Year: 2004

Despite a few lackluster albums during the nineties, we’re quite fond of Thompson’s studio releases—last year’s The Old Kit Bag stuck in our heads deeply enough that we wound up happily exploring further all the way back to his sixties work with Fairport Convention. But the deep-voiced king of British folk is really at his best live onstage, where his warmly sardonic sense of humor and improvisational gifts can come to the fore. He’s still one of the more innovative and nimble-fingered guitarists around, and has a fine feel for the surprising cover song—he might launch into a mock-serious version of Britney Spears’s “Oops I Did It Again,” or change the triumphal tone of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Woodstock” into a haunting, near-medieval lament.
Fitzgerald, 10 E. Exchange St., St. Paul, (651) 290-1221, www.fitzgeraldtheater.org

You might know them best as Paul Simon’s backing band on Graceland, the smash 1986 album that was many Americans’ first serious dip into the wide ocean of world music. But South Africa’s top choral group has too much musical grace to need to stand behind anybody. They’ve been championing the complex, lilting harmonies of Zulu singing for more than 40 albums, including the new Wenyukela: Raise Your Spirit Higher, which came out in January. Founder Joseph Shabalala formed the group after literally dreaming of children singing perfect harmony that he felt compelled to re-create in the waking world, blending Christian gospel with an African a cappella style called isicathamiya. The post-Graceland years have only cemented their status as South Africa’s ambassadors to the world, a rep untaintable even by less divine team-ups like their cover of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” with Dolly Parton.
Ted Mann, 2128 Fourth St. S., Minneapolis; (612) 624-2345

Still wondering what to get your beloved for Valentine’s Day? Here are a few hints: white linen shirt, a trip to a tropical rainforest, perhaps a new Jaguar. Still no idea? How about this: rhymes with “bling.” Sting brings the North American leg of his Sacred Love tour to Minneapolis before heading home for a European tour this spring. Sure, he’s gotten a little predictable in his old age after ten consistently chart-topping solo albums. But maturity and reliability must be some of your sweetie’s turn-ons, right? Why else would she still be with old, reliable you? Expect a set list peppered with more than enough legendary Police hits like “King of Pain” and “Roxanne” to satisfy you if you haven’t much bothered with his recent soporifics. If you’re lucky enough to score tickets to this already sold-out intimate engagement with the Stinginator (remember that classic SNL skit? He doesn’t always take himself so seriously), your precious will be sure to thank you with every breath she takes.
Northrop, 84 Church St. S.E., Minneapolis, (612) 624-2345, www.northrop.umn.edu

Six or seven years after being completely knocked for a loop on first hearing the traditional music of the tiny Russian republic of Tuva, we’ve still heard nothing quite like it. Throatsingers, as they’re called, can produce up to four notes at the same time, layered one on top of the other, rumbling like an earthquake or whistling like a mutant cricket. It’s unearthly stuff, seemingly more likely to come from Mars than the open steppes north of Mongolia. Huun-Huur-Tu is only one of several Tuvan groups who’ve successfully conquered Western world-music stages, and they’re probably the ones least influenced by outside genres and electric guitars. For our money, the best individual throatsinger is Kongar-Ool Ondar—who, if you’re new to world music, you might know from the Mervyn’s ad he did awhile back. But the four fellows in Huun-Huur-Tu are all masters of the genre and have the advantage of numbers—to hear the full quartet boom out together into a reverberating, rich kargyraa will send a tingle up and down your spine.
Cedar, 416 Cedar Ave S., Minneapolis, (612) 338-2674, www.thecedar.org

After 2002’s phenomenal Come Away With Me, one might expect Norah Jones to be weighed down by the challenge of following up such a debut…especially with that load of Grammys! But Jones claims that was never a concern of hers, and she describes the new album rather as a “snapshot” of where she is in life now and how she has developed musically. Feels Like Home, then, feels like the logical next step. Accompanied by her core group and backed again by the award-winning talent of “Don’t Know Why” songwriter Jessie Harris, Norah stays true to her roots while rocking out—at least, as much as a Norah Jones can rock out—on a few more uptempo tunes. She duets with Dolly Parton on “Creepin’ In” and covers tracks by idols Tom Waits and Duke Ellington, for whose instrumental “Melancholia” she wrote original lyrics and retitled “Don’t Miss You At All.” You can bet Jones will be making headlines again this year and garnering accolades from those in high places. But don’t hold your breath for any kind of reunion with her dad, sitar master Ravi Shankar. Norah’s still rising on her own star.

