Where to Invade Next Tells It Like It Is (even if you don't want to hear it)

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WHERE TO INVADE NEXT (2015/2016)

Directed by Michael Moore

Dog Eat Dog Films

110 minutes, R (language and naked people jumping into water—Really?)

* * * * *

Two stories we love to tell: (1) The United States is the greatest nation on earth. (2) The world envies us. The first isn’t remotely true and you have to crawl pretty far down the pole for the second to be the case. The USA is number one in the world in military hardware, graduate school education, and medical technology­, and the last two only if you can afford access. As for being the envy of the world, sure, if you’re from impoverished sub-Saharan Africa, a dictatorship, or from a war-torn failed state like Libya, Somalia, or Syria, though some of them are so desperate even the shattered economy of Greece looks pretty good. Still, Americans like to delude themselves into thinking life doesn’t get any better. Maybe that’s a necessary coping mechanism; as Michael Moore shows in his latest documentary—his best to date–it’s pretty damn depressing to consider how far we've strayed from American ideals.

Moore opens with a funny, but cheesy set-up: the military has come to him for answers as to why it hasn’t won a single conflict since World War Two, and okays his plan to “invade” Europe and steal its best ideas. (The US military really hasn’t won a war since 1945, unless you want to count Grenada, a nation with an army the size of the Massachusetts State Police but with less firepower.) Moore sets off for Europe, draped in an American flag, which he intends to plant and claim like a modern-day conquistador whenever he encounters an idea worthy of emulating. His sojourn takes him across Europe and into northern Africa. For the most part, though, Moore isn’t on camera as much as he usually is—he lets the details speak for themselves.

Moore has been denounced as a propagandist. Interesting word: propaganda. These days it tends to mean anything that makes us uncomfortable, even if it’s true. We never call the things with which we agree propaganda; we use nicer terms: advertising, marketing, infomercial, public relations….. So spin these and tell me what’s wrong with them: free health care supported by taxes that are less than what Americans spend on insurance and co-pays (Germany); 80 paid vacation days per year (Germany, Italy); two-hour lunches (Italy); factory owners who think wealth should be capped and welcome employee input (Italy); a government that is half women (Tunisia); or a land without student debt (Slovenia).

Moore’s travelogue reveals things that make American minds boggle. Finland has the world’s best schools, yet has abolished homework and standardized tests; Portugal decriminalized all drugs, saw addiction rates plummet, and now has money to spend on treatment, which is cheaper than prosecution and incarceration. The maximum prison sentence in Norway is 23 years and that only for true sociopaths; most of its jails are like summer camps—even for murderers—and even prisoners to maximum security facilities are greeted by a video of guards singing “We are the World.” French children eat school lunches worthy of top-rated restaurants and are aghast when shown pictures of American hot lunches. (And they eat yummy meals that cost less than US Mystery Meat specials!)

Best idea? Maybe Iceland. The US press was all over its 2008 financial crisis—one endlessly propagandized, sorry—“reported”—by outlets such as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal as “proof” that “socialism doesn’t work.” Did they report that a bank owned and operated by women did not engage in disastrous speculation and spearheaded the effort that led to full recovery in less than three years? And did you read about how Iceland jailed the bankers responsible for the 2008 crisis?

Moore’s guerilla documentary style makes a lot of people nervous, but it doesn’t make him wrong! Put down the laissez-faire Kool-aid and dare to ask the hard questions Moore poses: If other countries can do this, why can’t we? Is American business and government too male? Is testosterone poisoning holding back America? Or is just greed? This film made me wonder whatever happened to the attitude that Americans could do anything. When did a “Yes we can!” nation degenerate into an “It’s too hard/It costs too much/It’s not my problem/I blame it on the [fill in blanks]” bunch of whiny losers?  Think I’m overly harsh? Moore asked three Icelandic female business leaders a seemingly simple question: "What would you like to say to Americans?" He was met with stony silence, until one woman finally said, “Tell them I don’t want them to be my neighbors. They are not good neighbors.” Are you fine with the fact that none of the three could think of a single thing they found admirable about US society, its culture, or its people? I'm not and neither is Moore—who is a much better patriot than most of the idiots who wrap themselves in the flag.

