Music Review: Phoebe Hunt- "Walk With Me" (featuring Connor Forsyth)

This article was first published at Blogcritics.

“The Many Sides of Phoebe Hunt” might be a good alternative title for Walk With Me, the fine new album from singer/songwriter Hunt and The Gatherers due for release later this month. She does pop. She does country. She does folk. She can swing with a touch of jazz or sell an emotional ballad. And she does it all on the new album, and she does it all with style and vigor.

There might be some who see this as a scatter shot artist in search of herself. That would be a mistake, this is a talented artist who won’t be pigeon holed. And she shouldn’t be. If you can do it all, why accept limits. And if there’s one thing to take away from Walk With Me, it is that Phoebe Hunt can do it all, and do it all remarkably well.

Joined by multi-instrumentalist Connor Forsyth, she runs through a set of 11 tunes that spotlights both the singer’s different vocal personalities and her mastery of a variety of genres. There is the vulnerable innocence of “Warm Summer’s Evening,” and the worldly experience that rises almost to an anthem in “Before I’m Done.” “Long Gone” is catchy pop with an infectious hook that sticks with you. “Walk of Angeline” channels Cajun country with Hunt’s fiddle and Forsyth’s accordion, while “Flee Fly Flow Flum” is free flowing, ‘giant’ killer country pop. The album’s title song is classic country.

The album opens with some exciting brass infused swing in “Darkness,” and closes with “Send Out Your Love,” a quiet ballad sung with touching emotional honesty. She does a breathy, flirty “You Can Love,” a tune delivered as though it could have been taken from the Great American Songbook. “Song For Jacquelyn,” on the other hand, is a haunting folk ballad.

Phoebe Hunt is a talent that deserves to be heard, and Walk With Me is an album that ought to get her the attention she deserves.

CD Review: Original Cast Recording - 'Forbidden Broadway: Comes Out Swinging!

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If it is true that parody works best when its audience is familiar with the material being parodied, the more you know about the Broadway musical and the season just passed, the happier you’ll be with the latest edition, the twelfth, of Forbidden Broadway. The less you know about the Broadway theater, the less likely you will be to get most of the jokes and even the less likely to care.  Forbidden Broadway: Comes Out Swinging! now available on CD from DRG Records certainly has comic moments that don’t depend on prior knowledge, but they are few and far between. Clearly, the show and the album are aimed at the Broadway maven. If the name Jason Robert Brown doesn’t mean anything to you, you are not the audience for this album. That’s not to say that if you are acquainted with Jason Robert Brown you are necessarily going to love the show and find it funny, but at least you’ll have a shot.

What the show has going for it is an impressive cast of four talented singer/comedians who know how to sell the material, and have the chops to get the job done. Their impressions are spot on: Carter Calvert as Jessie Mueller playing Carole King, Scott Richard Foster as Frankie Valli, Marcus Stevens as Mandy Patinkin, Mia Gentile as Teresa Brewer. Their comic timing is impeccable. Hey are engaging performers, together, they make the most of the material they’re given.

Highlights include Mia Gentile’s powerful send up of Idina Menzel, “Let it Blow” with the obligatory shout out to John Travolta and her Audra MacDonald to Carter Calvert’s Carrie Underwood in a send up of the NBC production of The Sound of Music. And that’s a good thing, since both are parodies that would be familiar to a much wider audience. Most people would get the joke, certainly more than got the point in the number about Pippin. The ensemble work on juke box musicals and the revivals of Les Miserables and Cabaret, also more familiar, was effective. The general critique of the formulaic Disney musicals that have become a Broadway staple is a point well made. Less effective was the material on unsuccessful shows that quickly closed—Rocky, Bullets Over Broadway, and The Bridges of Madison County.

Forbidden Broadway: Comes Out Swinging is a must for the cognoscenti. For the rest of us, especially in the light of the charismatic performances, it may turn us on to what we’ve been missing.

