Violette, Cocetta Abbate, Gino Sitson, Bill Gable: ALL THAT JAZZ

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You’d never know that jazz is America’s least popular musical genre based on the number of recent releases that have crossed my desk. Here are four:

The most intriguing of the lot is from a young singer named Violette. To say her background is eclectic is an understatement. She was born in Paris and eventually studied at the Parisian Academy, though she spent most of her youth on Ars-en-Ré, a small island about 5 miles offshore in the Poitou region of France. Then she came to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, and now lives in Brooklyn. Her self-produced CD Falling Strong is a bilingual effort produced by Brian Bacchus, who also produces Nora Jones. Like Jones, Violette isn’t terribly concerned about genres. She’s in the chanteuse tradition of jazz, but her inspirations include everyone from Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel to Ella Fitzgerald and Michael Jackson. Among her dozen original compositions are ones that blur pop/jazz borders (“All My Life,” “I Heart New York”), those with Fitzgerald-like heavy staccato (“Falling Strong”), small combo numbers (“Coming to You”), and those with Brel-like fragility (“Annabelle”). It’s also an album of two distinct moods. When Violette sings in English she’s competent and confident, but when she switches to French, the emotions pop through with more drama. You can hear this in the swingy “Moi Pour Moi,” the catchy “Envol,” and the bouncy “Musique d’Amérique.” The English pieces are bon, but the French are trés bon.

I’ll call Concetta Abbate a jazz artist simply because she plays in jazz venues, but there really isn’t any clean category for her Falling in Time (Waterbug). She’s a classically trained violinist, but she calls this14-track selection “pocket-sized songs,” which is both intriguing and enigmatic—like her music. There’s nothing on this album longer than 4 minutes and several are two or shorter. In addition to her violin, Abbate also performs on harp, charrango, homemade box percussion, and glockenspiel. Guests add viola, cello, guitar, piano, bass, percussion, and trumpet. Her songs are frequently poetic and sometimes downright weird. I can’t promise you’ll love everything on this CD, but you’re unlikely to be bored!

Abbate gives us a Latin flair, but Gino Sitson is a voice of Africa (Cameroon). More precisely, Africa is among his voices. His VoiStrings (Buda Records 4707155) is aptly named and Sitson’s is a four-octave voice that can be as smooth as burnished wood or as taut as a violin string tuned to its breaking point. The band behind him is generally centered on piano, though double bass, percussion, cello, and viola help construct polyphonous arrangements that serve whatever Sitson pulls from his bulging bag of vocaltricks: scat, falsetto, wails, wounded cries…. Some of the tracks border on experimental, others pulse with African soul, and along the way we hear influences from gospel, the blues, and maybe some Papa Wemba and Bobby McFerrin.

Members of the rock band Steely Dan love the songs of jazzman Bill Gable and his album No Straight Lines (Autograph 502) explains why. As the title suggests, this is an album of departures and curves. It’s laid-back, but you name it and Gable weaves it into a song for his trademark counter-tenor voice: flamenco, pop, world jazz, Caribbean influences….  His lyrics don’t mince either: “Everybody sees/what they want to see/Every sinner finds his god/At the end of the day/no one comes to show us the way/No one gives a nod or a hand/judgment isn’t rendered/Bodies lie in state/overwhelmed by fate.”

Rob Weir  

 

Michael Cunningham's Snow Queen: Prose All Dressed up with Nowhere to Go

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THE SNOW QUEEN

Michael Cunningham

Picador, 258 pages, 978-1250067722

* * 1/2

Is there genre for writing that's too good for the novel that contains it? If so, The Snow Queen goes to the front of the class. This is a beautifully composed book whose prose soars so far above its characters one wishes Michael Cunningham had saved it for a better book. Cunningham's literary chops are well-established due to books such as The Hours (1998), which won a Pulitzer Prize; and Specimen Days (2005). Those books contained complex characters adrift in thorny situations, and were inspired by literary giants such as Virginia Woolf and Walt Whitman. Alas, The Snow Queen is Hans Christian Andersen as filtered through Woody Allen's obsession with love, sex, and death, and Bret Easton Ellis' portraits of bourgeois bohos behaving badly. Cunningham gives just enough to inspire is to plow through this book and admire its gem-like sentences, but it's a toss up as to whether these justify what is, at the end of the day, a pretty lame narrative.

