Saturday, October 30, 2004
'FIFTY YEARS OF ARTISTRY'
Tony Bennett
(Columbia/Legacy)
ssss Frank Sinatra once called Tony Bennett his favorite singer and here are 110 reasons why.
Tony Bennett supersizes his 1991 "Forty Years" boxed set by adding a fifth CD. The addition brings his '90s revival material and a couple tunes from his 2002 collaboration with k.d. lang aboard.
Singing standards is the rage now -- Tony, the caretaker all these years for the Great American Songbook, must be thrilled. But this treasure chest shows everyone, over and over, how these songs deserve to be sung.
'ENJOY EVERY SANDWICH: THE SONGS OF WARREN ZEVON'
Various artists
(Artemis)
sss Like most tribute discs, "Enjoy Every Sandwich: The Songs of Warren Zevon" is wildly uneven, with some transcendent moments alongside some mind-numbing head scratchers.
Particularly pleasing are live offerings by Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen on "Mutineer" and "My Ride's Here," respectively, and Zevon's son Jordan's take on the previously unreleased nugget "Studebaker."
But then there's Adam Sandler doing Zevon's most well-known song, "Werewolves of London." Why did anyone ever think that would be a good idea?
It's not that Sandler ruins the song: He actually sings it straightforward with no ad-libbing, but it stings of what could have been. Surely a more talented peer of Zevon's could have had a shot at it and done far better.
Equally perplexing is Billy Bob Thornton's throaty croak of the previously unreleased Zevon composition "The Wind." The Wallflowers, featuring another Dylan (Jakob), turn the entire project upside down with the most rollicking song on the set, "Lawyers, Guns and Money."
They do justice to the song, but it leaves the listener looking for equally pleasing versions of other Zevon classics that are missing like "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" and "Excitable Boy."
'SOUL SHADOWS'
Joe Sample
(Verve)
sss If you thought you knew Joe Sample through his work playing electric keyboards in the contemporary soul/funk jazz ensemble the Crusaders, you are in for a big surprise here. On his first-ever acoustic solo piano recording, the 65-year-old Sample returns not only to his own roots playing piano in the living room of his mother's Houston home, but also to the roots of jazz itself. Sample began his professional career playing acoustic piano in hard-bop groups in the '50s, but here he looks even further back into pre-jazz and early jazz styles.
The CD opens with a rumbling version of a song he learned from his father, a World War I veteran -- "How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm?" -- which was performed by the African-American military bandleader James Reese Europe, who is widely credited with introducing jazz to Europe in 1918-19. Sample dispenses with the need for drums and bass by drawing on such older piano styles as ragtime, stride and boogie woogie -- in which the left hand performs the rhythm section functions while the right plays and embellishes the melody -- on many of the tunes such as Scott Joplin's syncopated rag "The Entertainer" and Jelly Roll Morton's hot "Shreveport Stomp." Sample puts a more contemporary stamp on some of the standards -- for example taking Fats Waller's happy-go-lucky "Ain't Misbehavin"' and reinterpreting it in a more pensive, bluesy style.
In the past, Sample's playing in the Crusaders was sometimes dismissed as superficial as the keyboards gradually came to play a diminished role. With this heartfelt "roots" CD, Sample should make even some of his harshest critics see him in an entirely different light as a pianist.
'FUTURES'
Jimmy Eat World
(Interscope Records)
ss Jimmy Eat World's "Bleed American" was the feel-good emo album of '01, a record that displayed the style's fundamental sonic trappings -- and maintained the requisite dorkiness -- while piling on deadly infectious melodies and unusually hopeful lyrics. The result? A hit record and big-time attention for the Arizona quartet, which gave mainstream shape to a nebulous genre in which even the biggest fans can't agree on the form's definitions (and abhor the word "emo").
On "Futures," the band's fourth record and second for Interscope, the group returns to more standard territory, as vocalist Jim Adkins ticks off a litany of apparent emotional crises: breakups, let-downs, punting on love, kicking painkillers.
Like so many of those churning out today's brand of smart-rock, Adkins and company are wounded romantics at their core. Even at their most sonically vibrant -- on the 2001 hit single "The Middle," for instance, or the new "Polaris" -- an undercurrent of ache courses through the material. There's a familiar yearning driving such songs as "Just Tonight" and "Futures," but unlike traditional rock 'n' roll, you never get the sense the band could bust its way into catharsis at any moment. Instead, you listen nervously, suspecting an utter breakdown might take place right before your ears.
Missing are the vital hooks that carried "Bleed American" to widespread attention. "Futures" keeps the catchiness to a minimum, sleepwalking its way through at least eight of the album's 11 cuts.
'KATRINA ELAM'
Katrina Elam
(Universal South)
ss Here we go again: Another big-voiced young beauty gets a big Nashville push.
Based on this debut, Katrina Elam does indeed show some promise. But label honcho and album co-producer Tony Brown doesn't do the Oklahoma native any favors by surrounding her with Music City assembly-line country-pop that fails to separate her from the pack.
The songs, several cowritten by Elam, tend to have a generic, radio-ready quality. One Elam number in particular, "The Breakup Song," suggests that much of the singer's experience remains secondhand, and that she needs more life seasoning before that big voice has a chance to really stand out.