Book Review: "The Splintered Paddle" by Mark Troy

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If you like a thriller with a lot going on, Mark Troy’s The Splintered Paddle is right up your alley. You’ve got a beautiful prostitute hounded by a dirty cop, a vicious pot grower with a taste for young girls, and a newly released psycho convict looking for revenge. Throw in a runaway teenager, date rape drugs, rape videos, and a murder or two and there is more than enough to keep both private investigator Ava Rome busy and the reader turning pages.

Rome, a retired military police officer, working in Hawaii is first hired by the prostitute to help her deal with the cop who has been harassing her. Then a local lawyer asks Rome to locate his daughter who has run off. Meanwhile she begins getting crank phone calls, and a sadistic criminal she helped to catch years ago before she retired has been released from San Quentin and shows up in Hawaii. When she discovers the young girl with a local drug dealer, she finds herself dealing with three very violent customers, and it gets worse when all three seem to be working together.

Less a question of solving a mystery, the plot focuses on how Rome will be able to deal with what seem like the overwhelming odds against her. The local authorities offering little help, Rome is left to her own devices, both to protect her clients and eventually herself.  Though ex-military police, she is no Jack Reacher; still she is a woman who can handle herself, and she does get a little help from her friends. Beautiful, resourceful, tenacious—she is a heroine to be reckoned with.

Hawaii, as the TV networks have discovered, makes a sensational setting for a thriller. Not only do you have exotic scenery and lavish hotels, but you have a place with a seamy underbelly as well. You can have a film company coming to shoot on location; you can have Korean bars filled with Asian B-girls. You  can feature hard  bodied surfers; you  can have bikini clad sun worshippers. It is the kind of place where the surface beauty belies the ugliness beneath.

The Hawaiian setting is portrayed realistically. The conversation of locals is loaded with patois, Hawaiian pidjin. Characters represent the ethnic diversity endemic to the island. Local foods and customs are highlighted. Whether it is the aumakua, his guardian spirit, worn as an earring by one character, or the book’s very title, the novel fairly reeks with local color.

The title, The Splintered Paddle, refers to a principle of Hawaiian law based on an ancient law of Kamehameha The Great which mandates the protection of those who are unable to protect themselves. It is a symbol worn by the local police, and its message is emblazoned on Rome’s business card: “The defenseless shall be guaranteed protection from harm.”

Music Review: Harold Mabern - "Right on Time"

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Smoke Sessions Records a new jazz recording label launched by the owners of the New York City jazz club Smoke is nothing short of a godsend for jazz lovers—make that music lovers. While originally intended to focus on live performances of musicians associated with the club, not a bad idea given that Smoke features the cream of an elite crop, the success of the first releases may well argue for tweaking that original intention.

The first of the albums, pianist Harold Mabern’s Right on Time, is as good an advertisement for the series as anyone could want. Recorded in March of 2013 during the weekend of his 77^th birthday, Mabern working with bassist John Webber and drummer Joe Farnsworth plows through an energetic set mixing classic jazz tunes, an original or two, and even a couple of unusual choices. It is a lively foot tapping set filled with performance gems. Mabern is at the top of his game. His solos are rich and filled with wit. Webber and Farnsworth are the perfect complement.

Whether they are transforming, “Dance With Me,” the disco piece that opens the album, the Laverne and Shirley theme, “Making Our Dreams Come True,” or revisiting the Thad Jones classic “To You,” the trio delivers the goods in a big way.  Duke Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Any More” is treated as a powerful bluesy ballad with some strong solo work from Webber. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things,” made famous in the jazz context by John Coltrane, gets some cascading piano work from Mabern and its climactic musical allusion to “Lullaby of Birdland” is a clever touch.

The two Mabern’s originals are “Edward Lee” dedicated to trumpeter Lee Morgan and “Blues for Frank ‘n’ Paul ‘n’ All.” There are fine versions of “Charade” and “The Nearness of You” before “Cherokee,” a bop romp introduced and driven by drummer Farnsworth, closes the album on a high.

