Listening Post /Brief reviews of select releases
Rock
Plain White T’s, “Big Bad World” (Hollywood). Tom Higgenson and Co. have left behind the emo-ish aggro-pop of their first three albums with the mostly excellent “Big Bad World.” The album arrives as the band’s bid to follow up the surprise hit provided by the 2006 nugget “Hey There Delilah,” a massive presence on both radio and iTunes charts that summer. What makes “Big Bad World” so charming is Higgenson’s obvious reverence for his power-pop forebears — from early Beatles to Big Star to Cheap Trick to Fountains of Wayne — and the way that reverence is translated into an affable charm on each track. When the suits at Hollywood Records first heard the tracks that comprise the album, they must have danced a jig and headed straight out the door for a 12-martini lunch: The album is 10 tunes in length, and all 10 could be hits. What separates the record from the rest of the pop market it’s being released into is the manner in which it balances accessibility against believability. In the process, it reminds us that pop needn’t be a dirty word, if its motives aren’t wholly cynical. ★★★(Jeff Miers)
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Lindsey Buckingham, “Gift of Screws” (Reprise). Brian Wilson isn’t the only Californian pop auteur who’s routinely flirted with pure genius for decades. OK, so Fleetwood Mac will never be held in the same near-reverential high esteem as the man who made us “Smile.” But since he joined that former hard-blues outfit in the mid-’70s, Buckingham created what begs to be called “chamber pop” on a level rivaling Wilson’s work. “Rumors” made him rich, but the Mac’s “Tusk” was his masterwork. And it’s with his solo work that Buckingam lavishes us with idiosyncratic brilliance most abundantly. The man can write a pop hook to die for, but it’s what he wraps those hooks in — weird and wonderful layers of acoustic and electric guitars, played with his inimitable finger-picking technique; warm and lush reverb billowing within and around the yearning-infused vocal tracks — that makes Buckingham unique. “Gift of Screws” is the man’s finest work since his early ’90s masterpiece “Out of the Cradle,” and like that album, this one runs the gamut from the wacky but familiar opus to the instantly lovable straight pop ditty . Throughout, the guitar playing is close to peerless. ★★★★ (J. M.)
Jazz
McCoy Tyner, “Guitars” with Bela Fleck, Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot, John Scofield and Derek Trucks (Tyner Music/ Half Note, disc plus DVD). A great idea for a disc and half a great disc. While the guitar has spent more than three decades conquering the world, McCoy Tyner has spent just as long avoiding guitarists as much as possible — on disc anyway. Undoubtedly, there was a delusion that he and guitarists didn’t belong together. This disc proves all of that to be hooey. Here, finally, is one of the two most influential of all modern jazz pianists (the other was Bill Evans) with a powerhouse rhythm section (Ron Carter and Jack De-Johnette) and a handful of guitar players who couldn’t be more congenial. Marc Ribot and John Scofield, in particular, provide solo voices with Tyner that are almost as “natural” as any impassioned tenor player. Less apt by far is Bill Frisell and, sadly, Bela Fleck doesn’t really belong with Tyner at all. Fleck is, unquestionably, a formidable musician with every bit of the melodic, rhythmic and harmonic wherewithal needed to position himself brilliantly as the fourth member of a Tyner quartet. It’s just that his instrument, the banjo, simply can’t be stretched far enough to cover Tyner’s modal thunder. The stuff with Ribot and Scofield, though, is terrific. ★★★(Jeff Simon)
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Nina Simone, “To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story” (RCA/Legacy, three discs plus DVD). It certainly took long enough. This is the one, the ideal Nina Simone set from all eras of her life presented in an ideal way, with ample entries in the notes for every single song. If you somehow avoided the barrage of Simone reissues and box sets to bombard the world since her death in 2003, this is probably the definitive Simone box set — a slim, elegant package almost as beautifully thought out and presented as selected. To some extent, the uniqueness of Nina Simone — jazz pianist, jazz/soul/“protest” singer, freelance melodramatist — was a function of her time, when to be so conspicuously “young, gifted and black” was virtually an explosive statement of defiance, whether one intended it to be or not. Add to that, though, a temperament so mercurial and sensitive and willful that one never knew what would come next, and you’ve got one of the great jazz etc. figures of her time or any other. All of the familiar selections from her career are here and a lot that aren’t familiar at all. ★★★★(J. S.)
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Spyro Gyra, “A Night Before Christmas” (Heads Up). Unless it’s really good, let’s have a ban on Christmas originals. “I hung up the holly/I put up the tree/Strung all the lights/Just wait till you see. . . ” Don’t give us that. Come on, the old stuff is in public domain anyhow. Luckily there are only two Christmas originals here — the rest is pretty traditional, and it’s all in classic Spyro Gyra style. “O Tannenbaum” to a guitar pulse and Coltrane-like honks. “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is the usual purred duet, with Janis Siegel and Bonny B. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is a little more upbeat and groovy than that boozy little number calls for, but it’s pure Jay Beckenstein. Speaking of which, you have to hand it to Spyro Gyra for being so defiantly unchanging. This disc brings back the 1980s, when Smooth Jazz was young. ★★★(Mary Kunz Goldman)
Classical
Martha Argerich, Music for Two Pianos: Brahms, Lutoslawski, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky performed by Martha Argerich with Yefim Bronfman, Mirabela Dina, Gabriela Montero, Lilya Zilberstein, Giorgia Tomassi and Polina Leschenko (EMI Classics, two discs). Argerich, at this stage of her career, is virtually unprecedented. Has any virtuoso pianist as talented and idolized and emulated as Argerich spent their mid and late-’60s devoting herself as much to chamber music and two-piano performance? It’s Argerich’s own Lugano festival that has made all this possible, thereby making her more like Pablo Casals than her fellow pianists. She performs the two-piano adaptation of Prokofiev’s “Classical Symphony” with Yefim Bronfman, no less, and Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” Suite with Mirabela Dina. Along with Rachmaninoff’s Suite unprepossessing no. 2 for two pianos and “Six Morceaux for Piano Four Hands,” things become major on this collection with Brahms’ two piano Sonata in FMinor (with Zilberstein) and St. Antoni Variations (with Leschenko) and Lutoslawski’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini (the same one Rachmaninoff composed variations on) with Tomassi. ★★★½ (J. S.)
