Christmas Music Review: Brian Setzer Orchestra

(Third in a short series noting my favorite Christmas CDs. Previous entries: Chicago; Bruce Cockburn.)

Brian Setzer loves Christmas. He’s released two Christmas CDs (not including the newer compilation CDs), he’s got a DVD devoted to live Christmas music, heck, he’s even got a Myspace page featuring just his Christmas material. I guess you could say the man likes Christmas.

And his music reflects that passion. Boogie Woogie Christmas (2002) and Dig That Crazy Christmas (2005) take some of the best—and unexpected—Christmas carols and gives them the jump blues and swing treatment. In addition, he writes some new songs that, while not destined to be standards, fit right in with the rest of the tunes. There’s not a bad cut among the twenty-five total songs across the two CDs.

The remarkable thing about these CDs is the bravado Setzer displayed in the song selection. He knows his strengths: retro-sounding guitar, kick-ass big band, and a warbly baritone that can challenge the saxophones of the Lawrence Welch Orchestra when doing vibrato. Setzer, however, takes some chances and the overall results are better for those daring choices.

His “Jingle Bells” is not all that daring but it’s a blast. The music soars out of the speakers like a 57 Chevy during a drag race in the LA River. Setzer’s guitar work is all but Chuck Berry on overdrive. This is a version that puts almost all other versions to shame, even with the lyric alterations. Ann-Margret lends her sultry voice to a delicious rendition of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” In “Sleigh Ride,” the saxophone section of the orchestra gives a distinct jazzy 60s-era spy movie vibe by means of the “Batman” theme song. “Santa Clause is Back in Town” here becomes a standard blues tune that would be quite at home deep in New Orleans. Setzer does his impression of Elvis Presley singing like Roy Orbison for “Blue Christmas” and it somehow works. Another track that works despite itself is “O Holy Night,” where Setzer shows that he can really sing straight when the need calls.

The standout, by far, is his big-band take on Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker Suite.” As I wrote in my review of Setzer’s latest CD, “Wolfgang’s Big Night Out,” on the face of it, this selection might cause every listener’s eyebrow to cock with the obvious question: “Really?” Trust me: just listen. It’ll knock your socks off with the intelligence and passion for the source material. The woodwind sections gets to break out a few non-standard instruments in a big band—bass clarinet anyone?—and the drummer gets to play the bells. And midway through the song, the sax section gets to shine and the bari sax player gets to blat his way through the Trepak sequence. I’ll always love the traditional orchestral version…but this version is what I listen to more.

“Dig That Crazy Christmas” continues where the first CD left off, although now, we have some female singers that give the band a distinct 1940s vibe. And if their presence weren’t obvious enough, Setzer pulls out “Getting’ in the Mood (For Christmas),” a reworking of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” with yuletide lyrics. It’s just…fun! Setzer pulls another carol out of left field. “Angels We Have Heard on High” is largely instrumental except for the choir in the middle section. Setzer’s guitar work provides the lead in this version. While it’s not as special as “Nutcracker,” it’s still a nice change of pace from the traditional church choir and orchestra. “White Christmas” is here, and Setzer definitely was inspired more by the Drifters than Bing Crosby. The band gives “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve” a good reading and it’s not too difficult to close your eyes and find yourself on the dance floor on December 31st.

In “’Zat You Santa Claus,” Setzer tries on the jacket Louis Armstrong found so successful. While Setzer’s voice is too smooth for a direct comparison with Armstrong’s gravelly delivery, he compensates by singing in his lower range and half-yelling the title. It’s a fun version but, really, I’ll still take Armstrong for this song.

If there was one song destined for the Setzer treatment, it has to be “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” Not really a carol but equally famous, Setzer digs into the funnier lyrics, walloping the listener with his vibrato so warbly you can just imagine his Adam’s apple goggling up and down life Goofy from a Walt Disney cartoon. For the guitar solo, he tunes his guitar down. The result is kitschy evil, all the while his band is jiving at the background. It’s a real piece of work.

If the Chicago Christmas CD ranks as one of the best modern Christmas CDs with their distinctive take on traditional carols and Bruce Cockburn provides the antithesis to all that sparkles false in December, Brian Setzer’s contributions are just flat-out fun. I’ll give one thing to critics of this type of music: yeah, it is over the top, much more over the top than Setzer’s bouncing hair. But it’s just so much fun, I dare you *not* to tape your foot. You’ll feel like a kid again with the ebullient spirit of these CDs. And, in this season that is centered around children and the pure joy and exuberance in their eyes on Christmas morning, isn’t that worth something?

Movie Review: Foyle's War: Season Two

If Season One of “Foyle’s War” considered the emotional impact of the war on regular folks, Season Two emphasizes the war’s toll on the home front. (Here is my review of Season One.) Not that the four episodes of Season Two don’t involved emotion. We are talking about war, after all, the single most emotional event save love that can affect a person. Instead, Season Two focuses on something more fundamental: even in war, humans are still human. It may not matter that young men are laying down their lives for a cause, some people still want to make a buck, or a pound in this case. It’s absurd, it’s repugnant, it’s, well, human.

I have already reviewed Episode 1, “Fifty Ships,” (set in September 1940) in depth as it was the first episode I watched. Again, I want to stress that you should watch these shows in order. You will get much more out of them if you do. Needless to say, the end of “Fifty Ships” merely set a template for the rest of Season Two.

“Among the Few” (Episode 2, September 1940) finds Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle and his driver, Samantha Stewart, driving back to Hastings when they see a fuel truck ram through a road block. Setting chase, Foyle and Sam avoid the flying bullets and watch as the truck crashes and the driver perishes. Foyle recognized him and starts his investigation, aided, as always by Paul Milner, now walking with only a limp and no cane (the result of a leg amputation from a war injury). When the Nazis invaded France earlier in 1940, the Germans merely used the fuel the French abandoned. The English learned from those mistakes and consolidated all the fuel at regional depots located throughout southern England. The problem, however, is the local depot seems to be losing fuel. When his superior suggests a raid, Foyle proposes sending in an undercover agent. Using all of his natural gifts at manipulation (gentle, to be sure, but thorough), Foyle allows Sam to volunteer for the assignment.

