MUSIC FOR LIVING: Blue Cranes, Gidon Kremer/Kremerata Baltica, Mike and Ruthy, Rhys Chatham, Richard Thompson, Billy Bang

 

Blue Cranes
Observatories
BCM
www.bluecranesmusic.com
Portland, Ore.-based quintet Blue Cranes calls its music “jazz/not jazz,” a surprising coinage as jazz seems the least of what’s going on here. The group’s front line of saxophones reminds one of East Coast groups including the Ordinaires or even Morphine, and the other signifying characteristic seems to be a fondness for the repetitive ostinatos of minimalism and an aggressive rhythmic pulse drawn from indie-rock and other beat-based music. Not that I begrudge the group’s jazz cred; there’s plenty of swing and apparent improv going on here, on mostly original compositions plus a cover of Wayne Horvitz’s “Love, Love, Love.” Observatories should appeal to the more adventurous fans of the Bad Plus, as well as to followers of Bill Frisell and John Hollenbeck.

 

 

Gidon Kremer/Kremerata Baltica
De Profundis
Nonesuch
www.nonesuch.com
With his Grammy Award-winning chamber orchestra of more than two dozen twenty-something musicians from the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), Latvian-born violinist and artistic director Gidon Kremer tackles a dozen works by composers spanning two centuries on De Profundis. That could be a recipe for disaster—how could pieces by so many different composers possibly sit comfortably aside each other in the span of eighty minutes, especially when they are as varied and diverse as Robert Schumann, Astor Piazzolla, Lera Auerbach, and Alfred Schnittke? All the more credit goes to Kremer for curating a selection of music that speaks to the enduring yearning to be free through personal, creative expression, wonderfully exemplified by the performances captured by his group on this spiritually moving recording.

 

 

 

Mike and Ruthy
Million to One
Humble Abode Music
www.mikeandruthy.com
If Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan had modeled their sound on Fleetwood Mac instead of the Velvet Underground, Mike and Ruthy would be Yo La Tengo. That is to say, Mike Merenda and Ruth Ungar share the intimate harmonies of those iconic husband-and-wife rockers, but with a more roots-based approach, as one might expect from one-half of the folk group formerly known as the Mammals. They also share a gift for catchy melodies with the Hoboken duo, and they aren’t afraid to reach for pop glory on numbers including the giddy title track, which easily would have been a Top 10 hit in the early- to mid-1970s. Mike and Ruthy acknowledge their folk roots on the very Dylanesque “Be the Boss” and the bluesy “Covered” and “Who’s Who,” but Ungar proves herself a worthy soul singer on “Goodbye.”

 

 

 

Rhys Chatham
A Crimson Grail
Nonesuch
www.nonesuch.com
Ever wonder what two hundred electric guitars playing “do-re-mi” sounds like? Composer Rhys Chatham did, and so he composed A Crimson Grail, a full-fledged symphony for electric guitars (originally meant to be played by four hundred, but halved when the piece was performed live at Lincoln Center in 2008, the performance captured on this recording), sixteen electric bass guitars, and one lone percussionist. The result is a stunning work of metal machine music, Steve Reich or Brian Eno crossed with the Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth (or, possibly, King Crimson—perhaps the title nods to that group and its founder, Robert Fripp, who has also been known to gather dozens if not hundreds of guitarists in a circle to make noise—I mean, music). The shimmering drones produced here are evocative of the sort of ecstatic heights that rock guitarists such as the Who’s Pete Townshend and U2’s the Edge hope to achieve through mere volume and bombast, but the communal effort Chatham’s work relies upon, as well as his patient drones, gives the music a more spiritual, ethereal tinge.

 

 

 

Richard Thompson
Dream Attic
Shout Factory
www.shoutfactory.com
Few artists have been as consistently at the top of their game as English singer-songwriter-guitarist Richard Thompson has been for nearly forty years. Renowned for his scorching guitar work and incisive songwriting, both of which are given equal footing on this collection of a baker’s dozen new compositions recorded live before audiences mostly in San Francisco earlier this year, Thompson tackles Wall Street on the opening track, the acerbic rocker “The Money Shuffle” (“If you’ll just bend over a little/ I think you’ll feel my financial muscle”); communal transcendence in the haunting “Burning Man,” about the annual desert gathering by that name; and another one of his first-person creep tunes (“Bad Again”) in the vein of his classic “I Feel So Good.” Mid-program, several Anglo-Celtic-infused numbers hark back musically to his Fairport Convention days, including “Here Comes Geordie,” which pokes fun at rock stars with mutable identities.

 

 

 

Billy Bang
Prayer for Peace
TUM
www.tumrecords.com
Sometimes a single track on an album can grab a listener and make the whole thing worthwhile. Such is the case with the tune “Dance of the Manakin” on jazz violinist-composer Billy Bang’s Prayer for Peace, an infectious confection of Thelonious Monk-style funk (think “Bemsha Swing”), heavy on the riffing before expanding outwards into modal improvisation by pianist Andrew Bemkey as well as by Bang himself on violin. Trumpeter James Zollar, bassist Todd Nicholson, and drummer Newman Taylor-Baker fill out this quartet effort, which touches down in Latin jazz, Sun Ra-like explorations (Bang was in Ra’s Arkestra), and Afro-Cuban rhythms on the way to his own monumental, twenty-minute composition, the Asian-tinged “Prayer for Peace,” which ties it all together on a spine of Bemkey’s improvisational latticework, Taylor-Baker’s delicate accompaniment, and Bang’s sparkling musical vision.