The Musical Box

On one team we have Dave Rawlings, longtime performance mate of Americana idol Gillian Welch who now leads his own project with Welch reverting to the support role. On the other is Rosie Flores, the long proclaimed “rockabilly filly” who returns after a few years as a thoroughly independent act to team with punk vet and alt-country maestro Jon Langford - producer, co-writer, duet partner and even cover artist for her newest album.

dave rawlings machine: a friend of a friend

For Rawlings and Welch, the new A Friend of a Friend employs the relaxed folk settings of their concerts as a springboard in terms of performance attitude and repertoire. Initially, the Dave Rawlings Machine was designed as a cover band project that worked in a few original tunes penned for other artists with  instrumental fortification from members of the renegade string band Old Crow Medicine Show.

As such, A Friend of a Friend resurrects a near decade-old tune - To Be Young (is to be Sad, is to be High) - Rawlings co-wrote with Ryan Adams. This version is more of a hoedown with all of the Crow Show in tow. Curiously the song’s modestly wistful melody also reveals a slightly Dylan-esque cast.

From the covers corner comes a 10 minute medley of Conor Oberst’s Method Acting and an elegiac reading of Neil Young’s Cortez the Killer performed only with Welch.                               

Rounding out the record’s stylistic breadth is Bells of Harlem, one of several newer Rawlings/Welch tunes that again recalls Dylan, but in his more ambient, Time Out of Mind-era guise.

rosie flores: girl of the century

Girl of the Century benefits from Langford’s pub-style demeanor. But his Pine Valley Cosmonauts largely stay out of the way of Flores’ rootsy intimacy. Sure, rockabilly still figures into the fun, especially in the effervescent update of This Little Girl’s Gone Rockin’, a 1956 Bobby Darin-penned hit for Ruth Brown, and a raucous, riff-heavy This Cat’s in the Doghouse.

But the album shines just as generously as a vintage country affair, whether it’s through the 1969 Ernest Tubb/Loretta Lynn hit Who’s Gonna Take Your Garbage Out? with Langford adding a touch of Welsh vitriol to the flames or the fiddle driven swing of a recent Paul Burch serenade, Little Bells.

The outside inspirations are no match for Girl of the Century’s Flores-penned title tune, though. It’s a torchy work of dark folk reflection and border town strings bolstered by a voice that booms clear to the next century and back again.

Though operating within differing musical temperaments, Gov’t Mule and Los Lobos have maintained devout jam band and Americana followings over the years. But their new albums, which embrace styles that define their ensemble sound while cautiously expanding upon them, enforce the fact that both bands are best enjoyed when tags and demographic concerns are ignored.

gov't mule: by a thread

Gov’t Mule’s By a Thread starts, quite unexpectedly, with a sweaty Southern blues groove ripe with a thick, almost oppressive bass riff and chant-like percussion that makes the tune less like the design of group chieftain Warren Haynes and more like early ‘70s ZZ Top. Later, Scenes from a Troubled Mind offers the same sweaty sentiments by way of guitar hooks born from the blues but filtered through the learned ranks of early ‘70s British boogie merchants (Savoy Brown and Exile on Main St.-era Rolling Stones come to mind). And how about the chiming Haynes guitar lick that bounces around Railroad Boy? It sounds for all the world like the darker ‘70s twilight of The Byrds.

Everything Mule-a-holics have come to love about the band - the beefy but unhurried jams, Haynes’ blues-fortified guitarwork and storylines that find (or at least search) for the sun behind solid skies of grey - are everywhere on By a Thread. But the treats come when Haynes, drummer Matt Abts and company shuffle the deck with the churchy, acoustic rooted reflection Gordon James. Beautifully accented by the bowed bass of the newest Mule, Jorgen Carlsson, the tune is both fortifying and faithful. In short, if Gov’t Mule is hanging onto this world by thread, it remains a rock solid one.

