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On The Score he rapped about the power of "The Mask." This time he's wearing hiphop's current trend toward minimalism, but he trips it up with complex thought and agile polyrhythms. If at first "Thug Angels" sounds like a Swizz Beatz ripoff, its lyrics satirize the materialism Cash Money glorifies, and the music ultimately explodes that camp's trademark syncopation into some real Southern funk. Every other genre he touches is subjected to this focused, subtle deconstruction. Entertainment Weekly's David Browne missed the point as usual when he complained that the lithe beat of "It Doesn't Matter" was wasted on another rich rock star telling us money doesn't matter. In fact, Wyclef raps over ska-heavy dancehall about the way money doesn't matter because racism and class do, whether it's not getting into a club because he's black or stealing the honey from the guy who's too busy on Wall Street to notice her.
Eventually, every one of these tracks makes itself heard, from an unflinching Diallo memorial to the pro-stripper Miami booty jam to the Mary J. Blige duet, which condenses Elvis Costello's career-long message?love is war?into a heartbreaking 4:19. And though I probably could've done without the Kenny Rogers track, at least the pot-anthem-cum-Sly-tribute is stoner fun. If The Ecleftic lacks the globetrotting grandeur of his previous release, Wyclef Jean Presents the Carnival, well, give him credit for getting just as far with The Rock.
Justin Hartung
The trouble began with the conductor of our House unison song. He was two years younger than I, and shouldn't have been chosen. I had the seniority, and my two elder brothers had both conducted Tom Lehrer songs in the House singing competition before me. I wasn't deemed suitable. Perhaps stories of me deejaying upper-class parties with a mixture of early Lennon and Yoko Ono solo albums mixed in with hardcore punk from the likes of Crass and the Ruts had reached the ears of authority. Maybe it was my habit of whistling and tapping the table while playing chess against opposing schools' players. Whatever. I wasn't to represent North House. That was final.
It was a shame. Lehrer was somewhat of a tradition in our family. It had started with my parents?my father, particularly, possessed a somewhat subversive bent that manifested itself in his choice of records. Spike Jones, the Goons and Tom Lehrer. People who poked gentle?and not so gentle?fun at authority and modern-life absurdities. Of these, the two 10-inch records from reluctant performer and math teacher Tom Lehrer appealed the most to me.
The sleeve notes to both 1953's Songs by Tom Lehrer and 1959's More of Tom Lehrer made direct fun of the artist, something unheard of back then. (Indeed, it's something still unheard of among most of his anal, self-satisfied, supremely dull fellow countrymen.) The back covers gleefully quoted bad reviews. Real? Who knows? It was impossible to take anything associated with Tom Lehrer at face value.
On the first 10-inch, Lehrer made gentle yet biting fun of so many traditions, both new and old. Football songs ("Fight Fiercely, Harvard," later adapted as the college's official song). Love songs (the shocking "I Hold Your Hand In Mine"; "When You Are Old and Grey," to which the Beatles' "When I'm 64" could only ever hope to be a limp-wristed antidote). Sentimental songs ("I Wanna Go Back to Dixie," with its almost daring mention of lynching; "The Old Dope Peddler," which was certainly the first time I'd ever heard drugs mentioned). The second album was even finer and more adult?mentioning Oedipus' familiar difficulties, the genocide of little chirping creatures ("Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"), s&m (the shocking "The Masochism Tango") and The Bomb (the nightmarish "We Will All Go Together When We Go").
The main reason I liked Lehrer best, though, was because my eldest brother possessed a songbook for piano of his tunes?and they were easy to play! You can't beat that.
Of the man himself, my family knew little. No photos, no accolades, just 12 (and later 11) songs that struck right to the heart of the American dream, or what we knew of it from my parents' collection of MAD, also bought during the 50s. We knew he was a Harvard graduate and had financed the release of his first two mini-albums himself, selling the initial 400 pressing to friends and family. We were even aware that a couple of live albums had appeared, 1960's Tom Lehrer Revisited and 1959's An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer. My parents, however, heeding the pointlessness of paying good money for a couple of albums that merely duplicated the originals, only with "coughs, snores, sneezes, impacts" added, hadn't bought them.
