February 26, 2008
Made In New Orleans: The Hurricane Sessions
(Preservation Hall)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
City Of Dreams: A Collection Of New Orleans Music
(Rounder)
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, much of the concern centered around the flood's impact on the local music heritage. But little of the discussion was prepared to acknowledge that the scene was mostly just that: heritage. Sure, New Orleans was still home to countless fine singers and musicians, some of whom were once huge stars. But their accomplishments were pretty much in the past. With few exceptions, New Orleans has had little influence on contemporary music since the 1970s.
And yet that's not necessarily a bad thing, either, because some New Orleans musicians continued to hone, shake up and evolve their regional sound. Despite the lack of a large audience for what they were doing, you couldn't say they'd been standing still. These are the kinds of issues that have dogged New Orleans music for generations, and here are two box sets that once again raise such questions: At what point does a living tradition become nostalgia? At what point does music for young people become music for old people? Are these changes inevitable, or is there a way around them without betraying roots?
With the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the answer's a no-brainer. The PHJB was put together in 1961 to play traditional New Orleans jazz for French Quarter tourists. The group thus started out as nostalgia, or at least as music for old people. Yet early bands featured superb musicians who'd been playing this stuff all their lives, and it showed. The leaders were Billie and DeDe Pierce; she was a bluesy pianist and resonant singer, he blew a raunchy trumpet, and the Made In New Orleans tracks featuring them are still fun, if dated.
More recent versions of the band are likewise made up of skilled players, but they often sound like they're just picking up a paycheck. And nothing on the compilation can hold a candle to the 1959 track "Lord I Don't Want To Be Buried" by Sister Gertrude Morgan, who was never a PHJB member. She was a street evangelist and folk artist whose work sold through the gallery that became Preservation Hall, and her whanging guitar and straining voice are untamed and exhilarating in ways that reduce the PHJB of any era to a museum piece.
This CD is packaged with a DVD of mostly historical footage and Preservation memorabilia such as contracts and Mardi Gras doubloons, and no two boxes are alike. Priced at $150 for the autographed, limited-edition (504 copies) box containing original memorabilia, and $65 for the deluxe box containing reproductions, it's the sort of item that's hard to shell out for unless one of the musicians is a relative.
The four CDs that make up the Rounder box are often -- but not always -- a different story. The label began recording extensively in New Orleans in 1981; the glory days were over but many of the R&B greats were still around, often getting a second wind thanks to the ever-growing Jazz Fest (founded in 1970). Rounder was able to ride that wave as well as to stay abreast of such new developments as the hip, contemporary brass band scene.
Those bands, along with the Mardi Gras Indians, dominate the second ("Street Beat") disc. Though young second-line specialists such as the Rebirth Brass Band will still sound dated to some, they shouldn't. A jam such as "Feel Like Funkin' It Up", with its chanting vocals and riffing horns, overhauls and breathes new life into the traditional brass band sound; it's also downright irresistible. And Monk Boudreaux & the Golden Eagles' "Sew, Sew, Sew" catches the Indian sound as it's heard in parades -- with nothing but percussion backing the chants. (Most tribes record with a band, as the Eagles do here on "Golden Crown".) Much of the time, this is my favorite of the four discs.
The first disc ("Big Easy Blues") is more problematic. For one thing, it includes early-'60s tracks (Al Johnson's "Carnival Time", Joe Jones' national hit "You Talk Too Much") from the Rounder-owned Ric and Ron labels that might sound great on their own but come off as archaic next to the more modern R&B of, say, Marcia Ball ("Big Shot"), whose combination of songcraft, NOLA pianistics and rhythmic drive makes her a standout among "progressive traditionalists."
Disc Three ("Funky New Orleans") definitely has its moments; it's always a large charge to hear Walter "Wolfman" Washington's fiery blues guitar exploding out of his hard-funk rhythm section, as on "You Can Stay But The Noise Must Go" and "Funkyard". But this disc is too often a reminder of just how unique the Meters -- who started the whole NOLA funk thang while enjoying some of the last national hits to come out of the city -- really were.
Pianists mostly play solo on the final disc ("Ivory Emperors"), but that's the way it should be. And yes, there are a couple tracks from Professor Longhair ("Every Day, Every Night", "Go To The Mardi Gras"). But the real find may be the seldom-recorded Tuts Washington ("Tee Nah, Nah", "Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans"), a barrelhouser who influenced Fess and all the others, and whose singular combination of blues, boogie and pop held up surprisingly well long after its era had passed.
Finally, there's the notorious eccentric James Booker. He seems to have about eight hands on "Classified", and four of them are providing the wall of bass that serves as "fills" at the end of a line; he gets more mileage out of his left hand than anyone this side of Otis Spann. Booker represented a line of tradition-rooted explorers that had dried up even before Katrina, and it's hard not to wonder now if that line can ever be picked up and extended again.
-- JOHN MORTHLAND
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or John Morthland
Illustration by Shocko Grafix
Posted by Grant at 1:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 22, 2008
Archives Volume One: Live At The Avalon Ballroom 1969
(Amoeba)
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- Columbia Records boss Walter Yetnikoff once struggled to explain to Leonard Cohen the label's problem with the singer: "We know you're great...but we don't know if you're any good." We may ask ourselves the same about Gram Parsons: At this point, it's well established that Gram was great, but was he any good?
