Listening Post /Brief reviews of select releases
Pop The Ting Tings, “We Started Nothing” (Columbia). For the expanse of its first three songs, British duo the Ting Tings’ “We Started Nothing” bubbles with pure pop excitement, of the sort we haven’t been treated to since the ’80s.
It may be downhill from there for singer Katie White and multi-instrumentalist Jules DiMartino, but no matter — the Ting Tings’ trade in dance-floor pop ephemerality anyway. Check the title of the album — that should tell you as much as you need to know about the depth of this music. It can’t tell you, however, just how infectious the opening triple-shot of “Great DJ,” “That’s Not My Name” and “Fruit Machine” is. It’s pop like Blondie used to craft, and if “That’s Not My Name” shamelessly plunders Toni Basil’s inane ’80s cheer-leading anthem “Mickey,” well, so what? Played as snarky electro- pop, it’s much more satisfying than the original. This stuff is dumb, but it sure is fun. ★★★ (Jeff Miers)
Soundtrack
Temptation: Music from the Showtime Series “Californication: First Season” (ABKCO/Showtime). Well, go ahead, pick “High School Musical” if you absolutely must. This, it seems to me, is the coolest cable- TV soundtrack since the music from “The Sopranos” — maybe better. The show, after all, is about a dissolute and wildly verbal writer burying his professional inconsequence and domestic chaos in a ton of sex, booze and drugs, not a bunch of murderous Jersey thugs leading a middle-class life out of the back of a pork store. So we’re talking about very smart hip verbal music here — Bob Dylan, Warren Zevon and Steve Earle, of course, but are you ready for Mexican Institute of Sound’s “A Girl Like You”? And, a particular delight, the three nasal wails by the show’s castmember Madeleine Martin who plays Becca, the hard-rocking tween who, in her backyard bruiser way, makes Hannah Montana sound like a phony-baloney Mouseketeer and Britney Spears sound like a running dog of the capitalist conspiracy. Here is a rock soundtrack album for wastrels, smart alecks, people who want to grow up to be wastrels and smart alecks and people who just like smart aleck pop music. ★★★ 1/2 ( Jeff Simon)
Classical
Gyorgi Ligeti, TheLigeti Project performed by soloists, Asko Ensemble, Schonberg Ensemble and Berlin Philharmonic with conductors Reinbert de Leeuw and Jonathan Nott (Teldec, five discs). In retrospect, Stanley Kubrick’s 1969 film “2001” had a more revolutionary effect on the world of music than it did the world of film. Not only did it make the opening of Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra” so familiar it could be used in TV commercials but it introduced to the world at large composers who were undoubtedly space age composers — Krysztof Penderecki and the composer who may have been the greatest of all the late-era modernists, Hungarian Gyorgi Ligeti (pronounced “Gee-orzhee LIG-it-tee”.) At the time, those dramatically slow-moving clouds of sound on “Lontano,” “Atmospheres” and his “Requiem” (“micro-polyphonic” music Ligeti calls it) sounded like little anyone had ever heard. Even with a world of familiarity with New Music and Amer/Euro music of the 20th century, they are truly extraordinary works. What “The Ligeti Project” does in full over five hours of music brings them into complex context with the rest of his life and work (he refers to “the bizarre and hazardous course of my life” whose beginning was spent dodging “two murderous dictatorships, first by Stalin and then the Nazis”). It includes neo-Bartokian versions from folk sources, quasi-electronic textures after meeting Stockhausen, and the well-known New Music pieces “Adventures” and “Nouvelle Adventures” (which, with the title of another piece, “Clocks and Clouds,” seem to encapsulate Ligeti’s music). A major presentation of a major composer. ★★★★( J.S.)
Jazz
Art Tatum, ThePiano Starts Here: Live at the Shrine — Zenph Re-Performance (SONY Classical). What do they mean “live”? Tatum — the greatest technical virtuoso in the history of jazz piano along with Oscar Peterson — has been safely and decisively dead since 1956 (he was only 47 when he died of uremia, after a hard-boozing life.). Well, this is a Zenph concert, which means that computer programs of Tatum’s performances were made from classic Tatum recordings from 1933 and 1949 and then reproduced with near-perfection on a great modern piano in live concert at the Shrine Auditorium in 2007 — every ostentatiously dragged thumb, every slurred prestissimo run, every superfluous lightning arpeggio. You don’t have to be a Luddite with a shotgun across your lap to deplore the Frankenstein world of modern recording technology. When he was alive, after all, fellow musicians would say “God is in the house” when Tatum would walk in to a club where they were playing. But, so help me, this is a case where modern technology can give us what nothing else can — a recording of Tatum himself in performance with state-of-the-art sound instead of the tinny technology of pre-high fidelity recording. It’s the old piano roll idea but updated in the computer era with truly astonishing fidelity. And some of it was recorded to be especially vivid through headphones. Remarkable. ★★★★( J.S.)
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Karita Mattila, “Fever” (Ondine). Finnish-born lyric soprano Karita Mattila is trying hard, but she can’t hide the bigness of her voice. On this set of retro-style arrangements of 15 mostly overdone jazz standards, you can tell she’s making a conscious effort to sing quietly and lightly, plus — joke! — she even uses a microphone. She is the hundredth opera singer to make me wonder why singing Leonora in “Fidelio,” for heaven’s sake, isn’t enough for some people. No, everyone wants to be a sexpot and sing “Blue Moon” and “Fever.” Mattila does better than most. The big band that backs her up is pretty good. But some arrangements are cluttered and annoying (in “My Favorite Things” when she has a chorus like the Andrews Sisters backing her going “La da da da da”) and in her high notes and the way she says some words, she can’t quite hide what she is. I wish she wouldn’t try. ★★( Mary Kunz Goldman)
