Vagabond Opera Plays For Their Lives
One of this year’s most original releases in the constantly exploding world of gypsy rock is Vagabond Opera’s Sing for Your Lives. Portland, Oregon is a hotbed of good gypsy music: Fishtank Ensemble and MarchFourth Marching Band also hail from there. This group goes for an especially carnivalesque, theatrical vibe: the “opera” in their name is sometimes a misnomer, but sometimes not. Because of that, ironically, the best songs on this album are the instrumentals. Which isn’t to say that the vocal numbers aren’t good, it’s just that sometimes the torrents of lyrics and arch, Beirut-esque vocals go over the top to the point where they veer off toward Pink Martini territory and you wish the band would come in and take over: they could stick with just cellist Ashia Grzesik out in front and be better off for it. But the biting strings, rich accordion swells and horns make their sometimes austere, sometimes lavish minor-key epics irresistible: this album gets better as it goes along.
Sometimes the campiness actually works. Just the concept of the surreal steampunk tango, Red Balloon – about a guy who goes up and never comes back – is impossible not to smile at, as are the lyrical innuendos. The band really starts cooking on Tough Mazel, a ferocious klezmer mini-suite with a biting clarinet solo, viola and violin firing verses back and forth at each other as it winds out. Beard and Moustache is a silly but ultimately spot-on satire of tired trends in facial hair; they follow that with a couple of steampunk-flavored narratives that have some terrific playing (particularly Eric Stern’s soaring, spiraling accordion) but ultimately don’t really go anywhere.
The best track here is King of the Gypsies, a searing chromatic tune with machine-gun horns that swoops down to a swirly, almost dub interlude with suspenseful violin before they take it up again. Spirit Dances Evermore, sung passionately by Grzesik, is a celebration of gypsy roots with a gorgeous succession of solos for pretty much everybody in the band as it winds out. Lullaby is much darker than its title implies, moving from ominous vocalese over a throat-singing drone to a trickily circular, contrapuntal, Macedonian-flavored vamp. They follow that with Hanumonsoon, a surprisingly successful detour into acoustic bhangra, with a nice, blippy chromatic alto sax solo. And that’s pretty much where the album ends: the country waltz that follows has another one of those luscious accordion solos and not much else, while the sprawling title track reaches for Gogol Bordello-style pandemonium but falls short. This is one of those albums that you’ll want to completely resequence when you upload it – and most of it is well worth the effort. And for all the occasional camp, they sound like they’d be a lot of fun live. Portland fans who don’t already know them – or who do – can catch them on New Years Eve at about 10 PM at Refuge, 116 SE Yamhill.
Album of the Day 8/21/11
Every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1.
Sunday’s album was #527:
Curtis Eller – Wirewalkers and Assassins
2009 was a particularly good year for music – if you’ve been following this space, you’ll see we’ve been mining it quite a bit lately. This is Curtis Eller’s latest and best album – he plays banjo and happens to be one of the finest lyrical songwriters of our time. His specialty is fiery, minor-key, bluesy songs full of historical references and punk energy. This one has his very best one, the apocalyptic After the Soil Fails; the New York-centric Sugar for the Horses; the grim party anthem Sweatshop Fire; the chillingly summery, hallucinatory Hartford Circus Fire; the sardonic Firing Squad; the gentle, blackly humorous country sway of the Plea of the Aerialist’s Wife, and the wrenchingly haunting, whispery Save Me Joe Louis, its title taken from what were reputedly the last words of the first man (who was probably wrongfully convicted) to be executed in the gas chamber. It hasn’t made it to the filesharing sites yet but it’s still available from Eller’s bandcamp, where you can hear the whole thing.
Album of the Day 5/27/11
As we do every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Friday’s album is #613:
Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks – Original Recordings
Dan Hicks was literally a half-century ahead of his time. The title of his 1969 debut alludes to a much earlier era – the 1920s and 30s – whose music he updated, yet keeping a sultry roaring 20s feel courtesy of the harmonies of Lickettes Sherri Snow and Christina Gancher. It’s all low-key acoustic stoner swing Americana with funny lyrics. The funniest – and most vicious – number here is Canned Music, in a way 50 years ahead of its time, as a parody of lite FM cliches. There’s the sardonic How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away; the faux gypsy I Scare Myself (another one that was way ahead of the curve); the proto-Moonlighters shuffle Evening Breeze; the tongue-in-cheek boogie Waiting On the 103; the noir diptych Shorty Takes a Dive and Shorty Falls in Love; It’s Bad Grammar Baby (sort of his All Along the Watchtower); the sort of obvious Milk Shakin’ Mama, and after all this, they pull out all the stops for the Jukie’s Ball. They were steampunk 30 years before that term existed and remain one of the funnest, funniest retro swing bands ever recorded. Here’s a random torrent via Smalltown Pleasures.
