Eternal Echoes: Songs and Dances for the Soul

"The arena he built in Brooklyn has hosted concerts of hip-hop, Latin salsa and reggae, not to mention performances by Dylan, Streisand and the Rolling Stones, but when the genre chosen was Jewish music, Bruce C. Ratner decided to take charge himself.
Mr. Ratner, a real estate developer who cut his musical teeth on cantorial singing at a synagogue in his hometown, Cleveland, is the de facto impresario of a concert at the Barclays Center announced on Tuesday that will feature the violinist Itzhak Perlman and Yitzchak Meir Helfgot, the cantor from the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan who has been a leader in the revival of Jewish liturgical music. ... Mr. Perlman recently recorded an album with Mr. Helfgot, 'Eternal Echoes: Songs and Dances for the Soul,' that includes cantorial standards like 'Kol Nidrei' and 'Sheyibone Bays Hamikdosh' ('May the Holy Temple Be Rebuilt'). Mr. Perlman fiddled while Mr. Helfgot crooned" (Joseph Berger, "Another First for Barclays Center: A Concert of Jewish Music," New York Times, 1/15/13).

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Ben Kweller: Go Fly a Kite

"Singer-songwriter Ben Kweller, who's been pretty prolific for a 31-year-old, makes his way to Mohegan Sun's Wolf Den this week for a free show. Check out his latest album, Go Fly a Kite, released last February" ("Free Sounds Great," New Haven Advocate, 1/17/13, p. 21).

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The Return of the Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

"Too often we reflexively think that music is born when it is recorded, that it simply comes into existence fully formed. But every riff, every melody, every harmony has its own rich history. When it comes to the American songbook, taking rides through the deeper parts of that history can be as thrilling and immediate as seeing a live concert. This is the wonderful calculus of 'The Return of the Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of,' a two-disc set with great documentation that travels back to the 1920s and unearths some of the earliest recordings of homegrown American music. Here's the Fruit Jar Guzzlers (best band name ever?) doing a prehistoric version of the 'Stack-O-Lee' ballad. Here's blues legend Charley Patton going deep into the Delta. Here's a fiddler named Elder Golden P. Harris sounding like something coming through the open windows of a 19th-century Southern church as he twangs out 'I'll Lead a Christian Life.' Other traditions are represented, too: Two Eastern European tracks are welcome additions to the mix, jarring in the most evocative way amid all the country and blues. A great American musical lesson that puts the best of emerging legends alongside the long-forgotten – just as record collectors might dream of" (Ted Anthony, "Overlooked Albums 2012," Huffington Post, 1/3/13).

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J. S. Bach: Brandenburg Concertos 1, 2, and 3

"These works owe their existence to a commission from the Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg. Bach was at the time Kapellmeister in charge of the music at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Koethen, and the six concertos 'display clearly the joy Bach felt in making music and studying the works with the 15 instrumentalists of the prince's Collegium musicum; each of the concertos is written for a different combination of instruments' (R. Steglich). The Brandenburg concertos were published as early as 1721; Bach's original title on the first page was: Six concertos avec plusieurs Instruments" (CD notes).

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Joe Lovano Us Five: Cross Culture

"Long ago he developed a tenor saxophone sound for his temperament. It rolls and smears and smokes, all width, rhythmic unto itself; it can fit in or accommodate. ... More recently, he’s developed a working band for that temperament, Us Five. It has two drummers, which creates a broad area around the beat. They’ll play tight or loose, without cymbals or with only cymbals. ... Mr. Lovano’s third album with Us Five, 'Cross Culture,' with the drummers Francisco Mela and Otis Brown III, as well as the pianist James Weidman, the bassist Esperanza Spalding and the guitarist Lionel Loueke in an intermittent, undefined role, can sometimes sound like a jam session based on scraps. In fact most of these pieces are more composed than they seem; several have appeared in different arrangements on earlier Lovano records. But over all the feel is organic and basic, intense and casual. The record isn’t making any kind of argument on behalf of free improvising. Mr. Lovano isn’t partisan like that. There’s a gold-star version here of one of jazz’s most elegant ballad standards, Billy Strayhorn’s 'Star Crossed Lovers,' with rustling free rhythm at the beginning and end and easy swing in the middle. Mr. Lovano’s performance is a knockout" (Ben Ratliff, "New Music," New York Times, 1/7/13).

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Christopher Owens: Lysandre

"He is best known as the frontman and songwriter of Girls, a lo-fi band of shifting pop harmonies that arrived on the indie scene around 2007 and, with two albums and one EP, quickly became a critical darling. ... His debut CD as Christopher Owens, 'Lysandre,' a themed album charting the course of Girls’ first tour and a love affair with a Frenchwoman named Lysandre, is due on Tuesday from Fat Possum Records. It is at once a departure from his previous work — the first track, 'Lysandre’s Theme,' is 40 seconds of Renaissance-sounding melody, complete with flutes and classical guitar, that is folded into every subsequent song — and of a piece with Girls. There’s romantic longing, veiled bad behavior and naked self-doubt, set to pleasingly throwback California pop-rock (with flute and saxophone). Composing the theme not long after he returned from the tour, Mr. Owens did all the instrumentation himself — whistling the flute parts in his demos — and in a feverish rush wrote nearly all the songs in one day, a year later. 'I want to be somebody who writes about his life, at his own pace and who can decide to make an album like this when he wants to,' he said" (Melena Ryzik, "A Time to Go Solo, at Least Onstage," New York Times, 1/9/13).

