Favorite Music Of 2013

This is the first year in a long time where I have not had to assemble any kind of Top 10 CD list for Cadence, so I've decided to put one up here. Since I've doing it on my own I'm going by my own rules and making this a list of my favorite CDs released in 2013 whether they're new or a reissue and regardless of genre. Most of these are jazz releases but there's also some prog rock and by way of Elvis Costello, a little hip-hop.  I don't have the resources that go into a lot of other lists I've seen online and in print. I don't get promo CDs directly like professional critics. I'm basically limited to the stuff Cadence sends me and what I can buy on my own, so there are a few of the same discs everybody else is listing here and some that no one seems to have discovered.

First though here are my favorite live performances of the past year:

Charles Lloyd's 75th birthday concert at the Kennedy Center
Dawn Upshaw and the Crash Ensemble at the Kennedy Center
Gregory Porter at the Mid-Atlantic Jazz Festival
Mike Reed's People Places and Things at Bohemian Caverns
Kris Davis' Capricorn Climber at Bohemian Caverns
Janel Leppin's Ensemble Volcanic Ash at Bohemian Caverns
Luciana Souza at Atlas Arts Center
Newspeak Ensemble at Atlas Arts Center
Jack Dejohnette: Special Legends Edition Chicago at the Chicago Jazz Festival
Satoko Fujii Orchestra Chicago at the Chicago Jazz Festival
...and a late add, Matt Wilson's Christmas Tree-O turning seasonal songs of all types every which way at the Atlas a couple of weeks ago


And here are my favorite CDs of the year in alphabetical order:

Ralph Alessi/Kris Davis/Tom Rainey/Ingrid Laubrock, LARK, (Skirl)
Tim Berne's Snakeoil, Shadow Man, (ECM)
Andy Bey, The World According To Andy Bey, (HighNote)
Ketil Bjornstad, La Notte, (ECM)
Carla Bley/Andy Sheppard/Steve Swallow, Trios, (ECM)
Dave Burrell, Conception
Gary Burton, Guided Tour, Mack Avenue
Elvis Costello and the Roots, Wise Up Ghost, (Blue Note)
Kris Davis, Capricorn Climber, (Clean Feed)
Miles Davis, Live In Europe 1969 - The Bootleg Series, Vol. 2 (Columbia/Legacy)
Kaja Draksler, The Lives Of Many Others, (Clean Feed)
Shayna Dulberger, Ache and Flutter, (Empty Room Music)
Fire! Orchestra, Exit!, (Rune Grammofon)

Gerry Gibbs, Thrasher Dream Trio, (Whaling City Sound)
John Grant, Pale Green Ghosts, (Partisan)
Mary Halvorson Septet, Imaginary Sea, (Firehouse 12)
David Haney & Bernard Purdie, Selling It Like It Is, (Cadence Jazz)
John Hollenbeck, Songs I Like A Lot, (Suunyside)
William Hooker Quintet, Channels Of Consciousness, (No Business)
Ernie Krivda, At The Tri-C Jazz Fest, (Cadence Jazz)
Marty Krystall Quartet, Moments Magical, (K2B2)
LAMA & Chris Speed, Lamacal, (Clean Feed)
Adam Lane Quartet, Oh Freedom, (CIMP)
Greg Lewis Organ Monk, American Standard
Low, The Invisible Way (Sub Pop)
Rebecca Martin, Twain, (Sunnyside)
Allison Miller's Boom Tic Boom, No Morphine No Lilies, (Foxhaven)

Billy Mintz, Mintz Quartet, (Thirteeneth Note)
Mostly Other People Do The Killing, Red Hot, (Hot Cup)
Chris Potter, The Sirens, (ECM)
Sao Paulo Underground, Beija Flors Velhoie Sujo, (Cuneiform)
Wayne Shorter, Without A Net, (Blue Note)
Wadada Leo Smith & TUMO, Occupy The World, (TUM)
S.O.S., Looking For The Next One, (Cuneiform)
June Tabor/Iain Ballamy/Huw Warren, Quercus, (ECM)
Craig Taborn Trio, Chants, (ECM)
The Whammies, Play The Music Of Steve Lacy Vol. 2, (Drift)
Steven Wilson, The Raven That Refused To Sing and other stories, (K-Scope)

A few words about some of the lesser known discs.  Veterans Andy Bey and Dave Burrell had strong efforts, Bey just with his voice and piano, Burrell in a trio with sax and drums that spotlighted his unique ragtime-to-free piano playing. The Gerry Gibbs one is a fine trio CD featuring drummer Gibbs dueling with Ron Carter and Kenny Barron.  John Grant is a singer-songwriter with a beautiful baritone who did a chillingly lovely electronic-laced CD in Iceland. Kaja Draksler is a young pianist from Slovenia who made a interesting solo disc and singer Rebecca Martin does an endearing type of jazz-laced folk singing that more people should know about. My favorite songs of the year were Grant's "G.M.F." and Steven Wilson's "The Raven Who Refused To Sing".

