Think for A Jester's Tear

Random: Marillion's "Script for a Jester's Tear" comes very close to being the perfect progressive album. Fish delivers empassioned and engrossing vocals that have tremendous melodic components. Rothery posseses a distinctive guitar style that is applied judiciously across all the tracks with some vintage analog synths. Although the rhythms shift and each player contributes substantially, each part remains subservient to the whole of the tune and the mood of the album, avoiding useless wankery. The album begins with a soft ballad and grows through roller-coaster ups and downs through to the end, with continual evolution of the music and growth of intensity. Each track possess a memorable melodic signature and flows into the next track with excellent pacing; this provides a divers and wonderful experience. On the remastered version a bonus disc provides demo tracks as well as the Beowolf inspired, twenty-minute "Grendel."

Selected: On "Think Free," Ben Allison explores the violin as a front-line contemporary jazz instrument with excellent results. Ben produces slow ballad-like tunes with open voicing, but unlike Abercrombie's "Wait Till You See Her," all of these tunes move forward with energy. Perhaps the motion comes from Allison's perspective as a bassist. Light trumpet and violin lines sit well above the guitar, bass, drum rhythm section, in a familiar continuation of Allison's style, soft, but not ethereal. The violinist pushes the intonation to edge more so than Feldman and has a thinner tone overall, which creates some tension in the sound, like a bluegrass fiddle. I find Allison's arrangements simultaneously relaxing and energizing.

Tribes of Tribes

Random: "Live from the House of Tribes" portrays a small venue performance by one of Wynton Marsalis' groups. The album has a number of peculiar qualities that make for difficult listening. The most obvious feature is a an over-miked and likely over-rehearsed crowd. The crowd noise is mixed up equal to the band. In my experience at concerts when people are really into a performance they get lost in what they are doing, they lose self awareness and become quiet, although they may move around a bit. Here the people are performing for the record. It sounds like the "Wheel of Fortune" audience has been dropped in like a laugh track that exaggerates responses to inconsequential actions by the band. It's just odd. The record also starts off with a Monk tune and that is by far Wynton's weakest area of interpretation. Although I had not paid much attention to him before, I really noticed Wes Anderson's sax playing on this record, passionate, creative, and really distinct from the style of the other players in the band.

Selected: I have owned Lost Tribe's self-titled debut since its release, but each time I listen, I hear new things and find more to like. Adam Rogers and David Gilmore have different and very complementary guitar styles. David Binney is very creative sax player, and the bass and drums hold their own against this formidable front line. Excellent diversity and pacing is the hallmark of this disc. Each tune has a unique character and memorable themes. The pieces vary from a mellow sax ballad to rhythmically interesting rap with a lot of subtle interplay in the sound on all tracks.There is a slight studio compression to the disc that would be negative most of the time but here it helps to meld diverse styles and tones into a cohesive disc.

Spectrum of Mine

Brother of Mine

This is an important song from my youth. Were it possible, I'd have worn out several copies of the Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe CD in the same way people used to go through old LPs. Among the many excellent songs on that album, this one stood out to me at the time. I guess I can't really say why, whether it was the arrangement, the surprisingly coherent and optimistic lyrics, or something else entirely. Listening to it now, Bruford's percussion defines a great deal of the mood of the song for me, along with the characteristic "Yes" keyboard and guitar runs from Wakeman and Howe. For whatever reason, this song connected emotively to my teenage naivete. I suppose it still does.


Via the Spectrum Road

I have the excellent Saudades from Trio Beyond, the tribute band for The Tony Williams Lifetime. I figured I owed it to myself to check out the original thing, so I picked up a copy of Emergency! when visiting the Jazz Record Mart in Chicago last week. I am surprised to find the album not nearly so listenable as Saudades. I've selected a track I find particularly distasteful, largely because of the tired and lethargic sounding vocals. The track has no energy, and what little may be in the process of developing is crushed by the dead vocal lines, which is a problem on more than one track on this album. This CD may have to grow on me, I'm not sure, but the first two listens have not turned out as well as I expected.

Benighted Feeling

Angling Feeling

Kaipa was a nice surprise for me. I'd heard some of Roine Stolt's work with Transatlantic and The Flower Kings, but not anything from the band that gave him his "start". I like the use of two vocalists, one male and one female. Clearly some Yes influence here, including a possible reference with the phrase "Heart of the Sunrise" appearing in the lyrics. There are some nice dynamic transitions as well as Yes style rapid runs of notes in the introduction. I'm eager to hear more from this band.