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Gerald Barry: Piano Quartet and other works

"In the 70s, Barry was a pupil of Stockhausen and Kagel; he returned to Ireland, where he now lives between Dublin and a cottage perched on the brutally beautiful Atlantic coast of Galway opposite the Aran islands – a place where he sang me his version of Lady Bracknell to my open-jawed astonishment. That's a common feeling when you're listening to Barry's music, whether his Handel-inspired opera The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit, his brilliant operatic realisation of Fassbinder's film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, or any of his orchestral and chamber pieces, from the delirious scales of _______ (yes, that really is a title), to the outright hysteria of Bob, or the full-on orchestral onslaught of Chevaux-de-frise. Unlike so many other contemporary composers whose music is concerned with creating an artful craft of transition, a sound world of diaphanous meltings and meldings from one idea to another, Barry's is a world of sharp edges, of precisely defined yet utterly unpredictable musical objects. His music sounds like no one else's in its diamond-like hardness, its humour, and sometimes, its violence" (Tom Service, "A Guide to Gerald Barry's Music," Guardian, 1/7/13).

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Leonard Cohen: The Future

"The Future is the ninth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, released in 1992. ... The album charted as high as #36 in the U.K. and was phenomenally successful in Canada, going gold, platinum, and double-platinum. Cohen also won the Canadian Juno Award for Best Male Vocalist in 1993 for The Future. In his acceptance speech, he quipped, 'Only in Canada could somebody with a voice like mine win Vocalist of the Year'. The music video for Cohen's song 'Closing Time' also won the Juno Award for Best Music Video in 1993. ... The actress Rebecca De Mornay, who dated Cohen in the early 1990s, was credited as a co-producer of the album along with Cohen himself. The album includes Cohen's covers of the Irving Berlin song 'Always' and the Frederick Knight song 'Be For Real.' The Future is also the only Leonard Cohen studio album to include an instrumental Cohen composition ('Tacoma Trailer'). ... Three songs from this album ('Waiting for the Miracle', 'Anthem', and the title track) were prominently used on the soundtrack for Oliver Stone's 1994 film Natural Born Killers. Songs from the album have also appeared in the films Wonder Boys starring Michael Douglas and The Life of David Gale starring Kevin Spacey" (Wikipedia).

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The Best of BeauSoleil

"Chris [Strachwitz] asked me if I would be interested in recording for him with BeauSoleil which then [1981] consisted of Errol Verret on accordion, my brother David on guitar, Billy Ware on triangle, and Robert Vigneaud on bass fiddle. All having day jobs back then, we would have big jam/dances on Fridays, play for weddings, and venture out of state for festivals. I called them up and asked if they could meet me in an hour to record an album for Chris. Of course they all thought I was teasing but they all arrived at the petite chapelle within the hour. At that time I was working for the Diocese of Lafayette in Communications and behind my office was a 1920s era chapel that we used for a television sound studio. It had amazing acoustics but unfortunately has since been torn down. Chris set up his portable Nagra tape recorder with two Neumann microphones, and the beginnings of the album 'Michael Doucet dit BeauSoleil' were recorded. No song list, no rehearsals, no time to get nervous, no overdubbing! and no fiddle! I didn't have enough time to go back home and get mine so I borrowed a friend's new French fiddle for the night" (CD notes by Michael Doucet).

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Dave Matthews Band: Away from the World

"The Dave Matthews Band leads a wave of new releases taking over the top slots of Billboard’s album chart, as record companies begin their fall assault of major new releases. The Dave Matthews Band’s latest, 'Away From the World' (RCA), opened at No. 1 with 266,000 copies sold in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. It is the band’s sixth consecutive studio album to debut at No. 1, and the first time any group has achieved such a run. But with music sales depressed over all these days, 'Away From the World' had the lowest opening-week sales number for any of the group’s studio releases since 1996, when its second release, 'Crash,' opened at No. 2 with 254,000, as Billboard noted" (Ben Sisario, "Dave Matthews Band's Latest Opens at No. 1," New York Times, 9/19/12).