Those who recall Andersen's Snow Queen will recall that she rules over snowflakes that look and act like bees. Her kisses pack sting as well–the first warms, the second brings forgetfulness, and the third kills. Cunningham's book is set in 21^st century Bushwick, a section of Brooklyn in the midst of uneasy and incomplete gentrification–a warren in which one can find backbiting hipsters and blood-soaked hooligans. Tyler Meeks is a 43-year-old failed musician still dreaming of a hit in his idle moments he's not wallowing in self-pity. He shares an apartment with two seeming soul mates: his wife, Beth, who is mortally ill with cancer; and his chubby gay brother Barrett who, at age 38, struggles with his own string of failures–one failed love affair after another. Toss in 56-year-old Liz, the owner of the chic secondhand shop at which all four occasionally work, and you've got a collection of people whom one holds in both pity and loathing. It would easier to feel sympathy if Tyler weren't a coke fiend, Beth a passive dishrag, and Liz an amoral cougar. Barrett is the linchpin. During a stroll through wintry Central Park that was intended to jolt him out of despair, he sees an eerie blue light in the sky that he perceives as sentient. Has he just had a religious experience? Beth's seeming miracle recovery suggests this, but is Barrett cut out for the life of mystic? The book's action toggles between 2004 and 2008 as characters seek to address anxieties ranging from trivial—Tyler's inability to write a tribute song for Beth–to more substantial, such as Beth grappling with whether she's more comfortable in near-death or sleeping walking through life.

There are several intriguing twists in the narrative, but I was left with three feelings, that left me underwhelmed by The Snow Queen. The first is that it's hard to imagine Barrett as a holy man of any more substance than a doe-eyed sophomore dabbling in crystals; the second that Beth is passively uninteresting, Tyler a jerk, and Liz a joyless opportunist. Mainly, though, the book feels more like we are reading about Cunningham writing about writing about his characters rather than giving life to them. At best I give The Snow Queen a tepid endorsement. On the plus side, at just 258 pages Cunningham gives us a book in which we don't invest a lot of time if we reach the end and feel unfulfilled. I can also imagine it would be a good read for a book group. If nothing else, Cunningham leaves his title tantalizingly ambiguous. Who is the titular snow queen: pallid Beth, icy Liz, or cocaine? Or is she a metaphor for metro New York's seduction and dangers? If that sounds like enough, by all means read this novel. Just don't expect Woolf or Whitman.

Rob Weir  

Glen Campbell's Sad (and Insipiring) Farewell

GLEN CAMPBELL: I'LL BE ME (2014)

Directed by James Keach

PCH Films/Virgil Films 671075

103 minutes, PG

* * * * 

Toward the very end of I'll Be Me, we see Glen Campbell in a studio crooning the lines to the very last song he ever recorded: "I'm Not Gonna Miss You." There could hardly be a more poignant title; Campbell suffers from Alzheimer's disease and both stage and personal lights went out shortly thereafter. Campbell sounds great on the track, but he only got through it because one of his closest crew members—whose name Campbell could no longer recall—stood beside him at the microphone pointing out the words for him to sing.

I'll Be Me is simultaneously inspiring and heartbreaking. In 2011, Campbell got his diagnosis. We see he and his family at the Mayo Clinic, where he jokes about the fact that he can't recall four simple words or the name of first president of the United States, but there's nothing funny about the MRI scans or his prognosis: advanced Alzheimer's. But rather than roll over, Campbell set off on a farewell tour that lasted nearly a year—buoyed by a crew of longtime associates and employees, plus his wife, Kim, and three of his children: Cal, Shannon, and Ashley—a Julia Stiles lookalike who is an amazing musician in her own right. It began on a high note with a spot on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and ended in Napa, California, on a bad night made tolerable only by a very forgiving audience. In between there were shows in dozens of towns, an appearance before Congress, and a spot at the Grammys.

A performer of Campbell's stature certainly earned some slack: solid sessions work, a stint as Brian Wilson's stand-in for The Beach Boys, multiple Grammys (including his 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award), film credits galore, his own TV show, decades of good-as-gold shows, and enduring hits such as "Gentle on My Mind," "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "Galveston," "Wichita Lineman," and "Rhinestone Cowboy." (None of which he wrote, by the way.) One of the more remarkable things about the film is how well Campbell managed on the tour, as long as technology worked. At no less august place than Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, the teleprompter failed and he simply couldn't go forward until it was rebooted. Still, aspects of Campbell's stage persona confounded much of what we thought we knew about the brain. Campbell couldn't remember words or faces toward the end, but he remembered how the tunes were supposed to go. Is melody more powerful than language? It's hard to say, but body memory certainly is. Put a guitar in Campbell's hands and the notes simply flew off the strings as if they bypassed thought altogether.

