The Musical Box

At this point, are there any creative insights left to reveal about the Grateful Dead that haven’t already been exhumed in the hundred or so concert recordings released since the band’s demise following the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995?

Probably not. But when additional relics surface from the Dead’s youth, we are nonetheless reminded of an adventuresome spirit, an extraordinary performance intuition and, yes, a few creative imperfections.

The sixth and latest offering in the Dead’s mail order Dave’s Picks series does all of that and then some. It covers, over three very long discs, a pair of concerts given only two months apart – in December 1969 and February 1970. But the performances often differ in temperament with the Dead opus Dark Star at the center of each show.

The ’69 outing is far more playful. Dark Star is dispensed with at the onset as a spacious, animated jam framed equally by Garcia, the puncturing bass of a young Phil Lesh and organ lines that dance with snakecharming flexibility in the background from Tom Constanten. Such looseness dominates the entire show, from the rubbery bounce of New Speedway Boogie to Ron “Pigpen” McKernan’s 35 minute tent revival recasting of Turn on Your Lovelight  How wild is to hear him continually shout “Wait a minute,” undoubtedly knowing that the band and the audience weren’t about to heed the call.

There is also a lovely take on High Time that foreshadows the exquisite balladry Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter would fully unleash just a few years later in songs like Stella Blue and To Lay Me Down. The real surprise, though, is Me and My Uncle, where Bob Weir’s pre-outlaw country sensibility is transformed into a neo go-go party tune.

The 1970 set (cut after Constanten left the band) is considerably more solemn with Dark Star standing as a monument of everything the Dead did will – light, effortless improvisation that intensifies and subsides with Garcia’s brief vocals to reflect just a hint of desperate fancy. A few cracks surface, especially on the harmony support during a shorter, more subdued Lovelight. But the stark musicianship on Cold Rain and Snow and Black Peter (both of which set up Dark Star) beautifully compensate.

“Bad day for a replay, so I’m skipping the downside,” Randall Bramblett moans at the onset of his ninth and newest album of scholarly Southern soul. “Lizard in a whirlwind, monkey in a trash bin, … and that’s just the bright spots.”

Hence the record’s title – The Bright Spots, a record perhaps more blues in tone than in temperament. After all, the aforementioned tune’s sense of despondency turns almost playful once it gets shoved next to looped cowbell chatter, stuttering brass and a massive chorus that spreads the song’s single-word title over the groove like butter on burned toast: Roll. Yep. That’s what you do when the blues hit.

The Bright Spots is a sublime glance at how Bramblett rolls. For more than three decades, he has been the quintessential Southern stylist: a writer with a storytelling ability that favors dark but humane detail, a singer with just enough scratch and weariness in his singing to ignite the soul and blues spirits in those songs, and an instrumentalist whose playing on keyboards and saxophone establishes and expands numerous Southern soul traditions.

All of that holds true and then some on The Bright Spots. It’s Southern. It rocks. But don’t label it as Southern rock in any conventional sense.

In the lighter moments of The Bright Spots, Bramblett summons R&B and soul accents that uphold the music’s deep tradition without pandering to it. Case in point is ’Til the Party’s All Gone, a suitably sunny reflection that revels in a freedom that is as celebratory as it is effortless (“To be passing through, no one to tell you what to do; wouldn’t that be the way to slide through your lazy days?”).

The sentiments grow more restless as faith becomes tested on All is Well.  There are devils in the wind as the title is uttered in the chorus by a blind man with profound uncertainly. “I lost my keys to the future, I lost my hold on the past,” Bramblett sings over a light, patient, piano-crisp arrangement full of autumnal jazz.

Somewhere between those extremes sits John the Baptist, a slab of earthy spiritualism undercut by the guitar and sitar of longtime Bramblett pal Davis Causey, and a blast of ultra funky baritone sax from Tom Ryan. It all makes for a sermon that sounds cunningly streetwise.

