New York & Quiet Beauty
New York
Ron Kaplan
Kapland Records
Quiet Beauty
James Todd
Scottish Fox Music
Two CD’s that have nothing to do with each other, but there’s a common thread…
I’ve been trying to figure out why the vocals on jazz CDs sound different than say pop and top 40 and rock and all that, and it dawned on me that it’s most likely because they’re put out “au natural.” They’re not enhanced, and if they are it’s to make ’em sound natural and easy rather than full of reverb and electricity.
It’s a different feel, and if you’re used to the hyped up vocals of today’s pop, it’s almost too bare for the ear. So it takes some getting used to.
Ron Kaplan has a fun idea with his CD “New York,” in that it’s all jazz tunes about The Big Apple. Harlem, Broadway, Manhattan, all standards that give a nod to the city. I never much thought of NYC as a jazz town, usually for those of us in the Midwest we go for St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans, that kind of thing. But I’m sure in NYC there’s a bit of everything going on.
Kaplan has an easygoing voice, he gets around a song cleanly, and there’s no problem understanding the lyrics, even if you’re not paying attention. The musicianship behind him is excellent. Sometimes in fact, their skill is distracting from the vocals. Well not exactly that, but it calls attention to itself. The bass lines are creative and fun to listen to, the piano is light on its feet and some weird jazz chords deftly fall right into place. Trumpet, sax and clarinet add a bigger sound, and drums fill out the band nicely. There’s a lot to learn about jazz performance by listening to the band.
On the other hand, by the end of this album I was getting ready to hear something else. It all had the same sort of feel… maybe I don’t know this genre enough to get the subtle differences, but exploring oddities of instrumentation would be cool, a couple songs in a radically different style might not be what he had in mind but it would shake things up a bit, varying the vocal delivery to show off his singing prowess more would be cool, too.
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Posted by Jerry Rabushka at 11:35 AM
Pretty Blues
Pretty Blues
Antoinette Montague
Blues/Straight Ahead, LLC
Antionette Montague’s Pretty Blues is a CD of old time jazz & blues standards; songs that a lotta folks might thing “who needs to hear them again?” But as you know, the older a song gets, the more people are inclinded to play with it. The writer’s done gone so they play with the tune, the phrasing, and before you know it, it’s a whole different song.
Not so Montague, who makes her case by returning to the writer's intention... singing the songs as written, without embellishment. That way you can actually understand what she’s singing about.
If is, in fact, a bit of a shock. It’s like… where’s the growling, where’s the wavering, and I heard a voice in my head saying “this isn’t Billie Holiday.” Well, duh. It’s not.
Montague delivers with a clear-channel voice, and one that effortlessly hits its notes, almost like she’s talking and it just happens to have a melody to it.
On the other hand, there are times I’d like to hear her let loose a little more… a little more sex, a little more “feelin’ it!” We know she respects the notes, now… love them!
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Posted by Jerry Rabushka at 03:38 PM
Sigil: Volume 6
Sigil: Volume 6
Planetary Union
Checker Book Publishing Group
$17.95 US/ $24.50 Canada
review by John F.D. Taff
Checker is onto something. Definitely. The company has made a name for itself reprinting classic comics and graphic novels, many of them from the defunct CrossGen universe. And they do a great job of it. High production values throughout—bright printing, crisp heavy papers and a nice cover stock all come together in a great package that’s well worth the price.
And that’s beside the story and art inside. The story, written by Chuck Dixon and penciled by Scott Eaton, Dale Eaglesham and Fabrizio Fiorentino, is pretty engrossing. Volume 6 incorporates issues 33-38 of Sigil, produced in 2003, so if this is your first issue, you’re kind of dropped into the story. But Checker makes it easier by giving you an “Our Story So Far..” that gives readers an easy synopsis of the main plot points that have transpired. Basically Sigil is a space opera cum morality play where a regular soldier named Sam is gifted with a strange and devastating power in the midst of a crippling war with the Saurian Hegemony, basically Star Trek’s Gorn on steroids.