There are some sentimental surprises, too, such as David Hidalgo’s quiet and moving version of Randy Newman’s I Will Go Sailing No More (from Toy Story). But when Cesar Rosas lets loose Cruella De Vil as a blues rhumba, Los Lobos Goes Disney goes deliciously into party mode.

r.e.m.: live at the olympia

“This is not a show,” announces bassist Mike Mills through a bullhorn at the onset of the second R.E.M. concert album in two years. Such a qualifying intro winds up better serving the veteran Georgia band than the audiences crammed into the 19^th century Dublin theatre known as the Olympia. That’s because the five night Irish run during the summer of 2007 that now gives us the 39 songs on Live at the Olympia was intended as a string of working rehearsals before the band recorded its redemptive Accelerate album. Yet, outside of a false start here and a vocal hiccup there, nothing reflects a practicum-like environment. That’s pretty remarkable considering what winds up on Live at the Olympia.

For R.E.M., the Olympia concerts were a chance to give legs to nearly a dozen tunes being readied for Accelerate. Two of them - the fuzzy psychedelic romp Staring Down the Barrel of the Middle Distance and the jagged ballad On the Fly - were left off the record and appear here for the first time. But Live at the Olympia’s ultimate charm is its ability to reconnect R.E.M. with its past as it prepared for what was then its future. Along with the wealth of Accelerate-related music is a stunning assemblage of vintage material that favors obscurities over hits.

How old are we talking here? How about four of the five songs from the 1982 debut EP disc Chronic Town? How about five tunes from the mystic, muddy 1985 ceremony that was Fables of the Reconstruction? And then there are the obscurities, like Monster’s rampaging Circus Envy, New Adventures in Hi-Fi’s gloom-meets-glam confessional New Test Leper or the lost soundtrack gem Romance that wound up on 1988’s Eponymous.

Mills, guitarist Peter Buck and singer Michael Stipe don’t attack these relics with the cracked whip immediacy they employed in the ‘80s when they were roughly half their current age. But there is clearly a vital electric vigor that connects the old and new

The album opening crunch of Accelerate’s Living Well is the Best Revenge bleeds directly into 1984’s chiming, churning Second Guessing. The piano/backbeat melody of the 1996 pop charmer Electrolite (which is as close as Live at the Olympia comes to hit territory) neatly prefaces the jacked up, hook-heavy Man Sized Wreath. And in Live at the Olympia’s greatest mash up of the then and now, the propulsive Fables neo-hit Driver 8 crashes into the proto-punk gusto of Accelerate’s Horse to Water.

“We’re R.E.M. and this is what we do when you’re not looking,” jokes Stipe before the 1987 nugget Disturbance at the Heron House comes into focus. Given the breadth of the drive and spirit tied into the time traveling on Live at the Olympia, maybe we should glance away more often.

lyle lovett: natural forces

The Lone Star alliance of Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen, a friendship that extends back to the mid ‘70s, is wonderfully reconstituted at the conclusion of the former’s fine new Natural Forces album. On a jointly penned romp titled It’s Rock and Roll, Lovett speaks in his dry Texas tenor of glitzy fame where “the bright lights fall down on you and the money does the name” before a Slash-like guitar riff shatters the serenity.

The song is only partially tongue-in-cheek, mind you, as Americana accents dominate the rest of Natural Forces and all of Keen’s The Rose Hotel.

Natural Forces is essentially two albums in one. It sports four new originals, excluding It’s Rock ‘N’ Roll, and six covers of works by esteemed Texas songwriters that reprise the stately warmth of Lovett’s sublime 1998 tribute record Step Inside This House.

Of the new songs, the home cooked double entendres of Pantry offer the most immediate enticement. But Empty Blue Shoes, with its richly languid blues sentiments (”your mother might hold you forever but forever won’t hold you for long”) and the title song’s dark imagery of natural forces and very un-natural migration satisfy more deeply.

The Texas material, as with Step Inside This House, sounds regal. Eric Taylor’s Whooping Crane possesses an almost meditative unease while Vince Bell’s Sun and Moon and Stars outlines solitary but eerily elegant despondency. In comparison, Townes Van Zandt’s Loretta sounds surprisingly hopeful, a vision of home on an album where sentiments are as scattered as storms along distant Texas plains.

robert earl keen: the rose hotel

Keen mines more familiar turf on The Rose Hotel with tunes that tuck colors of minor chords into highly accessible choruses to heighten the mix of drama and sometimes wry but human humor. Such devices abound on Something I Do, a reggae-fied lowlife anthem with a cha-cha-cha beat and the album’s title tune storyline of intended but missed connections. Keen also covers Van Zandt by way of a darkly fantastical reading of Flyin’ Shoes.