Meanwhile, Foyle’s son, Andrew, returns home for a spell after a fellow RAFer (Rex) and he survived a battle in the skies. In a quiet, yet sobering scene, the kind that really provides depth of these shows, Foyle asks Andrew why the young man is so quiet. Andrew comments on the new recruits and laments their lack of experience.

Foyle: “Whereas you’re an old hand.”
Andrew: “You don’t see it. I’m an experience pilot now.”
Foyle: “You’re twenty-two.”
Andrew: “You sit there as if nothing’s happened. It’s not conkers anymore. It’s a different world. There’s Rex, Douglas, and myself, and we’re the three oldest.”
Foyle: “Well of course you are. You’re the only ones left.”

Foyle goes on to solve the puzzle of the missing fuel as well as the death of a young woman who dated Rex, Andrew’s friend. Rex is a suspect and, by the end of the program, Foyle ends up at the air field. The air raid sirens clang and the pilots jump in their Spitfires and fly off into the sky, his son among them. I won’t give away the ending. Suffice it to say the final scene—and the choice Foyle makes—is one to remember and will stay with you after the credit roll.

“War Games” is certainly an interesting title for Episode 3 (October 1940) considering the war is anything but a game. Foyle is the referee in a series of Home Guard practices on the vast estate of Reginald Walker when two things happen: a burglary and an apparent accidental shooting during the war games. To make matters more interesting, two men from Foyle’s past reemerge. One, the German-born Stephen Beck, is a naturalized British citizen and a friend of Foyle’s; and the other, Jack Devlin, is Foyle’s former sergeant (Milner took his place).

A man named Harry Markham is the burglar, and Stephen Beck, a barrister, is his defense attorney. Beck got Markham’s sentence reduced and now has a favor: steal something in the Walker estate. This Markham does but is injured. Foyle and Sam visit the estate to investigate the burglary and why the Walkers didn’t report the crime. Foyle continues to investigate until a murder occurs during the war games. The dead man is Markham. One thing leads to another and Foyle learns of secret business negotiations between Walker’s company and the Nazis and Beck’s clandestined role in everything. Foyle has no proof and Walker and his son start burning paper to conceal their culpability. In a humorous sub-plot, Sam is “in charge” of four boys scouring the town for recyclable material that can help the war effort. They abscond some of the bound paper from the Walker estate and, inside, is an incriminating document but it’s still not enough to convict Walker. What can is the item stolen by Markham. Where other episodes end on an emotional note, this ending is, quite frankly, pure American. And Foyle’s reaction to what happens says a lot more than you’d expect.

Among other things, “The Funk Hole” (Episode 4, October 1940) is an odd title, all the more tantalizing in that the characters in the episode all know what it is except Sam. Foyle and Milner get to tell her but you’ll have to read the extra details on the DVD to know from where the term originated. In Hastings, there is a robbery at a food depot. The guards fire and hit one of the fleeing men but they still escape. In London the same night, the Luftwaffe are bombing the city and a man in an underground air raid shelter starts mouthing off about Churchill and the “truth” of the war effort. The next morning, Foyle returns from London and starts his new investigation: the food depot robbery and the search for a missing young man, Matthew Farley, The distraught mother points the police toward Brookfield Court, the funk hole, where the rich can buy their way out of any sort of war participation. Sam and Milner start poking their noses around but then a problem arises: James Collier, police Chief Inspector, arrives from London and suspends Foyle on the grounds that he uttered seditious comments in a bomb shelter while in London. Flabbergasted, Foyle has to comply but not before Michel Kitchen displays some of the more animated acting in his reading of Foyle in the series. Collier takes over the department, reassigns Sam, and questions Milner’s loyalty.

Meanwhile, Andrew has crashed his Spitfire in the Channel and has a week’s leave. Foyle’s happy to have his son around but Andrew just mopes. Foyle asks Sam to take him out and that backfires, too. The investigation continues and it’s really Milner’s turn to have the spotlight. We get a glimpse of how Milner really is without Foyle around. It’s a tad eye-opening. We also get to see “how the other half lives” in all of its distasteful glory. In a move so subtle it’s easily missed, Foyle puts all the pieces together. Nothing strange there but then you realize he’s never actually interviewed anyone or found clues himself. All the data has been conveyed to him by another person, including Sam. He’s pulled a Sherlock Homes or a Nero Wolfe just without the idiosyncrasies.

Again, with “Foyle’s War,” the little details are the main selling point, even beyond the superb mysteries. The accurate historical details—the bombing raids, the existence of funk holes, the racketeering of fuel or food, the plight of household pets during the war—make this series stand heads and shoulders above other mystery series. By the end of this season, you might start wondering how the Allies won the war when the greed of regular people seeks to subvert the war effort for personal gain. You don’t need to wonder long, however. All you have to remember is the very creativity folks used for self-indulgence also was put to good use to win the war. I’ll admit it was an interesting feeling watching the fourth episode on December 7th. It makes me all the more hopeful that the stories of future Foyle’s War seasons go long enough for the United States to enter the war. I’d like to see that.

Question for anyone who might know: In many scenes in “Foyle’s War,” you can see British soldiers and civilians carrying boxes on straps around their shoulders. These are literal brown boxes and they seem cumbersome. What are they called and what’s in them? I think its either food, first aid supplies, or ammunition. But I still wonder why boxes and not bags.

Movie Review: Foyle's War: Season One

In the three weeks since I wrote my first review of a Foyle’s War episode (“Fifty Ships,” episode 1, season 2), I have had a chance to watch all of Season One. I gave thought to reviewing these films one-by-one they are so magnificent. Instead, I'll write about the entire season.