Nightcrawling 5/24/11
What do you do when you’ve been locked out of your building…on the first nasty day of summer in New York? You go see a show, obviously. Several of them, if possible, where there’s air conditioning. That’s what we did. First stop was le Poisson Rouge, where Not Waving But Drowning were playing. Turns out that this show was also a book release event, the author frequently reading random passages at the beginning or end of songs while the band vamped behind her. For the most part, she was inaudible – the show wasn’t in the main room but in an auxiliary area where the club had thrown up a makeshift stage, and the sound was atrocious. But when she could be heard, the plainspoken, random dissociative images added an extra surreal edge to the band’s steampunk psychedelia. And the band didn’t let the sound phase them: they’ve got three strong singers and rely on a lot of harmonies, but they had their parts down pretty much cold. And even though they didn’t have drums this time out, they were tight, passing a bass around between the Gretsch player, the banjo player and powerhouse violinist/singer Pinky Weitzman, all of them able to hold down the low end with a sweet growl. The songs, from their new album Procession, were a lot of fun. The actress in our crew loved Thanks a Lot, Lancelot, its funny Renaissance Fair bounce and punny lyrics. The tricky intricacies of November 3rd reminded someone else of Peter Gabriel; our staff cynic liked the metaphorically-charged Tiger Hunting, calling it a teens update on the Talking Heads’ Life During Wartime. And despite being obviously unable to hear themselves, the band nailed the high lonesome three-part harmonies on the eerily shuffling, warped bluegrass opening tune, Sleep Before I Wake. All these songs are on the album, recently reviewed here.
Next stop, it turned out, was across the street at the Village Lantern. This isn’t the famous folk club from the 50s and 60s (naming it that is sort of like calling yourself Bob Dylan if you’re a singer-songwriter). But it’s a nice place: the crowd was surprisingly un-touristy and nondescript (it looks like the douches and douchettes have all gone east for good), the bartenders were nice and the drinks weren’t ridiculously overpriced. Over in the corner, a pretty good Gibson SG player named Jerry Cherry (whose real name, we decided, is Gennady Shevchenko) and a couple of other guys from New Jersey played easy-listening oldies radio songs: Three Dog Night, Creedence, Elvis, Bad Company and a segue into Chubby Checker. Maybe if they get really good at this they’ll do their own stuff, and it won’t sound anything like that.
Last stop of the night was Pete’s Candy Store, where Raquel Bell was playing solo on electric guitar. Seeing her for the first time without her old art-rock band Norden Bombsight roaring and careening behind her was like wandering into one of Patti Smith or Exene’s early shows before they had bands: she’s that interesting, and original. On one hand, it made perfect sense that her wounded wail would make such a good fit with Norden Bombsight, and some of the songs she played last night might work with extended psychedelic arrangements. But she’s more diverse than that. She’s a better electric mandolinist and pianist than she is on guitar, but she’ll get those chops one of these days. As a singer, wow. There’s no one who sounds remotely like her. Her voice would be like butterscotch one second, and like blood the next, sometimes in the same syllable. She’d start a phrase as a whisper and in a split second it would be a murder indictment. Or maybe just a chuckle. And all that emotional leapfrogging didn’t sound the least bit contrived, although it was kind of scary. It was impossible to know what to expect, and she knows that, and works it. If Joanna Newsom decided someday to grow up and project some real menace instead of singing wike a wittoo teeny baby, she might sound something like this.
Bell delivered one distantly menacing number over just a simple bassline. Another set a more optimistic, sultry vocal against eerie Syd Barrett-style major/minor changes. A short, very amusing one explained what the “most excellent, excellent thing” you can give a narcissist is (the joke is too good to spoil). She dedicated a casually deadpan cover of Waylon and Willie’s Gimme the Weed to someone who’s been ostensibly been struggling with addiction, and failing, and probably having a good time with it. From that cover, and the rest of the show, it was obvious how she’s moving in more of an Americana direction, but a dark and complex one. One of her last songs was a punkish country shuffle that sounded like X circa Under the Big Black Sun; her best song of the night was a Nashville noir ballad with a wary, doomed edge evoking the Walkabouts’ Carla Torgerson, Bell musing how “he won’t help you, but he’ll drive.” It’ll be fun to see where she takes all this.
