Rock



Tom Waits



Glitter and Doom Live



[Anti-]



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Carnival barker gone stark raving mad; emcee for a tour through the freakish and the strange; doorman at the house of mirrors; Louis Armstrong after he sampled the magic Kool Aid; guard dog at the rusted iron gate of the junkyard.



Tom Waits may have started his musical life as a woozy, boozy singer-songwriter with a maudlin streak a mile wide — not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you—but he’s spent the last quarter century performing some sort of Kafkaesque metamorphosis. Captain Beefheart tackling a Kurt Weill opera, if you will.



“Glitter and Doom” is his third live album in a 35-year career, but it is far from redundant. The first, “Nighthawks At the Diner,” documented Waits’ hyper-caffeinated and half-drunk Beat poet phase. The second, “Big Time,” tracked the nascent stages of his burgeoning avant-garde tendencies. This new album is Waits at his performance peak, backed by arguably the finest live band he’s ever had, and now able to cherry-pick from one of the most eclectic and brilliant songbooks extant.



Not surprisingly, the album is comprised of live takes on tunes culled from the part of Waits’ career that kicked off with “Swordfishtrombones,” concurrent with his marriage to, and artistic partnership with, Kathleen Brennan. Brennan gave Waits all the urging he needed to get good and weird, and that probably wasn’t a whole lot. He’s never looked back, which probably annoys folks who think “Closing Time” and “The Heart of Saturday Night” are his finest albums, but thrills everyone willing to take the ride.



So here’s Waits touring after the release of the “Orphans” collection and his last album of new material, “Real Gone,” and he’s on fire. With son Casey Waits at times lending a John Bonhamlike groove, and multi-intrumentalists Vincent Henry and Omar Torez grabbing ahold of whatever axe is necessary for the job at hand, Waits howls his way through the likes of “Lucinda,” “Singapore,” “Dirt In the Ground” and “Make It Rain” with what sounds like twisted glee. The ballads provide contrast, as ever. “Falling Down” will knock you flat, “The Part You Throw Away” picks you up, dusts you off, then trips you on your way out the door. “I’ll Shoot the Moon” is a love song sung in the voice of a man drifting in and out of a fever dream. “Dirt In the Ground” is agonized existential de- spair, but man, what a melody.



Sampling a Waits concert in the flesh seems to have become an experience shared by only an elite few — not because tickets are pricey, but because the man tours in short bursts, hitting major markets, and then disappearing back into the soily thrift shop one imagines him residing within. So “Glitter and Doom” is as close as you’re likely to get.



—Jeff Miers



Jazz



Joshua Breakstone Trio



No One New



[Capri]



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Oliver Jones and Hank Jones



Please to Meet You



[Justin Time]



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“No One New — that’s me,” writes guitarist Joshua Breakstone in the notes to his new jazz trio disc. “To date I’ve done 19 recordings as a leader, as well as two as a sideman, starting way back in 1979 — that’s 30 years.” He’s never been bad but seldom as agreeable as he is in “No One Knew,” where he’s got in his working trio well-traveled bassist Lisle Atkinson (everyone from Wynton Kelly to Betty Carter) and drummer Eliot Zigmund, famously the late life drummer of Bill Evans and, after that, Michel Petrucciani.



“No One New,” then, is a guitar trio disc of no small art, grace and intimacy. Most of it is composed of originals by the group, but it’s hard to dislike musicians who can always find a reason to record Jimmy Rowles’ “The Peacocks,” one of the great tunes of the past half century.



As veteran a jazz player as Breakstone justifiably prides himself on being, no one active in current jazz can touch pianist Hank Jones who, bless him, is still playing with gentility and lyrical wit at the age of 91. The oldest and courtliest of all of Pontiac, Mich.’s, Jones Brothers (the others were Elvin and Thad) has turned out to be their survivor too and a justifiable object of universal veneration in 21st century jazz.



Canadian Oliver Jones (no relation) is, relatively, a mere stripling of 75. Their two-piano and rhythm section had long been planned, but when actual recording took place in the summer of 2008, the death of mutual friend Oscar Peterson was still fresh in their minds. Hence the “OP” repertoire and Oliver Jones’ tribute to him. I wish the disc had made it clearer who solos on which speaker, but Hank Jones plays a couple of tunes unaccompanied and is almost always easier to distinguish from the bluesier, more cliched and less artful Oliver.



—Jeff Simon



Classical



Dmitri Hvorostovsky



Tchaikovsky Romances



[Delos, 2 CDs]



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Every year at “Nutcracker” time, everyone across the board gets a taste of the romantic, Russian mind of Peter Tchaikovsky. We marvel all over again at his gift for melody, his vision, the knackhehasforcapturingourattention. This year has found Tchaikovsky himself ready for his close-up. A new biography has come out from Oxford University Press, unflinchingly chronicling his controversial love life. Just last week a new film turned up on my desk, irresistibly titled “Tchaikovsky’s Women.”



Musically, you are not going to get more intimately involved with Tchaikovsky than with these two dozen songs — “romances,” they are understatedly called — for voice and piano. Bass-baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, atmospherically aided and abetted by pianist Ivari Ilja, pours his whole barrel-voiced self into these songs. This is all-or-nothing music, as unabashedly emotional as I get the idea Tchaikovsky was in real life.



Dark and passionate, the songs can be brooding in that uniquely Russian way. “When roses quietly shed their petals/When stars grow dim in the sky ...” begins one number called “Death.” It paints a wonderful portrait of czarist Russian sensibilities, especially when considered together with another recent Delos two-CD set of the romances of Mili Balakirev. Generously, Delos provides translations. But Hvorostovsky’s thrilling voice is a delight even if you don’t know what he’s singing.



—Mary Kunz Goldman



Rock



Them Crooked Vultures



Them Crooked Vultures



[Columbia]



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If you’re a fan of heavy rock that isn’t lame-brained rehash, corporate spew or simply heavy for the sake of being heavy, odds are, you drooled profusely and with Pavlovian reflex when you firstlearnedthatDaveGrohl(Nirvana/ Foo Fighters), John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) and Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) were teaming to become Them Crooked Vultures. With a collective pedigree like this one, how could the band go wrong?



The good news is, the band didn’t go wrong. Not even a little bit. On first listen, “Them CrookedVultures” asserts itself as thefinestheavyrockalbumofthe year. A few listens in, it’s apparent that it’s much more than that.



It is Homme, perhaps surprisingly, who leaves the biggest footprint here. As singer, songwriter and guitarist with Queens of the Stone Age, he brought “stoner metal” into a new age, melding it to post-punk and prog-rock. That’s mostly what happens here, though when you have bassist Jones teaming with Grohl in his drummer role, well, you’ve got a low-end thunder to rival Led Zeppelin’s.



Suggesting that Them Crooked Vultures sounds an awful like a mash-up of the bands its members hail from is not too far off the mark. But with Homme’s odd, angularriffsandunexpected turns of phrase at the heart of the matter, this debut heralds the arrival ofabandwiththesound, the chops, and the songwriting to make a real difference in the world of heavy rock. Let’s hope they stick around.



—J. M.