By Steven Rosen

For music to go on living, it has to be reinterpreted from time to time. That can reinvigorate it – John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things – or be so corny and awful – Pat Boone’s infamous In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy is a textbook example – it can induce hysterical laughter.

Two recent album-length examples illustrate the risks and rewards of such an endeavor. The Bryan Ferry Orchestra’s The Jazz Age reimagines his Roxy Music and solo work as the repertoire of an elegantly swinging, 15-piece 1920s-era dance band. Ferry, who doesn’t sing or play on the project, co-produced with Rhett Davies.

As a singer with a romantically rumbling croon, Ferry long has had an attraction to the elegant compositions of the Great American Songbook – his 1999 As Time Goes By was an early example of a rocker doing an album of standards. On this exercise, you can’t fault the impeccable playing or the authenticity of the arrangements and period-evocative sound engineering (by Simon Willey), but are these really the right songs for this approach?

 Roxy Music’s art-rock – at least when it was new – was innovatively progressive and even dangerous. Here they become museum pieces. Hearing “Love Is the Drug,” “Virginia Plain” and “The Bogus Man” this way embalms the material. And many lose a key dimension without vocals. Even “Do the Strand,” which originally teasingly evoked the sass and swagger of a Roaring Twenties dance party, sounds less interesting. Ferry’s biggest solo hits are here – “Slave to Love” and “Don’t Stop the Dance” – with faster, brighter tempos that make them different, true. But at the cost of their mysteriousness.

 Ferry has the rep and clout to make sure a project like this is done first-class all the way – even the CD’s packaging is gorgeous. The interplay between strings and horns (with Martin Wheatley’s banjo emerging from the mix occasionally) is a pleasure. But overall, this material just doesn’t benefit from it.

  Desertshore/The Final Report had a troubled path to completion, but we can be glad its determined creators stayed with it.

 X-TG is Throbbing Gristle – the 1970s-originated British avant-garde art-noise outfit that arguably has proved a more influential and long-lasting contribution to contemporary music than its British punk contemporaries – minus singer Genesis P-Orridge.

 The group, which had reunited, had wanted to attempt a transformative interpretation of Nico’s 1970 Desertshore album, a tour-de-force of baroquely droning melancholy featuring her husky, longing, isolating voice playing off her harmonium and producer John Cale’s solemn arrangements. It had a sorrowful yet sacred quality that time has never diminished.

 In 2007, Throbbing Gristle privately released a limited-edition multi-disc chronicle of its attempts to date, The Desertshore Installation. But P-Orridge subsequently quit, so the other members – Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti – decided to start over with guest vocalists. But then Christopherson died in his sleep in 2010, so the others had to finish a project that now was as much a tribute to him as Nico’s album. It has been released using a name that implies being the remains of Throbbing Gristle.

 It’s a tastefully packaged two-CD set that looks like a breast-pocket version of the Beatles’ “White Album.” The second disc, The Final Report, is Carter and Tutti working with material left behind by Christopherson and is not directly related to Desertshore.

 The whole project is haunted by mournfulness and death. And that of course suits a Nico tribute well. (A child in Germany during World War II, she died in 1988 at age 49, the result of bicycling injuries in Ibiza. All the existential cruelties of life can be found in her time on earth, but also the ability of music to alleviate them.)

 The three Throbbing Gristle members generally favor an atmospherically simmering, ominous minimalism in their use of keyboards, synths, guitars, percussion and sonic treatments. This approach showcases the singers and underscores the beauty and the gravity of the undertaking.

 Marc Almond’s voice is wonderful on “The Falconer” as he explores both his low and high ranges. And Antony’s high singing is so swooping and lovely on “Janitor of Lunacy” that he injects an ethereal hopefulness into the song’s gloom, while X-TG’s accompaniment provides overtones of symphonic grandeur.

On two German-language numbers, “Abschied” and “Mutterlein,” Blixa Bargeld – certainly a kindred spirit to Throbbing Gristle – sings with a Brecht-Weill sense of enunciated importance. Tutti’s own singing is empathetic on “My Only Child,” whose gentle soundscape and choral-like harmonies is Eno-esque, while she suitably anchors the more industrial arrangement of “All That Is My Own.”

That leaves two odd ducks, both from the film world’s more extreme quarters. Sasha Grey, the former post-modern porn actress, somewhat tentatively warbles “Afraid,” and director Gasper Noe’s heavily treated croak winds up a footnote in “Le Petit Chevalier’s” no-nonsense repetitive arrangement.

 A final selection, an ambient original called “Desertshores,” serves as a way of saying goodbye to the ghosts that haunted both this project and Nico’s life.