Oh, yeah, ignore Michael Moore. Call him a propagandist. Keep on paying for an inept military that wastes billions daily. We wouldn’t want to build a safety net that would ruin our “self-reliance,” would we? Who needs the rest of the world? I call such thinking narcissism, self-deception, and fantasy. I call it the superhighway to self-destruction. This film should be required viewing.

Rob Weir

45 Years is Quiet and Powerful

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45 YEARS (2015)

Directed by Andrew Haigh

Sundance Selects, 95 minutes, R (for language and suggestive geriatric sex)

* * * *

Call this one "Portrait of a Successful Marriage in Crisis." Geoff and Kate Mercer (Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling) are deep into their golden years and have settled into a predictable and quiet life in their cottage in the Norfolk Broads–a routine in which Kate walks the dog each morning and returns home to down a glass of water, then settle down to a cup of tea and a chat with Tom, who is frail but content among his books and solitude. On the eve of their 45^th wedding anniversary, Geoff receives a package from Switzerland informing him that global warming has unearthed the frozen remains of Katya, his love of 50 years ago who died when she fell into a glacier crevice. The news sends Geoff into a quiet depression so deep that Kate begins to imagine that she's been little more than leftovers for the past four and a half decades.  

At the root of this small domestic drama lurk several of life's big fears: regret, doubt, fate, and what happens when you ask questions whose answers you don't really want to know. Kate disclaims feelings of jealousy toward a woman who died before she and Geoff ever met, but this is a fiction more wispy than the slides of Kayta she discovers deteriorating in boxes tucked away in the loft. Dare she ask the question that's tearing her apart:  If Katya had lived, would Geoff have married her? Such questions, of course, are the ultimate Pandora's Box monster. How does one compete against a ghost? How does one accept Geoff's attempt to defuse a no-win situation by reminding Kate that Katya did die and that it is pointless to muse over hypothetical questions?

The film covers the week leading up to the Mercers' anniversary fete. Geoff and Kate perform a pas de deux upon a stage drenched in the symbolic grayness of a late Norfolk autumn. Circumstantial pathos is made heavier by the subtle but powerful performances from Courtenay and Rampling. Is Geoff's gloom a natural response? Depression over his own impending mortality? Regret for a path never completed? Rampling is even more incredible; she's a seething volcano hidden behind a mask of stolidity.

45 Years comes across as the kind of play Eugene O' Neill would have written had he been English. Make no mistake; this movie is very English in the ways in which emotions are buttoned-down, much is left unsaid, and characters subject themselves to inner torture rather than beat their breasts and rage against the Fates. It is based upon the David Constantine short story "In Another Country" and stretches to 95 minutes by allowing the camera to linger over landscapes, faces, and skies. Impatient viewers might find the pace too languid, but I found it moving and powerful and it's closing scene almost too painful to watch. This is a film for adults–not because of its ridiculous R rating, but because one needs to have lived to quake at its terrors. Rob Weir

Female Voices: Siv Jakobsen, Candy Thief, Larissa Murphy, Granville Automatic

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Let's consider a category I call "Female Singers with Soft Voices." It's a dicey category. The reality of today's music world is that there are scores of young women with pretty voices vying to attract notice and a lot of them simply won't. Call it the female equivalent to the legions of young guys heading off to Nashville with bigger dreams than cowboy hats.