The album’s loveliest – and perhaps most curious – moment is Detox Bracelet, a slow-motion portrait of a runaway life. Images are presented like snapshots of objects and people in blurred motion. But when forced to a halt, the hurt – and, eventually, beauty – of life is revealed (“There are gifts of desperation everywhere”).

And for a record so filled with beauteous, soulful ruminations, those are just the bright spots.

If it succeeds in doing nothing else, Steve Earle’s The Low Highway solidifies the veteran songsmith’s reputation as one of today’s most steadfast surveyors of life in hard times. Sure, he chooses to chase such trials down rural highways into small towns, only to then stir the ensuing restlessness that prompts the urge to escape. But the vicious cycle that such journeys entail have long triggered some of Earle’s most captivating songs.

The Low Highway doesn’t so much conform to such a thematic scope as extend it. Perhaps the most extreme – and, curiously, most accessible – example is 21^st Century Blues, in which Earle depicts a future largely unchanged from the present. At first, his observations seem almost comical (“No man on the moon, no man on Mars. Where the hell is my flyin’ car?”). But deflation quickly sets in when the utopian visions designed by John F. Kennedy and others crumble into cold realities. For Earle, the future is permeated by the self-centered arrogance of today (“It’s head for the hills, every man for himself. Nobody helpin’ out nobody else.”).

It should come as no surprise that the album’s bleak view of the present often resembles the Dust Bowl of America’s past. In fact, The Low Highway’s title tune is ripe with the imagery of Woody Guthrie. Here, the blacktop Earle travels is like a passage through purgatory, a roadside view of a disenfranchised countryside, its inhabitants and its spirits. “The ghost of America (is) watchin’ me through the broken windows of the factory,” Earle sings with a glib drawl. “Naked bones of a better day as I rolled on down the low highway.”

Calico County is a close-up of the decimated America Earle witnesses – specifically, the rural terrain that is a breeding ground for poverty, ignorance and drug-addled ambivalence. Earle spits it all out in verses of Dylan-esque wordplay over a rolling electric groove (“Friday night dogfight suckin’ on a meth pipe”). Burnin’ It Down then brings the grief out of the shadows to confront the ignition of “10 gallons of gas and a bottle of propane” at the epicenter of the antagonist’s symbol of smalltown grief: the local Wal-Mart.

So vivid is the scenery along The Low Highway that you almost forget the efficient roots-driven support that Earle has been provided by the current lineup of his long-running, the Dukes (amended here to the Dukes and Duchesses with the inclusion of wife/keyboardist/singer/songsmith Allison Moorer and fiddler/mandolinist Eleanor Whitmore).

Their playing certainly eases the journey. But when you’re driving through fire, as Earle does for much of The Low Highway, no accommodations can take your eyes off the flames surrounding you.

Few musical situations elicit greater or more immediate excitement than the junctions where composition and improvisation meet. And perhaps no instrument better showcases that balance than the piano.

On two new recordings, John Medeski and Matthew Shipp – composers and improvisers who have represented themselves as prime artistic journeymen over the past two decades – explore various temperaments and even musical histories to further their piano voices.

Medeski is the keyboardist component of the avant-jam trio Medeski Martin & Wood, where his primary instruments are organ and clavinet and his favored stylistic device is the groove (along with various deconstructed variants). But on his debut solo album, A Different Time, Medeski retreats strictly to piano. And not just any piano, mind you, but a 1924 French-made Gaveau – an instrument whose pre-modern construction shapes much of the record’s mood.

Those accustomed to MMW’s frenzied jams – even the rare acoustic ones that featured piano – are likely to find the relaxed and often impressionistic tone of A Different Place a refreshing, if not somewhat unanticipated, departure. The delicacy of the Gaveau’s sound plays a part. But the largely contemplative intent of the album’s improvised title tune, the curiously wintry fancy that invests Willie Nelson’s I’m Falling in Love Again with studied grace and the huskier but pastoral sweep of the traditional spiritual His Eye is on the Sparrow place Medeski’s playing in a new and immensely complimentary light.