But the kicker is Wireless in Heaven, a smart honky tonk yarn that ponders internet connections to the hereafter with a melody that morphs from country to bluegrass.

Sure, the tune may search for an ISP in heaven. But its lyrical and melodic drive still come from deep in the heart of you-know-where.

Lyle Lovett and his Large Band perform at 8:30 p.m. Oct. 30 at Newlin Hall of the Norton Center for the Arts at Centre College in Danville. Tickets are $60-$125. Call (877) 448-7469.

Robert Earl Keen, Todd Snider and Bruce Robison perform at 7 p.m. Nov. 5 at the Lexington Opera House. Tickets are $22.50-$32.50. Call (859) 233-3535.

rosanne cash: the list

Born within two years of each other, Rosanne Cash and Patty Loveless represente a country music generation once embraced by radio. Since then, Cash explored heavily introspective songwriting that took her light years away from corporate Nashville while Pikeville native Loveless designed albums with husband/producer Emory Gordy, Jr. that received widespread country acclaim before refocusing on the mountain inspired roots music of her youth.

Now as members of a demographic that Nashville regularly shuns (women artists in their 50s), Cash and Loveless have again found common ground. For Cash, it comes with a collection of covers suggested by her legendary father, Johnny Cash. For Loveless, the link is a sequel to a hit recording of traditionally inclined rural country inspiration.

Cash’s The List, a new collaboration with her own husband/producer, John Leventhal, takes its cue from a catalogue of 100 songs termed essential by the elder Cash. Some are country staples forever associated with the Man in Black, including the always-dramatic Long Black Veil. Daughter Cash’s telling of the gallows tune’s storyline is understandably gentler than her father’s version. But some neat guitar tremolo and world weary harmonies from Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy make the song’s ghostly inspiration all her own.

Equally daring are grand takes on the Patsy Cline hit She’s Got You and the Merle Haggard classic Silver Wings. Both tunes indicate the grand sweep of The List by showcasing a voice than conveys heartache, urgency and simple human drama in a manner that respects regal country and pop traditions.

patty loveless: mountain soul II

Loveless doesn’t quite go for the epic tone of The List when approaching Mountain Soul II, a sequel to 2001’s Mountain Soul. That record was exquisitely timed with renewed interest in pre-bluegrass country music at a peak thanks to the hit soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? But Mountain Soul II is every bit as homey as its predecessor with acoustic arrangements that bring out the deeper contours of Loveless’ singing.

The bluegrass spiritual Workin’ on a Building, especially, is a work of wonders. It sports support from two of the mightiest bluegrass forces on the planet, Del and Ronnie McCoury, but the gospel gusto fueling the tune belongs to Loveless alone.

Loveless and Gordy add a few fine originals, too. But the killer is a cover of Emmylou Harris’ Diamond in My Crown, which is delivered as a hymn-like lament. As the vocal wail is reigned in, the gospel fortitude is magnified with only organ and Harris’ wildly plaintive harmonies as backdrops. Have mercy.

keith jarrett: testament

Already this year, we have seen two elder American jazz labels, Prestige and Blue Note, turn 60 and 70 years old, respectively. In November, the deliciously atmospheric Euro-based ECM turns 40. The celebration commences with fine new recordings from three of the label’s flagship artists: pianist Keith Jarrett, Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek and guitar journeyman John Abercrombie.

Jarrett’s mammoth three-disc Testament chronicles improvisational solo piano performances given days part late last year in Paris and London. Both are full of typically gallant passages. Then, just as the lyricism starts to sound too settled after 23 minutes of the Paris concert, his playing fractures, rumbles and bounds around the Salle Pleyel before briefly coming to a halt. Rapturous applause, of course, ensues.

