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- Created on Wednesday, 01 May 2013 00:00
- Written by Joseph Taylor
Telarc TEL-34021-02
Format: CD
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Michael Feinstein is a singer and pianist, but he is also, and perhaps primarily, an archivist of the Great American Songbook. Channel surfing the other day, I stumbled on Michael Feinstein’s American Songbook, which PBS first broadcast in 2010. Feinstein was visiting the Gershwin archives in San Francisco (they’ve since been moved to the Library of Congress). Feinstein was a friend of Ira Gershwin’s, and his extensive research of Gershwin’s recordings and sheet music helped ensure that the legacies of Ira and his brother George would be accurately and fully preserved.
Read more: Michael Feinstein: "Change of Heart: The Songs of André Previn"
- Details
- Created on Monday, 01 April 2013 00:00
- Written by Joseph Taylor
Telarc International TEL-33814-02
Format: CD
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Move is Hiromi’s second disc with bassist Anthony Jackson and drummer Simon Phillips, aka the Trio Project. Even with Hiromi’s acoustic piano dominating, Voice (2011), her first CD with this group, had more pronounced rock elements than her other jazz-trio recordings. Move continues that trend, and manages to balance even more deftly the muscle of rock music with the complexity of jazz improvisation.
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- Created on Friday, 01 March 2013 00:00
- Written by Joseph Taylor
Concord Jazz CJA 33676-02
Format: CD
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It took me a while to warm up to Patricia Barber, but Café Blue and Nightclub won me over, especially in their recent vinyl incarnations. As much as I’ve come to enjoy her work, though, I wouldn’t have described it as emotionally engaging until now. Smash, her 11th release and her first for Concord, takes as its themes love and loss, and as a consequence Barber leaves behind the sense of ironic distance she sometimes conveys in her earlier recordings. She also casts her stylistic net wider, including elements of rock music in ways that enrich her songs rather than create a feeling that she’s selling out.
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- Created on Friday, 15 March 2013 00:00
- Written by Hans Wetzel
XL Records XLCD583
Format: CD
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It’s uncommon to hear new music that stands out from the proverbial pack. Almost everything is derivative in some way or another, and for good reason. Different can mean provocative, but it almost always guarantees commercial failure. Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring provides perhaps the most illuminating example of this. During its very first performance, in Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the audience rioted in response to the avant-garde, thoroughly dissonant composition. Critics were equally unconvinced, one going so far as to label the forward-thinking piece “a laborious and puerile barbarity.” Tough crowd. Stravinsky, of course, would go on to achieve worldwide acclaim. Like so many mavericks, his unique compositions fell on conditioned ears and immutable minds that were unable to appreciate what he had to offer.
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- Created on Friday, 15 February 2013 00:00
- Written by Hans Wetzel
Matador OLE994
Format: CD
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The indie-rock group Yo La Tengo will be 30 in 2014, but the three-member band from Hoboken, New Jersey, formed by the husband-wife team of Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, shows no sign of becoming stale. Fade is their 13th studio album, and its title at first struck me as apt -- the music kept fading from my consciousness as I played it in the background during a few cold weekday evenings. The gentle guitar melodies and lazy drumwork offered a rhythmic listening experience that at first I misheard as uninspired. Repeated listening and reflection made it apparent that this album is the result of three decades of musical refinement.
