Month: May 2003

  • Carla Bley Big Band

    Bley represents a new and unique impulse in jazz—a desire to embrace big, messy, intellectual subjects. It’s not a natural mode for jazz, which tends to dwell on aesthetic detail. You know, art for art’s sake. But her latest album, Looking For America, sounds the clarion that jazz is uniquely equipped to approach complex issues…

  • Neil Young & Crazy Horse with Lucinda Williams

    Sometimes you’ve just got to see a show because of the rare lineup. And in the case of these completely simpatico artists, it’s a shame someone ends up playing in the invariably ignominious position of “warm-up.” Young, of course, still maintains a stadium-sized contingent of dope-smoking longhairs who need to be accomodated as they holler…

  • Jay Farrar, Terroir Blues

    That’s not a typo—terroir is a French term roughly meaning “soil” that has less to do with the current geopolitical bugbear than Farrar’s ongoing fascination with American culture and traditions. A song cycle about Farrar’s new hometown of St. Louis, it’s a solid piece of work that builds well on his earlier solo records and…

  • Annie Lennox, Bare

    Annie Lennox has not been terribly prolific in the years since she left the great ’80s art-pop duo Eurythmics at the beginning of the last decade. Solo, she brought us the sophisticated and occasionally wonderful Diva, and a dreadful covers album called Medusa, aptly named in that it turned the hearts of most critics to…

  • Radiohead, Hail To The Thief

    Great artists often reach an apotheosis in their careers beyond which they can do what ever they want. Radiohead managed that with OK Computer back in 2000, then followed up with Kid A, which was a low-rent, high-profile slumming in Aphex Twin territory, indulging in noise more than music. Which is fine—we’re as amenable to…

  • Walking With Cavemen

    This third installment in the BBC’s amazingly lifelike recreations of the ancient world doesn’t live up to the high standard set by its predecessors, Walking With Dinosaurs and Walking With Prehistoric Beasts, which combined cutting-edge paleontology and computer graphics to stunning effect. Which is a pity, because the story it has to tell is uniquely…