Keach's film is filled with cameo tributes from legions of performers: Sheryl Crow, The Edge, Steve Martin, Kathy Mattea, Paul McCartney, Brad Paisley, Blake Shelton, Chad Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Keith Urban, Jimmy Webb…. There are also political tributes, including one from fellow Arkansasan Bill Clinton. Some of the praise would seem mawkish were it not for the fact that many of Campbell's admirers were there because Alzheimer's has also ravaged their families. Brad Paisley delivers one of the more poignant lines. After informing us that his family has been hit several times by this horrifying disease, he turns to the camera and says simply, "I'm next. I'm 41, so let's figure this out, okay?" Kudos to Keach for not sugarcoating the story.

Campbell was no saint in his heyday. He was, in essence, a Southern good old boy—with all its virtues (charm, corny sense of humor, good manners) and its vices (Baptist faith preached but not practiced, chauvinism, rightward political drift). He has been married four times and, by his own admission, was often an absentee father to his eight children. He battled both cocaine and alcohol addiction, and was such a carouser that he took up with Tanya Tucker when she was 21 and he was 44. Much of his life followed the all-too-familiar celebrity-behaving-badly arc. That we feel great sympathy for him despite his shortcomings is another measure of Keach's documentary skills. And we should feel sympathy.

As inspiring as the tour was, the story cannot end well and does not. We see Campbell spiral into paranoia and witness his social graces dissolve one by one. The tour was the last hurrah and things have gone down hill since. The 79-year-old Campbell is now in a long-term facility and, as a final tragic footnote, several of his children have sued Kimberly, accusing her of isolating him. Alas, this too is a predictable story arc. You should watch the film, drink in its brief triumphs, and then contact your representatives to tell them to take up Brad Paisely's challenge.

Rob Weir

The Westies: New York with a West Texas Feel

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THE WESTIES

West Side Stories

WestiesMusic.com

* * * *

Forget a grain, when you've been reviewing music for as long as I have, you learn to take PR come-ons and pullout quotes with an entire cave of salt. For once, though, someone calls like it is. The Westies are the brainchild of singer songwriter Michael McDermott, whose repertoire is aptly described as "songs of love, betrayal, murder, hope, and redemption." His partnership with backup singer Heather Horton forms the core of The Westies. Toss in some talented sessions players and West Side Stories is a dark, brooding, and raw slice of real life. Well what else would one expect from a songwriter who names his ensemble after a Hell's Kitchen gang from the '60s/70s who came pretty close to pulling some hard time of his own. Mix in a dose of the Irish shanachie tradition and filter it through American outlaw country music and you're on the right track. The only curve ball is the album title; West Side Stories has songs set in the Big Apple, but more from its bad core side, and it detours to places such as Texas, Mississippi, Michigan, and Wyoming–the latter being the location for the song "Devil," where the song's anti-hero meets Old Nick "with his jailhouse tattoo and gold teeth grin" in a cheap bar and leaves with his soul bargained away.

McDermott's emotive and strong voice sounds as if its filtered through hard living, anguish, and emotions that gestated in the gut, not in some mythical Valentine-shaped organ. His pas de deux duet with Horton on "Say It" is a love song, but not the hearts and coronets variety. Theirs is a dance of passion, but with doubt firmly in place. And when McDermott reveals "These Dreams About Trains," his somnolent flights freely mix pleasant dreams and nightmares. That is to say, his trains carry people rushing home to loved ones, those fleeing shattered hopes, and even a casket or two. And forget those hokey country bar songs; McDermott's "Bar" is a place where "I hit the bottle so hard… it hit me back." Smart stuff. Call it the West Side of New York by way of hardscrabble West Texas.

Rob Weir

Ross Munro: Twisting the Bagpipes Tradition

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ROSS MUNRO

Twisted Tradition

Greentrax 384

Twisted Tradition might seem like an odd tack to take for a Scottish piper of Ross Monro's pedigree. After all, he apprenticed at the knee of John D. Burgess, MBE (1934-2005), who was renowned for his mastery of the demanding piobaireachd tradition generally associated with formal competition piping. Like his mentor, Munro also joined the British Army and submitted to the rigors of pipe band music, the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards in Munro's case. If any one person deserves credit for leading Munro down the less-regimented (pun intended) path it's Edinburgh's Iain McKinna, who included Munro and the Royal Guards on the award-winning Spirit of the Glen trilogy that melded military and classical music. Munro retired from the army in 2013, and found himself in McKinna's Offbeat Studio for his first solo endeavor.