(From Blurt Online, 5-20-13)

Read this post in its entirety:
Battle of the Cover Bands: Bryan Ferry Orchestra vs. X-TG (Throbbing Gristle)

PETULA CLARK – Lost in You

Album: Lost In You

Artist: Petula Clark

Label: The End Records/Sony Music

Release Date: April 02, 2013

  BY STEVEN ROSEN

 As much a surprise as finding a new album by 80-year-old Petula Clark (singer of the 1964 pop-rock classic “Downtown”) on a label that also features Art Brut, the Prodigy, Cradle of Filth and Anvil is the fact that it’s really good. Not just good, but contemporary in its production and (for the most part) material, creating a showcase for Clark’s reserved but convincingly involved voice.

 Clark, who as a child made her singing debut on British radio during a World War II bombing raid, went on to international fame in the 1960s collaborating with Tony Hatch on bright, catchy hits (“Downtown” “I Know a Place,” “Don’t Sleep in the Subway”). Before that in the 1950s, and again after the American Top 40 presence ceased in the 1970s, she had also been popular in France, singing in French.

 While Lost in You is an English-language album, her French experience serves her well – the introspective coolness of the chanteuse has an ageless quality and is quite becoming to her. It’s also a great way for a voice that understandably has lost some of its youthful range to still be expressive, through smart use of nuance and asides.

 For this project, she has partnered with producer John Owen Williams, whose own long career in the British music business includes production and A&R work for many younger rock acts like Alison Moyet, the Proclaimers, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine and many more. They have selected a savvy group of other collaborative producers, arrangers, players and writers, including Paul Visser, Steve Evans, James Hallawell (Waterboys) and Sarah Naghshineh.

 The songs are just right for Clark – subtly minor-key with a quiet beat, tastefully reflective string arrangements, stately piano and enough guitar to move things along. When they wander into ever-so-slight electronica, as on “Every Word You Say,” there’s just enough mysterious distance in Clark’s voice to give off a chill.

The opening song “Cut Copy Me” (by Naghshineh, Visser and Williams) is startlingly effective, from the computer-referencing title to the auto-tuned echo of her voice to the acoustic-guitar/piano interplay. It’s haunting and mysterious.

 She also does a harder-edged, dramatic version of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” that shows how her pop-rock version can work as well as Bettye Lavette’s recent soulful take. And on “Reflections,” a song adapted from Bach’s “Sleepers Awake,” lyrics about her childhood in Wales accompany the grandeur of the keyboard-and-strings arrangement. It’s a bona fide art song, and brings to mind how Procol Harum turned Bach into “A Whiter Shade of Pale” so long ago.

 Of special note is a new version of “Downtown,” her ebullient breakthrough American hit. It is now a ballad, her voice sometimes narrating the words as much as singing them. At the chorus, where the original song had her voice rise on “down” – connoting excitement – this time she straddles turning “down” into a minor-key note. The result is to make the song elegiac, a salutary tribute to a friend (the original version) from long ago.

 The album doesn’t need her cover of Elvis’ “Love Me Tender” or John Lennon’s “Imagine” – they’re musty rock-classic selections that work against musical relevancy. Still, Clark has shown that a good pop stylist can stay as interesting in her eighties as can a more “authentic” roots singer, with the right material and production support.

The Rolling Stones used to point to Muddy Waters as an example of how blues-rockers can age gracefully and still be vital. One gets the feeling a lot of young pure-pop singers will look to Clark the same way after Lost in You.

(From Blurt Magazine, online 5-15-13)

Read this post in its entirety:
Review: Petula Clark’s New Album Lost in You

Pet Shop Boys

Concrete

Battleship Potemkin

Astralwerks (www.astralwerks.com)

(This appear in Blurt in 2011)

By Steven Rosen

 In the better-late-than-never department, a double-live Pet Shop Boys album first released in England in 2006 is getting a belated U.S. CD release. Departing from their heavy reliance on synthesized keyboards and drum machines, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe used the BBC Concert Orchestra, under Trevor Horn’s supervision, along with a real drummer, to present their songs at London’s Mermaid Theatre. (It was for BBC’s Radio 2.)

 The Boys had already used orchestration on recordings, including then-new Fundamental whose material is notably featured here. They start off the concert with a version of the first song they recorded with orchestra, 1988’s “Left to My Own Devices.” They follow it with Tennant departing from his deadpan delivery to sing in his pleasant, high, near-falsetto voice on a lovely arrangement of “Rent” that Angelo Badalamenti did for Liza Minnelli on a Boys-produced album. (Tennant is scrupulous about crediting his arrangers.)