Siv Jakobsen comes from Brooklyn via Berkelee College of Music by way of her native Norway. She calls her current repertoire "dream-folk," a quiet, moody approach with lots of spaces and silence. I have her pegged as a future torch singer, once her voice ripens and she figures out that her tones lack the clarity to command the stage without more texturing. I sampled seven Jakobsen tracks, most of which struck me as too much of a piece. But the contrasts between her original versions of "Dark" and "How We Used to Love" with remixes done with composer/producer Martin Hviid are telling. In each case, Jakobsen alone with the white keys of her piano is too light to make impact. With Hviid, though, she slows the pace, drops down a half tone, and lets her voice ease into more soulful arrangements. Those work for me. Put another way, a song titled "Dark" deserves to feel more sonorous than somnambulant. Might be time to bust out the eveningwear and hit the late night jazz clubs.

About all I know about Candy Thief is that it's a movable pieces lineup anchored by vocalist Diana de Cabbarus. Now try to find information about her and good luck with that. I think she sews and there are tons of pictures of her on the Web, almost none of which are attached to reliable biographical details. She's allegedly from Staffordshire, but is based in Edinburgh, and apparently has kicked around a lot, but it might all be bullshit. So let's cut right to the music as experienced on an EP called The Starting Gun. It's sort of pop-rock, but with the unusual cadences and moodiness of Cat Power. Songs like the title cut and "Number Five" are like rainy days with bright sunshine interludes. Vocals (with some looping) evoke the chirpiness of The Hollies and the edginess of The Pixies, which makes them hoppy and melodic at one moment, yet strangely unsettling the next. Jangly guitar melts into crunchy power chords and back again. De Cabbarus doesn't have a clean voice either, but she's picked the right genre, whatever it might be! Listening to The Starting Gun evokes being at a party with deliciously weird people who are inventive and odd, yet grounded. I loved this release because it kept me off-balance. Every time I thought I had Candy Thief pegged, another curve emerged.

Larissa Murphy is an interesting new voice in country music if, for no other reason, she too skirts expectations. Her voice is a bit like Patti Griffin when she's being vulnerable, but with the timbre of Lucinda Williams minus the husk, and with the sensibilities of Patty Loveless, but with less fuss and frippery. Got that? How about this–it's not everyone who gets to produce a six-track EP with some of Nashville's heavyweights, and enlist a multiple Grammy Award-winning producer (Ray Kennedy) and John Prine's wife, Fiona, as executive producer. You can sample Speak Your Mind (Bego Music) online and hear for yourself. My favorite tracks were "No Town," which felt like a classic country/early 1960s pop song mash; "Mexican Flowers," a slowed-down sweet song with offbeat cadences; and "Late One Night," which is fragile but with Griffin-like soars. The latter turn is something I really admire about Murphy; she doesn't have a giant voice, but she's not afraid to air out what she has. {Footnote: If you Google her, reference the EP title or your search results will be overwhelmed by a different Larissa Murphy who has been doing Christian testimony about being married to a disabled man. Nice story–but no soundtrack!}

I'm torn about the duo Granville Automatic (Vanessa Olivarez and Elizabeth Elkins). Their latest effort is titled An Army without Music: Civil War Stories from Hallowed Ground (Red Clay Music) and consists of ten original songs rendered in a style that's one part 1970s style country music and one part old-style timelessness that makes the songs sound as if they could have been 19^th century campfire selections.  Many of them are lovely, though selections that break that mold stand out more. My personal favorites were the parlor room feel of "Goodbye Home," the mid-tempo waltz  "Salem Church," and the hoe-down-like ghost story "Grancer Harrison," though the last of these appropriates a bit too much of the tune of Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl." Overall, "pretty" is the adjective that best describes the album and I longed for something more distinctive. My bigger reservations are about presentation. Let me start by saying that referring to grown women (in their promo) as "girls" is a 70s country trait better left non-resuscitated. I also had squirm reactions to the project's Southern bias undercurrents. I've had it up to eyeteeth with Lost Cause romanticism. Although the stated purpose is to tell stories of places threatened by development, the only heroes—unless you count one of Perkins' ancestors who deserted after Day One at Gettysburg–are Confederates, the only Union officer referenced is the odious John Chivington, all the "hallowed ground" is in the South, and the words "secession" and "slavery" are AWOL. Excuse me for mixing politics and music, but my ears grew sticky listening to syrupy revisionism.

