Month: April 2015

I’ve broken bread and spilled beer with him, plus he has his own show on taintradio, so it would only be logrolling and puffery if it weren’t for the fact that there isn’t an atomy of aesthetic or moral compromise in my assertion that Kip Hanrahan is making some of the most intelligent and impassioned music of anyone anywhere, and that I’d like to serve up a tranch of his work so that you might hear it and consider chipping or kipping in to the fundraiser he’s got going—via his Facebook page or indiegogo.com—in order to record some new music for the first time in years and get it out there for us all. So this week’s Updoc—8 PM Friday and noon next Tuesday, Off-Broadway time—after starting off with new and newish music from burnout reedmen Kamasi Washington and Gilad Atzmon respectively, serves up about forty minutes of Kip Hanrahan’s life and thought. An early breakthrough album’s title, Desire Develops an Edge, says a lot about the highly charged nexus of love and sex and intellect and world and quest, frequently inflected by umbral looming geopolitical realities, that Hanrahan has achieved. I first encountered him in the late 1970s in the backstage shadows of the New York Public Theatre’s jazz series where, in one of the smartest moves anyone made at the time, he began to see a place where the avant-gardish jazz of the time might meet the Latin percussion he’d heard growing up in the Bronx, and that he might even write a nightborne singable poetry that could stitch those elements together in a way that those elements had yet themselves suspected—a strong beginning for a musical idiom that has enriched itself in passage through mixed countryside along its evolutions toward the sea. It has passed your town along the way, and you’ll probably catch sight of yourself in it. The show eases off, or doesn’t, with the sound of brilliant women singing: Rhiannon Giddens, Joanna Wallfisch, Aoife O’Donovan, Lena Chamamyan, the Wailin’ Jennys, and Dom La Nena: all in all, not 2 bad a 2 hoursworth, with days and nights of blue luck inverted included gratis.

This week Howling’s blues hounds are riding bicycles, talking to the dead and  fighting over names. Sounds like a strange crowd? Sure they are, but they do make some of the greatest blues ‘n roots you’ll find on the net so it’s got to be worth a listen.

Otis Taylor – “Who says men can’t multitask?”

Rhiannon Giddens seems to have arrived with the Spring, and now she’s everywhere amid the blasts and blossoms, stunning audience and host alike with her solo rendition of Odetta’s Waterboy on the Letterman show, headlining a country-gospel concert at the White House, profiles on PBS and NPR—seldom have the changing seasons witnessed such a rollout for a first solo album, her Tomorrow is My Turn, produced by T-Bone Burnett for Nonesuch; but in radical contradistinction to a music industry more notable for its industry than its music rolling out ubiquitous armies of promotion for ephemeral crapola, Giddens’ is a voice scaled not only to stun a waiting nation but embrace it, from hillbilly music to classic country to gospel declamation through uncountable gradations from darkest brown to pinkest white: a major talent has arrived, and her Macarthur genius grant will follow next year—you heard it here first, where all Updoc can do, Friday at 8PM and noon next Tuesday, Capital of the World Daylight Savings Time, is build a couple of vocal sets around her music buttresed by new releases from Nellie McKay, Lainie Cooke, Cassandra Wilson and a belated celebration of Billie Holiday’s centenary. And that’s not all, folks: we’ve got two long selections from Charles Lloyd’s celebratory Wild Man’s Dance. More than any other of John Coltrane’s epigones, Lloyd has long been drawn to Coltrane’s higher lyrical flights of the spirit, and while in the past it may have been convenient to think of Lloyd as Coltrane-light, nowadays there are so few players with any audible notion of their notes referring to anything greater than their notes that Lloyd brings not only a sense of meditation and celebration but a feeling of relief.

Howling’s back from his travels and this time he’s serious! This week  he plays a man too old to rock and roll, salutes a man who rediscovered the greats and gives one of them the opportunity to do a coffee commercial. So, normal service is resumed on the porch and as usual there’s an hour of some of  the finest blues ‘n roots on the net.

Sam Charters  – Blues Hound RIP

Second attempt to air this show in which: Updoc’s ace programmer decided to take the week off, sort of. Well, when you program a complete Mahler symphony, especially his longest, you’ve pretty much got your two-hour slot aced for the week—not that that was his motivation! No, his ear got hooked by last week’s alternation of Mahler’s 3rd excerpts and bebop alto: those selections were from Jascha Horenstein’s great version; this time he’s moved on to Claudio Abbado’s radiant conduction of his last, greatest orchestra, the Lucerne Festival guys and gals with whom he Blu-rayed probably the finest Mahler cycle anyone has achieved. Check this vast, nutty, pantheistic extravaganza out Friday at 8PM and noon next Tuesday, six-hours-behind-Lake-Lucerne time: it’s pure entertainment, and the programmer has left a lot of explaining for the annotator to do, so if you enjoy classic radio-baritone announcing there’ll be plenty of it. He has to link the Mahler with the finisher, Sibelius’ last symphony, the 7th, in a sweeping live performance of Simon Rattle with the Royal Copenhagen (Konigslige Kapel) bunch, and he goes the “the two symphonies prominently lift adjacent phrases from the last movement of the Brahms 1st” route, which doesn’t really tell us much, so he fills in with the better-known meeting of the two composers in 1907, when Mahler, having just finished his Symphony of a Thousand, spoke of trying to include the whole world, and Sibelius, having recently completed a 3rd Symphony in which he pared away received romantic rhetoric and set sail for the eventual destination of the one-movement 7th, finished his drink and grumbled about the condensed concentration of thematic material. It works both ways, especially in performances as fine as these. Next week we’ll make with the bebop, once these polarised symphonic apotheoses get digested. (Repeat “polarised symphonic apotheoses get digested” three times fast and call me in the morning.)