The duo’s romantically bittersweet compositions, lyrically sculpted and melodic even when Tennant primarily delivers them in a monologue, are perfectly suited for orchestra. They have an operatic grandeur that is sweeping and sumptuous, hinting of stormy melodrama but never bombastic or over-the-top (unless that’s what the Boys want for ironic impact).

 Concrete  features guest vocals on three tracks – Rufus Wainwright does “Casanova in Hell,” one of the Boys’ wryest lyrics ever; Robbie Williams sings “Jealousy,” and Frances Barber reprises the terrific version of “Friendly Fire” she recorded for Closer to Heaven, the musical the Boys wrote with Jonathan Harvey. There’s also an affecting Diane Warren composition from Fundamental, “Numb,” that’s remarkably free of the emotional overkill and banal sentimentality of her stuff for hit movies. The arrangement, with its slowly flooding strings and choir-like background singers, has a humbling, hushed solemnity fitting for the mature subject matter – seeking relief from life’s outrages.

 Wikipedia says Warren first offered it to Aerosmith, who have hit with her weaker material like “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” They rejected it. That says a lot about their taste – as well as the Boys’. Aerosmith missed a big thing – a better song than they’ve recorded in years.

Pet Shop Boys don’t have the hits anymore that they used to score in the 1980s (who does?), but they have become a pop-music institution (at least in England) whose musical standards are fundamentally, consistently high and innovative.

Battleship Potemkin is a more specialized release. It is an electronics-and-strings score that the Boys wrote for Sergei Eisenstein’s classic silent movie about the Russian Revolution, recorded with the Dresdner Sinfoniker with orchestrations by Torsten Rasch. (One track called “After All,” with a compelling lyric about Russia’s ruinous involvement in World War I, is performed live on Concrete. It is overall a successful effort, maybe not quite able to totally stand alone as a recording without the film to watch, but closer than many such efforts.

Read this post in its entirety:
Review of Pet Shop Boys: Concrete and Battleship Potemkin Albums

By Steven Rosen

 Kenny Vance and the Planotones

Acapella

LaPlano Records (www.KennyVance.com)

A couple years back, when I interviewed Donald Fagen for his Dukes of September tour – he, Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald took turns singing favorite oldies – I asked if he might be doing any Jay & the Americans songs.

It was kind of a cheeky question. While Fagen and Walter Becker got their start arranging horn and string parts for Jay & the Americans, they went in a vastly different – most  would say more sophisticated – musical direction with Steely Dan.

While Fagen said he would not, he also advised me to take a good listen to the work of Kenny Vance, one of Jay & the Americans’ founders. “He’s done some interesting stuff,” he said. (Vance had first hired the two, thus giving them their start.)

That was good advice. Since Jay & the Americans, the New York-based Vance – who is now 69 – has been searching for the dreamy romantic honesty, the origins, behind the schmaltz of the late-1960s pop vocal groups. While not a big name to the public, he has held varied, interesting music jobs. He booked bands during Saturday Night Live’s early years, even appearing once as the musical guest. and wrote the music (and provided Armand Assante’s singing voice) for the 1999 movie about a singing group, Looking for an Echo.

And he put together the Planotones to revive the unadorned harmonies and delicate, almost-ghostly vocals of 1950s-era urban, street-corner doo-wop music. He’s carved out a niche career doing so, the highlight of which has been his lovely modern doo-wop song “Looking for an Echo.” But “Acapella” deserves to bring him wider attention

Vocal pop music today, in the wake of Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Celine Dion, is a vastly different beast from doo-wop. Derived from both gospel and rock & soul  power-ballad singing, its mission is to impress us into submission with its extended, heavy-duty locomotive-breath swoops and sustains. But when the singer is forcing it, as many do, it’s often exhausting and charmless.

So reviving comparatively gentle a capella doo-wop is clearly an offbeat against-the-grain project, just as it was when the Belmonts released their now-classic throwback “Cigars Acapella Candy” album in 1972.

Yet just like that Belmonts’ record, this proves that a capella doo-wop is timeless. Vance and Planotones’ music director and vocal arranger Johnny Gale share the lead parts. (Gale produced, arranged and mixed the disc.) Their voices glide and caress the material airily, if not quite with total youthful élan then still mercifully without any of the raggedness that can challenge older vocal harmony groups.

Vance’s falsetto parts are exceptionally pure, be they harmony (“Mio Amore”) or lead (“Twilight”). The other Planotones, all of whom sound sensitively in tune, are Chip Degaard, Tony Galino, Jimmy Bense and Kurt “Frenchy” Yahjian.

Aaron Neville also has released a recent tribute to older vocal music, “My True Story” It’s neither a capella nor pure doo wop, covering as it does a lot of the earlier, harder-edged and more adult-oriented and –arranged R&B of the 1950s and 1960s, like “Money Honey,” “Ruby Baby,” “This Magic Moment,” “Work With Me Annie” and more.