Evening Dawn

Dawn Upshaw

I've long been intrigued by what is nowadays called "new music"  (I guess "modern classical music" sounds too old-fashioned) but I've never gone deeply into it the way I have jazz. I do have some random Ives, Stravinsky and Bartok in my ever-growing horde of CDs but I don't have any real handle on the breadth of 20th and 21st century classical music out there.  I do know about soprano Dawn Upshaw though and when I found out she was performing at the Kennedy Center Tuesday night, I made time to see her. I was very glad I did.

The concert opened with Upshaw performing two pieces by composer Osvaldo Golijov, one of her frequent collaborators, with a string quartet. I am not an expert on classical singers but I was touched bu the warmth and humanity in Upshaw's voice. Her singing is not as athletic as others I've heard but it's still very moving. The strings were mostly subdued and melancholy beneath her as she sang poems by Rosalia de Castro and Emily Dickinson and it was a graceful beginning to the show.

Upshaw and the quartet left the stage and after a few more chairs were added and rearranged, out came the Crash Ensemble, a new music group from Ireland, assembled by composer Donnacha Dennehy as a vehicle for performing his music. For this first number the group consisted of two violins, one viola, one cello, one string bass, and one each of clarinet, flute, trumpet, trombone and electric guitar plus a percussionist who mainly seemed to play various vibraphones and marimbas. They were joined by vocalist Iarla O'Lionaird who specializes in traditional Gaelic singing as they performed a Dennehy piece called "Gra agus Bas" (Love and Death).

This was amazing. O'Lionaird started in murmuring lines in old Gaelic with intricate rising and falling pitches while the ensemble attacked the music with a rhythmic, repetitive vigor that, in my limited frame of reference, reminded me of Steve Reich or Phillip Glass, and was flavored with traces of Irish jigs and fiddle tunes. Coming from a background in jazz and improvisation I was really taken with the rhythmic bounce carried through the strings and woodwinds with the percussion rattling around the edges and the brass and guitar adding carefully placed long chords. In the most intense moments this reminded me of saxophonist Evan Parker and his circular breathing feats, a twirling ribbon of sound that seemed go on forever.  While that was going on, O'Lionaird was crying out over the top, bring even more tension to the work. I've heard composers Dave Douglas and Sean Noonan use that type of folksinging in a jazz context but I've never seen it used in this fashion before.

After a needed intermission the Ensemble returned, this time with Upshaw in tow. The group was a bit different. The trumpeter was gone but a pianist and accordionist were there in her place. This combination performed "That the Night Come", a Dennehy song cycle constructed from six W.B. Yeats poems.  The group's activities were a bit more solemn this time as Upshaw's haunting voice took the lead. The rhythms still flowed freely with the strings and woodwinds again doing the heavy lifting but there seemed to be a graver and more internally turbulent feel to this piece. On the last piece of the suite, "That the Night Come", a bit of the earlier intoxicating highs returned as the ensemble picked up the pace and Upshaw soared to a powerful conclusion and the audience responded warmly.

Great.  Now I've got some more musicians to spend money on. What's next? Upshaw recently released a collaboration with one of my favorite "jazz" composers, Maria Schneider,Winter Morning Walks (left), and I'll probably order that this weekend. It also turns out that all the Dennehy music here was released on a 2011 Nonesuch CD by these same performers so that's definitely on my radar as well. I spend too damn much on   music but when it's this rewarding, I don't regret it a bit.

Carmel

In the 1980's as the ashes of Britain's punk rock explosion cooled off, a new musical wave seemed to emerge every few weeks, supposedly making the last one passe. At one time or another, there were the New Romantics, industrial, goth, the Germanic influence of Martin Hannett and the Factory records label, and a ska revival. For a while there was a turn away from all types of rock music in favor of other, more sophisticated pop musics like Jazz, Bossa Nova, and continental pop. This movement really got kickstarted when Paul Weller disbanded the Jam to form the Style Council but soon all sorts of seductive female singers on their own or fronting bands and dealing in sophisticated blends of Jazz, funk and soul came along. These included performers like Sade, Everything But The Girl, Weekend, Swing Out Sister and the subject of this piece, Carmel.