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Diana Krall: Glad Rag Doll

"First, you could understand it as a nifty bit of pop archaeology: a bouquet of songs culled mostly from the ’20s and ’30s, known to Ms. Krall because of a youth spent riffling through her family’s stash of 78-r.p.m. records. ... The producer is T Bone Burnett, whom you may know from any number of other albums filed under the inexact category of Americana, notably 'Raising Sand' by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, which won a Grammy in 2009 for album of year. ... 'All the world can see behind your mask,' she sings in the title track, a song memorably recorded by Ruth Etting in 1929. Arranged as a delicate duet with the guitarist Marc Ribot, it’s the moral heart of this album, an indictment of womanly artifice that Ms. Krall has said she associates with photographs of the Ziegfeld Girls. ... But it has never been a bad idea to engage Ms. Krall’s friskier side, and it’s satisfying to hear the swagger in her phrasing on 'I’m a Little Mixed Up,' a tune originally recorded by the blues singer Betty James. On 'Prairie Lullaby,' a song forever associated with Jimmie Rodgers, she plays the cowboy angle straight, while subtly emphasizing the drowsiness in her delivery. She sounds even better on another song with country pedigree: 'Wide River to Cross,' by Buddy and Julie Miller, longtime associates of Mr. Burnett" (Nate Chinen, "New Music," New York Times, 10/1/12).

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Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Psychedelic Pill

"Psychedelic Pill is the thirty-fifth studio album by Canadian musician Neil Young. It was released on October 30, 2012. This is the second release of a Neil Young collaboration with Crazy Horse in 2012, and their first original work together since the Greendale album and tour in 2003 and 2004. ... At 87 minutes, Psychedelic Pill is Neil Young's longest album and only studio album to span two discs. Many of the songs on the album came out of extended jam sessions with Crazy Horse after Americana was recorded. The opening track 'Driftin' Back' makes references to Young's new memoir 'Waging Heavy Peace' and his disdain for MP3s in between extended jamming. ... Overall, Psychedelic Pill has received positive reviews. Rolling Stone gave the album four stars and said 'it has the roiling honesty and brutal exuberance of their best records.' Douglas Heselgrave, writing for Paste Magazine, said: 'Psychedelic Pill may be the best album Neil Young has ever done with Crazy Horse. It'll take years to figure out.' Dan Stubbs, giving the album 8 out of 10 stars for NME, writes: 'two tracks here – "Ramada Inn" and "Walk Like A Giant" – could sit among Young's best.' ... The album was listed at #10 on Rolling Stone's list of the top 50 albums of 2012, saying 'This is as inspiringly strange as anything he's done'" (Wikipedia).

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Miles Davis + 19: Miles Ahead

"This release contains the complete original album Miles Ahead (Columbia CL1041), Miles' first collaboration with the Gil Evans Orchestra and probably the best. As a bonus, we include another complete album, Blue Moods, an introspective LP made by Miles in 1955 with a quintet featuring Charles Mingus and Elvin Jones" (CD container).

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Joni Mitchell: Blue

"This is the effect that listening to Joni Mitchell has on me these days: uncontrollable tears. An emotional overcoming, disconcertingly distant from happiness, more like joy -- if joy is the recognition of an almost intolerable beauty. It's not a very civilized emotion. I can't listen to Joni Mitchell in a room with other people, or on an iPod, walking the streets. Too risky. I can never guarantee that I'm going to be able to get through the song without being made transparent -- to anybody and everything, to the whole world. A mortifying sense of porousness. Although it's comforting to learn that the feeling I have listening to these songs is the same feeling the artist had while creating them: 'At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.' That's Mitchell, speaking of the fruitful years between [1967] and 1971, when her classic album 'Blue' was released" (Zadie Smith, "Some Notes on Attunement," New Yorker, 12/17/12, pp. 31-32).

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Band of Horses: Mirage Rock

"Every Band of Horses album seems to draw directly from a handful of their heroes. This time around there is a distinct Neil Young, Byrds, Crosby, Stills & Nash influence. They've always been indie-rock-meets-Americana, but gone is the over-production and frivolousness of the last album. This time they let the songwriting speak for itself, and it works" (Chip McCabe, "Listen Up! The Music of 2012: It's In the Air," New Haven Advocate, 12/20/12, p. 11).

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Justin Bieber: Believe

"He’s an R&B aspirant trapped in a pop universe, and subject to its whims. A pop star at his level has fewer options than you’d think. To make an album somehow out of lock step with the sounds of the day, and potentially come off as misdirected — or maybe worse, too forward thinking — would be to risk leaving food on the table. By that measure 'Believe' ... is gluttonous, full of savvy compromises: between Mr. Bieber’s natural gifts and the exigencies of radio; between warm, intimate vocals and music designed for arenas and nightclubs and arena-size nightclubs; between Mr. Bieber’s beloved R&B and the dance-oriented pop that’s currently in vogue. ... 'Believe' is a king-size ballad where he sings unfettered: 'There were days when I was just broken, you know/There were nights when I was doubting myself/But you kept my heart from folding.' That’s matched in intensity by the sun-dappled teen-crush soul of 'Catching Feelings' and 'Be Alright,' a guitar-driven number that recalls the Tony Rich Project, the underappreciated neo-soul classicist of the mid-1990s. These are this album’s high points" (Jon Caramanica, "Pop's Good Boy Tries Growing Up," New York Times, 6/14/12).

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