Music Review: Various Artists - ZZ Top: A Tribute from Friends

This article was first published at Blogcritics.

Covering another artist's hits can be a tricky business.  If you simply mimic their performance, you invite the wrath of those who have made a fetish of the original, while leaving yourself open to the question of why you bothered in the first place.  Who after all needs a cheap imitation?  If you make the song your own, you will still rile the fetishists, and you may or may not come up with something to compete with the original.  Still if you do come up short, you will at least have failed on your own merits.  The choice seems obvious; the only question is how far from the original should you stray. 

In an interview on the Canadian talk show, Paul Simon was asked about why he chose Aretha Franklin's cover of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" for his new album Songwriter.  His answer was that the singer's soulful rendition was as good as "Artie's." She didn't copy; she created, and she won a Grammy for it.  The greatness of her performance was that she honored the song as a work of art with more than one possible interpretation. 

ZZ Top: A Tribute from Friends is an album filled with the kinds of covers that honor the work of "that little old band from Texas," honor it with performances that may not make you forget the originals, but might have you saying they were as good as Frank's and Billy's and Dusty's.  The "friends" featured on the disc are a mixed bunch of some of the finest on the contemporary scene and represent a wide range of musical genres from as far apart as Wyclef Jean and Jamey Johnson.  And if Jean's "Rough Boy" may be a bit too mannered for some tastes, Johnson does a job on "La Grange" that is eight minutes of rocking power. He takes the song to another level.  It probably didn't hurt that Billy Gibbons is sitting in with guitar and vocals. 

Of the eleven tracks on the album, some stay closer to home, some stray further away, but each and every one sheds some new light on the band's musical genius.  Grace Potter and the Nocturnals deliver a "Tush" with a whole new point of view (talk about sexy).  Filter's "Gimmie All Your Lovin'" is a roaring re-imagination of the classic all their own as is Duff McKagen's Loaded's lowdown "Got Me Under Pressure."  Daughtry handles the combined "Waitin' for the Bus/Jesus Just Left Chicago" with style.  Mick Fleetwood, Steven Tyler, John McVie, and  Jonny Lang, calling themselves The M.O.B., get together to open the album with an all star stab at "Sharp Dressed Man" that has some really nice energy.  Nickelback's "Legs" does full justice to the classic.  Mastodon's "Just Got Paid," Coheed and Cambria's "Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers" and "Cheap Sunglasses" by Wolfmother round out the album.  There isn't a loser in the bunch.

The story  told about the band's reaction to the idea of the album is that when the ZZ Top triumvirate was told that a tribute album was in the works, they asked, "Who are we paying tribute to?"  How's that for modesty? Want more? "Then we found out that a bunch of great artists were paying tribute to us and we were in disbelief.  For the past 40 or so years, all we've done is get out there and crank it and try to have a good time while doing so. . . . Now comes A Tribute From Friends and we're so delighted that our music resonates with these great musicians whom we so admire."

ZZ Top has been cranking it out and having a good time.  The Friends playing their tributes cranked it out and had a good time.  Listen to the CD; you may not crank it out, but you'll have one hell of a good time.

Music Review: Paul Simon - Songwriter

This article was first published at Blogcritics

In celebration of Paul Simon's 70^th birthday on October 13, Sony/Legacy is releasing Songwriter, a two disc set of 32 songs spanning the composer's fabled career from the sixties to the present. The songs on the album were chosen by Simon himself, and although they include a number of his most famous pieces, this is not a greatest hits collection. Tom Moon, in the liner notes, contends that the album "features commercial landmarks alongside ambitious and often criminally under-appreciated compositions." Now this may be something of an overstatement, but it does, as Moon goes on to explain, allow Simon the opportunity to highlight some of his lesser known songs, songs that are sometimes "overlooked." Whether this will make up for the omission of a ton of fan favorites is problematical.

Disc one, which contains most of the 'hits' that Simon decided to include begins with "The Sound of Silence" from a live 2011 performance where Simon plays some interesting harmonic games with the melody. It is a clear indication that this is not going to be a simple recycling of material. There is of course no Garfunkel and that is unfortunate. This is followed by "The Boxer" from the live concert in Central Park and Aretha Franklin's soulful cover of "Bridge Over Troubled Water," the only cover on the album. Other classics included in the collection are "Mother and Child Reunion," "American Tune," "Kodachrome," and "Still Crazy After All These Years." The first disc ends with three songs from Simon's African collaboration "Graceland," "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes," and "The Boy in the Bubble." I would, myself, have put in a word for "The Myth of Fingerprints," but I suppose a third and fourth disc would have been necessary for all the songs I would have put in a word for.