In contrast to the records of MMW, A Different Time comes across as an after-hours meditation. Even the album closing Otis, first presented on the 1992 MMW debut  Notes from the Underground, possesses newfound patience and warmth, and a beautifully intimate piano accent that the Gaveau brings to the entire album.

Matthew Shipp has long been at the forefront of a new generation of improvisers. Solo piano also is the setting that best expresses his musicianship, but Shipp’s new Greatest Hits album is an anthology that celebrates 12 years worth of varied, compelling formats.

There is the militaristic rumble that ignites a quartet summit with the great New York trumpeter Roy Campbell (Gesture), the syncopated groove that positions programmed synths and William Parker’s ultra funky acoustic bass under Shipp’s piano lead (Cohesion) and the ruptured lyricism of his trio with bassist Michael Bissio and drummer Whit Dickey (the title tune to 2012’s Elastic Aspects). But the neo-classical construction of Module, from the essential 2005 solo piano record One, brings the magic of Shipp’s playing into fully sharpened prominence.

There is in an admittedly tongue-in-cheek aspect to calling such a decidedly non-commercial sampler Greatest Hits. Still, in summarizing the many musical profiles of one of today’s foremost improviser/composers, the anthology undeniably hits big.

The story goes that This River, the sixth studio album by southern soul-funk strategists JJ Grey and Mofro, takes its name from the St. John’s River near Jacksonville. But as you listen to the record’s mighty music unfold, you might think Florida native Grey has charted a course for Muscle Shoals. That’s the Alabama community responsible for some of the greatest R&B music of the past 50 years. Its influence has increasingly informed Mofro records for the past decade. By the time this new album’s 10 songs have run their course, the pilgrimage to Alabama sounds pretty much complete.

That’s not to say This River doesn’t pay heed to the distinctive swampy groove music that Grey began giving a solid Floridian stamp to as far back as Mofro’s 2001 debut album, Blackwater. That record’s earthy, humid air feeds the swelter of This River’s album opener, Your Lady, She’s Shady. The ragged guitar hooks and Grey’s equally juiced-up vocal shout instigate the groove over fast-talking, street-walking lyrics. But by the time the soul shouting commences on the chorus, the grand spirit of Sly and the Family Stone comes into play. A merry party ensues.

Then we get a hearty dose of the sleeker R&B tradition that edges Grey and company closer to Muscle Shoals. Somebody Else cues up the horns and organ for a sly, propulsive groove with Grey’s beefy singing in the driver’s seat. Later, 99 Shades of Crazy holds off on the brass initially so a weather-beaten electric piano run can establish a slightly chilled groove. Between the two, though, the skies clear for Tame a Wild One, a huge, brassy soul-pop celebration that smoothes a few creases out of Grey’s scratchy singing.

That’s essentially the pace This River runs at. For every dirty funk grind indicative of Mofro’s Florida roots there is a trek to the welcoming soul sanctuary of Alabama. Don’t be confused by Florabama, though. The tune’s title would seem to acknowledge the record’s Southern migration, but it clearly belongs in the funk camp.

The big thrill is saved for last. On This River’s title tune, Grey surrenders fully to the Muscle Shoals spirits with a musical roll call. The song starts as an acoustic meditation that measures a river’s motion and constancy against a story of more personal despondency. Then the organ chimes in. Then the brass. Finally, the vocals uproot and soar. Countless soul giants – Otis Redding is the most obvious – have run with such a game plan. Grey isn’t their league. But by respectfully dipping in the same musical stream, he fortifies Mofro with a soul charge as majestic and healing as the river he sings of.

The celebrity status accorded Levon Helm during his final years was a curious thing. Not that it wasn’t richly deserved, mind you.