Other albums among the first of the Smoke Session series feature saxophonist Vincent Herring leading a quartet in The Uptown Shuffle, the Javon Jackson Band’s Expression, and David Hazeltine’s For All We Know. Albums are scheduled for release one a month beginning with the Mabern in January 2014 and running through September.

Music Review: Anne Ducros - "Either Way"

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You may think you have heard the songs from the Great American Songbook more than enough times so that you have no desire to hear them again.  Think again; you haven’t heard them like you’ll hear them on Either Way, the new album from French jazz singer Anne Ducros. That she makes these hoary standards her own, doesn’t come close to doing justice to what she does with them. She transforms them, and more important her transformations are absolutely killer.

She takes the original song and pushes its musical possibilities as far as they will go. This is a singer who colors outside the lines. Her vocals are a perfect demonstration of what a jazz singer should be doing. Many jazz singers are content to interpret, Anne Ducros creates. In a sense what she does with a song parallels what her deconstructionist countryman Jacques Derrida does with literature. The original song becomes a remembered shadow that marks just how far she’s taken its ideas.

All this wouldn’t make much difference if the lady couldn’t sing.  No problem, this is a lady with the chops to make her music work. If her performances don’t quite make you forget the originals, they sure give them a run for their money.

The concept of the album as Ducros explains is to work with songs associated with great Ella Fitzgerald and somewhat surprisingly Marilyn Monroe. The two are associated because of Fitzgerald’s acknowledgement of a debt to Monroe for a booking she got at the prestigious Mocambo in Los Angeles, at a time when black artists were discriminated against. Monroe, it seems, called the club owner and demanded Fitzgerald be booked immediately. She promised to show up and take a front row table every night of the gig. With that kind of publicity, how could he refuse?

The album is made up of 15 songs, 14 standards and one, the title tune, original. Although there are some guest performers, the singer for the most part is backed by a quartet: Gilles Nicolas on double bass and electric bass, Benoît de Mesmay on piano, Maxime Blesin on guitars and percussion, and Bruno Castelucci on drums. It is a tight ensemble that not only backs up Ducros to perfection but contributes some fine solo work as well.

The songs— “You’d Be Surprised,” “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” “Thou Swell,” just to name a few, all titles you know—need to be heard to understand what Ducros is doing. Check out her version of “Summertime” and you begin to get an idea of the complexity of her art. And classics like “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing),” “A Fine Romance,” and “Laura” push the cliché envelope even further.

Either Way is perhaps the finest album from a jazz vocalist, I’ve heard this year, and certainly the most interesting.

DVD Review: "The Fall"

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If the first series of last year’s thriller, The Fall, is anything to judge by, the staid genteel stereotype of the BBC’s dramatic programming has long gone the way of the rotary phone and the VCR. Mrs. Marple has become a modern woman unwilling to take a subordinate role to men in any area of life, and a sexually perverted serial killer is pursuing beautiful young professional women.

Written by Allan Cubitt, The Fall, stars Gillian Anderson as DSI Stella Gibson, a hard-nosed detective sent to Belfast from the central office to review a murder case the locals have been unsuccessfully working on. Not only is she a no nonsense, demanding professional, she is smart and aggressive in pushing her opinions. Moreover, she is no less aggressive in her own sexual behavior. This is a woman who takes a back seat to no one. Almost immediately she ties the one murder case, to a second unsolved case, and then when there is a third murder, it is clear that she was right.

The Fall is not a who done it. Viewers meet the killer from the very beginning. Paul Spector, played by Jamie Dornan, is the father of two young children married to a nurse who works in a neo-natal intensive care unit. He works as a grief counselor, and he likes to strangle young women, pose their naked corpses, and take photographs of the bodies. On the surface, he is a model citizen. We are shown him washing his little daughter’s hair. We are shown him packing his kids’ lunch for school. We are shown him counseling a couple who have lost their young son. Of course we are also shown him doodling a nude picture of the woman as he pretends to take notes. We are also shown him breaking into a victim’s house and stealing some of her underwear. He is a perfect candidate for a chapter in Krafft-Ebbing.