It's now axiomatic to say that Parsons' greatness was misunderstood and undervalued in his lifetime, that anyone who couldn't gauge his value back then was an idiot. There's consensus for his greatness, even if the evidence of his "goodness" is more tentative. By good, I mean did he possess those requisite practical characteristics that many artists need to achieve? Was he the kind of guy who could reliably deliver onstage and win over an otherwise disinterested audience?
Apart from the fading memories of his contemporaries and fans and a brace of muzzy-sounding bootlegs, concrete evidence is scant. Into this vacuum comes this release, a soundboard tape of two sets which has languished in the Grateful Dead's archive. It's a mixed affair that will not resolve the questions about Parsons' reputation.
The opening set suffers from a few wayward harmonies and the soundman's inability to fade down Chris Ethridge's bass and fade up Pete Kleinow's steel. Parsons isn't much of a compere -- his stoned-sounding stage asides don't grab the crowd, and it's humbling to hear early performances of sublime Burrito numbers such as "Sin City" and "Hot Burrito #1" greeted with polite applause rather than rapture.
By set two, the audio balance is better, the band is on more assured footing for nuggets such as Mel Tillis' "Mental Revenge", and a chugging cover of Roy Orbison's "Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream)" earns an encore. It swiftly goes from triumph to pathos with a flaccid reading of Dan Penn/Chips Moman's "Do Right Woman"; they should have stopped while they were ahead.
Also include are two home demo tracks, and even this is a split decision -- an aching 1969 piano rendering of "$1000 Wedding" with a vocal that is not so much sung as sobbed, and a 1967 crack at the Everly Brothers' "When Will I Be Loved" that recalls the scene from Spinal Tap in which the band attempts an a cappella "Heartbreak Hotel".
-- PAUL CANTIN
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or Paul Cantin.
Posted by Grant at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
February 20, 2008
Best Tracks And Side Tracks 1979-2007
(Yep Roc)
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- Behind his rock-your-face-off exterior, Jason Ringenberg was always a lot smarter than his aw-shucks demeanor suggested. So having climbed Himalayan-scale heights of metallic country soul with Jason & the Scorchers, he has wisely followed more of a troubadourial course as a solo act. But he can still rock it out with the best of them, and this 30-track retrospective of his solo catalogue ranks right up there with his Scorchers stuff.
Opening with a chiming remake of the 1985 Scorchers standard "Shop It Around", the set hits most of his solo high points (including "Tuskegee Pride" and Jim Roll's "Eddie Rode The Orphan Train") plus choice rarities, down to Ringenberg's pre-Scorchers band Shakespeare's Riot.
The wild card is Farmer Jason, Ringenberg's children's-music alter ego, who turns up on disc two. "Punk Rock Skunk" and "Lovely Christmas" will probably have you snickering as much as Ringenberg himself.
-- DAVID MENCONI
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or David Menconi
Posted by Grant at 8:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 14, 2008
Nashville Stars On Tour
(Bear Family)
(NODEPRESSION.NET) -- Blame it on the Cold War. With America's extensive European military presence, Armed Forces Radio playing country discs, and country acts touring those bases, it was inevitable European civilians would embrace the music. RCA Victor's expert promotion machine in Europe stood ready to exploit that new audience in April 1964. With Beatlemania seemingly ruling the world, RCA sponsored "Nashville Stars On Tour," two weeks of shows for military and civilian fans. The headliner was Jim Reeves (already wildly popular there) and his band the Blue Boys, plus Chet Atkins, Bobby Bare, and the Anita Kerr Singers.
Among those attending: Bear Family's Richard Weize, which explains this lovingly assembled four-CD, one-DVD package of live recordings from Hamburg and Berlin, the troupe's Oslo, Norway, concert on video, and a disc of later German-language recordings by Bare and other RCA Nashville acts.
The performing schedule frazzled everyone, yet the performances captured here reflect none of that. While the Blue Boys prove a capable backup unit, the Kerrs, so effective when Atkins used them as session accompanists, come off bland and soulless during their onstage solo spots. Bare radiated fire and youth as he sang "Shame On Me" and his signature hits "Detroit City" and "500 Miles Away From Home". Atkins' shyness didn't detract from his stunning instrumental virtuosity on the crowd-pleasing "Yankee Doodle/Dixie", "Windy And Warm", Jerry Reed's complex instrumental "Yes Ma'am", a rousing and intense "Tiger Rag", and the jazz instrumental "Gravy Waltz".
Reeves' performances are powerful whether he reprised pre-Nashville Sound hits "Mexican Joe" and "Yonder Comes A Sucker" or his greatest moments: "He'll Have To Go" and "Four Walls", "Danny Boy" and "Adios Amigo", undiluted even by the Kerr harmonies. There's nothing soft or mellow about anything he does, reiterated by his prickly onstage temperament (a truth still hotly denied by some Reeves idolators). Three other live Reeves albums exist from earlier periods, yet these performances carry special poignancy given that in slightly over three months, Reeves and Blue Boys pianist Dean Manuel would be dead.
As with all Bear Family collections, this one includes a photo-laden book. A hardcover affair, its text is mostly in German, some in English. Certainly, the photos, clips and memorabilia all convey the excitement these shows generated. For most, however, hearing (and seeing) Atkins at his best, and marveling at Reeves and Bare performing in the classic, austere Nashville Sound style that began in the late '50s, will be the true reward.
-- RICH KIENZLE
Copyright c. 2008 by No Depression Inc. and/or Rich Kienzle.
Posted by Peter at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)