Fine songs those, but this is the deeper and more emotional musical experience. It explores the innocence at the heart of classic doo wop, without succumbing to a post-modern dissection of it. That’s hard to do, like bouncing on a spider web, and it’s amazing how well Vance’s Planotones pull it off. Not just the singing parts, but the way they supply stomping percussion (the Stereos’ “I Really Love You”) and finger-snapping (the Cadillacs’ “Zoom”).

The ballads and mid-tempo tunes are sublime, like “Twilight” (originally by the Paragons), “Jeannie” (the Unique Teens), “Diamonds and Pearls” (the Paradons) and “Please Be My Love Tonight” (the Charades).

Each of those groups’ names is, indeed, a diamond or a pearl – like a little imagist poem or haiku. And that brings up my one complaint. This record, like Vance’s recent Christmas CD, is self-released and presumably done on a tight budget. While the liner notes are sufficient, listing the songs and writers, they don’t mention the songs’ histories, or why Vance chose them. If you like the music, you’ll long for that while you’re listening.

But what sweet listening it is.

(This first appeared on the Blurt webzine site, 3-11-13)

Read this post in its entirety:
Kenny Vance’s New Tribute to 1950s Vocal Harmony Music

By Steven Rosen

Under Steve Kemple, music reference librarian in the Popular Library, downtown’s Main Library has begun doing some fascinating free programming to highlight the depth of its music collection — and just music in general. It already has an Experimental Music at the Library series, featuring live events such as a band from Oakland (Horaflora) that plays grapefruit, electric toothbrushes and balloons. At 7 p.m. on March 20, Hadron Collider will pair psychedelic light projections with feedback and drone noises.

 But coming up first, the spotlight is on another of Kemple’s ongoing music programs at the Main Library — Listen to This! — for which an audience is invited to listen to and discuss albums from the Library’s collection.

Past sessions have been devoted to Iranian music and Marvin Gaye. Next Wednesday, March 13,  from 7-8:30 p.m., Listen to This! features the traditional music of North Korea. So far, Kemple has only found one relevant album in the collection — North Korean Folk Songs — but it’s a good one. And the hunt is on for more.

No word if Dennis Rodman will attend with or without his new best friend, but you’re sure to have a good time — and become well-versed on North Korean music — if you do. The program will be held in the first-floor Popular Music Lounge.

Kemple’s creative programming was just written up in the Library Journal.



From http://www.citybeat.com

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Cincinnati Library to Spotlight North Korean Music

Haden. The name’s Haden. Charlie’s a cappella-fetishist daughter Petra Haden follows up her acclaimed Who Sell Out re-creation with a tribute to Hollywood soundtracks.

Petra Haden, whose new album is Petra Goes to the Movies, has a name for the kind of music she makes – and makes better than anyone else right now. It’s called “a cappella voice collages” (according to her record label, Anti-) and Goes to the Movies is a tour de force of it.

Taking mostly instrumental themes from her favorite films, such as Psycho, A Fistful of Dollars, The Social Network, Superman, and Fellini’s 8½, she has arranged them entirely for voice. Patiently overdubbing, she wordlessly “sings” the melody – sometimes by humming, sometimes by using choral and group-harmony vocal techniques – atop her masterful vocal mimicking of instruments. She does actually sing lyrics over her own vocal accompaniment on one a cappella number – “Goldfinger.” And there are three tracks on which she sings the lyrics of movie ballads while jazz musicians (including her father, bassist Charlie Haden, who recently won a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2013 Grammys) assist her.

But the pure collages are the standouts. They not only showcase the beauty of her voice and depth of her imagination, but also remind that a voice is a musical instrument capable of varied and inventive sounds. It’s not just a vessel to carry words. (She is indeed a lovely interpretive singer who coaxes a dreamy sense of reassurance out of the lyrics to Bagdad Café’s “Calling You” and Tootsie’s “It Might Be You.”)

Goes to the Movies follows several other heralded related projects – her largely a cappella first solo album, 1999′s Imaginaryland; her intimate 2003 project of covers with jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, and 2005′s landmark solo a cappella version of The Who Sell Out.

“I love singing and recording, and doing multi-tracks on my voice,” says Haden, during a recent telephone interview. “When Mike Watt gave me the idea to do the Who Sell Out record, it inspired me even more to record my other favorite music. I really enjoy it.”

Goes to the Movies came about because, in addition to loving to sing, Haden also loves movies. And she found the scores and title themes by famous composers like Bernard Herrmann (Psycho, Taxi Driver), Lalo Schifrin (Cool Hand Luke), Ennio Morricone (A Fistful of Dollars, Cinema Paradiso) and Nino Rota (“Carlotta’s Galop” from 8½) as moving as the films themselves.

