Legendary Scottish pop duo the Vaselines are reforming for their first shows since 1990! First up a gig at Scotland’s Tigerfest on May 16th, then they’ll be playing Sub Pop’s 20th Birthday bash in July. Also newly announced for SP20’s lineup are Eric’s Trip and Les Thugs. [NME/Sub Pop]

The Police will play the last show of their reunion tour in NYC. [NME]

Italian conductor Ricardo Muti named music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. [Sun Times]

Neil Young unveils his Java/Blu-ray multi-media archive. [CNet]

Paul McCartney will give away copies of his latest album Memory Almost Full with this Sunday’s edition of the Daily Mail’s weekend paper, The Mail on Sunday. [Spinner.com]

Pete Doherty is out of jail. [Reuters]

Gang of Four’s rhythm section quits. [Pitchfork]

Oasis have posted songs online from their upcoming album. [Myspace]

While it is true that these albums do fit into the larger ’80s jazz trend of looking backward to the music of the ’60s, a lot of that had to do with the aesthetics of the time which were a reaction against the ’70s trend of electric, rock-influenced jazz. All of which is to say, that yes, the Harrison/Blanchard albums were deeply influenced by acoustic modern jazz and specifically the music of Miles Davis’ classic late ’60s sextet, but also by such cerebral and boundary-pushing jazz luminaries as Ornette Coleman, Woody Shaw and Joe Henderson. Further, as evidenced by the title cut to New York Second Line, Blanchard/Harrison were at once taking jazz back to its roots and propelling it forward again with a youthful inventiveness that hadn’t been heard on record in some time.

Notably, in 1986, Blanchard and Harrison released two live tribute albums to another great jazz duo with Eric Dolphy & Booker Little Remembered Live at Sweet Basil, Vol. 1 and Fire Waltz: Eric Dolphy & Booker Little Remembered Live at Sweet Basil, Vol. 2. Featuring the late trumpeter and saxophonist’s rhythm section of pianist Mal Waldron, bassist Richard Davis and drummer Ed Blackwell, these albums were a distinct honor for Blanchard/Harrison at the time and based on the cuts, a deserved one.

Ultimately, Blanchard and Harrison went their separate ways after 1988’s Black Pearl with Harrison retaining a low, but active, profile and Blanchard going on to become the sound of director Spike Lee’s films — even pairing with Branford Marsalis for the highly influential soundtrack to Mo’ Better Blues. And while both artists progressed creatively since their time as duo — notably Blanchard’s epic 2007 paean to the hurricane-ravaged New Orleans A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina) was nominated for a Grammy — there is still something fresh, brash and vigorous about these early recordings. The Blanchard/Harrison albums deserve reissue/re-evaluation.

Check out some of the Blanchard/Harrison tribute to the Eric Dolphy/Booker Little quintet.

Aggression
Booker’s Waltz
Number Eight (Potsa Lotsa)
Bee Vamp

Pete Doherty is finally headed to jail. [NME.com]

George Strait tops R.E.M. on the charts, marking his fourth Number One on Billboard’s Top 200. [Billboard.com]

The script for High School Musical 4 is apparently in the process of being written. [BBC]
 
 
Singer Toni Braxton has been hospitalized. [Eonline]

Coldplay puts people to sleep. Well, duh! [Contactmusic]

Bobby Brown makes some sensational claims about his ex-wife in his upcoming autobiography, “Bobby Brown: The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But.” [tv.popcrunch.com]

By agreeing to share its profits with various music publishers, MetroLyrics has become the first “legit” website for songs lyrics. [Wired.com]

New software claims to take feedback out of live music, “meaning Mogwai’s gigs would finish 20 minutes earlier.” [Guardian.co.uk]

Axl Rose has made another “promise” that Chinese Democracy will be out soon (suuure, Axl — maybe when Paradise City freezes over). [EOnline.com]

A British internet service provider will not disconnect users who download music illegally. [NME.com]

Whoops. Calvin Harris may have lost the laptop that was storing his new album. [Idolator.com]

Released in 1974 on Prestige, Bridge Into The New Age was the first of three albums Lawrence recorded as a leader for Prestige — all before he was 25 (this one when he was a pup of 21). But Lawrence had logged some serious time with Tyner (getting the first notices for his work on the pianist’s classic Enlightenment set from 1973). He had also played on Davis’s freaky live funk date at Carnegie Hall, released in 1974 as Dark Magus. Beatheads and crate-diggers, the true cultural archeologists of our age, God bless them, have been onto this maddeningly out-of-print licorice pizza for years.

