Disc reviews: John Mellencamp, Ted Nugent, Matt Wilson Quartet and Jacques Loussier
Rock/Folk
John Mellencamp
Life Death LIVE and Freedom
[Hear Music]
Three and a half stars
More and more with the passage of time, John Mellencamp is taking on the personality quirks of a character from a William Faulkner novel. Like, say, Bayard Sartoris from Faulkner’s “Flags in the Dust,”Mellencamp seems, on one hand, ornery, a coiled-up personality with a short fuse and a mouth full of fire, a tough nut not given to suffering fools gladly. On the other, he’s a deeply American romantic idealist, a liberal-minded man who has never shied away from putting his money where his mouth is on topics ranging from the struggle of the American farmer to race relations in the American South.
Starting with his first truly great album, the 1985 release “Scarecrow,” Mellencamp has been mining a vein of rich Americana, a roots music born in folk, country and blues, and one that handily prefigured the alt-country and No Depression movements that would take root a decade after “Scarecrow’s” release.
Though widely held to be a populist singer-songwriter in the Springsteen tradition, Mellencamp has in fact been honing a consistently dark, incisive vision of the American dream’s underbelly for several decades by now. Last year’s T Bone Burnett-produced “Life Death Love and Freedom” was perhaps the most simultaneously bleak and riveting album Mellencamp had tracked since the gorgeously understated “Big Daddy” in 1989. A convincing argument might be made that the record was the true jewel in Mellencamp’s crown, even if it didn’t sell all that particularly well.
This new live album shows just how much Mellencamp and his band — guitarists Andy York and Mike Wanchic, bassist John Gunnell, violinist Miriam Sturm, keyboardist Troye Kinnett and drummer Dane Clark—have invested in the Burnett material. Tracked during a run of concerts prior to the release of the studio album, “Life Death LIVE and Freedom” finds Mellencamp confronting his fans with stark, visceral and emotionally complex music that they could not possibly have been familiar with at the time. This was a brave move —though probably annoying to many in attendance who’d come simply to hear the hits. There’s a sense of risk-taking throughout and, as a result, an elevated air of excitement permeates the songs, which Mellencamp is doing his damndest to drive home.
Opening with the murky blues stomper “If I Die Sudden,” and including live versions of the songs “Don’t Need This Body,” “A Ride Back Home”and“My Sweet Love” that handily outshine their studio counterparts, the album documents Mellencamp’s current concerns—which essentially boil down to mortality and the transient, ephemeral nature of life and love. It’s all incredibly powerful, if stark and simple, folk music played by a crew of stellar musicians and led by a man who has managed to turn anger, remorse and disappointment into high art.
—Jeff Miers
Jazz
Matt Wilson Quartet
That’s Gonna Leave a Mark
[Palmetto]
★★★½
This is the most exciting drummer-led jazz band since Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition featured the likes of Arthur Blythe, David Murray and Chico Freeman in it. (Jeff “Tain” Watts doesn’t lead a regular band. If he did, he’d certainly be competition.) What Matt Wilson is doing with his arresting young pianoless band is playing tunes with some of the bruising melodic curves of Ornette Coleman but with the a propulsive fury that’s all his own.
Echoes of Ornette can be heard all through this terrific disc, which makes it one of the more exciting straight-ahead jazz discs to come along in a while. I don’t think you’d find too many other jazz bands that could make something as lean, laconic and fierce out of John Lewis’ bebop anthem “Two Bass Hit.” Nor are there many who could make something as head-clearing out of the Onion’s standing joke on journalism, “Area Man.”
Wilson’s two young saxophonists are tenor saxophonist Jeff Lederer and alto saxophonist Andrew D’Angelo — both tough players — and his all-important anchoring bass is Chris Lightcap. Everything ends in raucous comedy as the “Swayettes” and the “Wilson Family Singers” join in a version of War’s “Why Can’t We Be Friends,” which has that glorious combination of sincerity and satire you could find almost nowhere else but Lester Bowie andtheArtEnsembleofChicago.
—Jeff Simon
Jazz
Jacques Loussier
Plays Bach The 50th Anniversary Recording
[Telarc]
★★★½
Jacques Loussier’s fleet-fingered jazz Bach sounds a little dated, recalling days of “Switched on Bach” and Claude Bolling’s jazz/classical hybrids. But it’s still a lot of fun. Loussier, joined by bassist Vincent Charbonnier and drummer Andre Arpino, has become a classic in its own right. The biggest marvel of his Bach playing lies in how straightforward it is. He plays the tune through, and it’s funny how at home Bach sounds with a bass and drums. Then he might outline the changes, then fills them in. It’s all graceful and natural, which is high praise. His technique, as illustrated by an elaborate treatment of the Toccata and Fugue in C, is holding up fine. And I cracked up hearing “Sleepers Awake”—the famous obbligato laid down by the growling bass, punctuated by witty single notes on the piano in the high treble and low bass. Bravo to Loussier for still seeing new things in this music, after all these years.
—Mary Kunz Goldman
Rock
Ted Nugent
Motor City Mayhem: 6,000th Concert
[Eagle Records, two discs]
★★★½
Is there any greater guitar wanker in America than Ted Nugent? When he says, in this July Fourth orgy of disorderly conduct on his fretboard, that he has been playing some of these licks since 1958, our boy isn’t exaggerating by much. He will, after all, be 61 in December —and if you think that detracts a whit from his ability to inject primal rock ‘n’ roll rebellion into an otherwise peaceful world, think again. He’s as outrageous here as he has ever been. Be grateful, you weren’t on this concert’s security crew.
For his 6,000th concert, the “Motor City Madman” was in stupendous form, playing some of the hardest rock you’re going to find anywhere in America. And that’s where there’s something poignant about this man and his roaring, note-spitting, thunder lizard versions of Bo Diddley and Willie Dixon tunes. Once upon a time, it seemed to mean something that he came from Detroit, America’s home of Industry As Art. Now that Detroit has fallen on such horrifically hard times (and so many of the plants associated with it), Nugent’s antic impersonation of America’s rebel spirit almost sounds heroic.
But then, of course, as this concert ends, he’s done with “Cat Scratch Fever” and “Baby Please Don’t Go” and the immortal “Wango Tango” and he invokes the spirit of the buffalo and Native America, as if some-how he were the bow and arrow toting 21st century version of a James Fenimore Cooper hero. At that moment, our great screaming extremist turns into our great half-deaf buffoon.
You can’t play 6,000 concerts at that volume level in your life, after all, without incurring a little damage somewhere.
Still, God bless Ted’s damage — and protect his delusions, if that’s what keeps getting him out there to wail for us all. (Also available on DVD.)
—J. S.
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