Rob Weir

Franzen's Purity Has Dirt Stains

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PURITY  (2015)

Jonathan Franzen

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 563 pages

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Americans don't read much, but that doesn't stop them from tossing the occasional writer into the celebrity hype and buzz machine. Jonathan Franzen is the literary equivalent of a rock star. This means reviewers generally decamp in one of two tents: sycophants who praise everything he types, or iconoclasts seeking to knock Humpty Dumpty from the wall. The Guardian dubbed Purity—Franzen's first novel in five years–"brilliant," and the New Republic speculated that Franzen might be the nation's greatest living novelist. By contrast, Gawker slammed Purity as high school prose, sniffed as its "placid gutlessness," and dismissed it as a buzz-driven "piece of shit."

Few embody buzz, excrement, and overwrought as well as Gawker, but though I'm tempted to agree with Gawker's takes-one-to-know-one assessment, I'd judge Purity  neither masterpiece nor bovine exhaust. It has occasional insights, but it's mostly just mediocre. It surprises me more, though, that almost no one has picked up on the book's most-intriguing aspect, its title and Franzen's musings upon it. Most reviewers stop with the observation that Purity is the given name of the book's central character, 23-year-old "Pip" Tyler. They miss that every character suffers from existential crises resulting from the pull between purity and grime. These are expressed in ways such as: morality versus desire, character versus celebrity, principle versus pragmatism, prudence versus urgency, and fidelity versus lust.

Our titular character Pip/Purity is the cog of the novel. She's a 23-year-old recent college grad living with a band of misfits in Oakland, and stuck in a revolving door of dead-end jobs that won't make a dent in her college debt. She has good intentions and tries to care for her housemates, a few of which are scarred physically or psychologically, but she also suffers from Millennial self-absorption and doesn't understand why she can't sleep with anyone she wishes, or why somebody won't just give her $130,000 to pay off her student debt. It sure won't be her mother, Anabel Laird, a recluse in the Santa Cruz Mountains who lives like a cross between an ageing hippie and a survivalist. Pip can't even get her mother to stop calling her "Pussycat," tell her who her father is, or reveal a single detail of her life before she had Pip. The out-of-sort Pip is thus intrigued when another housemate, Annagret, an oddball German-born eco activist, recruits her for The Sunshine Project. This, we discover, is a Bolivia-based Wikileaks-like organization run by an East German ex-pat, Andreas Wolf. Like Julian Assange, Wolf is famous, infamous, and wanted; hence the Bolivian address. (We know Andreas is like Assange because Franzen constantly makes that very analogy!)    

All of the major characters' stories overlap. We first meet Andreas in East Berlin two years before the Wall came down, where he's torn between his earnestness as a street angel/church youth counselor for troubled teens, and his libidinous desire to bed them. Annagret, though, is special and he helps her in a way that put both in danger. Before Andreas makes his way to the West, he enlists the aid of a visiting American journalist, Tom Aberant, the one person other than Annagret who knows Andreas' dark secret. Decades later, Andreas has assumed the mantle of a social justice crusader and uses his Svengali-like magnetism to draw idealists to his Web projects. Will Pip also fall to his charms?

Purity leaves opens itself to charges of packing way too many implausible coincidences into one story. Tom reappears–along with an absurd and superfluous back-story involving his father–and with a life partner named Leila, whose purity is compromised by her simultaneous roles as Tom's colleague/lover and her live-in status as the caregiver for a paraplegic husband she was on the verge of leaving before his accident. Through even more bizarre circumstances, all of the characters are connected through Pip. Gawker's overwrought tag has merit, especially in Franzen's deus ex machina approach to resolving dilemmas. 

