Listening Post /Brief reviews of select releases

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Hip-Hop

Robin Thicke “Sex Therapy” (Interscope) What makes Robin Thicke’s “Sex Therapy” so addictive is the way he bends the latest hip-hop styles to his will. Whether he is surrounded by the spacey stomp of “Elevatas” with Kid Cudi, the Dirty South-fueled “Shakin’ It 4 Daddy” with Nicki Minaj or the playful bossa nova of “Meiple” with Jay-Z, Thicke and his smooth vocals remain remarkably on target. He even makes a mashup of Eurodance rhythms and James Brown funk on “Rollacoasta,” with help from Estelle, sound as effortless as his Princely falsetto. ★★★189; (Glenn Gamboa, Newsday)

•••

Jazz

Harry Allen, New York State of Mind (Challenge) Once every decade—or even less often— a delightfully incongruous jazz tenor player comes along with the big, fat sound and pre-bop approach to standards that you’d hear in a swing tenor cohort of Buddy Tate, Chu Berry or Ben Webster. It’s as if Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane never existed, much less Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler. A few decades ago, it was Scott Hamilton, who came out of New England and couldn’t possibly have seemed a merrier anachronism. Now that Hamilton is no one’s idea of “young,” we have Harry Allen, a much better musician, in truth, than Hamilton and an even less ironic inhabitant of swing tenorland. If you listen to him and his pianist Rossano Sportiello here playing Fanny Brice’s “Rose of Washington Square” over Chuck Riggs’ rick-y-tick drumming on the hi-hat cymbal, you laugh at the time warp of it all. And then, when Sportiello breaks out into stride piano swagger, entirely without sarcasm, it’s almost as if they’re reproving, say, Sonny Rollins for all the sardonic acid he once found in which to immerse “Rock a Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody.” You know Allen isn’t kidding, because if you give him a gorgeous melody like Earle Hagan’s “Harlem Nocturne,” he caresses it with pure love. The program is the kind of “New York Songs” melange that the great pianist Dave McKenna would have liked, everything from Billy Joel’s title tune to a Cole Porter obscurity called “Down in the Depths of the 90th Floor.” Great fun—a kind of New Year’s Eve of a jazz record. ★★★½ (Jeff Simon)

Wadada Leo Smith, Spiritual Dimensions (Cuneiform, two discs). The great Leo Smith has been a leading visionary of jazz trumpet since he co-founded the epochal AACM and first started recording with Anthony Braxton. That he’s still playing for the sake of adventure and polyrhythmic explosion is wonderful news for jazz. Here, on one disc apiece, are two of Smith’s groups—his two-drummer Golden Quintet with the great younger pianist Vijay Iyer, and Organic, a nine-piece electronic ensemble with four —yes, four—guitarists. His Golden Quintet was recorded live at Vision Festival XIII in New York in June 2008 and you have to hear the polyrhythmic splendor of drummers Pheeroan Ak’laff and Famadou Don Moye to understand what thrilling music Smith can still make. Jazz, these days, is not exactly overpopulated with those willing to learn from Coltrane’s late music with two drummers. Organic, with just one drummer (Ak’laff), is replete with long electronic-tinged groove epics that Miles might have approved. It’s stunning stuff all put together. ★★★½ (J. S.)

•••

Classical

David Felder, Stuck-Stuecke, Memento mori, partial [dist]res[s]toration, BoxMan, the Arditti Quartet, New York Virtuoso Singers, New York New Music Ensemble, Miles Anderson, trombone (Albany Records). UB composer in residence David Felder has a sense of humor that runs like a live nerve through this record, ad-ding a needed extra dimension to sounds that would otherwise be alien to the ear. The sparks and spiky texture of one of the Stuck-Stuecke—good title there—appeals when you see it is marked “Effervescent.” “Mechanically!— incessant,” “Chorale-still,” “Bubbly”—the evocative words sum up the sounds brilliantly. I often think of Felder’s works not as music but as soundscapes. He seems to be trying to put something into music that cannot be put into music. A string quartet has to make a sound like murmuring, or dancing, or breathing, or bouncing off the walls. In “Memento Mori,” a chorus takes up the challenge and it sounds otherworldly, like the sounds picked up by ghosthunters at the Iron Island Museum. I kept visualizing the changing harmonies like rays of light passing through a prism. It all strikes me as more science than music. But still, ingenious. ★★★. (Mary Kunz Goldman)