If you’ve read my earlier review—which I just did—you’ll note that I made some assumptions about things. The biggest one was Foyle’s wife. Even as “The German Woman” (episode 1, season 1) starts, Foyle is a widower, not a divorcee. That fact alone makes the old flame storyline in “Fifty Ships” that much more poignant. And, it’s yet another reason to watch this series in order. The mysteries they solve are independent of each other. It’s the character progression that is important.

For example, in “Fifty Ships,” Foyle’s driver, Samantha, ends up staying the night at the home of her partner, Paul Milner. With no context to draw on, when his wife returns home and sees them dancing, I just assumed it’s the typical man-wife thing. Now, having watched season one and witnessed Paul’s injury and recovery and seeing how it has strained his marriage, the dancing scene carries much more weight.

So, long story short: watch these shows in order if you can. You will be rewarded.

Season One consists of four 100-minute episodes. “The German Woman” is the first and we are introduced us to Christopher Foyle, a veteran of The Great War. Now that Hitler has started another war, Foyle considers his talents could best be used by the government, not in some provincial police station down on the coast. His requests continue to be rejected. until, of course, his investigation into why the German-born wife of a respected Englishman is still free (the rest of the German-born people having been rounded up and sent away from the coast) leads to a potentially damaging scandal. When the woman turns up brutally murdered, Foyle’s doggedness intensifies. As you could expect, his desire for a military post is now offered as an incentive to stop the investigation. His character is almost fully revealed in one decision: stay on the case, knowing he'd never be offered the post again. It is also in this episode where he is assigned Samantha Stewart as his driver and Foyle recruits a former policeman, Paul Milner, a man who suffered injury and an amputation of part of his leg in battle.

Episode 2, “The White Feather,” is, to date, the most emotionally engrossing entry into this series. Guy Spenser, played wonderfully by Charles Dance (of Bleak House), is a Nazi sympathizer who speaks at the Friday Club and awaits the invasion of England by Germany. He has a few allies, one of which is Margaret Ellis, who runs a hotel called The White Feather. Ironically, a white feather in World War I was a sign of cowardice. Foyle comes into the story when he interviews Ellis’s chambermaid, a Jew, who was caught cutting telegraph wires. One night, Ellis, Spencer, and a few pro-Nazi supporters are sitting in the great room of The White Feather when the lights go out and shots are fired. When the lights go on again, Margaret Ellis is dead. The suspicion is that the shooter tried to hit Spencer but missed in the dark. The chambermaid’s boyfriend, a fisherman, is distraught over her imprisonment and makes a few actions that get him detained by the police. Meanwhile, the British soldiers over in France are surrounded by the Germans at the town of Dunkirk. Every available fisherman with a boat is crossing the channel to pick up as many men as possible. Foyle agrees to release the boy and work the fishing trawler with his father. During the evacuation, Foyle discovers the true killer (in really well-done Sherlock Holmes observational style) and returns to the beach to let the young man know he’s free. As you might imagine in a story set in wartime, the young man is killed.

“A Lesson in Murder” is the third episode of season one. The Germans have begun to bomb England and many of the children of London have been sent away into the country for safekeeping. A young boy, Joe, gets into all sorts of mischief at an estate of a wealthy landowner, a judge who all but hates that the boy is in his house. When the boy is killed in a bomb intended for the judge, Foyle and Milner start investigating. This episode has a good number of historical details woven into the plot. Foyle’s initial investigation is into the death of a conscientious objector in prison. Later, we learn the details of how and why the children of London are evacuated. We get a glimpse of how powerful families were able to keep their loved ones from being drafted. And lastly, we see the power of prejudice. Foyle has a long-time friend, an Italian man, who runs a restaurant. The Italian’s son and Samantha get along well. However, as soon as Mussolini declares war on England, the townsfolk of Hastings turn on the restaurateur in a heartbeat. Again, I can’t stress it enough: it’s the non-investigatory details of this series that allows Foyle’s War to rise above your run-of-the-mill detective story.

“Eagle Day” rounds out season one. Foyle and Milner investigate the body of a man found in a bombed out house with a knife sticking out of his chest and a locket clutched in his hand. The dead man was a lorry driver for an art museum in London. The curator decided to move the priceless artifacts out of London and into the country for safekeeping for the duration of the war. Milner tracks down the locket’s owner, a young woman, Lucy, who died under mysterious circumstances months before. As the investigation continues, Andrew, Foyle’s son, is stationed in Hastings as part of top secret duty: fly his Spitfire around the area to help train the British radar operators about the new system. Eventually, Andrew is accused of treason and Foyle must find the murderer of the lorry driver, acquit his son, and help convince Samantha’s father to allow her to remain his driver.

All in all, this is a splendid collection of stories, made all the more emotional and dramatic with the World War II setting. The acting is superb by the main three with Michael Kitchen delivering award-winning work. As a man of few words, Kitchen must allow Foyle’s emotions to come out in other ways, usually through facial expressions and his eyes. Milner’s transition from wounded war veteran who doesn’t know what good he can do to loyal partner of Foyle is fun to watch. Pay special attention to this relationship in "The White Feather." And good old Samantha is like many of us: wanting to do more to help her boss, flubbing it up sometimes while outshining her two males partners at other times.

If you haven’t made time for Foyle’s War yet, I can’t recommend these movies highly enough. Let me put it to you this way: The Dark Knight is, by far, the best thing I’ve seen this year. Foyle’s War ranks as Number Two. It’s that good.

Music Review: David Bowie in the 1990s

David Bowie, in the 1990s, played the most important character of his career: himself.

Many critics and fans consider Bowie’s 1990s output mediocre. His 1993 album Black Tie White Noise is the point, they say, where the slide began. However, when you examine Bowie’s entire career, the 1990s are not a slide but a rebirth.