Add overlong to the book's problems. Must we equate being a "weighty" writer with the quantity of pages churned out? Purity could lose half its bulk and be no worse for it. The central premise is a compelling one. How does one maintain integrity in a world whose stronger currents run the other way? We don't, however, need another long book on this theme–Donna Tartt already wrote and collected a Pulitzer for it. Her Goldfinch also had characters less whiny than Pip, more deliciously Machiavellian than Andreas, more convincingly bohemian than Anabel, more conflicted than anyone in Purity, and with considerably more trust in the readers to connect the dots. I didn't hate this book, but as purity goes, it's more beige than white.

Rob Weir

 

Caroloyn Chute and the Other Maine in Treat Us Like Dogs

TREAT US LIKE DOGS AND WE WILL BECOME WOLVES (2014)

Carolyn Chute

Grove Press, 671 pages

* * *

Most visitors to Maine wax rhapsodic over postcard cute towns like Ogunquit, Wiscasset, and Camden, or indulge in retail therapy in Kittery or Freeport. The nose-in-the-air set eschews the hoi polloi for the obscene wealth enclaves of Kennebunkport or Northeast Harbor. Neither group drives more than a few miles inland, though both wonder how Maine ended up with a nut-job like Paul LePage as governor. They've never seen Carolyn Chute's Maine–the postindustrial hopelessness of towns like Lewiston, the lumber mills of Bangor and Lincoln that Global Capital deems "noncompetitive," the empty quadrants that bear only township numbers, or Canadian border whistle stops like Calais that redefine the word dire.  

Chute lives in the "other" Maine. Though she's a renowned author, she and her illiterate second husband live on the poverty line, make do with an outhouse, belong to a militia group, and live among folks who think the Tea Party is a bunch of prissy suburbanites whose ideas of survivalism comes from bad reality TV shows. Not that she's seen such a show; Chute doesn't have a TV, phone, or computer. She also knows that the American class struggle isn't between the haute and petite bourgeoisie, and her view of those who disparage the other Maine is summed by the title of her latest novel.

It's also the book's simmering theme. Chute sets her novels in the semi-fictional town of Egypt, Maine. This one revolves loosely around bearish 39-year-old Gordon St. Onge, known as "The Prophet" to those living in The Settlement. What is The Settlement? Call it where free thinkers-meet-the-frontier. There are loads of women bearing the last name of St. Onge and lots of home-schooled kids, many of whom look like Gordon. Is Gordon a Northeast David Koresh, a pre-reform Mormon, a randy satyr, or just an unorthodox backwoodsman who rails against Peak Oil and Corporate America? Does he even run The Settlement, or is it Claire, the rotund, older Indian woman who was once Gordon's only legal wife? Most of Gordon's neighbors are also poor as church mice; they mostly see him as a little off, but an affable guy who operates sawmills, helps out, and takes in troubled kids who don't spell very well, but know more about the science of solar and wind power than most engineers.

Everything about The Settlement and Gordon is off the grid by polite society's standards, including a manifesto declaring itself "no wing" on the left/right scale. Residents are pro-democracy and anti-government, pro-equality but anti-feminist, pro-gun but anti-NRA, live in poverty yet eat heartily, are self-sufficient but don't isolate themselves, hate banks but watch the cash flow carefully, and hate most technology but in the name of environmentalism. They are serious about freedom–the only non-negotiable rule is no TVs or computers.

In other words, they scare the hell out of "respectable" Mainers for whom any whiff of anarchy means there must be must be something sinister going on. Soon allegations swirl that The Settlement harbors everything from incest and child abuse to Satanism and gun stockpiling. This puts reporter Ivy Morelli, a quirky but spoiled Millennial, on the investigative trail. Will Ivy expose the evils lurking in the woods or succumb to Gordon's magnetism? Her efforts to reveal the "truth" put me in mind of the bungled Island Pond, Vermont religious commune scandal from the 1970s. There are parallels, but much more is afoot in Chute's novel.

