Month: July 2012

Clouser is probably best classified as a jazz guitarist, but when you listen to his music, the funk and rock in the mix keep you on your toes. And the beauty of it is all the songs have melodies that stick.

“Serenity Now” is the perfect introduction, with its light soul feel, finely placed trumpet, and Clouser’s quirky solo. The jumpy “Meet Me At the Polo Grounds” has a solo seemingly pulled from a late-’60s jam, and uses a slightly fuzzed sound over a funk vamp. “Curtis” is exactly what you’d think – a perfect tribute to Curtis Mayfield, with Clouser soloing wonderfully. “Bobby White in the City” is a swinging bopper with a solo that blows through the changes and is never clichéd.

The mix of styles shows up again on “The Habit Kick,” which features big horn solos with slinky wah guitar underneath. Then Clouser plays a rock solo that builds and releases with a skill not easily acquired. There’s also a fine cover of the Harry Nilsson song “One,” on which he sticks to the melody until a nasty solo out.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s May. ’11 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

You needn’t push Play to realize this is not your typical Cajun album. The cover photograph shows a bird encased in oily sludge. Inside, next to the date April 20, 2010 are the words “4.9 million barrels.” There is no need to ask, let alone answer, “Barrels of what?” And the CD’s title refers to the Louisiana town whose livelihood evaporated as balls of tar soiled its beaches in the wake
of last year’s catastrophic BP oil spill.

Riley has been playing accordion for 27 of his 40 years, including three years with the legendary Dewey Balfa. With his Mamou Playboys, Riley has blended Cajun and zydeco to make some of the best albums to come out of Louisiana in the past two decades. Proven masters of the traditional, the band took a bold leap with Bayou Ruler (’98) and Happy Town (’01), enlisting producer C.C. Adcock, Riley’s buddy since high school in Lafayette, to stir the sonic pot. But for Bon Reve, the Playboys returned to the traditional repertoire.

Grand Isle reinstates Adcock behind the board and pushes the envelope sonically and thematically. Fiddler David Greely bites off the words to “Too Much” with almost punk defiance, while the band churns out an infectious two-step – Sam Broussard’s guitar solo skipping over the top. Riley’s “This Is The Time For Change” is another example of what Greely calls “survivor joy,” finding hope and even celebration in the face of tragedy – be it Katrina, Rita, or BP. An uplifting schoolgirl chorus rides over a loping ska rhythm while Broussard turns in a squawky solo that is simultaneously graceful and gnarly.

On “Pierre,” Broussard turns a slave poem into a hypnotic mix of homemade percussion, murmured chants, and slide guitar. Adcock’s description of the song – “simple, elegant, powerful” – holds true for the whole album.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s May. ’11 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

Takamen has become a mainstay in New York’s jazz clubs, and this record shows him to be a mature player with a keen sense of composition, considerable technical skill, and a supportive band (especially pianist Hitoshi Kanda) that helps bring Takamen’s compositions to fruition.

For a quick check of chops, just go to “14-1,” a bopper that finds him playing through the changes with ease. The middle section contains nice interplay with drummer Yutaka Uchida before Takamen wraps it with nice chord work. His ballad work gets a showing on “Smile,” with its chord intro that gives way to a precise melody, and his solo has a nice pop feel. Takamen is so conscious of melodies that even his solo on this one forms its own little melodies. “One Big Shot” finds the band navigating a frantic pace with humor and grace, and Takamen’s playing on the head uses single lines and octaves before a solo allows he and the band to show their empathy for each other’s playing. Things wrap up with “The Other Side of City,” an almost 14-minute tour de force that starts with 90 seconds of solo guitar before it turns into a light swinger that gives Takamen and Kanda time to build interesting solos. Takamen may only be in his early 30s, but shows maturity and skills that indicate he could remain a mainstay on the jazz scene for decades to come.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s May. ’11 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

When I had occasion to visit Lancaster, California, in 1996, I was shocked to discover that there wasn’t a single thing in the town to acknowledge the fact that Frank Zappa had spent a good chunk of his formative years there. There are people in every corner of the globe who know of that city and Antelope Valley High School specifically because of their connection to Zappa, yet there was no statue, no plaque, no street named for him.

As far as I know, there still isn’t – at least not in Lancaster. Last September, a bust of Zappa was unveiled in Baltimore, Maryland. It’s actually a replica of one that already graced a public square in Vilnius, Lithuania; Zappa fans there donated it to the city where he was born.

December 21, 2010, would have been the 70th birthday of Zappa, who died in 1993, just shy of turning 53. Three new releases from the Zappa Family Trust’s vaults celebrate the bandleader/guitarist/ singer/composer/activist – the live, triple-disc Hammersmith Odeon (on Vaulter Native Records); an expanded reissue of his 1968 Cruisin’ With Ruben & The Jets ode to doo-wop, re-titled Greasy Love Songs; and Congress Shall Make No Law…, containing Zappa’s 1985 anti-censorship testimony on Capitol Hill (the latter two on Zappa Records).

Hammersmith, recorded at the London hall in early ’78, provided the basic tracks for Sheik Yerbouti. The 1979 double-LP was Zappa Records’ debut release. He founded the label after “playing out his contract,” so to speak, with DiscReet, a division of Warner Bros. “I delivered four completed albums to them almost two years ago, to fulfill my contract,” he told me in ’79. “I owed them four albums, so I walked in one day and said, ‘Here’s the tapes.’” (Said tapes were released as Zappa In New York, Studio Tan, Sleep Dirt, and Orchestral Favorites.)