“I’ve been listening to Herrmann since I was a kid, and Morricone the same,” she says. “I remember first watching these movies and immediately gravitating toward the music. And I remember thinking one day, ‘I’m going to play this in an orchestra or sing this.’ It’s like living a dream now that I finally did it and I’m really happy with it.”

Haden, 41, is one of bassist Haden’s three triplet daughters. In addition to singing on solo projects, she plays violin and has been involved with several rock bands, most notably That Dog with bassist/vocalist sister Rachel. She also is an active collaborator and session/studio singer – her a cappella rendition of the Bellamy Brothers’ “Let Your Love Flow” for a Toyota Prius TV commercial in 2009 was enormously popular. The Haden Triplets (also including sister Tanya) currently are recording an album of country songs for producer Ry Cooder.

Haden attributes her interest in chorale music to a love of the Bulgarian State Radio Vocal Choir, whose albums became popular in the U.S. when issued in the late 1980s, followed by a memorable tour. “I listened to them on my Walkman on my way to high school,” Haden says. “That always inspired me.” Another inspiration has been Steve Reich’s 1981 Tehillim, a contemporary classical work based on Hebrew Psalms and arranged for female voices. “It’s so beautiful I would just memorize it,” she says.

This new project has a fundamental difference with Who Sell Out, Haden explains. “When I did the Who record, I was really nervous about singing the guitar parts and getting all the chords right. I wanted to sound like a guitar and that’s how I approached recording (it). But for the Goes to the Movies album, there aren’t really solos that stick out. There are just string sections and horns.”

So this project actually was easier for her, she says. “Something like Psycho was a little challenging because it has lots of different notes and I wanted to get it right. And also ‘Carlotta’s Galop’ from 8½ required a lot of stopping and going back. I really wanted it to be perfect. Justin Burnett (co-producer with Haden) was just great working with, because he really gets my brain. And the same with Woody (Jackson), who recorded ‘Carlotta’s Galop.’ They were patient because they knew at some point I would get it eventually.”

Haden tried to hit all the notes naturally. But Burnett did have to raise the pitch a couple times, to achieve the high-violin sound on Cinema Paradiso and at the scary end of Psycho.

On “It Might Be You,” written by Dave Grusin and Marilyn & Alan Bergman, Haden sings lyrics straightforwardly while Frisell accompanies her on quiet, spare guitar. Brad Mehldau provides piano for Haden’s multi-tracked voice on “Calling You,” written by Robert Telson. And both Frisell and her father join for “This Is Not America,” the darkly ominous ballad – written by Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays and David Bowie – from the espionage thriller The Falcon and the Snowman.

“When I made my list of songs, I knew ‘This Is Not America’ was one I really wanted to do,” Haden says. “And my dad asked, ‘Can I play on it?’ (His Liberation Music Orchestra has recorded it.) So it was perfect.”

The hardest song for Haden to sing was the John Barry-composed title song for “Goldfinger,” since Shirley Bassey’s booming, brassy version has been seared into pop culture’s consciousness ever since first recorded in 1965. Haden sings it in a lower register than is normal for her, because she sensed that it sounded right. But it was difficult to arrive at that decision.

“That took me a long time to do,” Haden explains. “I’d sound like an idiot if I tried to sing like Shirley Bassey. I wasn’t satisfied with my lead vocal and I kept changing it. I even did a version as Edith Bucker just for fun. I was driving myself crazy and I thought, ‘Can I just get this out of my system?’ Finally I thought I’m going to sing this really mellow and relax, because I sing better when I’m not nervous.”

Someday, maybe, that Edith Bunker version will be released.

ELECTRIC PRUNES: The Complete Reprise Singles
By Steven Rosen
From Blurt 02/15/2013

It says something about how wacked-out the psychedelic 1960s were that not only could there be a rock band with the ridiculous name of the Electric Prunes, but that name was considered far more of an asset than the actual individuals who made the music using it. What a strange tale, and the 24 tracks and companion booklet of The Complete Reprise Singles reveal a sizeable but not complete portion of it.

It’s hard to figure out from the booklet the exact line-up changes that rocked the Prunes during its short heyday, 1966-1969. (A Prunes with original members had reunited during the last decade, but seems to have stopped following the death of bassist Mark Tulin.) It’s too bad the package didn’t include a personnel chart. Wikipedia lists the members of the original or “classic” Prunes (the band behind the 1966 garage-rock chart topper “I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night”) as singer James Lowe, guitarist Ken Williams, bassist Tulin, rhythm guitarist Jim Spagnola, and drummer Preston Ritter (who both replaced and later was replaced by Michael Weakley).