Even if you think that Bowie’s hits began with 1969’s “Space Oddity” and followed with 1971’s “Changes,” I think most folks will agree that David Bowie really hit it big when he became Ziggy Stardust. For the rest of the 70s, phases of his career were noted by which character appeared on stage. You had Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, the Thin White Duke, or that weird clown he played in the “Ashes to Ashes” video. Even in 1983 when he went mainstream with “Let’s Dance” he was more the Thin White Duke’s brother than Bowie himself (although, when you look at the number of songs he played on the Serious Moonlight tour, he was closer to his true self than ever before). Even in 1987 and his overtly and, in retrospect, too bombastic Glass Spider tour, you could make the case that it was the characters that mattered more than the music. Heck, if you hear “Suffragette City” or “Let’s Dance” or “Scary Monsters,” you think more of how Bowie looked than how good the songs are. Bowie has said that he staged the Glass Spider tour—with a giant, translucent spider hovering over the stage—because that’s what people had come to expect of him. The music didn’t matter. Only the image mattered.

But, for Bowie, it was the music that matters most and his 1990s catalog proves it. Many fans at the time wondered about the ill-fated experiment that was Tin Machine. Why was Bowie trying to be just a member of a band? Doesn’t he know that’s impossible? Yeah, it probably was impossible but he was doing something he needed to do: get back to his roots. Get back to why he wanted to be a musician in the first place. In the mid-1960s, Bowie, then going by his given name of David Jones, was a member of a series of bands. After he had changed his last name to Bowie—so as not to be confused with the Monkees’ Davie Jones—Bowie became a solo artist and meshed all of the smorgasbord that was 1960s London into his own unique sound.

Bowie’s Tin Machine experience placed a bookend to the first phase of his career. After putting his extensive back catalog to rest in the 1990 Sound + Vision tour, Bowie returned to what got him first interested in music: jazz and playing saxophone. Black Tie White Noise (1993) is the result. With this record, Bowie pays homage to his musical heritage that influenced him in the 1950s and early 1960s, while still sounding modern. Nile Rodgers produced the album, their second collaboration after the multi-platinum Let’s Dance album. Lester Bowie, the avant-garde trumpet player, is featured heavily and Mick Ronson and Mike Garson, members of Ziggy’s band, the Spiders from Mars, also beam into the studio. The semi-autobiographical “Jump (They Say)” is the most popular from this CD. The rest of the music, including some instrumentals, a first since the 1970s, gyrated between pop, dance, jazz, and fantastic, yet underrated ballads. Sinatra would have been proud. Oh, and while Bowie is known for his often dour outlook on life as reflected through his songs, his then-recent marriage to model Iman made Black Tie White Noise altogether ebullient.

Later the same year, he recorded and released music for the BBC program "The Buddha of Suburbia," a collection of experimental music for which Bowie is quite proud. The music--almost all performed by Bowie and Erdal Kizilcay--was fresh. You could hear Bowie's pure enjoyment in the anonmyity of the instrumental music.

Having been musically born again, Bowie reviewed his career before he tackled his next album. For all the hit records and personas, fans and critics generally agreed that his trilogy of albums with Brian Eno—Low, “Heroes,” Lodger, (1977-79), sometimes referred to as the Berlin albums named for the city in which they were recorded—marked a creative moment in time for which Bowie could be proud. With that in mind, and giving a nod to his earlier theatrics, Bowie and Eno collaborated on 1995’s Outside. A concept album, somewhat bloated by its strict adherence to the overall story, Outside marked yet another example of what Bowie has done throughout his career: take stock of current musical trends and take a step ahead. The grunge movement was in full sway but there was also an undercurrent of industrial-rock that was bubbling up to the surface.

Characterized by a furious guitar-driven wall of sound as well as the moody, ambient synthesizer of Eno, Outside is Bowie return to the familiar, desolate sound of isolation in the midst of the modern. The tour that followed, co-headlined with Nine Inch Nails, exposed Bowie to a new, younger audience who must have wondered why Bowie, the original author of “The Man Who Sold the World” but made famous by Nirvana’s Unplugged set, was covering a Nirvana song. For the older fans, Bowie’s 1995 tour was a pleasure with new, industrial readings of old songs (Scary Monsters, Look Back In Anger, or DJ) and the dusting off of rarely-heard songs (Andy Warhol, My Death, or Teenage Wildlife). Popular songs from this album were “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” (good song but somewhat out of context when heard on the radio), “Hallo Spaceboy” (pile-driving rocker with blistering guitar work), and the subtle and wonderfully melodic “Strangers When We Meet.”

After Bowie’s experiment with industrial music, he noticed that the clubs in London played what was described as jungle/drum-and-bass music. You could certainly make the case that jungle/drum-and-bass was to London what hip-hop was the America, namely, an urban musical form with its own vocabulary and styles. In the mid-90s, this style was still more a jumble of musical types superimposed on each other, the result somewhat mish-mashed. Leave it to Bowie, with his perfectly maturing voice, to inject a degree of melody on rapid-rhythm drum-and-bass on his album Earthling (1997). He created something altogether unique in his career as well as the 1997 musical scene. Highlights of this CD are “Dead Man Walking” and “I’m Afraid of Americans.” In certain concert settings, Bowie unplugged these songs, stripping away the techno music to reveal the beauty of his music and voice underneath.

When examining Bowie’s entire career, you can see trilogies emerge. The aforementioned Berlin trilogy is one, the trilogy of albums surrounding Ziggy Stardust—The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Aladdin Sane, Pin-Ups—is another and the 1980s albums—Let’s Dance, Tonight, Never Let Me Down—is a third. The early-to-mid 1990s albums just discussed is another trilogy and, yet, Bowie gave us a fifth. Beginning with 1999’s …hours, Bowie began to reexamine his own career in a quite overt way. Upon listening to the sedate musings of the then 52-year-old man, …hours sounds very much like the answer to the question: What would Bowie’s 1971 album Hunky Dory sound like if it were recorded in 1999? With its acoustic stylings and meditative reflections, …hours was the answer. And it was a distinct break from the previous three albums. “Thursday’s Child” was the lead single, followed soon after by “Seven” and “Survive.” Back in 1999, you had to wonder if this were one of the few stand-alone albums Bowie had released throughout the years—The Man Who Sold the World, Young Americans, Scary Monsters—or the beginning of another cycle.