Brian Carpenter Resurrects Obscure Jazz Treasures from the Gatsby Era
Hothouse Stomp, the new album by Brian Carpenter’s Ghost Train Orchestra, captures a magical demimonde in American music from between roughly 1928 and 1931. Forget for a minute that by transcribing and arranging eleven now-obscure songs from that era, Carpenter has rescued them from the even smaller demimondes of 78 RMP record collectors and musicians who still play this kind of stuff. First and foremost, these rapidfire gems from Harlem and Chicago are some of that era’s coolest and most controversial party music, the P-Funk or hip-hop of that time. Kids danced to it until their feet hurt, and now so can you even if you can’t afford a Victrola or any those old 78s which now sell for ridiculous prices. On one level, many of the songs here have a quaintly frantic Keystone Kops vibe and a droll wit, but they also have a level of sophistication that far surpasses most of the era’s pop music. Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton are the big names that everybody remembers, but at the top of their game Charlie Johnson, Tiny Parham and Fess Williams were just as good. Carpenter’s imaginative new charts pay homage to the originals while freeing them from the narrow time constraints of a 78. The band here plays them joyously, sometimes almost conspiratorially: Carpenter on trumpet, harmonica and vocals on one number; Dennis Lichtman on clarinet; Andy Laster on alto sax; Matt Bauder on tenor and alto sax and clarinet; Curtis Hasselbring on trombone; Jordan Voelker on viola and singing saw; Mazz Swift on violin and vocals; Brandon Seabrook on banjo; Ron Caswell on tuba and Rob Garcia on drums.
Carpenter opens the album with a big, dramatic harmonica crescendo and then they’re off. Mojo Strut, by Chicago-based Tiny Parham and His Musicians, has an brooding Ellingtonian minor-key intensity under its bouncy beat but also a drum break that’s practically Spike Jones, and some crazed conversation between the saxes at the end. With its lush strings beneath the romping tune, Stop Kidding, originally done by Harlem band McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, blends serious and silly in the span of barely two and a half minutes. Another Cotton Pickers number, Gee Baby Ain’t I Good to You (a popular staple of the oldtimey circuit), gets more of a New Orleans vibe with a good-natured alto solo, and matching vocals from Swift. Voodoo, by Parham, goes for a wary Black and Tan Fantasy feel with some quiet sizzle from the banjo on the way in and Voelker’s theremin-like saw building the atmosphere to somewhat crazed and dazed layers of horns. Harlem pianist Charlie Johnson’s Paradise Orchestra’s Blues Have Sure Got Me has a similar minor-key restraint, with the saw oscillating eerily behind Swift’s hushed, wounded voice.
A casually soulful, trombone-fueled, practically five-minute midtempo version of Johnson’s Hot Bones & Rice foreshadows how this stuff would morph into swing and dixieland. But enough of the intricacies of the music – as fun as it is to blast on the ipod, just try sitting still to the triumphantly swirling clarinet on Dixie Stomp, the lickety-split Lucky 3-6-5, the pensive sway of The Boy in the Boat, or Harlem bandleader Fess Williams’ seemingly calypso-flavored Slide, Mr. Jelly, Slide. They wrap up the album with a warm, summery Johnson tune, the surprisingly titled Hot Tempered Blues. If this often deliriously fun album piques your curiosity, some (but not all) of the originals can be streamed at the irreplaceable redhotjazz site if you have Real Audio.
Roosevelt Dime Have Oldschool Fun with Vintage Americana
This one’s a lot of fun. Anchored by Andrew Green’s spiky banjo and Hardin Butcher’s soaring, smartly tuneful trumpet and cornet, Roosevelt Dime’s lineup is pretty unique today, although eighty years ago banjo-and-horns bands were pretty common. Their aptly titled new album Steamboat Soul sets set vintage 1960s-style soul or country songs to wry, clever arrangements that go back another forty years or so, sometimes with hokum blues or dixieland tinges. All this falls somewhere in between Preacher Boy, the 2 Man Gentlemen Band and the Wiyos. Weaving in and out of period vernacular and accent – “a pack of tobacco and a late night pay phone call,” and so on – they set a vibe that varies from laid-back to boisterous. All the songs here have the immediacy and warm interplay of a live album, Seth Paris’ clarinet and saxophones interweaving with the trumpet, pulsing along on the laid-back beat from Eben Pariser’s bass and Tony Montalbano’s drums.
