Everything about Dark Hope was screaming ‘No!’ at me. Opera singer covering rock songs? No, it never works, never ever. Well, I reckoned without the good taste of Fleming and producer/arranger David Kahne. They’ve re-interpreted fabulous contemporary songs by Band Of Horses, Muse, Death Cab For Cutie plus a sprinkling of classics from Jefferson Airplane, Peter Gabriel and Leonard Cohen.
Courtney Love’s return, says the press release, has been ‘feverishly anticipated’. I feel I have the right to ask, ‘Who by?’ Certainly not me. This album is as cheap and premeditated as anyone with more than half a brain would expect it to be. Courtney snarls and drawls like Marianne Faithfull on Ritalin through a mess of bitchy faux-grunge pop ditties, most of them knocked up by song doctor Linda Perry, probably on a afternoon when she wasn’t writing hits for Pink, Gwen Stefani or Christina Aguilera.
Composer, pianist, leader and educator Django Bates has done just about everything, but in his 50th year he’s filled a gap by offering this tribute to his earliest inspiration, Charlie Parker. The idea, though, dates back to 2005, the 50th anniversary of Parker’s death, when Bates arranged tunes associated with Bird for a celebration event in Copenhagen. On this trio album he doesn’t play a bop style but lets loose his own piano pyrotechnics in ‘Scrapple From The Apple’ and other be-bop anthems. A final piece of contemplative musing creates its own space from a fragment of ‘Ah-Leu-Cha’, and if this is the least frenetic track, it’s also one of the most successful.
After a brilliant start as a boy classical pianist, the teenage Cowley played in a Blues Brothers tribute band, then plunged into electronic pop with the Brand New Heavies and Zero 7 and his own group Fragile State. Returning to the piano, he formed the trio which recorded Displaced in 2006 and Loud Louder Stop in 2008. For their third album the trio are still together, or to be more accurate, more together than ever. They play as one.
No matter how deeply it’s been mined before, the Blue Note vault is still a rich source of reissue gold. In what amounts to a relaunch of the XRCD audiophile format, Audio Wave has begun with a clutch of soul jazz classics. Soul Station has Mobley’s old Jazz Messengers boss Art Blakey on drums, with Paul Chambers on bass and bluesy pianist Wynton Kelly. This seemingly carefree album marked a turning-point for the light-toned tenor player, as 1961 would see him briefly and not very happily joining Miles Davis.
Revisiting favourite old songs, the late great composer’s singer daughter has the luxury of Phil Ramone as producer, as well as some special guest stars. Stevie Wonder does a fabulous harmonica obbligato on ‘Blame It On The Sun’, while Brian Wilson and Take 6 vocalize amazingly behind her on ‘God Only Knows’. One of the best realisations, if not a jazzy one, is the opener ‘These Days’, with the unmistakeable liquid voice and soft guitar of composer Jackson Browne. This isn’t to be confused with the title track, the Billy Joel song, more wistful than ironic in Mancini’s hands.
The Bach playing of Tatiana Nikoleyeva was the inspiration in 1950 for Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, and her two recordings inevitably are seen as definitive. (Nikoleyeva endeared herself to London audiences late in life; she also made several Hyperion discs. ) The young Moscow pianist provides a booklet overview of exceptional thoroughness, although the accompanying 23m DVD interview with a stubbly Andreas Staier gets us practically nowhere. Melnikov’s pianistic range, though, is something else.
If not quite as monumental a milestone in her career as Heart Like A Wheel, this album from 1977 stands almost as proud for its portrayal of Ronstadt as a far more versatile singer than her previous country-rock leanings suggested – a genre she helped to fashion. Here she ranges from straight rock ’n’ roll to ballads to pure C&W, if not quite intimating that a few years later she would become one the first of the rock generation to cover the standards of the 1940s/50s. True to form, this set also emphasises her immaculate, prescient taste: among the tracks she commandeers as her own are Roy Orbison’s ‘Blue Bayou’, the Rolling Stones’ ‘Tumbling Dice’, and a hardly-known Warren Zevon’s ‘Poor Poor Pitiful Me’.
Sound Quality: 92%
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As has been de rigueur of late, Swiss-born Beat Kaestli has joined Tony Bennett, Rod Stewart, Michael Bublé and others releasing ‘American Songbook’ sessions. Kaestli, though, has resisted the more obvious A-list songs and opted for ‘slightly-less-covered’ masterworks, including ‘My Romance’, ‘Day In Day Out’ and other tunes that are familiar rather than done to death. Backed by a superb quintet and recorded at St Peter’s Episcopal Church, NY, with David Chesky at the controls, it’s a perfect showcase for SACD surround, which seems to be enjoying a renaissance. Kaestli’s emphasis is jazzier than the norm, a refreshing break from Sinatra wannabees.
A heartbreaker, as it’s the sole LP from one of the finest of the wave of mid-1960s US bands who wished they were the Beatles. Like the equally fragile Left Banke (yes, that’s how they spelled it) with their leader Michael Brown, this group boasted a song-writing genius in Emitt Rhodes, and gave off a whiff of ‘Sunny Afternoon’, Kinksian Englishness that permeated the whole LP. While ‘You’re A Very Lovely Woman’ is equally well remembered, their biggest hit – ‘Live’ – had the kind of catchiness that made songs like the La’s ‘There She Goes’ so memorable. Yes, it was that good.
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