In 2002, Bowie released his most critically acclaimed album in years, Heathen. Produced by Tony Visconti, the soundboard genius behind most of Bowie’s albums in the 1970s, Heathen all but returned to the sound of the Berlin trilogy. Dark, moody, introspective punctuated with loud bursts like Bowie’s cover of the Pixie’s “Cactus,” Heathen arrived on store shelves in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks and seemed to pose new questions. In interviews during 2002, when Bowie was asked if the attacks had inspired any of the songs on the record, Bowie usually responded by stating that this particular pessimistic outlook on life had been a staple of his entire career. So, nothing fundamentally different but again, it was a prescient Bowie being one step ahead of the rest of us.

Then, in 2003, came his latest album, Reality. And it is here that Bowie embraces something altogether positive: the spirit and essence of New York City. Just listening to the tracks you can all but smell the odors wafting along the Avenue of the Americas or hear the sounds of the city. There are obvious post-9/11 depressive lyrics—“See the great white scar/Over Battery Park/Then a flare glides over/But I won't look at that scar”—as well as more surprisingly optimistic lyrics, perhaps as the result of his fourteen-year marriage to Iman or the joy that the couple’s three-year-old daughter bring to their life.

But there’s also something else. There’s a sly wink and a smile by Bowie to all of us. He tells us that he’s never gonna get old. During the Reality Tour, he delved into every phase of his catalogue, bringing out album cuts that hadn’t been performed live in decades. The DVD that documented that tour contains thirty songs (just drool at the set list and look at the stats of the tour), a three-hour experience that showed a performer, musician, and icon still performing at a peak many other artists would envy.

Smoking and touring finally caught up with Bowie in 2004, enough so that he had to cut the tour short. In the years since—going on five—it is the longest drought of Bowie’s career without a new record. He has recorded one-off songs here and there but performed rarely. You would be foolish to think there won’t be another Bowie album out there. But Ziggy is 61 this year and, as much as I hate to admit it, it is possible that we have all we’re going to get.

Either way, do not dismiss the 1990s albums. Collectively and separately, they constitute some of the best music of Bowie’s career. And if we do get that one, last album, you can bet David Bowie, The Thin White Duke, will probably be one step ahead of everyone and beckoning us to follow.


P.S., On the commemoration of the album's 20th anniversary, in 2019, I reviewed ...hours.

Music Review: Wolfgang's Big Night Out by The Brian Setzer Orchestra

Brian Setzer can travel through time. Want proof? Just look at his resume.

In the early 80s, when synthesizers and flaming pop metal ruled the radio airwaves, Setzer jumped back in time thirty years when he led the Stray Cats in a pseudo rockabilly 50s revival. It lasted for something like two albums and two quite famous and toe-tapping songs: “Stray Cat Strut” and “Rock This Town.” Then, for most folks, the felines on the fence got the boot thrown at them. They fell off. We all dusted our hands and nodded at a job well done.

But ten years later, in the mid-90s, Setzer went back even further in time, this time, sixty years. In a world filled with grunge, Setzer landed in the 30s, arriving just in time for the mini swing revival that crested prior to the millennium. His 17-piece big band helped to lead the movement and, for an alto sax player like me, gave me something really fun to get into. In fact, as the swing craze set the 90s ablaze, many folks had thoughts like this: “Wow. This is some good music.” Uh, yeah. What took y’all so long to realize that? Just look what they did to the Stray Cats hit “Rock This Town.”

Setzer and his band produced four studio albums (the third, The Dirty Boogie, is the best) and two Christmas CDs and a few live albums. The first Yule collection, Boogie Woogie Christmas, featured a big band, jazz rendition of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker Suite.” I remember seeing the track listing on the jewel box and thinking “Seriously?” Could a piece of music played in straight time ever come off as a swing number? The short answer: yeah, it can. And it’s really good.

So it was a natural progression for Setzer to travel back further in time and tackle an entire CD’s worth of classically inspired jazz pieces. And Wolfgang’s Big Night Out is the result. And you know what? These classical composers can swing, baby!

The album is basically a greatest hits record of classical songs and themes. “Take the 5th” kicks off the album and the music is only half the fun. All the song titles save one are themselves jazzy, Vegas-lounge inspired riffs off the original pieces. Thus, “Take the 5th” morphs from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. And this piece could have come directly from Benny Goodman’s orchestra circa 1936. The thing about this track and most of the other tracks is Setzer’s guitar sound. It’s straight 50s and early 60s: very little reverb, very little distortion. It’s a clean sound although Setzer is not shy about the whammy bar. Not only do you get 30s and 40s era swing arrangements, you get 50s and 60s guitar sounds to boot.

“One More Night With You” is the only song title that’s not a direct take-off of the original piece. And this is the only vocals that Setzer delivers. The theme is Grieg’s “Hall of the Mountain King” and the music is quite good. The lyrics are all about how Setzer doesn’t need all the bling associated with success if he has the woman of his dreams. The female backup singers channel the Andrew Sisters as they vocally prance their way behind Setzer’s warble.

You know Mozart can swing so the title track (AKA “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”) is pleasant and uneventful. Ditto for “Yes We Can Can” (I don’t have to tell you what that song is from, do I?) and “Sabre Dance,” a song that keeps its title and its intensity.

Setzer is an underrated guitarist. He’s flashy but not as well known as, say, Clapton, Page, or Van Halen. Setzer’s genius is in his picking techniques, put on glorious display in “Honey Man” (“Flight of the Bumblebee”). Yes, it would be much easier to do a Van Halen and play only with his fingers on the fret board and not pick each individual note. Heck, if Setzer did that, the song could have been played much, much faster. Instead, the song blows through your speakers at a rapid clip and Setzer picks every single note. Impressive.