Coming out of the San Fernando Valley, the young musicians impressed Reprise producer Dave Hassinger, who requested a commercial band name. Incredibly, this is what they came up with. Yes, 1966 was the year of “Mellow Yellow” and bananas were cool, but prunes? Hassinger, who stayed active shepherding the band’s career, wound up having more to do with the fate of the Prunes name than did the original band members.

The songs from this incarnation of the Prunes are excellent garage-rock, very Stones-influenced (“Get Me to the World on Time” echoes “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?”) with some of the Yardbirds’ stomping flair. “Ain’t It Hard” has such cool attitudinal lyrics as “Well you’re mother’s in the bathroom with acid in her head/and there’s no place to go cause the town’s all dead.”

“Too Much to Dream,” which reached Number 11 on the Top 40 in 1967, is still one of the best three-minute rock songs ever. A buzzy, fuzzy opening guitar riff directs the song toward the scary, minor-key melancholia of the opening verse. A thunderbolt drum beat kicks off the chorus and Lowe shouts out “Then came the dawn/And you were gone, gone, gone.” The song ends with sighs, or tokes, trailing off – a complete trip, downright operatic.

Listening to one of “Dream’s” follow-ups, the catchy “Are You Lovin’ Me More (But Enjoying It Less),” you might be struck about how un-macho it is for a mid-1960s garage-rock song. Asking the girl how she feels about the lovemaking? From Dylan to the Syndicate of Sound (“Little Girl”), this strain of rock tended to sneer at a girl’s feelings, not console her. Garage-rock was a man’s world.

Well, surprise, surprise. “Are You Lovin’ Me More” was written by one Annette Tucker, who – along with Nancy Mantz – also wrote “Too Much to Dream” and “Get Me to the World.” (She wrote “Are You Lovin’ Me More” with Jill Jones.) Further, the liner notes state, the Prunes rearranged “Dream” from a slow, “Vegas lounge-act” demo. That needs to be heard. And Tucker, Mantz and Jones deserve wider recognition from 1960s-rock fans. (They wrote other songs for the Prunes.)

As a rock band, a cohesive unit, the Prunes probably peaked with these songs and their first album – just called The Electric Prunes – from 1967. The singles from the period of the second album, 1967′s Underground, start to force the psychedelia. Still, “The Great Banana Hoax” has its anarchic charms and “You’ve Never Had It Better” has the trippy pop-rock swagger of a band who became the Prunes’ fruit-named rivals, Strawberry Alarm Clock.

It was time for a change. The gifted composer-arranger David Axelrod became convinced the Electric Prunes were the right band – and had the right name – to do a rock/orchestral version of the Christian Mass. (Too bad they weren’t called the Holy Prunes.) In reality, the idea was pretty good – this was years beforeJesus Christ Superstar. And the two-sided single from the album Mass in F Minor has beautiful musical ingredients – the guitar solo on “Credo” is involving, and the chanting vocals are lovely.

What it has to do with the actual guys who were in a band called Electric Prunes, however, is another question. Lowe and Tulin were still involved, apparently, but Axelrod needed session musicians to finish the project.

With management in control of the band’s name, an entirely new Electric Prunes was hired to join with session musicians for the equally complex, equally religious follow-up, Release of an Oath, which featured the Jewish Kol Nidre and other religious compositions done the Prune way.

This all sounds hard to believe, like Lester Bangs’ fictitious review of Count Five’s “unknown” post-”Psychotic Reaction” career, except…it really happened. And the two-sided single featured here from Release, ”Help Us (Our Father, Our King)/The Adoration,” again has some damn good guitar work intertwined with the sumptuous arrangements. Axelrod knew what he was doing. (The original singles from both religious albums were marked PRO, which may mean they were promotional, only.)

For whatever reason, this new Electric Prunes was allowed to “return” to rock for one album, 1969′s Just Good Old Rock and Roll, and a series of singles. Principal members were Richard Whetstone, John Herron, Mark Kincaid and Brett Wade.

Here, the charm is gone – these guys made bad rock ‘n’ roll. “Hey Mr. President” is clunky, “Following Smoothly” is second-rate Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the remaining tunes just lurch along without any apparent notion of what an Electric Prune song is supposed to sound like. There’s a growling throat-shredding vocal on “Love Grows” that is downright terror-inducing.

It’s doubtful anyone, anywhere wanted to hear these third-rate songs. Well, maybe in Copenhagen. Prune Danish was at the time, and remains still, very popular.

Move over, Frankie Valli: celebrated reunion of beloved band to be turned into true rock theater.