Treat us Like Dogs is a sprawling, sometimes clunky novel filled with unusual characters, including several personified forces and objects. How would Television, History, or Mammon speak if they were people? Chute imagines it. There are lots of "secret agents" in the book as well, including a six-year-old black girl and the mysterious "Grays," that might be aliens, or a self-aware collective unconscious, or something akin to Emerson's Over-Soul. A particularly compelling character is 15-year-old Bree Vandermast, a wildly inventive red-tressed artist with an attractive body and a deformed face. Another is feminist professor Catherine, who also orbits around Gordon and makes us wonder if she is the snake in the Garden. And, yes, there are militias.

Chute wisely set the novel in 1999-2000, just before the crooked fall election and 9/11 confirmed a lot of what Gordon said about the world. Treat Us Like Dogs has so many characters that even Chute claims not to know how many. This makes for a parade of intrigue, but a tougher editor would have demanded better flow. (There are parts that probably made more sense in Chute's head than on the page.) Yet this book is unlike anything else you'll read and its fascinations more than compensate for its frustrations. A final thing: the New York Review of Books called its humor "propulsive." Oh dear! There are funny passages, but the humor is black, not haw! haw! (The reference is to Ivy's cloying laugh.) Only a tourist who has never been ten miles from the coast would call it "propulsive."  

Rob Weir

  

Circling the Sun McLain's Latest Triumph

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CIRCLING THE SUN: A NOVEL (2015)

Paula McLain

Ballantine Books

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Do women have to die to be considered heroines? I’ve long wondered why there’s been such intense fascination over Amelia Earhart, when Beryl Markham (1902-1986) remains a relative unknown whose remarkable autobiography was decades out of print when it was republished in 1983. She appeared only as a composite character in Isak Dinesen’s 1937 autobiography Out of Africa (and in the 1985 film), though Beryl and Karen Blixen (Dinesen is a nom de plume) were friends in life, as well as rivals for the affections of Denys Finch Hatton. Markham made history in 1936, the year before Earhart’s doomed flight, by becoming the first aviatrix to cross the Atlantic solo from east to west. If that doesn’t sound like such a big deal to you, consider that her plane had to carry all its fuel with it, and the working tank had to drain completely before allowing fuel from the auxiliary storage to flow into it. Still not impressed? Markham also had to turn off the engine while doing all of this, lest a spark blow up the plane. This meant the aircraft went into free fall, and Markham had seconds to restart the engine or she would have met Earhart's fate.

Paula McLain finds Markham a compelling subject for a novel, and I couldn’t agree more. McLain–who earlier dazzled with The Paris Wife–begins and ends her novel in the sky, but she focuses more on Beryl’s African youth. What a fascinating tale it is–one that makes Markham a thoroughly modern woman long before it was fashionable or safe to be one. Along the way she took the word “no” as a personal challenge and smashed every gender expectation her society threw at her.  For Beryl the words “Well behaved women seldom make history” wasn’t a slogan; it was her de facto mantra. This made her a “difficult” person by respectable standards. She was a tomboy who married three times and kept her vows in none of those attachments; count King George V’s son as among her probable lovers. Finch Hatton was definitely in that company, but he bedded just about every available woman in British East Africa.

McLain presents British East Africa (today’s Kenya) as the liberating antidote to the stultifying British society into which Beryl was born. She was the daughter of a horse trainer, Charles Baldwin Clutterback, and a mother so English that when the family moved to Kenya (when Beryl was just four), she spent little time in locating a lover with whom she could flee back to England. This was probably all for the best for Beryl, who grew up with dreams on becoming a Kipsigis warrior. Beryl’s long friendship with an African local is among McLain’s subplots.  Because her father provided love but little structure, Beryl became something of a wild colt who adapted to whatever came her way, including repeated cycles of wealth and poverty. Quite logically, the wild colt followed her father’s footsteps into what was then the exclusive male domain of training prize racehorses and was so good at it that British aristocrats like Lord Delamere were willing to act as patrons, social convention be damned. In McLain’s book, Delamere acts as a more effective second father figure–another very interesting relationship. But the dynamics between Finch Hatton, Karen Blixen, and Beryl make for the book’s most complex triad. Both women bedded the free-spirited Finch Hatton, but given that Blixen was 17 years Beryl’s senior, she sometimes acted as a surrogate older sister, almost as if she were the superego between two out-of-control ids.

