TUNE HEAD: Short Takes

Patricia Barber
Mythologies
Blue Note

What jazz album this year could be more innovative, daring, and gripping than singer-pianist-composer Barber’s exploration of Ovid’s Metamorphoses? This thrilling ninth album from a spectacularly ambitious artist features 11 stylistically varied mind melds with Ovid’s characters—the result of Barber’s three years’ work supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship. Mythologies appeals in equal measure to mind, heart, and ear. Barber pulls American songbook, hip-hop, gospel, and various other popular idioms together with classically inspired song-cycle approaches, dives into her deep poetic imagination, and surfaces with a beautiful but also intellectually powerful work, here advanced superbly by Barber, guitarist Neal Alger, bassist Michael Arnopol, and drummer Eric Montzka, joined by some fabulous vocalists. There’s not a weak track on the album, but “Narcissus,” a crafty, sparkling love song, will quickly pull you into its sensuous still and deep waters, and “Phaethon” miraculously melds its insouciant syncopations with choir calls and youth-rapped shout-outs to endangered species. Say what? Yeah, take a listen. Mythologies is novel enough that the only way to start to fathom it is to start to fathom it. A dozen listens later, it will only grow more impressive.

Ann Hampton Callaway
Blues in the Night
Telarc

A feisty album of standards and originals, with the power-packed backing of Sherrie Maricle and the Diva Jazz Orchestra. Broadway veteran Callaway has a wonderfully hearty voice, tapered by intelligence and a deep musicality, and these thick, soaring arrangements serve her delightfully. You’ll get a chuckle out of her own “The I’m-Too-White-to-Sing-the-Blues Blues,” but she gets down to sentimental business on tunes like “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” and the artfully arranged Porter standard “It’s All Right With Me.” Her duet with her talented sister Liz Callaway on the combined “Stormy Weather/When the Sun Comes Out” is also a treat.

Doc Powell
Doc Powell
Heads Up

Guitarist Powell is in a mellow mood, like straight-to-smooth-jazz-radio-don’t-operate-heavy-machinery-while-listening-to-this mellow. He takes some acoustic departures on tracks like the finale reprise of Carole King’s “It’s Too Late,” and those, particularly, let him display his artfully polished phrasing and sweet ringing tone. But these Muzak-worthy arrangements relegate this, at best, to chain-restaurant background music. He deserves better but, as his own arranger, has no one to blame but himself.



Eliane Elias
Around the City
RCA Victor

This smashing Brazilian singer, pianist, and composer blends eclectic covers with cowritten originals in this revitalizing blend of Latin, jazz, rock, and varied world beats. Her Sade-smooth take on Santana’s “Oye Como Va,” the dance-club jam on Bob Marley’s “Jammin,’” and slow-dance sway on Beck’s “Tropicalia” are enjoyable. But she really hits her stride in the urban-bustling opener, “Running,” the strutting slice-of-life title track, “Around the City,” and her ballad “Segredos (Secrets).” I also loved the wishful “We’re So Good,” the flamenco-spiced “Slide Show,” and the longing “Another Day,” with its refreshing combination of pathos, a vital undercurrent of percussion, and impressionistically chorded keyboard.

Sound in Action
Gate
Atavistic

This free-spirited and talented trio—Sun Ra veteran Robert Barry and Tim Daisy on drums, and Ken Vandermark on reeds—pay homage to Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and Herbie Nichols, but also include five original tunes. They wail and thrash with gusto through numbers like Vandermark’s “Horizontal Fall” and “Red Cross.” Their ensemble nuance emanates best, though, in the quieter pieces, like Dolphy’s “The Prophet” and Vandermark’s “Medium Cool.” Their bop chops are in full display in Coltrane’s “One Down, One Up,” and Vandermark’s shares his lean, swinging, sing-songy clarinet in Nichols’s “House Party Starting.”

Stanton Moore
III
Telarc

Jazz-funk drummer Moore, with Robert Walter on Hammond organ, Will Bernard on guitar, and a couple guest artists serve up a spicy buffet of varied hot licks and cool grooves. The good news is that the trio play like one fine-tuned New Orleans organism, especially on shifty up-tempo numbers like “Big ’Uns Get the Ball Rolling.” The bad news is the sound gets a little monotonous after a while. My favorite track is the soulful “Water From an Ancient Well,” which provides some memorable counterpoint between Bernard’s guitar, and the duo of Skerik on sax and Mark Mullins on trombone, followed by sweeping amen solos by all three.