Personally, 2006’s The Carnegie Hall Concert sounds more emotive and complete. And while were on the subject of the ECM legacy, nothing in the label’s solo piano library stands up to Jarrett’s majestic Koln Concert from 1975. But Testament is just that - a beautifully recorded pair of performances that again displays the spontaneous beauty that flows whenever Jarrett sits at the piano with only the sounds in his head to guide him.

jan garbarek: dresden

The stunner of the bunch is Garbarek’s Dresden, another live recording. This one was cut two Octobers ago with a modified version of his long running quartet. Bassist Eberhard Weber (another veteran ECM recording artist) is gone due to heath reasons and is replaced here by Brazilian Yuri Daniel. Drummer Manu Katche, who has toured internationally with the likes of Peter Gabriel and Sting maintains an understandably rockish approach to the performance which manages to up the urgency level of Garberek’s playing without defusing any of its ghostly appeal.

But the true Garbarek foil is keyboardist Rainer Bruninghaus. His tensely orchestrated backdrops are arresting from Dresden’s outset as they weave an almost cinematic web around Garbarek’s soprano sax squeal on the album-opening Shankar composition Paper Nut. Similarly, Bruninghaus’ piano intro is equally complimentary as it dances around cymbals and, again, the soprano, on Twelve Moons. A truly unearthly delight of an album.

john abercrombie: wait till you see her

Abercrombie’s Wait Till You See Her has the guitarist once more working off of violinist Mark Feldman on studio sessions marked by studied reserve. Well, most of them are, anyway, like the lusciously quiet title tune and Sad Song. But on Out of Towner, the groove heightens, drummer Joey Baron is unleashed and the more dynamic fun starts.

Through it all, though, is Abercrombie’s remarkable tone. It remains clean, warm but delightfully restless.

heaven on earth

On Heaven and Earth, a tasty concert recording cut at New York’s Blue Note jazz club last May, the remarkably versed saxophonist James Carter takes the helm, even though a quartet of support players receive equal billing. Together they flirt with the abstract, run hot and cool with tempos and temperaments and ultimately bow to tradition.

In contrast, Radiolarians III - the third and last of Medeski Martin & Wood’s experimental album series where compositions were penned or arranged quickly, ironed out on tour and then promptly recorded in the studio - sports a vastly more combustible sound.

And just to make these journeys all the more curious, keyboardist John Medeski serves as double-agent player on both recordings.

Heaven on Earth starts out like most MMW sessions with Medeski’s organ bleeps adding typically outer space accents to fractured grooves and free-flavored jazz overtures. That the melee is actually a set up for Django Reinhardt’s Diminishing is where surprises begin. As the album progresses, Carter takes over with tenor sax skirmishes that can’t help but summon the spirit of John Coltrane while Medeski moves the groove into churchy soul territory.

From there, things settle somewhat. A 75 year old chestnut like Street of Dreams unleashes Carter’s most sparkling and playful tenor lead but Medeski puts the tune on ice with a sense of supreme soul wonderfully colored by omnipresent bassist Christian McBride and similarly studied rhythm by drummer Joey Baron, a player versed in explosive improvisatory interplay. Guitarist Adam Rogers similarly rides Heaven on Earth’s waves with ease, meeting head on its stylistic cunning while enhancing the club setting’s unmistakable intimacy.

radiolarians iii

Radiolarians III, as with all MMW sessions, loves to flirt with danger. On the spiritual Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down, Medeski unplugs for a piano intro that blends Lennie Tristano’s improvisatory daring, McCoy Tyner’s beefy modal play and his own inherent playfulness. A distorted lead emerges which sounds like mutated, amplified acoustic bass figures by Chris Wood, but with MMW, who really knows? Underneath it all, Medeski’s piano frolic sounds less like gospel and more like a barrelhouse rumble.

Later, Undone gets down to more familiar MMW turf with layers of keyboard haze and a sweaty but altogether foreboding drum pattern that gathers steam before briefly spilling over into more uplifting rock ‘n roll.

Where Heaven and Earth is the sound of friends takings cues from tradition, Radiolarians III turns the groove inward for a gospel, soul and jazz square-off that stands far more on muscle than ceremony.

pearl jam: back spacer

“Do you wanna hear something sick?” moans Eddie Vedder as guitars swirl like cyclones at the onset of Pearl Jam’s new Back Spacer album. “We are but victims of desire.” Not surprisingly, Vedder sings of purging said desire upon its discovery (”I wanna shake this pain before I retire.”)