As one of the three lead singers of The Band, he helped to forge a generational voice for a roots-rock hybrid commonly referred to today as Americana. But the deaths of The Band’s other vocal giants (Richard Manuel and Rick Danko) through the years barely caused a mainstream ripple. Helm, by comparison, has been positively adored. Hence a new tribute concert recording titled Love for Levon, which is a testament to the boundless enthusiasm of his drum work and singing and a benefit for the barn studio where Helm’s famed Midnight Ramble concert series originated.

Recorded at a summit concert last October — roughly six months after Helm died of cancer — Love for Levon doesn’t stand on ceremony. It brings together contemporaries (Gregg Allman, John Prine, Mavis Staples), unlikely peers (Roger Waters, John Hiatt, Bruce Hornsby, Lucinda Williams), new-generation disciples (My Morning Jacket, Grace Potter, Jakob Dylan), a relative (Ollabelle’s Amy Helm, the drummer’s daughter) and a Band-mate (keyboardist Garth Hudson).From there, the repertoire leans understandably heavy on tunes by The Band. But the choices aren’t always obvious.

Dylan, perhaps more than anyone, gets the idea of what’s to be done. He serves up a fun, spirited version of the Clarence Frogman Henry hit Ain’t Got No Home that Helm interpreted on The Band’s 1973 covers album Moondog Matinee. The loose, brassy groove that surrounds Dylan’s version also encapsulates the roots-driven charm of the Midnight Ramble shows.Another delight is Allen Toussaint’s treatment of Life Is a Carnival, the 1971 Band tune that boasted one of Helm’s most underappreciated vocal performances. Toussaint also arranged the horn charts for the original Life is a Carnival. This time, though, he funks the groove up with a solid New Orleans charge.

Other delights come from Warren Haynes and Hiatt, who unlock joyous senses of soul in two early Band classics, The Shape I’m In and Rag Mama Rag. Bonus points go to David Bromberg, whose treatment of the Motown hit Don’t Do It (which Helm made his own on the Band’s classic 1972 live album Rock of Ages) abounds with righteous cheer.Eric Church, John Mayer and Dierks Bentley let the energy slip a bit on the second disc, although hearing Hudson amp up Chest Fever alongside Bentley with the same mischievous keyboard rampage that colored The Band’s early-’70s shows is a true blast.

But the vibe is what sells Love for Levon. It runs deep within the playfulness of these performances to empower the spirit behind one of rock ‘n’ roll’s least likely heroes.

The duet format has long been a staple of every genre of contemporary music. But nowhere has its influence established itself more generously than in country circles. Two new recordings offer wildly different reflections of the country duet formula. One is based on a working partnership than extends back nearly 40 years. The other is new and almost happenstance in comparison.

Old Yellow Moon re-teams Emmylou Harris with one of the first and most acclaimed graduates of her ‘70s-era Hot Band, Rodney Crowell. But the relationship extends deeper than time served. Harris has regularly recorded Crowell’s songs, works that illuminate grim – and often self-inflicted – emotional wounds. But there were merry works, too. In fact, one of Old Yellow Moon’s many highlights is Bluebird Wine, a Crowell tune Harris cut as the first song on her first major label album, 1974’s Pieces of the Sky. This new version gives Crowell most of the vocal chores and a light Americana feel to work off of that is reflective of the entire album.

Old Yellow Moon avoids the perhaps obvious concept of having Harris cutting an entire album of Crowell songs. Instead, the two are placed on equal footing with outside material and country classics mingling with the Crowell works.

It comes as absolutely no surprise that Harris steals the show. Few artists, country or otherwise, have discovered such a sagely (if not slightly world weary) tone to the interpretive power of their singing as Harris. That attribute radiates from Back When We Were Beautiful, a tune with the plaintive gravity of a McGarrigle Sisters classic even though it was penned by Matraca Berg.

“I hate it when they say I’m aging gracefully,” Harris sings as the song turns wistful. That might just go down as one of the most ironic lines this Americana matriarch has ever let slip from her lips.