The second disc begins with four songs from The Rhythm of the Saints highlighted by the much praised "Spirit Voices" with its Portuguese interpolation by Milton Nascimento. There are a couple of songs from Simon's ill-fated Broadway venture, The Capeman. If the music represented here, the dramatic "Born in Puerto Rico" and the doo wop throwback, "Quality," is any indication, one has to wonder why the show didn't do better. The album ends with selections from his 2011 release So Beautiful or So What including the title song. If the music on this disc is not as well known, it is nonetheless indicative of the composer's range and the continued variety of his interests.

Tom Moon's liner notes provide a lucid critical evaluation of Simon's work. He talks about the composer's lyric brilliance, emphasizing his sense of humor. He stresses the composer's eclectic musical passions. "Simon's songbook," he suggests, "can be appreciated as the journey of restless songwriter searching for new ways to communicate, driven toward new musical settings for his ideas." Simon has never been one to keep repeating his successes. No doubt he could have kept turning out the kind of music that made the duet's name a household word back in the sixties, but that is not the way of the true artist. The true artist is always looking to exceed his grasp.

Paul Simon is the true artist. Songwriter, with its classic songs and its new works that may yet become classic, is simply one more demonstration of that fact. Certainly there will be those that object to this or that inclusion at the expense of this or that omission, but the more one listens to the newer pieces, the more familiar they become, the more likely those objections will disappear.

Music Review: Sa Belle Belle Ba Leni Stern

This article was first published at Blogcritics

I guess the first time I really got interested in the fusion of the pop music aesthetic with world music was back in the eighties when Paul Simon resurrected himself with his award winning Graceland album. Certainly there had been world music influences in some of Simon's earlier music, "Mother and Child Reunion" for example, but the new album suggested a commitment beyond a single here and there. Collaborating with musical groups like Ladyship Black Mambazo and Los Lobos, he combined multicultural rhythms with his trademark poetic lyrics to produce gems like "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" and "All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints." The Rhythm of the Saints which followed never had the same success, but it did show a similar cultural outreach.

There is a lot about Leni Stern's new CD Sa Belle Belle Ba that reminds me of Simon's landmark album. She comes to world music with a successful resume as a jazz guitarist and infuses track after track with swinging guitar riffs and mellow highlights. Listen to the twanging guitar punctuating the vocal on "Nan Jeya" and the electrical improvisation on "Born Bad." There is also some nice improvisation on the kora (a 21 string West African lute like instrument) by Yakouba Sissoko in the Arabic flavored "Yakhai Bi Khali" and the lilting "Souma Chamon." She makes it her business to collaborate with authentic voices. Guest musicians include Haruna Samake, Ami Sacko, Bouba Sacko, Bassekou Kouyate and Zoumana Tareta. They join Stern in chorus and with individual solo work, most often providing an African counterpoint to her English lyrics. For example listen to the choral background to the bluesy "Smoke's Risin'." It is unfortunate that individual solo work isn't always credited in the album notes.

Her English lyrics range from the deceptive simplicity of "Souma Chamon" and "Sera" to the poetic eloquence of "Now I Close My Heart" that begs comparison with Simon at his best. There is a prayer like quality to her paean to Africa the motherland of humanity, "Farafina Cadi." She combines English lyrics with African and Arabic lyrics, in a sense illustrating the need to go beyond linguistic barriers and find the humanity that fills us all. In the same way her fusion of musical genres symbolizes her desire for cultural fusion. So, for example, there is the combination of traditional African chants with rap on the title song, "Sa Belle Belle Ba." She melds jazzy blues and a swinging electric guitar solo to a backdrop of African rhythms in "Born Bad."

Leni Stern has explained that the title of her new CD is a warning about the dangers of snakes, both the reptilian and the two legged variety. "Sa" means snake in what I assume is Bambara the official language of Mali. "Ba" means big, and "belle," very. The world, it seems, is filled with very big snakes, and we would do best to be on our guard. In notes provided in the promotional material for the album, Stern tells a lengthy story about how she was encouraged by singer Ami Sacko to go to see particularly powerful sorcerer to assure the success of their work on the album. The sorcerer advised that she needed to ride a wild white horse every morning for seven days. She took the advice and one day she discovered a boa constrictor near the sorcerer's home. She became frightened until she was assured that the snake was dead. It was then that she began writing the song, "the image of the snake," she says, "etched" in her mind. The story is another testament to Stern's commitment to cross cultural pollination: a passion that is the theme of her album.

Jazz, folk, blues, rock, pop, rap, world music—pick your poison; it's all there on Leni Stern's new CD, Sa Belle Belle Ba. Whether she's singing in Arabic or Bambara or riffing on the electric guitar, Stern's work is emblematic of the South by Southwest World Music Festival motto: "all music is world music." Her songs bridge languages. Her CD is an eclectic collection of fused musical styles and genres. Leni Stern is all music.