Carmel, The Band: Darby, McCourt, Parris.

Carmel was both the name of a trio and its lead singer, Carmel McCourt. In school in Manchester after other musical adventures McCourt joined up with bassist Jim Parris and his cousin, drummer Gerry Darby to form the band. I got their first EP way back in 1982 and immediately paid attention.  The lead track, "Tracks Of My Tears" stayed most in my mind. Their treatment was very skeletal with the song's distinctive melody replaced by a simple downbeat jazz-blues walking rhythm by acoustic bass and drums with Carmel doing the heavy work singing the lyrics in a unique tough and brassy style that didn't sound like any of the softer voiced singers around at the time. She didn't have a conventionally pretty sound or a big range but there was power and emotion along with a note of wavering uncertainty in her voice that underlined the fact this was a real person singing. It got me to pay attention when further records came out, a chilling gospel-powered single, "Bad Day" that had Carmel shouting over organ and a backing choir, and two full albums, The Drum Is Everything and The Falling, which featured excellent songs like "More, More, More", "The Drum Is Everything" and "Mercy" and found the trio further experimenting by adding African and Caribbean elements to their mix.

As time went on I didn't see any further releases by the band in the stores outside of a live CD, Live At Ronnie Scott's, so I basically forgot they existed.  Then about a month ago I came across a small review in Jazzwise magazine of a new Carmel CD called Strictly Piaf, an Edith Piaf tribute that was her first recording in 17 years. After searching around on the Internet I learned that the band had been hugely successful in France for many years and that of late, they had been busy separately with writing, teaching and performing gigs. Darby officially left a few years ago leaving McCourt and Parris as the core players on the new CD. Thanks to Amazon almost no CD is hard to find anymore so I ordered Piaf and was happy to find things much the same as I remembered but improved.

McCourt's range is stronger now. She hits high notes and holds them more effortlessly than she did before but the human, soulful bleat that makes her voice so arresting is still there. The CD is all Piaf material but, as in the past, wildly rearranged. "Sous Le Ciel De Paris" is done as mid tempo lounge jazz, "Les Amants D'un Jour" is sung in French to a dark reggae beat and "Running" is done as ambient funk with trumpet and piano featured. "Autumn Leaves" is sung hauntingly over rippling electric piano, "The Poor People Of Paris" is sludgy like a slow motion carousel and "La Vie En Rose" is unrecognizable with a chorus of treated voices singing the song's lyrics over a rippling synthesized vamp. Only "Mon Legionnaire" sticks close to Piaf's torchy vibrato and McCourt is as good doing that as she is at everything else.

Further investigation revealed there had been four other Carmel CDs released in the 80's and 90's I had completely slept on, Everybody's Got A Little...Soul, Set Me Free, Good News and World Gone Crazy. Fortunately all four were reissued just last year in fully tricked out deluxe packages  with remixes, b-sides, and live recordings. I have the first two now and I expect the others will follow. This music is gutsy and thrilling in all the best ways.

Here are a couple of examples of what I'm talking about. First a live TV performance of "Sticks And Stones":




And a TV clip of "Mercy". They may be playing along to the record but Lord what a record! Have mercy, indeed...

"The End Of An Era"

Today I did something I'm probably going to have very little chance of doing for the rest of my life, I went to a record store.   Not just any record store but Melody Records, the last independent general record store left in the Washington, DC area. It's been around since 1977 but in the next few weeks Melody will bow to the inevitability of the times and close.  That will leave Barnes and Noble and their meager selection as the only place around here you can actually walk into and buy CDs.

Like any music lover I've been buying this stuff in one form or another for a long time, 40 years in my case, and I've seen plenty of local stores come and go, Waxie Maxie's, Harmony Hut, Viscount, Orpheus, Olsson's, and Kemp Mill and though it was a worldwide chain, Tower Records was always a great stopping place for me because of its infinite variety of selection.  The wonderful thing in going to all these stores was that you were always going to be surprised. You might go in looking for a particular item but you were always going to see some album or CD you had barely heard of or didn't even know existed.  I always loved the feeling of being immersed in music of all types. In the 70's I listened to mostly progressive rock then punk and new wave,  but all the jazz reissues coming out in those days from Original Jazz Classics and Blue Note would invariably catch my eye. As I got to know more about jazz, it was always great to go into a store and find new titles from labels like ECM and Black Saint popping up almost weekly. The covers, the liner notes, even the song titles, all fascinated me.

