew (hence, the sandwich in the sink). This is nifty little curio in concept, but none of it stands too well on it's own without some steamy visuals. And anyone with even a radio would do better to select from that source if looking for a musical accompaniment to sex.
NILS PETTER MOLVAER Khmer (ECM)
Norwegian trumpet player Nils Petter Molvaer has previously recorded in settings from a big band to duets with a percussionist, to sessions with a singer/songwriter. Khmer, his first album as a leader, is a bracing and inventive melting pot of dub rhythms, ambient washes and organically textured ensemble arrangements. Amidst the samples, electric guitars and sound treatments, his trumpet is the breathing human voice. He is the explorer dancing through this modern, yet monumental and timeless musical landscape. Khmer's six compositions range from the austere to the playful and possess a sort of sculptural presence, both in terms of their surface and their scale. Comparisons to '70s-era Miles Davis are inevitable, but not altogether accurate. Davis focused on lengthy grooves and the world of subtle definition that could be found by jumping in the river and swimming along with the current. Molvaer, on the other hand, has a more cinematic approach, setting up less metered and more impressionistic pieces. As a marriage between the presence of a voice--in this case, his trumpet--and the relative distance (though no less emotionally potent effects) of electronics, Khmer bears a relationship with Bjork's recent work. From the open-ended balladry of "Phum" to the screaming guitar and enormous drumming of "On Stream" (which brings to mind fellow ECM artist Terje Rypdal), this album sounds like music that could only come from a part of the world that spends part of the year in endless night and part of it in endless day.