Offbeat indeed! A lot of this album is more in the spirit of the mosh pit than competition piping. "The Gravel Path" opens with pulsing electronic sounds evocative of a didgeridoo before Munro kicks up stones with a bold report of notes that turn the path into a racecourse. Whether by accident or desire for wordplay, the next track also suggests Australia, at least in title: "Roo Joey." Like many of the tracks, it features drum loops and midi arrangements. Purists might scoff at such studio tricks, but let's face it–the Highland pipes only produce nine notes and even if you're a skilled master such as Munro and can stretch the range with grace notes and key shifts, it's a challenge to make a solo pipe album sound contemporary. You'll also hear some actual guitar, bass, and drums (McKinna, Ed Lowden), touches of brass, and vocal fill (Kirsty Anderson), but mostly it's Munro, his pipes and his midi. When he wants to sound contemplative, as on "The Dark Island," he overlays some whistle, but this album is about confounding expectations. For instance, Munro takes a serene tune such as "Lexie," lures us into a mellow space, and then breaks into a spirited version of "Jenny Dang the Weaver."  And he definitely has the dance hall crowd in mind with the club tempo of "Funky Paddy" and the boogey-down heartbeat pulses of "High Road to Itchiness." I have no idea what the trad crowd will make of "Cuimhneachan," which is how I imagine hypnotic music for robots to sound. No matter what one thinks of this project–and I like it a lot–Munro is a man of his word. Beware: Ross Munro has doffed his army kit and he's in a tradition-twisting mood!

Rob Weir

aave, Meh! Chris Whitten, Yes! Honeybird, Nope!

It's summer clean out time. Here's the word on three recent releases.

aave

There's Nothing

Villain Place/Rock Ridge Music

* *

The four-piece band aave hails from Nashville, but you're excused if you thought it was from San Francisco, circa 1967. This quartet consciously locates itself in a  psychedelic/ambient mode and, if you close your eyes, you could summon forth images of garland-adorned hippie chicks in tie-dye dresses, heads-tilted, eyelids half closed, and twirling against a light show backdrop. While that's sort of cool, musically it means that aave is more about mood than melody. It often draws comparisons to bands like Pink Floyd and Flaming Lips—largely because it combines the dreaminess (bleak and optimistic) of the first with the occasional thrash of the latter. I'd also call aave a post-punk band for the way in which songs often flirt the edge of cacophony. Add Hollies-like bubbly lead vocals and chirpy harmonies, and aave emerges as the ultimate mash-up band. Alas, this is less interesting than you might expect. The eight tracks I heard lack the signature hooks of acid rock classics, the attitude of punk, or the catchy melodies of The Hollies. In other words, meh!

CHARLIE WHITTEN

Assortment

(Digital downloads)

* * *

Charlie Whitten is also based in Nashville, and he too admires late-60s psychedelia. Luckily for us, he also likes Simon and Garfunkel, folk-rock, grunge, and fin-de-siècle radio hits. Although he is sometimes compared to Don McLean, Nick Drake and Neil Young are more apt comparisons. Especially the latter, if you can conjure Young in his youth with his rough edges smoothed out. Whitten, in fact, positively channels Neil in a cover of "Only Love Can Break Your Heart." One the things I admired about Whitten's folk-rock sound was his balance between trippiness and control.  "Dreaming" and "Home" have a Drake-like drift to them, but they don't meander. In like fashion, "Wedding Song" is sweet, but not treaclely, and "Too Far Gone" is funky and cool without being remote. Only "Lost I Heard" fails to connect, a song that simply feels and sounds undone. Whether any of this is good enough to break through in Nashville is up in the air, but Whitten's music is certainly worth a listen.

  

HONEYBIRD

Out Comes Woman

(Digital download)

*

I suppose Honeybird (aka/ Monique Mizrahi) has her charms, but they eluded me on Out Comes a Woman, the sort of album I imagine Gil Scott-Heron would have made with a gender change and a talent transplant. Honeybird tries too hard to be hip and sassy, efforts that lead to literary disasters such as "Good Job," where she rhymes "rejection" with "erection" (mostly for shock value) and "tease job" with "on your knees, John." There are also musical train wrecks such as "You Think I'm Single" that are so muddled they are little more than random noise masquerading as art. This album feels homemade, but not in homey way. Honeybird styles her instrumental approach as "charango punk" and bass, but some of the bass tracks are so out of balance that what pours out of the amp obliterates sounds in its path. When she mixes spoken word with song, she her musings and snippets of poetry frequently lack enough articulation to connect. For the record, I don't know this Brooklyn-based artist. For all I know she's funny, kind, and smart, but Outlaw Woman felt pointless and self-indulgent. At several junctures I felt like I was in a Dos Equis ad gone terribly wrong and wanted to cry out, "Please lose the 'tude! You're not that interesting."

