I haven't gotten around to reading Robert Christgau's new memoir Going Into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man (Dey Street Books, $27.95) but I will acknowledge that the former Village Voice rock critic -- specifically his old "Consumer Guide" (see it at robertchristgau.com) -- is probably the biggest influence on the way I approach writing what we used to call "record reviews."
Christgau has been doing his guide since 1969; his most recent was posted in October 2014. In those brief, paragraph-long reviews, Christgau didn't make allowance for his prejudices, assumed a reasonable amount of knowledge on the part of the reader and got to the point by any means necessary.
He made an art of the brief.
Lately I've been slacking off record reviews because I've had my doubts about their utility, given that -- for the most part -- the album, as a would-be cohesive collection of songs programmed and sequenced in a meaningful way, is nearly extinct. In the digital age, when technology has unshackled the individual track from its mushing harness (Who let the dogs out? The guys who brought us the CD, that's who), the single is king. Also, there's only so many ways you can dismiss the ephemeral pretending to timeless, or at least timely, art. We are not in a good place pop music-wise, folks, and I'm not saying that because I don't like Taylor Swift or Beyonce.
But truth is, I miss the immediate quick take, and think it's occasionally warranted. So maybe from time to time, I'll do some shorter critiques here. Consider it a nod to Bob.
• Clark Terry, Justin Kauflin, Dave Grusin, et al., Keep on Keepin' On Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Varese Sarabande). If you saw (or better yet, if you missed) the documentary Keep on Keepin' On, Alan Hicks' nonfiction examination of the mentor-student relationship between recently deceased Arkansas-based trumpet great Clark Terry and a young pianist named Justin Kauflin when it was released in theaters last year, you might want to check out the film's soundtrack, which functions as a souvenir of the film and an aural history of Terry's long and distinguished career.
Terry, who was born in St. Louis in 1920, started playing trumpet after he heard the Duke Ellington Orchestra. His first instrument was fashioned from material he found at the dump. He used a funnel for the bell, a piece of hose and a piece of lead pipe as a mouthpiece. His neighbors, horrified by the sounds he was making with the makeshift horn, pooled their money and bought the kid a pawnshop trumpet. He was hired by Count Basie in 1947, and he considers his time in the group "prep school for the University of Ellingtonia." He was with Ellington through the 1950s and joined The Tonight Show band in the '60s, becoming the first black musician hired to play on-air by NBC.
But Terry is much more than his resume. Dizzy Gillespie said he was the best trumpet player ever. Quincy Jones, who was Terry's first pupil and later hired him for his band, claims Terry was Miles Davis' idol. One of the chief pleasures of Hicks' film is the archival footage of Terry blowing (and scat singing, which becomes an important tool in his tutelage of Kauflin) on stages through the '50s, '60s and '70s. His tone and attack are unmistakable; it's not hard to see why his trumpet has been described as "the happiest sound in jazz."
Along with several pieces composed and performed by Kauflin, the disc touches on all phases of Terry's career, from his work with Ellington, Jones, Dave Grusin and Basie to Terry's work with his own small groups. A-
• Steve Earle & the Dukes, Terraplane (New West). In his late career, Steve Earle seems to have become Neil Young in his Geffen phase, circa Trans and Re-ac-tor -- with every new album he gets a new outfit. While there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this -- Earle's albums tend to rise or fall on the strength of his writing, no matter what guitar he's playing -- it is sort of interesting that an artist who rose to prominence in the '80s by dithering the lines between record store genres seems to so tightly focus his projects that they all sound like hermetic auditions. I'm thinking about Nick Lowe on the cover of Pure Pop for Now People (Jesus of Cool) -- I like all those guys, at least a little.
So this is his Texas bluesman album, and it's as musically convincing, though at times it's lyrically banal. But his band is tough and thorough, without any of the usual virtuosic flourishes that typically mar such projects. To his credit, Earle has managed to write a couple of songs that could pass for the work of Lightnin' Hopkins or Mance Lipscomb. Then there's "The Tennessee Kid," which is so loaded with mythic country blues hoo-ha that it could have been recorded by, well, anyone who doesn't mind being compared unfavorably to the Charlie Daniels Band. B
• Bob Dylan, Shadows in the Night (Columbia). Like a lot of my friends, I was willing to dismiss or ignore Bob Dylan's new Frank Sinatra album as Ol' Brushy Top's latest inside joke. But after I listened to it, it struck me as something more than a novelty or a valentine, and a much better record than his Christmas album of a few years back, which, if not exactly hack work, seemed entirely nonessential.
At this point, I don't know why anyone would feel compelled to either attack or defend Dylan's musicality, and the only front on which he really seems vulnerable is his taste. This could have been bad had it not been executed with such loving restraint and precision. Sure, it's a crazy, nutty way-gone thing, but it's neither bad nor easy listening. There is an expressiveness to the man's phrasing that rivals his model. What he lacks in clarity of tone, in sheer, soaring harmonic power, he makes up in a quality that might best be summarized as humble love. He damned sure respects the music.
I'm not to the point where I'd buy a Dylan album every week, but I'm willing to let him try and make one. C+
• The Decemberists, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World (Capitol). There was a time when Colin Meloy and his crew struck me as a nice but ultimately ignorable pop group, a sort of slightly more pretentious version of The Shins. This changes that. Lively, casual and yet deeply terribly affecting -- the record operates the same way R.E.M.'s IRS albums did. Insidiously, with a scalpel too sharp to sting. A
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style on 03/08/2015