So anyway, the House music competition. This young upstart had been chosen over me to conduct "The Hunting Song" (Lehrer's caustic look at the hunting crowd, from the first album). I would have my revenge. Before we went on in front of a few hundred parents that evening, I hatched my plot. The first verse went: "I always will remember/'Twas a year ago November/I went out to hunt some deer/On a morning bright and clear/I went out and shot the maximum the game laws would allow/Two game wardens, seven hunters and a cow." To the end of this, the whole bassline (led by me) added the reprise, "and a cow," throwing everyone off. The conductor dropped his baton, the choir dissolved in disarray. Someone shouted my name. Three days later, my name was read out in front of the whole school as due for Drill?an archaic form of punishment it was unheard-of for sixth-formers to receive. The headmaster demanded to see me afterward: he informed me curtly that I was a disgrace to my school and would never amount to anything in life. Also, that I didn't need to go run around the playing field a couple of times, as that would only serve to bring the school into further disrepute. Sigh.
Lehrer went on to sell more than two million copies of his albums. He's also made the Billboard charts on a surprising number of occasions. Part of this was due to his brief association with the brilliant That Was the Week That Was in 1964; part of it was due to luck, doubtless. It certainly couldn't have been caused by media overkill. Lehrer all but retired from performing after 1961. (Rumor has it that he was so disgusted once the Democrats lost their strong base and factionalized, he declared that there was no point in writing satirical songs in such a climate of idiocy.) Since then, he has returned to the public eye only when prompted by the occasional children's program and mathematical conundrum. He does, however, still enjoy teaching undergraduate math courses.
All this makes the recent placing of the sumptuous Rhino 3-CD box set collection The Remains of Tom Lehrer, with its exhaustive and rather amusing Dr. Demento notes, at number two in the Amazon charts all the more surprising. It seems that there might be hope for America yet.
Everett True
Ryan's new album, East Autumn Grin, has all the stony clarity of a bad hangover. He sounds like a man who has just rolled out of bed with a nasty taste in his mouth and a dull recognition that he didn't have any fun, and he's not having any fun now, and he's not gonna have any fun anytime soon.
Ryan grew up in Chester, PA, and his music is colored with Rust Belt despair. Like Springsteen's, his esthetic is the working man's. Even when he's trying to sound hopeful, like on "I Hear a Symphony," he sounds convinced that the grind is going to wear him down in the end. His two-pack-a-day voice doesn't help either. A line like, "Most things are meaningless/the more you get to know them," can't really be sung; it has to be croaked. At the age of 28 he's barely older than Britney, but he sounds like he could be her crotchety sourpuss grandfather.
Which is not to say that listening to him is a drag. On the contrary, East Autumn Grin is a pleasure, just maybe one best suited to a rainy day. Stylistically it owes a good deal to the pop/rock angst of Springsteen, Westerberg and early U2. Like his influences, Ryan is an ordinary guy just trying to get by, torn by the moral conflicts imposed by hard times, pedestrian tragedies. As Springsteen put it, he has "debts no honest man can pay." In the opening anthemic track, "3rd of October," Ryan cries out, "But I don't want to lose myself/And I don't want to lose you," as if he's going to have to choose between the two.
Ryan has a moral conscience that is developed well beyond the average pop star's. When rock 'n' roll intentionally tries to be morally aware it usually degenerates into self-important pronouncements. Ryan avoids this pretense through self-disclosure and humility, bewilderment even. He confesses, "Disintegration I don't understand/disintegration of the heart/disintegration of morals/disintegration of common sense... I'm confused/but I'm tipping my hat anyway." These insights approach the level of the political obliquely, mainly by Ryan's reference to the classic American songbook. Almost unnoticeably he lifts snatches of "When the Saints Go Marching In" and "Camptown Races" in the intros to two tracks. The references serve to establish a link between Ryan's broken tales of life in America and the greater tradition of our country's songwriting, not out of a misguided attempt to subvert the supposed optimism of folk America but to fulfill it.
This mission reaches its highest pitch in "Ballad of a Limping Man" and "The World Is on Fire," which laments the media's tendency to exploit suffering and inure sincere hearts to others' pain. With its almost martial cadence, "The World Is on Fire" powerfully recalls the chastened hope of Leonard Cohen's "Democracy." Like Cohen, Ryan aims at a thoroughly realistic appraisal of the American project and finds it, for all its faults, still worth fighting for. The ragtag triumph behind lines like, "America you're beautiful, yeah you're beautiful/when you're sleeping," is at once sobering and almost approaches patriotism. "Ballad of a Limping Man" examines the soul of an individual who has realized too late his corruption by a consumerist society. "There are no new radicals/there are only brazen thieves/And all that could be done has been done/Countless times through history," he intones, and concludes: "I wasn't sure/But tonight I think it's safe to say/The only one thing we've got is our disgrace."