By Steven Rosen

Felix Cavaliere has announced that Once Upon a Dream, the Rascals’ reunion concert and multimedia show produced and directed by Steven Van Zandt, is Broadway bound. (Go here to read the BLURT review of the Dec. 13 concert in Port Chester, NY.)

 He said this from the stage at a solo concert Saturday night (Feb. 9) at the Fairfield Community Arts Centers’ theater in Ohio, near Cincinnati. “I’m happy to announce it’s going to be on Broadway. We’re going there — yeah!,” he said. “And then I hope it will come around the U.S. and you can come see the old guys still rock ‘n’ rollin.’”

Once Upon a Dream was mounted for a short December run — to ecstatic reviews — at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, N.Y. In addition to reuniting the four original Rascals — one of the biggest rock bands to come out of New York/New Jersey in the 1960s — or their first public concerts in some 40 years, Van Zandt ‘s Once Upon a Dream combined the appearance with filmed vignettes with members, filmed reenactments of their stories (with younger actors), and a massive sound-and-light show on a 50-foot-screen. The Rascals — singer/organist Cavaliere, singer Eddie Brigati, guitarist Gene Cornish and drummer Dino Danelli — sang and superbly played hits from throughout their career: “Good Lovin,’” “Groovim,’” “People Got to Be Free,” “How Can I Be Sure,” “See,” “Come on Up” and more.

(First reported for Blurt, http://www.blurt-online.com, on Feb. 11, 2013

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Felix Cavaliere Says the Reunited Rascals Are Broadway Bound

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When Ravi Shankar died in December at age 92, Jim Tarbell’s thoughts turned to when he brought the great Indian classical musician to the historic — and endangered — St. Paul Church in the Pendleton District. 

At the time, in the early 1970s, Tarbell had created the Committee to Save St. Paul’s, and for a while had even moved into the parish house of the deconsecrated and unused then-120-plus-year-old Catholic church. He staged other events there, including a concert by the Jazz group Oregon, but Shankar’s 1975 appearance was the crowning achievement.

“It was the perfect match,” Tarbell says. “For someone with his mastery and spiritual side, it was the perfect setting.”

It was one of the most memorable activities Tarbell ever has been involved in — and he’s done plenty during a career that has included sponsoring Grateful Dead’s first local concert, owning the Ludlow Garage Rock club and Arnold’s Bar and Grill, championing Over-the-Rhine and Pendleton preservation and being one of Cincinnati’s most distinctive City Council members.

It also showcased Tarbell’s belief in saving historic urban buildings as “living museums” with new uses. It was not a popular idea yet — a few blocks away, in downtown, movie palaces were being destroyed in the name of “progress.”

Tarbell booked Shankar for two concerts — Saturday night on April 26 and on the following Sunday afternoon — and connected them to University of Cincinnati’s Spring Arts Festival. He paid him $3,500. Spring Arts, itself, was a major event that brought Santana, Allen Ginsberg and the Living Theatre Collective, among others, to the Clifton campus.

Shankar, whose mastery of the sitar and use of droning had a consciousness-raising effect that inspired the Beatles and John Coltrane in the 1960s, had already come to Taft Theatre in 1968. But this was different; a unique setting that was unfamiliar and decidedly off-the-beaten-path for many of the hundreds who attended. 

“That was part of it — to do something sort of otherworldly that would be a good reason for coming to the neighborhood,” Tarbell explains.

Besides the significance and quality of the show, it was memorable because Shankar played his meditative ragas on the floor of the sanctuary, surrounded by lit candles and the glorious windows. 

James Wierzbicki, a critic for Cincinnati Post, began his review (among the material Tarbell has meticulously saved) this way: “Candles burned around the stage area and cloudy sunlight seeped in through the stained glass windows.

Part of the audience — mostly young, mostly in blue jeans — preferred to sit on the floor rather than in the church pews.”

With his tabla player Ali Rakha and an unnamed musician playing the droning tamboura, a stringed instrument, Shankar performed some spellbinding selections. Wierzbicki praised a 35-minute solo: “He could have continued the improvisation for hours without ever repeating himself.”  

The spacious church, which had opened in 1850, had suffered from declining population. There was a fear that it and its companion buildings — a parish house, two schools and a convent, all now part of a National Historic District — might be sold to a parking lot operator. Among the church’s architectural treasures were its stained-glass windows, including one 35-foot-tall depicting the Wedding Feast of Cana that let early-morning sunlight stream in.

The neighborhood, as well as the church, was struggling at the time. Roughly bordered by Reading Road and Sycamore and Liberty streets, it had (and still has) a spectacular European streetscape of close-together, brick multi-family buildings with first-floor shops, but the church-going population had declined after a Liberty extension cut it off from Prospect Hill to the north. And U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had targeted the remaining enclave for absentee landlord-managed low-income housing.