Perhaps the most unexpected arrangement is the modifying of Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” into “For Lisa,” a gypsy jazz piece that would have made Django Reinhardt proud. In the only song that doesn’t feature the entire band, Setzer and a few mates (violin, bass, drums, clarinet, and Setzer himself on acoustic guitar) present a soft, acoustic piece that evokes Parisian cafes at the turn of the century. Setzer’s albums are usually loud and bombastic. This little piece just floats along, making you smile and wanting some coffee.

To say that there are some missteps puts a damper on the tracks themselves. None of the songs are bad; some just work better than others. “Swingin’ Willie” (“William Tell Overture”) is a decent enough track but the swing seems a tad forced. The same is true for “Some River in Europe” (“Blue Danube”), a song that stays hews close to its classical inspiration, rarely veering into swing territory.

Wolfgang’s Big Night Out showcases one true blender song on an album full of them. By blender, I’m talking about when you put a bunch of different influences into a blender and turn it on. “1812 Overdrive” does that a bit at the beginning of the song as the Latin-tinged drums and percussion give you that Louis Prima, jump blues vibe. But the shining star of blender songs has got to be “Take a Break Guys” (“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”). If you count jazz and classical as the two base motifs, then you have to include Goodman’s “Sing Sing Sing” (tom-tom drums), surf guitar (at the beginning), an introduction that could have come from a James Bond film, and, then, the coup de grace: Jimi Hendrix. During the phenomenal guitar solo, the rhythm shifts to straight rock time and Setzer begins to shred, a la mid-70s rock gods like Terry Kath (Chicago) and Joe Perry (Aerosmith). The horns come back in for the second half of the solo but then Setzer breaks out the wah-wah pedal and does his best Hendrix impersonation (think "All Along the Watchtower" among others). From there on out, he keeps the wah-wah going but funkifies it, just like you’d hear in an early 70s Isaac Hayes tune. As much fun as the other eleven tracks are, this is the track to take home and share.

A recommendation: I first heard this CD while driving in my car. As such, I couldn’t just pick up the CD case and look at the title of the song whilst driving at sixty-miles-per-hour. So, the fun thing was to try and determine, as quickly as possible, which classical piece was Setzer’s inspiration. Some are easy: Beethoven’s 5th and "Take the 5th" both start out with the same four notes. Some are much more fun. If you’ve already bought this CD, try this: put away the track listing, set your CD player to random, and just revel in the fun. You’ll be tapping your toe in no time.

And speaking of time, I wonder where Setzer time travels next? Gregorian chants as jazz songs? In Setzer’s capable hands, anything is possible.

Music Review: Chiller by Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra

Mozart never made a concept record. And, no, I don’t count opera. It wasn’t until the 1800s that music took the natural next step and created a sonic landscape with a unified story or theme. A concept record before there were even records.

What am I getting at? Program music—that is, music with the intended purpose of creating images in a listener’s mind—didn’t flourish until the Romantic Period in the 1800s. And it wasn’t long before music evoking a pastoral landscape gave way to things that scared us: demons, witches, and death. Often referred to as tone poems, some of the best are collected in the 1989 CD “Chiller,” by Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra.

Kunzel has made a niche market of popular music from movies being recorded and packaged together to go with a common theme. “Round-Up” features western music, “Star Tracks II” showcases some great themes from science fiction films, while “William Tell and Other Favorite Overtures” shore up the usual pops orchestra material. So it was not long before they tackled the music of the macabre.

One of the fun things on a Kunzel CD is the sound effects. “Round-Up” begins with sounds around a campfire. The CD that includes music from “Jurassic Park” starts off with the sounds of a T-Rex stomping through the forest. So, as you can expect, “Chiller” starts off with a scream. A very loud scream. You hear thunder and rain, a mewing cat, and footsteps running—natch—up some wooden steps. Three knocks of the door knocker boom and the door creaks open. The woman, so happy that some is home, turns to look at the…thing in the doorway and screams. The thing screams back. The short piece ends with the door slamming shut and immediately, the opening to the Andrew Lloyd Rice’s “Phantom of the Opera” kicks in, the pipe organ played to full volume. It really starts things off with a bang.

After the Phantom has left the stage, the remainder of the CD’s first half (time wise; these are long pieces) meanders through the great supernaturally-themed orchestral pieces from the 19th Century. All the great ones are here save one. “Night on Bald Mountain” blows through your speakers with its accustomed ferocity. You hear the intense string line flurrying around and, then, suddenly, the thunder of the low brass bolts from the sky. Having played this piece before, it never gets old.

My personal favorite supernatural piece of music is Saint-Saens’ “Danse Macabre.” Musically, you hear night fall and the dead rise, led by Death sawing through his violin concerto as the dead dance. Kunzel and the orchestra nail this reading of the piece, bringing forth all the innuendos of the instruments: xylophone as dancing bones, harps tolling midnight, the oboe as rooster, among others. This piece just floats along and, man, you can just see (dead people) the skeletons and ghouls prancing in the graveyard and over the tombstones. It all climaxes in a fantastic melding of two scales, one ascending and one descending, being played over each other. Just like when you turn up the volume on your car radio when you hear “Hotel California,” I always crank up the volume when these scales do their thing. And then it all ends at dawn.

The rest of the classical music includes two pieces from Berlioz (“March to the Scaffold” and “Pandemonium”) and Greig’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Peer Gynt, a piece that can always leave you panting. The one piece whose inclusion would have made this CD perfect is Paul Dukas’s “The Sorcerer's Apprentice.” You’ll have to get it elsewhere. “Classics from the Crypt” includes it as a few other pieces not on this CD. I have both and pretty well have all the great supernatural orchestral pieces out there.