Hardcore jazz fans were hip to Lawrence and excited about him as a leader. The lineup here is enough to make your mouth drop open in an extended “Whooooooaaaaaaa”: besides the leader playing soprano and tenor saxophones, this date hosts Julian Priester (trombone), Woody Shaw (trumpet), Hadley Caliman (flute), Arthur Blythe (alto saxophone), Joe Bonner (piano), John Heard, Woody Murray, and Clint Houston (variously on bass), Billy Hart (drums), Leon Chancler, Mtume or Kenneth Nash (percussion), and on two tracks, the title and “The Beautiful And Omnipresent Love,” the beguiling Jean Carn appears to grace them with her gloriously soulful vocals. Lawrence, despite his deep debt to John Coltrane (along with every other tenor and soprano player in the 1970s), uses it to take the music to a different level. Here one will find the true roots of post-bop jazz, spiritual soul jazz, Latin Jazz, Afro Cuban jazz, funky acoustic modal jazz, and much more. The set has a complete identity for all of its ambition, which makes it even more impressive; it is as worthy as anything on the highly collectible Strata East Or Black Jazz labels. It is as balanced and nearly perfect an album as one is likely to find. The aforementioned beatheads are drawn to the furious jazz dance jam “Force Of Nature” that combines Afro-Cuban and Nuyorican salsa rhythms and melodies in a wide harmonic spread that makes it compositionally enthralling as well as rhythmically driven. But this is one of five flawless cuts. “Fatisha” is one of the more beautiful ballads of the spiritual jazz era with gorgeous work by Bonner, and “Warriors Of Peace,” contains some of the most focused incendiary horn work by the saxophonists driven by a rhythmic pulse that combines Yoruba drumming, salsa beats, and hardcore Cuban son time signatures.

Besides his two other excellent leader dates for Prestige (People Moving and Summer Solstice, which are also great –- and currently unavailable), he wrote songs with Chuck Jackson, played on Earth, Wine and Fire’s Powerlight set, formed Chameleon with Patrice Robinson (a.k.a Chocolate from Graham Central Station) and recorded for Elektra, played with Zappa, Tapscott, and Higgins and appeared in Busta Rhymes’ “In the Ghetto” video wailing on his tenor. Lawrence is out there on the bandstand almost every night in the greater Los Angeles area and he is still a monster of a player. You can check his whole story on his web page as well as samples of his work right HERE.

Anuna 2002
Fionnghuala:
Crist and St. Marie:
Sí Do Mhaimeo Í;
 
 
 
 
 
 

Riverdance
The Heart’s Cry:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Sensation
Lux Aeterna:
The Maid:
Tenebrae IV:
 
 
 
 
 

Behind the Closed Eye
Aisling:
Ceann Dubh Dílis:
 
 
 
 
 
 

John Adams, London Sinfonietta - Rosenman: “Knife Fight” from Rebel Without a Cause

Born in Brooklyn, Rosenman seemed well on his way to having a conventional career as a modern composer when he met James Dean. He had studied with Roger Sessions and with Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles; when Rosenman first encountered Dean he had just completed a master class at Tanglewood with Italian serialist Luigi Dallapiccola. “We met at a party,” Rosenman remembered in 1997. “[Dean] heard me play the piano, and about a month later, my doorbell rings about 11 o’clock at night. I open the door, and here’s a guy I don’t remember all dressed in leather, motorcycle stuff. I said, ‘What can I do for you?’ And he said, ‘I’d like to study piano with you.’” The street-smart, intellectual Brooklyn composer and the soft-spoken and shy but thrill-loving actor from Indiana became unlikely friends, and later shared a flat. Dean convinced director Elia Kazan to use Rosenman on his first assignment, East of Eden, which he only accepted after both Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein urged him to. Rosenman’s fears for his classical cachet proved well founded, as according to him, “The year I did my first film, I had five major performances in New York. The minute I did my first film, I didn’t have a performance [in New York] for 20 years. I couldn’t get performances of my works. They would never say, ‘I don’t like them.’ They wouldn’t look at them.”