Love? Addiction? Mortality? Vedder may well be referencing all three. But the rant is a bit of a tease, this time. On its ninth studio album, Pearl Jam lightens the temperamental load, sidesteps post grunge attitude for more digestible ‘70s album-rock guitar lingo and even serves up a few serious romantic yarns.

To fans of the flannel clad fury that was an earmark of such early Pearl Jam gems as Ten and Vs., Back Spacer may be sick indeed. But it’s likely those crowd surfers have either grown up or else found a band with a more lasting sense of misery.

That’s not to say Pearl Jam has gone soft. On the opening Gonna See My Friend and Got Some, Vedder still sings like a bag of hornets getting poked with a stick. Similarly, the band has re-enlisted producer Brendan O’Brien for the first time in over a decade, and his aim is clearly not to pay homage to the grunge gods. The guitar sweep on Back Spacer is cleaner while the lyrical scope sounds positively uplifting at times. In fact, an undercurrent of pop - unsettled, though it may be - runs through the album.

With a running time of only 37 minutes, Back Spacer’s block party mood seldom lags. Johnny Guitar, which just might be the funniest Pearl Jam tune ever, employs a double barreled guitar hook to underscore a dream involving the late soul/funk hero Johnny Guitar Watson. It’s not so much a tribute as a fantasy, where envy isn’t paid to Watson’s artistic ability but his well documented ladies man image.

Elsewhere there are all kinds of images of light and darkness that often - and somewhat unexpectedly, given Pearl Jam’s angst ridden past - favor the former. Some flirt with darkness at bay, as in The Fixer. Here Vedder sings of redemption, renewal, and, in its final verse, digging his lover’s grave. Others are more overt. Just Breathe, in fact, is as unapologetically sentimental as Johnny Guitar is daffy. Oh, and did we mention Just Breathe and the album closing The End come with full blown string arrangements? A long walk from Jeremy, you say? Shoot, it’s a long walk just from Gonna See My Friend.

A little less extreme but still very removed from conventional Pearl Jam is Speed Of Sound, with a rolling, autumnal melody and chiming guitar/keyboard figures that echo the grace of late ‘60s Beach Boys records in a way that recalls R.E.M.’s underappreciated 1998 album Up. But like the greatest Brian Wilson songs, the levels of hope and hurt on Speed of Sound are equal. “This night has been a long one,” Vedder sings, “waiting on a sun that never comes.”

The song pretty much sums up the mood on Back Spacer. Still vital and pensive as it shifts pop gears, the album offers as much fun in the sun as possible without forsaking all those beautiful grey skies.

fleck/hussain/meyer: the melody of rhythm

Considering a new collaborative album featuring banjo journeyman Bela Fleck, veteran Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain and pioneering bassist Edgar Meyer alongside an unaccompanied piano concert recording of vast spiritual depth by veteran jazzman McCoy Tyner might seem something of stylistic leap. After all, The Melody of Rhythm, the Fleck/Hussain/Meyer summit, skips heartily through fields of classical, folk, world music and more while Tyner’s Solo: Live in San Francisco is a grand portrait of bop, blues and learned jazz reflection.

On The Melody of Rhythm, the trio’s conversational lightness isn’t so much the product of some East-meets-West lexicon as it is a field trip across cultural common ground.

Remember, Fleck last spring released a stunning album of collaborations with African musicians that explored the banjo’s heritage while Hussain, a protégé of India’s most cherished classical masters, has long collaborated with British and American players. Meyer, in the meantime, still leapfrogs between classical and new acoustic projects. Last fall, he played the Kentucky Center of the Arts with the Louisville Orchestra but was here in Lexington weeks later performing acoustic duos with mandolinist Chris Thile.

mccoy tyner: solo, live in san francisco

Even Tyner, who shifts between effortless delicacy and the brute strength of a prizefighter on Solo, embraced the craftiness that sparks frequently during The Melody of the Rhythm on his 2008 Guitars album. That project teamed the one-time John Coltrane protégé with such modern-minded string men as Derek Trucks, John Scofield, Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell and, quite fittingly, Fleck.