Here she is performing "Ex-Spearmint."

  

Shaun the Sheep Movie: Recycling Works!

SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE (2015)

Directed by Mark Burton and Richard Starzak

Studio Canal, 85 minutes, PG

* * * *

Nick Park and Aardman Studios set the gold standard for claymation, that anally retentive form of animation in which pliable models are minutely manipulated for each film frame. Park is the guiding spirit behind this project, though his role is that of executive producer rather than director. Those who have followed his output already know that Shaun the Sheep was a character introduced in the delightful 1995 Wallace and Gromit film A Close Shave. Shaun proved so endearing that, in 2007, he got his own series in Britain (130 episodes and counting). This, however, is Shaun's first time as lead sheep in a wild and wooly big screen adventure.

Any skeptical or cynical charge one might level against the film is true. If you know Park's work and values, you'll find them recycled on the screen. He has long been an animal rights' activist—though contrary to popular belief, Park is not a vegetarian—and all Park movies place well-meaning critters in jeopardy from menacing humans looking to cage or devour them. Shaun and his associates have to fend off a power-mad Animal Containment Officer in this film. Akin to other Park features, the story of Shaun is a thin contrivance there solely to link a series of sketches and capers. The story for Shaun is essentially a rework of Chicken Run (2000), which was a takeoff of The Great Escape. You'll see other Park trademarks: goofy inventions, makeshift fantasy contraptions, hair's width escapes, and frenetic chases. If one is honest, nearly all of the major characters are recycled: The Farmer is a mumbling hayseed-meets-grunge boy version of Wallace, Bitzer is a less-adorable Gromit, the Flock variants of Chicken Run fowl, and the Naughty Pigs an ongoing gag. To which I reply, so what? Chuck Jones repeated characters and ideas for Looney Tunes, and Aardman productions are essentially cartoons in a different format. We watch both because they are wildly clever, are for adults as much as for children (maybe more so), and because they make us feel happy all over.

The story, such as it is, unspools in response to the universal theme of boredom. Shaun and all the barnyard animals love The Farmer who, in turn, sees them as part of his extended family. Shaun, however, can't help but notice that each day is pretty much the same—right down to the on-time arrival of the bus from the city. One day, though, a  bus-side advertisement for a "A Day Off" prompts Shaun to consider that a 24-hour break in routine is just what a clever sheep such as he needs. He lulls The Farmer to sleep in a van and diverts Bitzer's attention, but his plan goes terribly awry when the van is dislodged and hurtles downhill toward The City. A sudden stop and The Farmer gets a knock on the head that leaves him with amnesia. Mayhem ensues when Shaun, the Flock, Bitzer, and an ugly stray they meet set out to find The Farmer and restore order from the chaos Shaun has unleashed.

As noted, Aardman films are not about structured narrative; they are inventive imaginings of what sort of adventures can be told by manipulating small figures. In this film, the challenge is even greater as no one speaks per se—even the humans are reduced to mumbles and dramatic gesticulations. The sheep, of course, baa, but with differing inflections. Put some music to it and you can even come up with an ovine approximation of the Blues Brothers! Shaun the Sheep references all manner of other forms and tropes: pantomime, prison films, mad inventors and, yes, The Great Escape (though this time the goal is to break in rather than out). The fun happens when the Aardman crew makes us look at ourselves through the button-eyes of their creations. Characters such as a snotty head waiter, golfers, and a vain Celebrity serve as butts for takedowns of bourgeois values and hipster airs, and The City itself becomes a metaphor for the inauthentic. I'll say no more except to remind you to look hard into each sequence for all the jokes put there for alert adults. And be sure to stay through the credits, if for no other reason to hear Tim Wheeler, Mark Thomas, and Rizzie Kicks warble the hysterical (and catchy) Shaun the Sheep song.

The whole film is a silly bit of fluff, but it's such a lark you won't care. I can't remember the last time I was in a cinema in which six- and sixty-year-olds were both laughing. Oh wait—it was Chicken Run. Note to Nick Park: Keep on recycling. 

Rob Weir