That's an experience online shopping and (shudder!) downloading can't give you.  I have bought things from several stores with online presences like Seattle's Jazz Loft, Chicago's Dusty Groove and the ubiquitous Amazon but the first two only specialize in certain genres or carry small amounts of titles and Amazon is fine if you know what you're searching for beforehand.  There's no real surprise in buying that way.

Obviously that doesn't matter to most folks so the public has left the physical stores behind and they have slowly given up the ghost, one by one.  Now the last one left in DC has fallen. If I want that pleasure again I'm going to have to wait until I make an infrequent trip to some other city and hope I can find a CD store left like the one I ran across in the historic section of Philadelphia a couple of years ago.

I made my first trip to Melody since the closing announcement 10 days ago. The store was pretty full of people buying up what they could and telling the staff how much they appreciated their being around all these years.  I did that as well and walked out with $100 worth of CDs: Craig Taborn's Avenging Angel, June Tabor's Ashore, Magnus Ostrom's Thread Of Life, Thelonious Monk's Criss-Cross, Claire Martin's Secret Love, Aaron Goldberg's and Guillermo Klein's Bienestan and Katie Bull's Freak Miracle, a haul of avant jazz, jazz singing, British folk and, in the last case, something I had never seen before.  Today I went back again and it was a little depressing. The store was still busy but several racks were now empty with the Jazz, Folk and World sections taking up about half of their former space. I still found another $100 worth to buy though, CDs from Lisa Mezzacappa, Aki Takase, Clarence "Frogman" Henry, Jen Shyu, Wu Man, Theresa Wong and again one that came as a complete surprise, a 2 CD set of Gershwin compositions and other 20's Broadway works performed by Scottish classical pianist Joanna MacGregor. I think it's always fun to discover something new and record stores were always a great place to do that for me.  Never again, never again...

2011 In Review - The Non-Depressing Parts

This is the time of year when a lot of internet denizens, professional and amateur, review what things in the popular arts they liked over the last year. In my case that would be music and movies, but I really don't feel able to do a conventional "best of 2011" in either genre. In music, I don't listen to much current rock or pop stuff anymore, usually just paying attention when some familiar old duffer like Tom Waits or Lou Reed comes out with something new, though  Florence and The Machine has caught my ear recently and I always have time for folk-based singers like Gillian Welch and Eliza Carthy.  In that vein I really enjoyed the maligned Reed-Metallica opus, Lulu, and was really amazed upon hearing the legendary Beach Boys Smile Sessions.  Even at a remove of 40 years with bits and pieces floating out there for years, the work turned out to be every bit as beautiful and visionary as it was always claimed to be.

The main music I listen to is Jazz which had an avalanche of riches come out this year, most of which I've yet to hear. Almost every best-of-the-year list I've seen in print or online has different recordings on it which just a few names like Craig Taborn, Bill Frisell and Sonny Rollins showing up in more than one place. That's cool with me because that gives me a lot to catch up on but I've yet to see any love for the 2011 CD I enjoyed the most, Kaiso Stories by the group Other Dimensions In Music.  Jazz Reissue lists have been a different story with praises universally showered on the two historic finds from the International Phonograph label, Bill Dixon's Intents and Purposes and Julius Hemphill's Dogon A.D.  The same went for the Miles Davis Live In Europe 1967 set for damn good reasons.



I have spent a lot of time watching movies over the past year but not too many of them were 2011 releases.  I hope to catch up on at least a couple of current releases this week but so far I 've managed to see and enjoy in different ways the following Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives, The Tree of Life, Kill The Irishman, The Guard, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Meek's Cutoff, Young Adult, The Descendents Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Everything Must Go, the serious Will Ferrell film that seems to have slipped everyone's mind. I did also see one very popular movie, Bridesmaids, about which I can only say...are you kidding me?  A few funny bits of raunch are thrown into a predictable plot about a whiny, unlikable loser who can't find a decent boyfriend and that's supposed to be a great female comedy?  Charlize Theron's Young Adult was much more entertaining even though her character was a complete mess.