That interview (for Musician magazine – the first of several I was fortunate enough to conduct with Zappa) took place as Sheik was just hitting record shelves. In his Hammersmith liner notes, Peter Wolf recalls Frank telling him during rehearsal “boot camp” that the lineup would “most likely turn into the best band I ever had.” Indeed, with keyboardists Wolf and Tommy Mars, bassist Patrick O’Hearn, drummer Terry Bozzio, percussionist Ed Mann, and Adrian Belew sharing guitar chores with Zappa, then-new material like “City Of Tiny Lites,” “Tryin’ To Grow A Chin,” and “Dancin’ Fool” sound as tight as they would postoverdubs on Sheik. Catalog staples like “Peaches En Regalia,” “King Kong,” and “Dinah-Moe Humm” also shine.

The guitar vehicles “Black Napkins” and “Watermelon In East Hay” illustrate Zappa’s blues-guitar inf luences. “To me, it seems incomprehensible that a person could listen to ‘Three Hours Past Midnight’ by Johnny Guitar Watson and not be moved to get violent,” he told me. “I mean, that’s really saying something. Same with the guitar solo on ‘Story Of My Life’ by Guitar Slim. I mean, that stuff used to make me violent. I’d just want to get an icepick and go out and work over the neighborhood! I loved that. To me, that was the real world. I couldn’t play any of Guitar Slim’s guitar solos or Johnny Guitar Watson’s guitar solos or Clarence Gatemouth Brown’s – but I liked them all. And I think I was inf luenced by them because of comprehending their melodic approach to what to do with those notes in that situation.”

Back to Antelope Valley High, he said, “You had the R&B guys, then you had the ones who went for Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All Stars. The R&B guys used to find the ones who liked jazz and beat them up in the parking lot – I mean, it was that vivid a lifestyle difference between the jazz guys and the ones who liked the real music.”

Our discussion of blues records and icepicks was an extension of Frank’s explanation of Cruising With Ruben & The Jets. Recorded during his Mothers Of Invention days, the album was perceived by most as a parody of the ’50s and doo-wop, but it was actually a labor of love for Zappa. “There’s a very scientific reason for the existence of Ruben & The Jets,” he said. “The closest relationship between that album as an artistic event and another event from a different field that you can compare it to would be the point in Stravinsky’s career in which he decided he was going to write neo-classical music. He started doing stuff like ‘Pulcinella’ – writing music in his day and age, but using forms that were thoroughly out of style and frowned upon by the academic establishment. You have to remember that the American people don’t have much going for them in the way of taste. I mean, taste is something that’s inflicted on the American public by other outside forces. So if somebody tells you that something is cool, well, you’ll think it’s cool and you’ll go out and buy it. To make an album like Cruising With Ruben & The Jets at that time in history, in ’68, was very unfashionable. And everybody went, ‘Oh, I can’t own that; it’s not cool. It’s not acid rock; it’s not fuzztone; it’s not psychedelic. Who needs this?’ I didn’t do it just to be arbitrary; I like that kind of music, and I wanted to have some examples of that style in my total catalog output. I think Ruben & The Jets is a really good album, but at the time that it came out everybody thought, ‘You can’t. It’s corny.’”

Cruisin’ (or Greasy Love Songs) was re-mastered from the original vinyl stereo mix. Maintaining stylistic accuracy (sometimes uncannily so), guitar isn’t heavily featured, although Zappa’s six-string comes to the fore on “I’m Not Satisfied,” and he delivers a purposely anachronistic wah solo on “Stuff Up The Cracks.” This expanded edition features alternate mixes, an unreleased cover of “Valerie,” interview snippets, and liner notes by Cheech Marin.

Congress Shall Make No Law… is a fascinating document of the Reaganera climate regarding freedom of expression and Zappa’s extremely articulate testimony against Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) applying a rating system to or putting warning labels on music. As he tells the Senate committee, “The PMRC’s demands are the equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation.” (Isn’t it ironic that today a song called “F*** You” is nominated for the Record Of The Year Grammy?)

In his liner notes, Zappa lawyer Larry Stein writes, “In my long career representing talent in the entertainment industry, no artist has been more challenging, rewarding, and pleasurable to represent than Frank Zappa.” I’d say the same regarding musicians I’ve interviewed over the past 35 years.

© 2011 Dan Forte; all rights reserved. Interview quotes from August ’79 issue of Musician magazine.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s May. ’11 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

How many versions of the song “If That Mocking Bird Don’t Sing” have you heard? I’ve listened to more than I can count on all my digits. So when I heard Carrie Elkin veer into “Mocking Bird” during the chorus of “Jessie Likes Birds” I wondered where she was going with it. What followed was a virtual tutorial on how to build a song around an older song to create a new one. This combining of old and new populates much of Elkin’s musical landscape. Elkin lives in Austin, where she’s part of the folk/roots music scene, and Call It My Garden is her second solo CD.

Usually, singer/songwriter albums fall into one of two categories – those that highlight songs and those that feature the singer. Occasionally, an album such as Call It My Garden does both. Elkin’s voice is direct and guileless, with little in the way of fancy bits. But she displays a breadth of emotion and nuance that eludes many with more flamboyant pipes. Her country influenced vocals avoid the cornball clichés while retaining an intimate and natural quality.

Elkin’s songs aren’t musically complex, yet her melodies never fail to deliver a few surprises. On “Iowa,” she builds a delicate structure that demonstrates how a simple arrangement can let a song bloom. “Berlin” begins with just lead vocals and Trevor Smith’s minimalist acoustic guitar. By the end of the song, she has built a wall of sound.

Folk music used to be limited as a musical category, but artists such as Elkin show that even a well-trodden road has plenty of paths waiting to be explored.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s May. ’11 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.