Night is an altogether different beast. It teams Tift Merritt – an artist groomed for country stardom whose intensely personal music was instead embraced by Americana audiences – with classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein. The two met when Merritt was recruited by Grammophone magazine to interview Dinnerstein for a profile story. The alliance, unlikely as it seems, bloomed from there.

The resulting album is slight, sparse and graceful without sounding stoic. No other artists are utilized. Much of Night, in fact, has Dinnerstein’s regal playing serving as the primary foil for Merritt’s delicate vocals, from a gorgeously nocturnal take on Billie Holliday’s Don’t Explain to a ghostly variation of I Will Give My Love an Apple.

Toss in the compositions and spirits of Henri Purcell, Brad Mehldau, J.S. Bach, Patty Griffin and Leonard Cohen and you have a duets session that is far more worldly than country.

Pity the poor musical genre known as prog. Full of symphonic intent, narrative bravado, and long instrumental passages loaded with tricky shifts in tempo and temperament, it catapulted bands like Yes, Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake & Palmer to stardom in the early ‘70s while fortifying the comparatively underground followings of King Crimson, Caravan and Soft Machine.

Of course, when it fell out of commercial favor later in the decade thanks to the punk revolt, prog was viewed for what it often was – bloated, self-important pop pageantry. Today, in an age when just about any pop genre with a retro slant has an audience, prog was reinvented by bands like Porcupine Tree with a harder, more guitar-centric feel. It was taken to even more metal-esque extremes by trendier acts like the now-defunct Mars Volta.

But The Raven That Refused to Sing, the third solo album by Porcupine Tree frontman Steven Wilson, returns to the heart of prog’s orchestral heyday and makes some intriguing updates.

First off, the album’s six compositions – split evenly between longer suites and more concise pop reflections – operate with a musical vocabulary that extends far beyond the work of Wilson’s contemporaries. Some of the sounds are unapologetically retro. For instance, the Fender Rhodes electric piano colors of Adam Holzman strike like Big Ben against his Jan Hammer-like mini Moog sprints at the onset of The Holy Drinker while the layers of string-like sounds Wilson summons from the very mellotron used by King Crimson on its 1969 debut album underscore Luminol.

The guitar work, primarily by Guthrie Govan and Wilson, broaden the sound. They counter the album’s somewhat weighty storylines with lighter, warmer, pop-inspired melodies on Drive Home that recall the solo recordings of ex-Genesis guitarists Steve Hackett and Anthony Phillips. But the team also roars to life regularly with warp-speed, jazz fusion-style runs and generally beefier orchestration that, despite the might, doesn’t paint the music into a stylistic corner in the tradition of many modern prog units, even Porcupine Tree.

Further fleshing out The Raven That Refused to Sing’s longer passages is the flute and saxophone contributions of Theo Travis (a frequent collaborator of King Crimson chieftain Robert Fripp) and the string arrangements of Hatfield and the North/National Health alumnus Dave Stewart. Topping its all is The Raven’s extraordinarily crisp sound. For that, thank engineer and prog-pop everyman Alan Parsons.

Wilson himself operates as ringmaster. Even his lyrics and vocals are downplayed as lead devices in favor of a huge, luscious sound that summons prog’s past from its undignified demise and refashions it to give The Raven That Refused to Sing an altogether fetching voice.

Prior to the occasion of his 66th birthday earlier this year, David Bowie had effectively disappeared. He had not released a new studio recording since 2003 and hadn’t been seen onstage since a heart attack cut short an extensive world tour a year later. Since then, the word on the atypically absent Bowie was that he had retired.

But in January came word of the prophetically titled The Next Day, an album that Bowie had worked on in secret with longtime producer Tony Visconti for two years. The title suggested a new chapter in the career of one of rock ’n’ roll’s most colorful participants. Yet the songs, all streamlined with a musical and lyrical directness, echoed bits and pieces from Bowie albums that date to the ’70s. And if you think the new record’s title suggests promise, be warned. This is a dark and often dour work. “Here I am, not quite died; my body left to rot in a hollow tree,” Bowie sings over an infectious, guitar-hued grind in the chorus of The Next Day’s title tune.

