Music
The Smile grew in stature at Roadrunner on Wednesday, the second date of its first U.S. tour. It didn’t take long for the band to flash shades of Radiohead-like intensity.
“What I love about H&H is they are hugely passionate. You feel their love and joy for this music. And they have such a willingness to want to go deeper, to rehearse.”
Thoughtful and intriguing, the concert reminded listeners that a lot of great music has been marginalized and all but lost to history.
The music comes out of an extended personal crisis; the compositions found here are a testament to a musician regaining his voice.
I put Joni Mitchell on a short list of the most remarkable pop music artists of the ’60s and early ’70s. Longevity of excellence isn’t the point here, just peak incandescence.
Damn straight, English singer/songwriter Beth Orton was back in the room – after a six-year absence.
I feel that I have lost a dear friend whom I met through profoundly heartfelt recordings and, in the form of interviews, inspiring self-portraits.
The advantage to listening to the recorded Unstuck in Time: The Kurt Vonnegut Suite is that on disc pianist Jason Yeager writes beautifully for septet: the textures he evokes in his arrangements are curiously varied and invariably moving.
Vince Guaraldi isn’t the heaviest of jazz pianists: he played at a time when McCoy Tyner and Bill Evans were omnipresent. But his tunes, his gently humanist approach to music, meant that he reached listeners that others couldn’t or didn’t.
Revelations continue: a composer best known for his sonatas and concertos (the Four Seasons) is a master of vocal music as well.
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