The second half of “Chiller” is a let-down after the spectacular music from the 19th Century. It’s film music from the 20th Century. None of it is bad, it just suffers when compared to the older music. Moreover, the carefully-crafted mood evoked by the classical music is broken with happier-sounding material like the overture to the movie “Sleuth” or the theme to the movie “Without a Clue.” If I had selected the music for this disc, I would have included more pieces like the Herrmann music from “Psycho,” complete with the exact sound effect you’d expect from the famous murder scene. The theme from “The Bride of Frankenstein” does its job well, bringing to mind all the fantastic images from that horror film of that era.

The fact that there are images associated with the film music is why I enjoy the older tone poems better: they were intended to stir up in the listener images of their own imagination. Film music, by its very nature, compliments eerie pictures on a silver screen. There’s nothing wrong with that. Some great music is out there to correspond to some great horror films: the theme to the movie “Halloween,” for example, or the music from “Silence of the Lambs.” But so much horror film music is best experienced within the context of the film. The classical music on “Chiller” is of itself and the images are entirely yours. Yeah, I’ll admit that I can’t listen to “Night on Bald Mountain” and not think of the demon from “Fantasia” but that’s the exception (and, oh boy, what an exception!).

What made these concept classical pieces of the 19th Century so compelling was that we, as humans, didn’t know as much as we 21st Century citizens know. With our ultra modern lifestyle, we can keep the supernatural at bay more easily than we used to. Heck, we keep nature at bay, as well. To some extent, with greater scientific knowledge comes with it a greater understanding that supernatural things our ancestors were scared of are merely figments of our collective imaginations. Death doesn’t rise from the grave and play a violin. There is no supernatural witches’ Sabbath. With nature largely conquered in the western world, the things that scare us are falling stocks, serial killers, terrorism, or bio-warfare, things all man-made. We don’t get scared at the supernatural anymore.

Which is why “Chiller” is such a wonderful CD. With the classical pieces included here, you can get a sense of the frightening wonderment audiences experienced two centuries ago in the concert halls. After an 1870s concert featuring “Danse Macabre,” I can imagine a few folks looking around shadowed corners as they walked home or rode in carriages. Horror films do the trick for us nowadays but there’s a part of you that knows, logically, that the amputated leg is fake, that the demons in a film use fake blood, or that it all is created on a computer.

Not so with this music. It’s all in your head. Which is why I would have loved to experience a demonic piece by Mozart. With his brilliant orchestral work, can you imagine how messed up and scared the citizens of Vienna would have been if Mozart trotted out a “Danse Macabre” or “Night on Bald Mountain”? I know your smiling one of your devilish smiles at that delicious thought. I am, too.

Music Review: Hot Streets by Chicago

Now what?

That must have been the thoughts of the members of the band Chicago after fellow founding member Terry Kath’s untimely death in January 1978. The previous year, they had released their eleventh album and conducted yet another successful tour. Their last show—the last time Kath performed in public—was 1 December 1977 and they had already decided to move in a different direction by parting ways with James William Guercio, their producer and manager since 1969. The year 1978 was going to be a time of change and transition anyway. Soon after Kath’s death and funeral, the band had to wonder if they should move on as a band or call it quits.

Before they could even think of recording anything, they needed a new guitarist. The remaining members of Chicago—Robert Lamm, Peter Cetera, Lee Loughnane, James Pankow, Walt Parazaider, Danny Serephine—interviewed numerous guitarist. The true list has never been revealed so it’s a wonderful mystery thinking about who jammed with the band during their try-outs. One of the last guys to play was twenty-seven-year-old Donnie Dacus from Texas. At that point, his most recent work was with Stephen Stills (of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young) and he went into his audition and decided to play with abandon. According to various sources, the guys were impressed that Dacus didn’t seemed cowed and just played his heart out in his own style. The Texan landed the job. And Chicago lived another day.

After hiring a new guitarist, Chicago needed a new producer. Phil Ramone, already legendary by 1978, had mixed a few of Chicago’s albums and he signed on as co-producer. The other listed producer was “Chicago.” Now, self-producing a album can have mixed results. If an artist has one vision, the results can prove excellent. Without a cohesive musical vision, the results can leave something to be desired. The ten songs that ended up being Chicago’s twelfth album lands somewhere in between. That’s to be expected with so much riding on it and the questions that would inevitably arise. How would Chicago sound without Terry Kath, the musical soul of the band since the early days? How would Chicago cope with the changing musical landscape of 1978, the year after “Saturday Night Fever” and the rise of disco, not to mention punk rock? How would the new guitarist blend in with the now-traditional Chicago sound?

The first track of the new album, “Alive Again,” was the answer. A bold, brash opener, complete with a disco-ish guitar riff, “Alive Again” told the world that Chicago was not dead. Pankow’s lyrics spoke of romantic love but you could pretty much read the band’s love of Kath in between the lines.

Yesterday I would not have believed
That tomorrow the sun would shine
Then one day you came into my life
I am alive again I am alive again

Heck, you could even account for the newfound enthusiasm the band had on stage with Dacus in those lyrics as well.

If the opening track on their first album, “Introduction,” is all you needed to know about Chicago circa 1969, then “Alive Again” is all you need to know about Chicago post-Kath. Peter Cetera sings the tune and this is the beginning of his ascendancy. The band accommodates and incorporates a newer musical sound within the context of the band (read: disco; although not as much as Chicago 13). The guitar solo by Dacus, while good and appropriate for the song, is less inventive than previous solos by Kath. Dacus’s vocal range is not Kath’s deeper baritone and the band’s vocal sound collectively rose in pitch without Kath and with Dacus.

And then there's the horns. Yes, they are there but only in a support role. “Alive Again,” in all of it’s three-minute, radio-friendly glory left little room for any extended horn breaks. To be fair, many of Chicago’s radio hits featured few horns breaks (“Just You n Me” is the most famous exception) but the horns were always, there, as the “fourth voice,” in many Chicago hits. (See how the horns interact with the vocals on “Saturday in the Park” as a good example.)