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Posted by Jerry Rabushka at 11:34 AM
The Way of the Rat
The Way of the Rat
Vol. 3: Haunted Zhumar
By Chuck Dixon & Jeff Johnson
Checker Book Publishing Group
$17.95 US
Review by John F.D. Taff
This is actually a reprint of six issues of the defunct comic book, The Way of the Rat. A popular independent book, The Way of the Rat ceased publication a few years ago because of the financial difficulties of the publisher. The Way of the Rat is a comic-book answer to Kung-Fu movies.
The story centers around a peasant boy who steals a ring that makes him a master of staffs. The theft of the ring has numerous repercussions for the characters, none of them good.
This graphic novel is engaging. The story is interesting, the characters involving, and the artwork is bold and rendered in vivid colors. In fact, it’s probably the action—conveyed both by the story and the art—that really sets this apart from other independent comics and graphic novels.
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Posted by Jerry Rabushka at 01:04 AM
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend
By Winsor McCay
Checker Book Publishing Group
$19.95 US
Review by John F. D. Taff
Winsor McCay was one of those talented people who often get lost in the pages of history. Wildly popular in his own day, McCay was an illustrator who produced a comic strip of the same name from 1904 through 1911 in the New York Evening Telegraph.
The comic strip was a wildly inventive, almost hallucinogenic cartoon, taking its cue each issue from a person’s dreams following the consumption of a “rarebit”—a toasted cheese sandwich.
As the book says, the strips were so popular they basically kept the Telegraph in business for a number of years. McCay used surreal, Freudian, sometimes almost Dali-esque illustrations and storyline to illustrate the various fads and angsts of the day.
And make no mistake, though some of the strips are topical and seriously outdated (several of them wincingly depict various African-Americans in full Amos ‘n’ Andy dialect), most of them are odd enough to have been written in the drug-induced ‘60s.
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Posted by Jerry Rabushka at 01:03 AM
It's About The Rose
It’s About The Rose
Karen Marie Garrett
This one’s pretty nice. I put it on and thought “O great another album of pretty piano music I’M JUST NOT IN THE MOOD" but Garrett transcends pretty for lost, lonely, and introspective. This works as “play it in the background for a nice dinner” but I can see sitting in a chamber concert hall actually paying attention.
I should throw in a caveat here, it doesn’t bother me but there’s basically two patterns in her left hand that alternate, there’s la la la laaaaaaa, in three, and an Alberti bass of LA la La la La la or La la la La la la. The song that forgoes all of this, “Café Expreso,” kind of sticks out like a sore thumb and you’re like “what’s this doing here?” It's happier & also uses some odd piano prep.
The left hand repetition was soothing actually and the melodies on top while simple, are very well planned, very… ethereal? That’s a good word. Occasionally a bit more adventurous than you think it’s going to be. It’s beyond simple “new age.” But I’m curious if the bass lines were planned that way, or perhaps this is a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.
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Posted by Jerry Rabushka at 12:32 PM
Lotus Land
Lotus Land
Gandalf
Real Music
review by Jerry Rabushka
Very little is cooler & more exciting, new-age-musically speaking, than opening a pack of promo CDs and finding a new release from Gandalf, the Austrian musician who took his “stage name” from Mr. Wizard of Lord of the Rings. He’s the cut-above in the new age world, “new classical” is what he’s been called by some, where you can actually listen to the music, or just have it roll over you in the background.
Lotus Land is in ways much like his earlier releases, but much different, in that you’re not going “oh it’s the same damn thing!” You can play it over and over, the same smooth rolling guitars, keys, English horn; a bit more sitar this time, melodies reprising when you don’t expect it, just very nice driving-in-the-dark or I-have-that-special-someone kind of music. Could be the orchestration, the fact that he uses a variety of instruments, it’s well thought out what plays where, it’s all lush and peaceful and does what it’s supposed to do.
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Posted by Jerry Rabushka at 07:57 PM
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