Anyway I think for a non-professional movie fan like myself who doesn't have to keep up with all the latest stuff, the idea of just paying attention to the newest work coming out is really antiquated. We live in a time when recent movies are always around on DVD or some other medium and older films are consyantly being rediscovered and put on the market.  At any give point there are hundred of movies available in multiple forms from past decades as entertaining as anything currently playing in theatres.By accident, most of the movies I've seen in the last year have been recent releases from the past few years. Some were highly touted and some really obscure, but all had something that grabbed me. They included a Belgian equivalent of Robot Chicken, A Town Called Panic, Sally Potter's experimental drama made for Smartphone viewing, Rage, Tilda Swinton ripping a hole through Viscontian melodrama in I Am Love, and Ken Loach's comedy about a British postman getting life coaching from the imaginary presence of an English football star, Looking For Eric.

    The others I liked were: Winter's Bone, The Illusionist, The Wrestler, Black Dynamite, The Ghost Writer, Gone Baby Gone, Sugar, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, Wild Grass, Boogie Woogie, Alexandra's Project, The Descent, I'm Not There, The Social Network, Babel, The Disappearance Of Alice Creed, The Diving Bell And The Butterfly and The Fighter.

As for somewhat older work, I got to see Sir Laurence Olivier in a 1968 production of Siringberg's The Dance Of Death, John Carpenter's Assault On Precinct 13, Newsfront, an Australian epic about the history if the newsreel business and a real rarity in Girl Of The Night, a 1960 film that starred a gorgeous Anne Francis as a call girl dealing with the psychological trauma of her profession.

I also saw a few oddities from the always fascinating early talkie, Pre-Code era like Safe In Hell, a drama about a prostitute running from a murder rap with a ming-blowing conclusion, He Was Her Man, an obscure early James Cagney film where he plays an uncharacteristically, for him,  gallant gangster who sacrifices himself for the woman he loves and the 1929 version of The Letter, stiff like many talking pictures of its time but with an intense, modern performance by the play's original stage star, the doomed Jeanne Eagles.

Then there were new discoveries from two of my favorite directors, typical Sam Fuller pulp artistry in The Steel Helmet and Underworld U.S.A. and Michael Powell delivering what was proablty one of the most genteel war movies ever made, The Battle Of The River Plate.

 
Above all though there were two movies that really just blew me away with their effectiveness, two films that only relatively few people have  probably even heard of, 2006's The Gymnast and 2010's A Marine Story.  Both of these films were lesbian themed dramas with the same director, Ned Farr and the same star, his wife, Dreya Weber, a beautiful actress/aerial performer/choreographer. In the first one, Weber plays a former Olympic athlete in an unhappy marriage who develops a spectacular aerial nightclub act with a younger Korean dancer with the two women's feelings inevitably getting out of control. In the second, she's a lesbian former Marine officer, forced out of the Corps because of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", who goes back to her hometown and ends up undertaking the rehabilitation of a young woman involved with a drug gang. The narratives of these films ignore all the cliches that others may get from these situations, instead going for deep characterizations and tell stories about people having the courage to find themselves no matter what society thinks. Weber is a striking, compelling actress with impressive athletic skills and is really a formidable presence in both films. The privilege of watching her is one of the things I enjoyed most at the movies this entire year.

The Library Of Alexandria

The Library Of Alexandria (seen in an artists' representation on the right) was one of the wonders of the ancient world, a repository of just about all the writings in science, philosophy, history and arts done to that point. A fire destroyed the library and much of the collected knowledge of the world was lost forever.

Today things are very different. Thanks to technology and cyberspace nothing seems to be lost forever, especially anything that can be stored on CD or DVD. A lot of old films may be gone without a trace for the time being but at the same time it seems that weekly some rare or forgotten film or TV show suddenly shows up on the market. From Stan Laurel silents and rare cartoons to 1948 TV shows and legendarily obscure independent films from the 60's somebody somewhere puts it out. The same goes for music.

As a result even chain stores like Blockbuster or Barnes and Noble can be looked on as modern libraries of Alexandria. The humblest of them still hold thousands of different titles and if you look around, there's always something more on the shelves besides last summer's blockbuster movies or the latest disc from some American Idol zombie. That's not to mention what you might find in a place like Netflix or in any of the independent stores that are still around.

From now on that is what I'll be concentrating on in this blog, all the cool pieces of sonic and visual art out there that the mainstream misses out on, at least the ones that strike my fancy. I've been doing this all along but in a really lackadaisical way. From now on I will endeavor to regularly write about the work I come across. Hopefully I can keep this going a while. Whoever reads this maybe I can tell you something you didn't know before, and once I master YouTube, show you a few things as well.