In short, these albums are adventures. For Fleck, Hussain and Meyer, the daring behind The Melody of Rhythm revolves around the triple concerto title piece (commissioned by the Nashville Symphony in 2004 but presented here on a recording with the Detroit Symphony). Much of it sounds like a movie score, with orchestral colors tempered at times by Hussain, whose playing on the resonating Indian hand drum known as the tabla gives the music not so much as a beat as a pulse. By the time strings and reeds match the percolating pace established by Fleck and Hussain, the orchestration’s calm center dissolves. The piece then moves through Frank Zappa-like fancy into stormy crescendos.

The remaining five pieces are shorter trio exercises with an attractive spaciousness. Out of the Blue, for instance, offers numerous thrills in the ways its pace and mood shift between the three instruments - particularly from the tabla’s spiritual punctuation to the banjo’s inherent giddiness. The concerto is dynamite. But these trio pieces sparkle with even greater immediacy, invention and depth.

Such traits also run rampant through Solo, which Tyner cut in 2007 (he was 69 at the time). And, yes, the playing is fearsome in places, as in the blasts of typhoon-like intensity during the finale of Sweet and Lovely. Even the Duke Ellington standard In a Mellow Tone is beefed up with modal-style gospel at points. It’s like swing on steroids.

But listen to Ballad for Aisha and the long-heralded Coltrane hymn Naima - tunes that have been in Tyner’s repertoire for ages - and you hear a more sage-like spirituality. There are no bandmates about, but the music’s deep bedded soulfulness remains contemplative and, above all, complete.

the beatles: the beatles/abbey road/past masters

To give proper attention to the avalanche of new Beatles reissues that hit stores this week, one would require an inexhaustible budget (retail prices for the stereo and mono box set collections retail for roughly $250 each), a week or so to studiously compare the original 1987 CD editions to the new versions and an audio system peerless enough to detect the more modest nuances these sparking new recordings undoubtedly possess.

Sadly, none of that was available on this end. So instead, we’re whittling down the appraisals to three entries in the reissue series:  The Beatles, aka “The White Album,” the band’s fractured 1968 double-record opus and its last album to be released in mono; 1969’s Abbey Road, the final Beatles recording, although not the last to be released (Let It Be was in 1970) and Past Masters, originally two albums issued in 1988 that mostly gathered Beatles b-sides (there were many) and non-album singles (there were even more, most notably Hey Jude) and is now available as a two CD set of mono and stereo goodies.

First things first. The new editions make you re-appreciate the 1987 versions. Sure, their mixes now seem dated, even flat. But elements like hiss and tape speed were seldom an issue (although the more scholarly of Beatle geeks insist the original stereo mix of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a record made in mono, amounted to heresy).

Nonetheless, when the plane touches down at the onset of Back in the U.S.S.R. to kick off the newly remastered stereo edition of The Beatles, the clarity is remarkable. Throughout, the album’s guitar sound, which was a selling point of the original CD versions, remains full and confrontational. But the rhythm tracks - particularly ones that emphasize piano, bass and good ol’ Ringo’s drums - come alive. Examples: the tac piano and accordion in Rocky Raccoon, the withdrawn rhythmic wheeze under John Lennon’s I’m So Tired, the celebratory percussive rattle of Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey and, to a lesser extent, the distinction between strings and vocals as Ringo closes the album with Good Night (although, to be fair, much of that charm was initiated by the stereo mix).

The stereo masterwork Abbey Road, quite simply, sounds like a million bucks with a clarity that the original CD mix only partially captured. Lennon’s estate should be ecstatic over this one, as it is his electric performances that benefit the most - namely, the hazy psychedelic rocker I Want You (She’s So Heavy), the second side suite’s Mean Mr. Mustard and Polythene Pam and even the trippy hit Come Together. But what cooks under Lennon’s tight fisted vocals, especially the lean, almost cautious bass and drum lines, seriously boosts the newly complete sound. That said, Lennon’s glorious vocal orchestrations on Because and Sun King sound even more wondrous.

Past Masters is the curiosity as it is the only way many fans can get even a partial glimpse of the band’s glorious mono recordings (the complete mono albums are available only as a boxed set while the stereo albums can be purchased separately). Unfortunately, From Me to You and Thank You Girl now substitute stereo mixes. Still, the stereo conceived Hey Jude now sounds like the hippie tent revival it was always meant to be.

New mixes for a new Beatles age? Essentially, yes. But these recordings were perfect before. Now, for a price, they simply unveil another shade of their inherent greatness.