The opening track, with its rapidfire lyrics, has an almost hip-hop feel, with a sweet clarinet solo: as long as the singer’s got his booze and Johnny Cash on the turntable, he’s content. The second cut, Where Did You Go kicks off with a semi-truck horn and ends with a siren: in between, it’s a swaying hokum blues that reaches for a sly Mississippi Sheiks vibe.The band motor through the fast banjo shuffle What a Shame as the kick drum boots it along, then chill out with the easy calypso vibe of Sway. Jubilee is a rousing second-line tribute to “the funkiest joint in town” and its hard-drinking house band. And Digging Song is absolutely brilliant, a spot-on swipe at trendoids with an oldtimey tune but contemporary references, as is the next track, Slow Your Roll, snidely referencing pretty much every Brooklyn neighborhood to suffer the blight of gentrification.
But it’s the soul songs here that really set them apart from the rest of the oldtimey crew. Wishing Well takes a Willie Mitchell-style Memphis shuffle back in time, a clever sendup of a golddigging girl (or one who wants to be a golddigger, anyway). Helpless has more of a ballad feel; the wistful Long Long Time reaches for the rafters with a lush, crescendoing string arrangement. The album winds up with Spikedriver, a biting update on an oldtimey railroad song. Fans of Americana music from across the decades have a lot to sink their teeth into here.
Album of the Day 10/12/10
Every day our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Tuesday’s album is #840:
The Roulette Sisters – Nerve Medicine
Arguably the finest band to spring from the Blu Lounge scene in Williamsburg, the Roulette Sisters first combined the fearless talents and soaring oldtime harmonies of resonator guitarist Mamie Minch, electric lead player Meg Reichardt (also of les Chauds Lapins) and washboard player Megan Burleyson. Their lone album to date, from 2005, is a slinky retro feast of delta blues, hokum and sultry country swing. Innuendo has always been their drawing card, and this has plenty of it, whether Bessie Smith’s Sugar in My Bowl, the hilariously Freudian Keep on Churnin’ (“Keep on churnin’ til the butter flows/Wipe off the paddle and churn some more”) and I’m Waiting, sung with characteristically rustic, austere charm by Burleyson. There’s also the defiant, revenge-fueled Black Eye Blues and Black Dog Blues, the irresistibly charming Coney Island Washboard, a similarly antique take of Bei Mi Bist du Schoen and Reichardt’s wistful, bucolic No Particular Thing. The band brought in viola player/composer Karen Waltuch before breaking up in 2007. Happily reunited recently, they’re playing their annual Halloween show on Oct 30 at 10 at Barbes.
Christabel and the Jons Heat Up The Night
Knoxville, Tennessee’s Christabel and the Jons ran through one slinky, swaying swing shuffle at Banjo Jim’s last night. “I can feel the electricity in the air,” frontwoman/guitarist Christa DeCicco observed. She didn’t mean the dancers twirling on what passes for a dance floor in front of the stage – she meant the cool autumn night. “I can tell some broken hearts are about to be mending.” Potent observations from someone whose songs celebrate romance in all its difficult, exasperating forms. Consider: in the summer, your brain is so fried it’s impossible to make the right choices. Fall, on the other hand, is snuggle weather: that, and a whole lot more. Not that there’s anything wrong with a fling: “Give me a room full of men like you, and I’ll get closer to you,” she sang on one particularly seductive track from the band’s most recent studio album Custom Made for You. But there’s a depth, and a bittersweetness to her songs that resonates just much as her sultry vocals.
The band was tight beyond belief, drummer Jon Whitlock switching between brushes and sticks when the pace picked up, locked in with the swinging rhythm of the upright bass and DeCicco’s acoustic guitar, multi-instrumentalist Seth Hopper moving expertly from violin, to trumpet, to mandolin and back again, sometimes in the same song. DeCicco announced that for the first time in her life, she’d successfully haggled with a street vendor. “It was a crack pipe,” cracked Whitlock. The audience riffed back and forth with the band: whatever she’d scored (probably something to wear) had cost her ten bucks.
A couple of songs pulsed along on a bossa beat, including a vivid bon vivant’s lament punctuated by a soaring trumpet solo. Back to Tennesee featured the band on deadpan, jump blues-style call-and-response vocals – what were they looking forward to when they get back from their 12-hour drive? “Black cherry ice cream.” DeCicco told the crowd that their forthcoming album was going to be all brooding ballads, resulting from a “dark night of the soul.” But a couple of cuts, one of them titled You’re Gonna Miss Me, Baby were as jaunty and irrepressible as the rest of the set. Even the somewhat sarcastic Boy Crazy, with its minor-key gypsy-jazz vibe, wouldn’t concede an inch. DeCicco’s voice has a tinge of smoke and a casual allure that goes straight back to Billie Holiday, but she’s got a somewhat defiant optimism that’s uniquely her own: this band isn’t one of those Snorah Jones wannabe projects. For those who can’t wait for the new studio cd, the band has an online-only live album available at their site.
Lucid Culture 