Paul Fetler, Three Poems of Walt Whitman, Capriccio, Violin Concerto No. 2; Ann Arbor Symphony conducted by Arie Lipsky, with narrator Thomas Blaske and violinist Aaron Berofsky (Naxos) Back in the 1980s, the Buffalo Philharmonic offered excellent performances of then-Minnesotabased composer Paul Fetler, including the Whitman Poems and Violin Concerto listed above. Former BPO principal cellist Arie Lipsky now heads the Ann Arbor Symphony and has expressed his fondness for Fetler’s works in this new Naxos CD. It’s a significant addition to recordings of under-recognized, listener-friendly American composers. Fetler fits in that category, with superbly inventive orchestration, such as the bassoons that open the “Three Poems of Whitman.” The recorded performance is very good, marred only by the narrator’s emotionless traversal of the opening “I Am He That Walks.” The following “Beat! Beat! Drums!” and the surpassingly tender “Ah, From a Little Child” capture the spirit of poetry and music very well. “Capriccio” is a sprightly, thinly scored work featuring delightful flute and piccolo interweavings. And the Violin Concerto No. 2 is a captivating work that combines great expressiveness with quiet depth and textural delicacy, very persuasively played by Berofsky, Lipsky and the Ann Arbor orchestra. ★★★

(Herman Trotter)

Beethoven and Korngold, Violin Concertos, Renaud Capucon, violin, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Yannick Nezet-Seguin, conductor (Virgin Classics). It’s good to see the violin concerto by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, long underplayed because of anti-Hollywood elitism, is se-curing a place in the core repertoire. Michael Ludwig, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra’s concertmaster, played it just last summer at Artpark. Gil Shaham played it here in 2005. Renaud Capucon, with his light and lyrical tone, gives the work a loving and convincing performance here. A highlight is the Romance, which Capucon plays from the heart, the orchestra a shimmer behind him. He brings the same loving attention to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, stressing the work’s tender, lyrical aspects. ★★★★. (M. K. G.)

Schubert, Heliopolis, Matthias Goerne, baritone, Ingo Metzmacher, piano (Harmonia Mundi France). Goerne is admirable, with his virtuosity and big voice and commitment to the music. But it seems to me he is missing the warmth, the humor, the seductive qualities that are frequently called for in the kaleidoscopic Lieder repertoire. Goerne chooses repertoire that plays to his strength, and is at home in these 19 Schubert songs, centered on mythology, wars and scornful gods. He thaws a little in the lovely “Fruehlingsglaube,” Schubert’s nostalgic look at the coming of spring, with a catch in his voice that almost won me over. Otherwise the disc is admirable, certainly, but still on the cold side. It struck me that an en-closed DVD about the making of the album focuses on “Fruehlingsglaube,” as if they were aware that was the best performance on the disk. While it all takes place in a boring recording studio, it gives insights into the challenges involved. ★★★. (M. K. G.)

•••

Rock

Animal Collective “Fall Be Kind” (Domino) On this five-song EP mostly culled from outtakes from “Merriweather Post Pavilion,” Animal Collective’s most recent and most successful record, David “Avey Tare” Portner, Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox and Brian “Geologist” Weitz continue their delicate balance between creepy-crawly sweetness and bubbling, dark psychedelia. After all, if it didn’t mix the uncomfortable with the transcendent, it wouldn’t be Brooklyn’s Animal Collective. There’s not a cut here that will make anyone think differently about the Baltimore-born outfit, but it’s a worthy addition to the catalog. “Fall Be Kind” coalesces around the band’s sonic staples, leaning particularly toward Panda Bear’s dreamy aesthetic: anchoring polyrhythms, nether-worldly textures and amber-warm vocals with a few new tricks thrown in, such as the near-syrupy strings that begin “Graze.” “What Would I Want? Sky,” which uses the first-ever licensed Grateful Dead sample as a recurring motif, shows off the band’s talents at creating near-mystical transitions. ★★★(Margaret Wappler,

Bluegrass

Blue Highway, “Some Day: The Fifteenth Anniversary Collection” (Rounder) If you’re a bluegrass fan and you get a gift card for Christmas from a store that sells music, you might want to hang onto it until Jan. 19, when Rounder Records re-leases a greatest hits collection for Blue Highway. The band has been on the road since 1994, released eight albums and garnered a truckload of awards. And Rounder is celebrating the band’s 15th anniversary with an album filled with 10 previously released tracks (including one from one of resophonic guitar player Rob Ickes’ solo albums) and three new tracks. Band members wrote or co-wrote 11 tracks. The others are a traditional number—“Wondrous Love”—and Mark Knopfler’s “Marbletown,” a song about a graveyard. Both of those songs were nominated for Grammy awards. Although the band’s career dates back to 1994, this collection dates from 2000, the beginning of Blue Highway’s Rounder years.

Tracks include “Through the Window of a Train,” the 2008 International Bluegrass Music Association song of the year; “The Seventh Angel,” with Alison Krauss; “Seven Sundays in a Row,” with Sonja Isaacs; “Sycamore Hollow,”a Civil War tale of love and revenge. If you haven’t already discovered Blue Highway, this is a good place to start. If you have, you’ll probably want this album. ★★★ (Keith Laurence, McClatchy Newspapers)

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