Cubitt’s script tends to alternate scenes of the police investigation and some of their outside activities with scenes of the serial killer stalking his new victim as well as his family life. Both Anderson and Dornan give masterful performances. She manages to be both dominating and alluring as she exudes sexuality. He is the model of the young family man, even as he pursues his obsessions. He is an example of what psychologists call doubling, as DSI Gibson points out. One might well argue that she, herself, is also a doubler on some level. Doubling, as explained in Psychology Today, is the creation of two independent selves within a person. Robert Louis Stevenson might have called it “Jekyll and Hydism. Different selves operate in different situations.

It is an interesting thesis and makes for a riveting five episode series, available in a two disc DVD set from Acorn in the middle of October. This first series runs for approximately 300 minutes, and seems to end with a promise of a series continuation, something  for those of us who enjoyed the show to look forward to. The DVD includes a 12 minute “Behind the Scenes” featurette with cast interviews.

DVD Review: "Alliyah"

This article was first published at Blogcritics.

A young Parisian with what a recent romantic attachment calls “existential problems” decides it is time to seek a solution by making his aliyah (emigrating to Israel, a duty many Jews feel as an obligation). Life in Paris for Alex Raphaelson has little, if anything to keep him from the move. He works in a restaurant, but he really supports himself by dealing drugs. His immediate family is dysfunctional. His mother is dead.  He has little to do with his father who has moved on to a new family. His older brother Isaac is a leech who is only interested in what he can get from Alex. His ex-girlfriend is planning to get married.

So when he goes to a dinner for a cousin who has returned from Israel for a visit, and learns that he is planning to open a restaurant in Tel Aviv, it seems like a perfect opportunity for Alex to escape from the morass of Paris to start a new life. Everyone around him finds the idea ludicrous. No Zionist, he has never shown any interest in Israel. Indeed, he had ridiculed the cousin when he decided to make Aliyah. He is not religious, his attachment to Judaism is nil. He doesn’t speak Hebrew. Other than the cousin, he has no contacts in the country. Still he finds his life in Paris so impossibly oppressive that Israel becomes not only a viable option, it becomes a desirable goal.

Things become a little more complicated when he immediately learns that he needs a large amount of money to buy into the restaurant, and even more so when he meets a pretty gentile girl, a student, and there is an immediate attraction. Were he to stay put in Paris, something more than a few sexual encounters would seem a good possibility.

Alex is played with intense conviction by Pio Marmai. Brother Isaac is played by Cedric Kahn, an award winning director and screenwriter. Adele Haenel plays Alex’s love interest, Jeanne. It is a solid cast with a feeling for their characters, and keeping them real.

Directed by Elie Wajeman, who also has a screenwriting credit, the film was an official selection for the Director’s Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012.  She takes material that in some hands could become a noir thriller, and focuses equal attention on family relationships and emotional stress. Scenes like the Sabbath dinner for the cousin and the brother’s visit to their mother’s grave add a sense of low key realism that give the film its emotional spine. Physical violence is quite limited.

The French film with English subtitles is now available on DVD from Film Movement, a company that calls itself a “Film-Of-The-Month Club for new, award-winning Independent and foreign films.”

The DVD includes an interesting Israeli short called On the Road to Tel Aviv directed by Khen Shalem. It deals with a terrorist attack on a bus and the reaction of an assortment of Israeli’s when an isolated Arab woman boards a bus they are all going to ride on. It is a telling comment on the effects of terrorist activities on the lives of those living under constant threat. While Middle Eastern politics have little to do with Aliyah, On the Road to Tel Aviv sets them front and center in all their complexities.