McLain excels at probing the interiors of complex people placed in unusual situations. We soon understand the attraction between Finch Hatton and (still gangly) Beryl–they are among the few Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa who were at home amidst the wildness rather than dreaming of sedate domestication in England or Denmark. McLain is equally adroit at making Africa come alive–with all of its horrors and beauties. Beryl’s world was one in which you could rid yourself of an unwanted governess by putting a dead black mamba in her room; it was also one of knowing what to do when thrown from a horse within venom-spitting distance of a coiled cobra, or having a clear head when attacked by a lion. If this doesn’t sound like a place you’d ever wish to be, read McLain’s gorgeous description of staring into the Great Rift Valley before closing your mind.

This is a fascinating treatment of a remarkable–and, yes, pigheaded–young woman that take us just until she is 28 and floating in the clouds. Once you read about Markham’s formative years, her flight will seem like the most logical thing in the world for her to do. Amelia Earhart crashed; Beryl Markham soared.

Rob Weir

Alba's Edge Finds Connections between Celtic, Latin, and Jazz

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ALBA'S EDGE

Run to Fly

Paddledoo

* * *

Celtic music fans certainly know the name Aidan O'Rourke. His latest project, though, found him twiddling dials in the studio rather than rosining up his bow. He has produced Alba's Edge, a young band that explores the connections between Celtic music, jazz, and Latin music. Please emphasize the word connections. Far too many contemporary mash-up efforts are force-fits instead of retrofits. A listen to Run to Fly finds Alba's Edge looking for logical affinity, not simply engaging in cultural splicing for the sheer sake of novelty. While I wouldn't say that every track works, I give these youngsters high marks for thoughtfulness.

Siblings Lilly and Neil Pearlman, she a Celtic-style fiddler and he a jazz pianist, anchor the quartet. They grew up in a Maine household filled with Cape Breton, Scottish, Brazilian, and Cuban music. The Pearlmans generally drive each composition, but solid cross rhythms from percussionist Jacob Cole and the versatile bass lines of Doug Berns texture the music. Don't expect cheesy cha-cha-chas appended to jigs. Alba's Edge sets the tone on the first track, "Rising," which strikes an ambient mood with its cascades of piano notes. In fact, quite a few tracks evoke high-end New Age jazz. This is certainly true of "Willard State Park," in which Neil Pearlman's keyboarding is reminiscent of that of jazz legend Vince Guaraldi, who was known for his work on Peanuts TV specials. "Willard State Park" has similar joyous piano runs, but the overlay with backswing fiddle produces a more complex result.

We don't really notice overt Latin influences until track four, the title track, which opens forlorn and foreboding, but is lightened by soft fiddle notes and keyboard chording that eases the piece into a swaying, playful bridge that allows the band to shift into a joyous higher gear. "General Jinjur/NOLA Chili" is also an interesting mix. It has decided Latin cross beats and Brazilian jazz piano running through, but the bass lines evoke some of Robby Krieger's work with The Doors, especially on Morrison Hotel. Another solid effort is "Summer Scraps," a giddy little tune that will make you grab your dance shoes. There's also a nice cover of "The Diamond," a famed whaling song popularized by Ewan MacColl. The deliberately scratchy fiddle on this one exudes bluegrass influence.

To my ear there are a few missteps. "HRK: Strength in Recovery" could use more structure and seems more like a forum for cool riffs than a cohesive piece. Ditto "The Sordid Life of Scientists," which has slices of soca, gypsy fiddling, and Latin cool jazz, but a helter-skelter binding that comes apart in places. But as I hope comes across, these folks are serious and skillful musicians. Even their not-quite-realized pieces are interesting ideas. Rob Weir

Samples found here.