It’s hard to know why these things happen, but this superhip French duo is more a living museum of genteel new wave than the bleeding edge of ambient electronica. Their chic debut of a few years ago, the moogy Moon Safari, rode the crest of a kitsch wave at about the same time we started seeing those late-night infomercials for the Dean Martin Celebrity Roast video library. Still, if you have a special place in your heart for Switched-On Bach and Vangelis, know that there is someone out there still consciously tending that garden, even if they’re French. Smooth, light—you’ll be hearing this one at salons, art galleries, and gay bars all over town.

We’ve been saying for years now that the future of pop music is the Flaming Lips, but that may have been only because Stereolab appeared to be on extended hiatus. True, they’re Eurotrash, whereas the Lips are all-American Okies. But like so many great rock bands from abroad, Stereolab had a special ear for traditional recording methods and instruments, obsolete forms of pop, and an obsession with melody. If you can tolerate the heavy dose of intensely self-conscious “artiness,” you’ve got a keeper. We were worried that the tragic death of singer Mary Hansen in 2002 would shelf the band literally or figuratively—so we’re pleased to see this new disc.

The sixties were tumultuous enough here in America, but it was nothing compared to the institutionalized insanity of China’s Cultural Revolution. One survivor, interviewed in this compelling and chilling documentary, calls it “an age ruled by the poet and the executioner. The poet scattered roses everywhere, while the executioner cast a long shadow of terror.” Gangs of Beijing’s young people organized, took to the streets, and bloodily revolted against those they thought were disloyal to the ideals of the 1949 revolution—a bizarre national mania somewhere between Beatlemania, Stalinist purges, and the Spanish Inquisition, whipped up by Mao himself to solidify his grip on power by advertising himself as a kind of demigod. In a weird irony, the antiestablishment youth were fiercely loyal to the head of state. That frenzied drive to maintain the image of Chinese Communism as heaven on earth was all the more frenzied, it seems, because China’s leaders were trying to cover up the recent millions of deaths resulting from the catastrophic agricultural debacle that was the Great Leap Forward. Morning Sun would have been improved with a less stiff and monotonous narrator, but it’s a minor problem in a film whose subject is anything but dry.
U Film, 10 Church St. S.E., Minneapolis, (612) 627-4430, www.ufilm.org

Before he directed low-budget B-movies, Sam Fuller was both a hard-nosed newspaper reporter and a World War Two combat infantryman. So it’s no wonder that his noir films were especially gritty and no-nonsense examples of the form. Pickup on South Street is one of his finest, a grim and multilayered tale of Red Scare politics smashing into the criminal underground. Richard Widmark gives the movie its cynical core as Skip, a pickpocket who steals a purse that, unknown to him, contains secret microfilm that both Communist spies and federal agents desperately want. Grifter that he is, Skip smells money and doesn’t much care whether he sells out to the Russkies or the government. Since this movie was made in 1953, it shouldn’t surprise you that the Commies are so sneaky and dishonorable that even garden-variety American lowlifes wind up detesting them. But Fuller was too sharp and sensitive to let his screenplay go the way of a meatheaded Spillane pulp story. Thelma Ritter is especially noteworthy as Skip’s stoolpigeon pal Moe, who justifies her life of crime in classic hardboiled style by complaining that she needs to earn enough to buy her place in the cemetery.

George Cukor’s all-singing movie version of George Bernard Shaw’s much more nuanced Pygmalion was a smash success, winning eight Oscars (including 1965’s Best Picture), and one of the most commercially successful musicals ever made. It’s still a remarkable piece of entertainment, though it seems fairly dated forty years down the road. The costuming is terrific, as is Audrey Hepburn. Nobody was ever as good at playing sad lost waifs, and she’s perfect as Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flowergirl who desperately wants to escape the London slums by learning a “proper” English accent from the grumpy linguist Henry Higgins. On the downside, there’s Rex Harrison’s too-convincing performance as the petulant, sexist Higgins—and worse, the bizarre decision to change Shaw’s original father-daughter relationship between the two leads to an implied romantic one. But the make-or-break quality of a musical is the songs, and My Fair Lady rewards us with a solid set of classic Broadway showstoppers…even if to our tastes they do go on and on. (Yes, Audrey, you could have danced all night; you don’t have to sing about it all night too.)