Charlie Hunter Trio
Copperopolis
Ropeadope

Similarly, some fine Orleans funky bobbin’ and weavin’ here, but with a more electric, psychedelic edge, especially in the title track. My favorites are the knowing electric piano-padded “Frontman,” the skulking cat-in-the-alley “Blue Sock,” and the trio’s syncopatico (if you will) version of Monk’s “Think of One.”

Jeff Lang
Prepare Me Well
Telarc

This Australian guitarist-singer-songwriter blends blues, root music, folk, and rock in this, his first American release, which includes re-releases of some of his Australian titles. His literally plucky virtuosity is evident starting on the second cut, the frantic “The Road Is Not Your Only Friend,” and his twangy Ry Cooder personality kicks in on the third, “London.” “Too Easy to Kill” goes into an amplified acoustic rock slide on a hard-hitting contemplation of violence. “Mr. God” is a trippy take on the creator as iffy job applicant. And another standout is the bitter love-gone-bad “Prepare Me Well.”

Mike Stern
Who Let the Cats Out?
Heads Up

The versatile guitarist is joined by a great, large, rotating crew for this spirited ride through Stern’s heartfelt, sometimes impish compositions. The sound is effervescent, punctuated by some inspired bubbly vocalizations by Cameroonian bassist and singer Richard Bona, as on “Language.” The prayerful, quiet nylon-string “We’re With You” pays tribute to one seriously ill colleague and to another mourning his wife. The overall vibe remains quite Metheny-like, but in my book that’s high praise. These are deliciously concocted West Coast jazz delicacies, served with passion.

Jamie Saft Trio
Trouble
Tzadik

After the Kabbalah-like parsing of Bob Dylan’s lyrics over the years, it’s high time that someone pay tribute to the beauty of his music alone. Pianist/organist Jamie Saft, bassist Greg Cohen, and drummer Ben Perowsky take that tack in this latest addition to the Radical Jewish Culture series. But oy vey! Though most of the group’s arrangements are unobjectionable enough, there is—as the corporate types say—no value added. You suspect that they’re rockin’ in their heads as they play along with the Dylan tracks deeply ingrained there, but the pleasure’s all theirs. And guest vocals by Mike Patton on “Ballad of a Thin Man” are downright cringe inducing in their stylistic self-indulgence. That is to say it ain’t only Mr. Jones who doesn’t have a clue. Antony, singing a too-precious soft-shoe-style “Living the Blues,” doesn’t fare much better. Trouble’s the word all right.

Maria Muldaur
Heart of Mine: Maria Muldaur Sings Love Songs of Bob Dylan
Telarc

Uh oh, again, you might think. But backed by excellent instrumentalists in sensibly humble arrangements, Muldaur takes what could have become a tacky vanity project and fashions a tribute in the best sense of the word. The originals lurk in mind, but her versions are thoughtful and deeply felt mental overlays. Her “Heart of Mine” is especially moving, bringing out its seductive vulnerability, seasoned with a slightly husky world-weariness and Cranston Clements’s elegant Spanish-inflected guitar solo. “Make You Feel My Love” also brings out the sheer, sweet ardor of Dylan’s tune. “I’d go hungry, I’d go blind for you, I’d go crawling down the avenue…. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to make you feel my love…go to the ends of the earth for you, to make you feel my love.” If you sometimes forget that beneath his many masks, some of them so sagely bitter, there’s also just a wonderfully tender balladeer in Dylan, this album will gently remind you.

Liquid Soul
One Two Punch
Telarc

The eight-piece collective piloted by saxophonist/composer Mars Williams packs a punch, indeed, in this latest acid-jazz burn, with tight horns topping grooves that segue from soul to funk to hip-hop, synth and studio doodads sometimes dressing up the package in a light otherworldly electronica. Dig, particularly, the wah-wahed, batty-based, percussive hyperfunk in “Sex God” and “Stop.” Great party tracks. Or well suited for iPod therapy as you gear up for work, unleashing your inner cyborg groove thang on the subway. Just try not to knock anyone down if you’re still shakin’ it in the elevator.

-A.C.K.