That sense of resignation is certainly pervasive in Ryan's work, but his vision is never cynical. It is worth mentioning that Ryan's underappreciated debut, Mayday, was an incredible piece of work, just as insightful as East Autumn Grin and very much worth purchasing, but you could hardly accuse the new album of representing a sophomore slump. Ryan is developing a singular voice, one that stands as an authoritative challenge to the standards of the genre.
Jeff Hanson
As far as jazz goes, Delmark was instrumental in fostering Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in the 60s. The spark ignited by this collective would light the fire for the Art Ensemble of Chicago. As a young tenor player, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre would join future Art Ensemblists Lester Bowie and Malachi Favors on Roscoe Mitchell's groundbreaking Sound LP in 1966 (also on Delmark). Humility in the Light of the Creator was his debut album as a leader. As the name suggests, this LP is wrought with spiritual themes, much like the work of Pharoah Sanders during the same period. It's a free-jazz classic to rival Alan Shorter's crazed, chaotic stuff. Upon its release in 1969, this record must've come off as so weird it made Trout Mask Replica and The Stooges sound mainstream. It's "uneven"?if you consider an "even" record to be one that follows a uniform pattern throughout. Like a lot of records in this vein, there's a lot of dead air. But there are also things like the Coltrane-ish breakdown on the title cut (the "alternate" version, actually) that prove McIntyre was one of the more promising free-jazz tenors to emerge during those rather fruitful years.
Delmark isn't only doing reissues, however; it's still an active label with many new titles under its belt. One of the best ones I've heard is Africa Nda Blues by Kahil El'Zabar's Ritual Trio. Pharoah Sanders guests on tenor sax, and there are many moments of sterling beauty here, most notably the late-night smolder of "Africanos/Latinos." The first time I heard it, it really was late at night. I was sitting here typing away when all of a sudden I heard this seductive female voice, courtesy of Susan Sandoval, mouthing what basically amounted to a soul poem, alternating between Spanish and English, as the music cruised with perfect nuance underneath. Soulful blowing from Sanders and great piano courtesy of Ari Brown make this the best Latin blues I've heard since Mongo Santamaria's Afro American Latin. Being a percussionist, El'Zabar keeps the whole thing moving to a slow, almost tribal, rhythm. Sanders, meanwhile, is a standout on "Ka-Real (Take Two)" as well as the band's version of Miles Davis' "Miles Mode."
Flamethrower's credits almost scared me: no saxophone, only cornet, which few folks this side of Don Cherry can play correctly, and banks of "electronics." These guys have jammed with Chicagoan math-rockers like Tortoise, and they're into the same electronic-led hum. But far from being techno trash, the electronics here are more like the "electronics" of the Silver Apples or Sun Ra circa Atlantis (yup, way back then). "A Lesson Earned" features wild drumming, as well as a good bass riff, which emerges just as the song fades into oblivion. On "Flamethrower," Rob Mazurek uses the cornet to produce an almost Anthony Braxton-style breakdown.
Speaking of Braxton, perhaps the highlight of this recent rash of releases is the reappearance of Braxton's legendary For Alto, generally acknowledged as the first solo free-jazz saxophone record. Coltrane had a similar outing a couple years earlier with drummer Rashied Ali on Interstellar Space, which led the way, but Braxton doesn't even need drums, just the "space" itself. This is full-bodied assault: notes, sounds, as pure emotion. Perhaps only Frank Lowe ever approached the same level of intensity, and that was with a full band. Braxton, whose works are often "difficult," established himself as one of the true pioneers of modern jazz with this sometimes abrasive, but always enthralling, record.
For Alto isn't the only solo sax record to be making the rounds again: Steve Lacy's even more obscure Snips has also reappeared, on the New York label Jazz Magnet. A two-CD set consisting of solo performances recorded in 1976 at the New York loft space Environ, Snips proves that Lacy's alto playing is a great deal more mellifluous than Braxton's, but no less intense. Lacy squawks and honks and performs momentary intervals of hot-sax breakdown, but his soloing always curves back to the harmonic center. This record is an incandescent triumph. Let its stirring finesse illuminate your own late-night introspection.
Joe S. Harrington