Tarbell, who had been living in Over-the-Rhine/downtown locations, learned through the grapevine in 1973 that St. Paul was, essentially, surplus. 

Tarbell went to see recently appointed Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, who himself had made a point of living downtown. “I said to myself, ‘He gets it,’ ” Tarbell recalls. “He said, ‘What do you have in mind?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll live there and pretend to caretake. I’m not shy to having activities going on. I’ve done that elsewhere. Maybe it will provide some goodwill for the church.”

Tarbell and some friends moved into the parish house (he had moved out before the Shankar concert). “I’d come over with my sleeping bag to sleep at the foot of the stained-glass window when the sun came up. It was a religious experience.”

Today, Pendleton — like adjacent Over-the-Rhine — is in full renaissance, with an active neighborhood council and new projects being announced almost weekly. The restored older single-family homes along Broadway are among the city’s most desirable. 

Inspired by his St. Paul experience — of which Shankar was the highlight — Tarbell went on to open Arnold’s in 1976 and began buying, renovating and living in homes on Pendleton’s Spring Street and Broadway. 

And, although it took a few more years and Tarbell was not directly involved, Verdin Co. bought the church complex in 1981 for its headquarters. Today, the church itself is Bell Event Centre; the other buildings are used by Verdin. 

Shankar’s visit was also a key moment for Pendleton’s fledgling community of young urban activists who already had started a “back to the city” movement — way ahead of their time. 

“That Shankar concert was one of the greatest things to happen down here,” said architect Ken Jones, who in 1970 moved into one of the beautiful old homes along Broadway. It was in foreclosure. Jones provided a carpet for Shankar and his two accompanying musicians.

“It was a magic moment. Looking back, we were extremely fortunate to have someone like that come to our neighborhood.”

(From Cincinnati CityBeat, 1-23-13. Photo of Jim Tarbell with Ravi Shankar material by Jesse Fox, CityBeat photographer.)

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How Ravi Shankar Helped Cincinnati’s Urban Renewal

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Review:

DIANA DARBY: I V (intravenous)

(Delmore Recording Society)

www.dianadarby.com  

We’re so used to drama and forcefulness in contemporary music being expressed through loudness that we forget the capacity of a song – and a singer – to be quietly devastating. Too often, those who turn down the volume are just trying to soothe us by playing to our auditory comfort zone, or are taking a breather before the next rave-up.

Diana Darby, however, is different. Her voice is often whispery or calmly recitative, although it is always tuneful. It at times is so soft it risks our inattention, which would be a mistake. It also sometimes can hit a lower, more ominous range, as on I V (intravenous)’s ”Buttercup” where she reaches a drone-y sense of gravitas like Nico.

On this album, officially her fourth, she plays electric guitar but uses it more for subdued, sometimes-eerie accompaniment than as a soloing instrument. She produced the record with Mark Linn, and her playing interacts well with David Henry’s lovely cello playing and Dan Dugmore’s delicate pedal steel/banjo work. Together, they flesh out the often-minor-key melodies.

The temptation is to classify Darby as a folk-oriented singer-songwriter, but she’s really more like Eleni Mandell – not in how she sounds so much but in how both use that time-honored style to present very personal, sophisticated and carefully honed lyrics.

The writing is I V (intravenous)’s strongest suit. It’s deceptively simple and direct, but imagistic like haiku. She can be exceptionally spare, as on  “Snow Cover Me” or “Spinning,” yet incorporate intense feeling into her well-chosen words.

According to press notes sent with this record, Darby was in a serious auto accident just before embarking on a tour to promote her last record, 2005′s The Magdalene Laundries, and she has subsequently spent time recovering. That may be what the album’s title refers to – there is a kind of restless-sleep in-the-ether quality to the songs.

On “Talking to God,” the subject reproaches her mother for being born: “I was talking to  God/And running on the moon/I was counting all the stars/Before I came to you.”

And the song “Heaven” – with the morose open-tuned guitar serving as counterpoint to  her almost-childlike voice, is haunting in its telling of an religious mother warning her “unsaved” family of what awaits them in death. (It’s not heaven.) It’s like a Flannery O’Connor story.

One is unsure why Darby, who has been making records since 2000, has yet to find the larger devoted audience she deserves, although her health issues probably set her back. But she’s back now, and her songs demand utmost attention. They’re not instant grabbers, but they mesmerize.

DOWNLOAD: ”Buttercup,” “Heaven”  

(This originally ran in http://www.blurt-online.com on 1-15-13)

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Diana Darby: A New Album by an Underappreciated Singer-Songwriter