What the circumstances add up to is this: The Next Day is one of the first truly great major label albums of 2013 and Bowie’s strongest work since 1977’s Heroes (which The Next Day oddly mimics in its cover art).

Credit Visconti for much of the album’s lean, cohesive sound. The songs are all constructed on fabrics of guitar created by stylists Gerry Leonard, David Torn and veteran Bowie sidekick Earl Slick. Together they fortify the dark jangle of The Stars (Are Out Tonight), a true love song to the heavens, and the harsher staccato drills of How Does the Grass Grow, one of two potent anti-war rants (the more vitriolic but dance savvy I’d Rather Be High is the other).

Of course, the primary fascination, as always, rests with Bowie himself. When he plays starmaker on (You Will) Set the World on Fire, a tune that can’t help but be viewed with a hint of irony in the American Idol age of instant celebrity status, Bowie recalls his majestic mid-’70s heyday. Of course, the song’s powerful hooks help the cause. But on the album-closing Heat, he sails out into space, just as he did more than 40 years ago, questioning identity and purpose in a beautiful cosmic haze.

The Next Day is the album you didn’t expect from Bowie only because no one expected to hear from him again at all. Once its music takes hold, you will recognize fragments of a reconstituted pop voice. Its battle cry is powerful, vital and delightfully disturbing.

As if you weren’t conflicted enough by what does or doesn’t constitute country music these days, we have two fascinating new recordings by Son Volt and The Mavericks to further blur the borderlines.

Son Volt, longtime brainchild of song stylist Jay Farrar, was born out of the wreckage of alt-country fave Uncle Tupelo. Over the past 17 years (which included a favorable run of Farrar solo records), the band has inched away from anything resembling country – alternative or otherwise. Until now. Its new Honky Tonk album is a selection of rustic, spiritually inclined waltzes, pedal steel-steeped reflections and wistful meditations that embrace a country spirit more traditional than even Uncle Tupelo could have envisioned.

The Mavericks, on the other hand, were one-time corporate country darlings. But that darn Raul Malo, the country Caruso that fronts the Miami-based foursome, had to go and explore his Cuban roots, causing the band to incorporate enough brass and brazen grooves to make their music sound less like it was forged in Nashville and more like it poured out of Havana circa 1959. The only curiosity about the new Mavericks album, In Time, is that it is completely indistinguishable from a Malo solo project. But given how glorious the songs are, that’s not exactly a problem.

Honky Tonk is a beautiful listen. As possibly the least rock-oriented album Son Volt has made, its sound centers around pedal steel guitar melodies, fiddle accents, and, of course, Farrar’s singing. But just as the album’s overall tone opts out of traditional country self-pity in favor of more spiritually inclined promise, Farrar’s vocals have dropped the sad sack warble of early Son Volt records for a warmer, more articulate cast that neatly compliments the antique fiddle waltz Hearts and Minds and the more tentative hope (“going for broke in a film noir smile”) that unfolds like ripples in a pond on Shine On.

In Time is equally inviting, even though it slides its stylistic (and geographical) reference points between vintage Cuban pop and ‘60s style Tex Mex. Malo, still in possession of a voice with Roy Orbison-level clarity and range, fronts the parade, from the lush Cuban sway of Back in Your Arms Again (which grooves like a slower version of the early Mavericks hit Dance the Night Away) to the twang-happy dance drama Come Unto Me to the Orbison-style pop lullaby Amsterdam Moon.

Malo wrote or co-wrote all of the album’s 13 tunes, which kind of makes you wonder what the other Mavericks brought to the party. But democracy doesn’t matter here. View the album as another great Malo solo venture if you like. Regardless, the music of In Time is thoroughly in tune.