Rosenman’s résumé reads like a “what’s what” of offbeat film projects: he scored Edge of the City (1957), the film that broke actor/director John Cassavetes, Budd Boetticher’s quirky gangster picture The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), the Oscar-winning avant-garde documentary The Savage Eye (1960), Robert Altman’s first film, the realistic space drama Countdown (1968), the revisionist western A Man Called Horse (1970), gritty war dramas such as Pork Chop Hill (1959), Hell is For Heroes (1962), and the TV show Combat! (1962-1967), not to mention Ralph Bakshi’s animated version of The Lord of the Rings (1978). Rosenman was a “go to guy” when it came to special kinds of film productions, and he never minced words when it came to producers or directors whom he felt had the wrong idea about a scene. His forthrightness in such instances caused Rosenman’s firing from some films, but it was well established in the business early on that when you hired Rosenman, you were getting the best –- and that was enough for many producers in the industry.

The bold experimentalism of Rosenman’s film scoring is easy to recognize divorced from the screen, but his work has the highly desirable quality of invisibility –- no matter how “advanced” his language, the music sinks right into the mood of the picture. This is part of the reason Rosenman’s work was so slow to gain critical recognition, at least in comparison to Alex North or Elmer Bernstein. For all of Rosenman’s achievements and his widely ranging methodology, it is hard to say that in his film work that he ever topped Rebel Without a Cause. It’s an old film now, but doesn’t feel like one, and a large measure of that success is due to the timeless modernism of atonal, jazz-inflected musical score, which sends the tragic events onscreen right to one’s gut. However, Rosenman continued to compose concert works right alongside his film music, which stretched into the 21st century. These remain little known, but titles such as his Dinosaur Symphony (1996) sound intriguing; perhaps if anything of Rosenman is left to exceed the ginormous status of Rebel Without a Cause, it will be found in the concert hall rather than in the screening room.

Kind Of Blue, the record that bonded Macero and Davis for 20-plus years. They had worked together previously, but this moment changed jazz history and the pair would continue working together until Macero left Columbia in 1982. “So What,” with its striking Paul-Chambers bassline, Bill-Evans arrangement and sparse, chord voicings, Philly Joe-Jones restrained kit work and the nearly hushed front line with Davis, John Coltrane, and Cannonball Adderley in the midst of all that space is arresting from its very first note.

Gil Evans and Miles Davis had worked together on two albums previous to this one, but Sketches Of Spain is undeniably their greatest moment. And while the collaboration between Evans and Davis is rightfully celebrated, Macero was the glue here; his sense of economy, texture, color and space works as a mercurial element that makes this album such a transcendent recording. This period in the careers of all three men would prove a defining one. Here’s a nibble from the album’s second track, Manuel DeFalla’s “Will O’ The Wisp.”

Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um is one of his greatest recordings. His band at the time included Booker Ervin, John Handy, Jimmy Knepper, Daanie Richmond, Horace Parlan, Wille Dennis and Shafi Hadi. Ever the mercurial persona, Mingus sat in the editing room with Macero to make sure his presence was felt. The album is a pillar in his catalog, as is another one they did together in 1959, Mingus Dynasty. The sample provided here is from “Better Git It In Yo’ Soul,” the joyous riot that opens Mingus Ah Um. (The set also includes “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” “Fables Of Faubus,” and “Open Letter To Duke.”)

Macero worked with the great John Hammond, Sr. on Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji’s Drums Of Passion in 1959, one of the most enduring recordings of African drumming and singing ever recorded. It has been almost continually in print since that time, and legend has it that it was Macero who wanted to keep the recording as raw and natural as possible. Here’s a bit from the title track (”Jin-Go-Lo-Ba”).

Incredibly, as if Kind Of Blue and Sketches Of Spain weren’t enough to solidify Macero’s place in the pantheon, he also produced Dave Brubeck’s smash Time Out. Unlike Davis or even the silent but imposing Mingus, Brubeck insisted on total control over every note in the editing process, but Macero’s sonic approach is still evident in the final mix. Two hit singles came from this record:
“Take Five”
and “Blue Rondo a la Turk”

Shockingly, in addition to the aforementioned albums Macero also produced Everybody’s Boppin’, the Columbia Records debut of the jazz vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. No other vocal group in America would reach the same heights of popularity until the Manhattan Transfer some 20 years later, but this trio did it first and best. Sure they could scat, but that was only about a tenth of what they did; here are a pair of clips:
“Moanin”
“Charleston Alley”

Garrett took his rejection like a man, albeit a man who can’t quite grow a mustache. This was our first “proper” elimination since Blake got axed last spring, and Ryan Seacrest did it quickly and cleanly, not unlike the lightning-fast method of removing a Band-Aid. The best part was watching Jason Castro’s wide-eyed reaction, as I get the feeling that he hasn’t really watched much Idol before. You could see him instantly register the intensity of Elimination Night, and it was sorta hilarious. I hope he stays with us for a long time.