Benighted

The iPod randomly selected this track from Opeth's album Still Life. I really like this band and this song is an excellent example of why. A death metal band which has been given the label "progressive" presumably owing to the musical range and complexity of their work which shows a wide variety of musical influences. It is typical of Opeth to contrast a harder death metal sound and rough vocals with softer passages and clean vocals. I've long been impressed with Mikael Åkerfeldt's voice in both modes. A strong "clean" vocalist, he also manages to make his "rough" vocals musical, unlike many in death metal whose sound quickly becomes monotonous. Having said much about their death metal roots, this song betrays little of that, being an acoustic guitar driven clean vocal song. It conjures a lonely, somber mood, as suggested by the title.

The Sara Conspiracy

Random: "Inflikted" by the Cavelara Conspiracy marks the reunion of the two brothers at the core of the original Sepultura. Albums such as Chaos A.D. and Roots had a remarkable groove for thrash music. This tune comes very close (closer than the current Sepultura) to achieving that easy groove at times, but never seems to cross the line. The growling vocals in this genre of music have always struck me more as performance art than honest music; however, Max Cavelara sounds like he is trying to honestly drag you into his dark and tragic world. I believe him for some reason. The tune has no real rhythmic changes, but has a nice bridge section to prevent monotony from settling in. The brothers construct the other tunes on the album similarly.

Selected: Apparently there is a new genre of music "bluegrass-chicks teamed with Led Zepplin alums" This could be fine thing except that thus far the genre has been dominated by slow ballads. The instrumental "Freiderick" jumps out with most energy early. John Paul Jones moves between harmony vocal, organ, and bass throughout the disc. "Any Old Time" adds a little vocal energy, but maintains the slow traditional country feel. Heavily applied pedal steel drapes most tracks. Tom Waits' "Pony" doesn't speed things up any, but Sara's voice is great here; there is a lot of room for subtlety. The addition of Gillian Welch to "Lord Won't You Help Me" makes for a beautiful vocal tune. This is another new disc with lots of great moments, but has a need more stylistic (or at least tempo) diversity... more bluegrass... a lot less pedal steel.

Wait Til You See The Concerto da Camera

Random: Fernando Lopes-Graca's Concerto da camera (Chamber Concerto) came up randomly on the squeezebox today. The piece begins with long sustained, slow phrases. I have no doubt that in lesser hand this piece could be very tedious for the listener. This piece, written for Rostropovich, features high-pitched slow lines that seem to pit the cello against the ensemble with constant light tension. Briefly in the second movement, a short run of faster notes punctuated by mallet percussion, breaks the tension. The finale builds to a climax with numerous faster runs and the first prominent appearance of brass. This energy dissipates and the peice fades slowly away for the last few minutes. Initially put off by the slow opening of the first movement, each repeated listen has left me with new musical features to ponder. For some reason there are close intervals throughout that make me think of Ligeti.

Selected: As one of my favorite guitarists, I eagerly awaited the release of this disc "Wait Till You See Her" by the John Abercrombie Quartet. This group features very interesting voicing with guitar, violin, bass, and drums. However, the pacing of these tunes is very, very slow. Interesting tonal interplay abounds, but there is a continual urge to have the music... get up and go! "Out of Towner" poses the first reasonably distinctive melody. Although I like it, I can't decide, if "Chic of Araby", is clever, gimmicky, or just cliche.

Lost ELP Boys

Random: Two-thirds of the tunes on The Lost Boys soundtrack permeated pop radio in the middle 1980's. "Good Times" by INXS has the most energy, "Lost in the Shadows" by Lou Gramm, "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" by Roger Daltry, and "Cry Little Sister" by Gerard McMann got the most radio play. Echo and the Bunnymen's version of The Doors' "People Are Strange" has always been my favorite track on this disc. The main thing that stands out is that even with all the ridiculous reverb, studio effects, and artificial sounding snares, pop music in the 80's was not all that compressed so it still conveys much more vitality than current pop fare.

Selected: Emerson Lake and Palmer have never set well with me. While I love early 70's progressive music and particlarly love tunes that require some effort on the part of the listener, ELP sounds... wrong to me. I have not been able to put it into words. Perhaps it is arrogance, perhaps lack of cohesion among the players, perhaps it just a general lack of passion and an aritficial sound. Most ELP strikes me as musical practice exercises rather than passionate music. The best context for my attitued is that Emerson is a great keyboard technician, Lake is a good singer and competent bass player, and Palmer is a good drummer, but they are all weak composers. In playing so much existing music, they sound a but like a DJ that is just dropping samples of other tunes together to make a performance that never sounds cohesive and organic. Having said those things, I would say this disc possesses the least of the bad qualities of ELP; it sounds more sincere, but a bit sloppy. In "Take A Pebble" one can already hear odd "samples" of tunes clashing together in strange ways. However, "Lucky Man" is one of the great all time rock tunes and may be representative of "even a blind squirrel finds a nut occassionaly." Having never felt connected to ELP, I have not learned much about their history and was shocked to learn that they were a huge selling band. Popularity has been said to be proportional to predictability and their inclusion of so much familiar classical-type music may have given them a head start with the public.