The American Idol Show Choir made its first appearance of the season, and the dance moves seemed to bewilder Amanda. I can’t blame her, really — she’s probably never done anything like that in her life. The ’60s medley was forgettable at best, but I enjoyed David Cook’s high note toward the end of the piece. He’s got a smidgen of diva in him, which should blend interestingly with the rock ‘n’ roll side.

Kudos go to the ladies’ stylist for making Carly look great in a beehive.

Matt Collar: Nothing too surprising last night. However, as dweeby as Garrett “Mini Mutt Lange” Haley was, I actually preferred him to Luke “Save Big Money At” Menard who I could barely hear on “Everybody’s Talkin’”! I can’t say I’ll miss either Colton Berry or Garrett that much though, and I’m sure Colton will stretch his 15 minutes a bit farther with an appearance on Ellen — especially after he said he looks just like her. Simon’s comments to Colton to get a job and enjoy singing were laughably harsh, but I’m glad he’s bringing his opinions hard and unfiltered this season. These kids looked especially dazed last night and I think they needed Simon’s wake-up call.

As far as the girls go, it was also no surprise that sweet and pretty Amy Davis got the boot. I think she’s probably a better singer than her “Where The Pitch-center — er, Boys Are” let on, but nonetheless she was a HUGE let down. Joanna has an interesting, if small voice and is also quite pretty, but I just don’t think her talent matched up well with the other big female voices we have this season.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine:
The Girls:
Amy Davis: For as much as I crush on Amy, I am not surprised that she was the first female to leave: limited exposure on the show, combined with a horrible song choice, is a guaranteed ticket off the show. I’m disappointed, but I steeled myself for this outcome. Too bad she sounded better on Thursday than Wednesday.

Joanne: By all rights, Joanne should have been around another week or two as she’s a sweet, straight-ahead soul singer — but she was a little bit too sweet and straight-ahead to stand out, so she fell through the cracks. She never had a real shot at the top six, so this isn’t a huge surprise, but her quick dismissal leaves the sour aftertaste that she just may have made the Top 24 so she could leave quickly, giving other people room to grow.

Should have gone: Guess Alaina’s birthday pouting and Kady’s transparent loathing of the judges worked for them, as they made it through to the next round. Until they get kicked off, these bland blondes will be at the top of my “should have gone” list — cute with no charisma doesn’t wear well.

The Guys:
Garrett: You’d think that his blonde main and cheerfully dippy pseudo-surfer dude shtick would have made him a teen idol … and maybe it would have, if it was 1976. Instead, he was rubbed out with cold efficiency by Seacrest — and even if he didn’t sound that much better on his sing-out, it was hard not to feel that the kid might have deserved another week to awkwardly attempt to charm the nation, especially if Jason Yeager is still around.

Colton: A bigger surprise than Garrett, as Colton pushed at the opening and closing of Tuesday’s show … but he kind of deserved the quick dismissal, as his “Suspicious Minds” showed that he was in over his head as both a singer and performer. Cruel as it may have been, Simon’s advice to Colton of getting himself a real job is dead-on.

Should have gone: Jason Yeager surely is a nice guy and a good dad (even if he did approve that Muppet haircut on his moppet) but his “Moon River” was so cornball, it’s amazing that he lasted another week. Guess that proves that the AmIdol audience isn’t entirely consisting of tweens.

Heather Phares: The first elimination show of season seven didn’t just crush a few dreams, it also delivered plenty of cheesy, baffling and quintessentially American Idol moments. Dressing “the kids” in black-and-white ’60s mod outfits to sing “Needles and Pins” and “Spanish Harlem” felt like it was straight out of junior-high glee club. The premiere of Randy and Paula’s new video “Dance Like There’s No Tomorrow” was uncomfortable, and not just because Paula’s voice was so processed that it sounded like she’d swallowed a robot, nor because of the silly freeze-frame of Simon, Randy, Paula and Ryan at the end. Maybe Garrett, Colton, Amy and Joanne could’ve switched places with the judges and given their opinions on Paula and Randy’s performances? One improvement over previous seasons, however, was placing all of the “this was your journey on American Idol” retrospectives for each eliminated contestant at the end of the show — it really helped keep the night’s momentum going.