This diminished capacity of the horns on this new Chicago record goes on for most of the ten songs. “The Greatest Love on Earth” is Cetera’s attempt to write “If You Leave Me Now” Part III (after Chicago XI’s “Baby, What a Big Surprise;' here's my take on that album.). It’s a pretty song but you know that the band is capable of so much more. It’s also another indicator of the change in the sound of horns. Most Chicago songs feature a horn sound that is mellow, balanced by Pankow’s trombone, giving the sound a rich, deep timbre. With “The Greatest Love on Earth,” the trombone is there, but the mix reduces its sound. The result is a higher pitched sound, like Ramone turned the treble too high and the bass too low.

“Little Miss Lovin’” is Chicago’s answer to KISS’ “Christeen Sixteen.” It’s a rocking paean to teenage lust that features the Bee Gees on background vocals. Makes you wonder what Cetera was thinking when he wrote this tune. Another Dacus guitar solo and this one’s better.

“Hot Streets” is the fourth track as has the distinction of being a title track. For eleven albums, the only title was a number (other than the Carnegie Hall album). Chicago decided to title their twelfth album and they chose the most Chicago-sounding song on the album. “Hot Streets” is a Lamm-penned tune that evokes the spirit and feel of 1978 while still remembering where Chicago’s sound originated. The horns are back to being the other voice throughout the song. The high-hat is definitely of the late 70s and is a good example of how Chicago incorporates other trends into their own sound. And, shock of shocks, there is a horn solo. This time, it’s Parazaider’s flute blowing a fantastic, jazzy solo that evokes his great solo from Chicago II’s “It Better End Soon” without all the early 70s experimentation. The solo segues into an honest-to-goodness horn break. The timbre of the horns is still high but the break definitely hearkens back to the way the horns were used early on. “Hot Streets” ends with an extended guitar solo by Dacus that, sonically, is the sequel to Terry Kath’s last recorded solo (XI’s “This Time”). It’s a compositional solo, with refrains and a melodic line that runs to the end of the song. If, in 1978, any fan was listening to the new album wondering where the old Chicago was, the song “Hot Streets” put their worries to rest.

Dacus’s vocal debut, “Take a Chance” rounds out side one. It’s a pleasant song, pretty good really. Again the horns are the fourth voice, with a secondary melody behind Dacus’s singing. The guitar solos are wonderful, trading leads with the horns. These last two tracks of side one can be considered the best of the old and new Chicago.

Side two is opens with “Gone Long Gone,” a standard Top 40-type song of the post-Kath era: Cetera sung (including his own backing vocals) and hornless. It’s nice, yet simple. “Ain’t it Time” is Dacus’s second lead vocal. Decent song just nothing to write home about. One thing you can tell is how well Cetera and Dacus sound together. They are, in a sense, Bee Gee-sounding without all the high screeching. Lamm’s “Love Was New” is a pleasant, wistful look back at new romance. “No Tell Lover” is another ballad and probably the best one on the album. Cetera sings it and it’s the foremost example of how well Dacus and Cetera sound together. It’s got a horn break but it’s pretty simple. The album ends with the somewhat experimental sound of “Show Me the Way.” Synthesized strings open the song and poke their heads out during verses. Chicago had used strings before but mostly they were real players with real instruments. I can certainly see why they put this song at the end. It’s a good tune, written by drummer Serephine and sung by Lamm. It’s just one of odder-sounding cuts in Chicago’s repertoire. The ending fades out with a pseudo-Russian sounding chant “Marching into your heart” under the synthesizer.

The album “Hot Streets” was released to the world thirty years ago this month and the band hit the road. Regardless of what listeners thought of the album, the band’s stage show rocked. Dacus brought a new enthusiasm to the show. He wasn’t Kath and didn’t play like him. He had long, blond hair, he moved and gyrated like, well, a rock star. On older cuts, he interpreted the solos his own way. In February 1978, Van Halen’s first album hit the world and a whole new style of guitar playing emerged. Dacus played like Van Halen. Check out his take on Chicago’s most famous guitar-driven song, “25 or 6 to 4.” It was probably a shock to the crowd’s who loved Kath’s playing. Ironically, the very enthusiasm that Dacus showed in 1978—and that another guitarist, Dawayne Bailey, showed in the late 1980s—would eventually get him fired from the band two years later after making one more album.

No one would have blamed Chicago if they hung it up after Terry Kath’s death. You can make the case—and some members have—that the true Chicago died in 1978. (I still think of the first eleven albums as Chicago: The Originals.) But they didn’t. They forged ahead and continued to make some fantastic and lasting music. And it started with the addition of Donnie Dacus and the ten cuts that make up the album “Hot Streets.”

Love it or hate it, this album is the key album in Chicago’s nearly forty-plus year history. Without “Hot Streets” you would not have the famous ballads of the 1980s, you would not have “Stone of Sisyphus,” and you would not have the Christmas CD. While their first album was one of the best opening statements in rock history and their second solidified what it meant to be a rock band with horns, “Hot Streets” demonstrated that Chicago could and would adapt to changes in personnel and musical trends. Unfortunately, when their record label cancelled their contract two years later, Chicago was again left with the same question they asked in early 1978: “Now what?” The good thing for us, looking back, we know the answer.

Movie Review: Harper

If, as the trailer proclaims, Paul Newman is Harper and if “Harper” the movie is a little dull, does that make Paul Newman dull? In a math world, yes. In our world, not at all.

“Harper” is the screen adaptation of the Ross MacDonald book The Moving Target, featuring the PI Lew Archer. In a nice introduction to the DVD, Robert Osborn from TCM explains how the name Archer became Harper for the movie. Paul Newman had, by 1966, some success with movies that had the letter “H” in the title. See "Hud" and "The Hustler." So, he lobbied for the name change. I’m not that much of a purist so it didn’t bother me one way or the other.

If you’ve read my review of the novel, you’ll know that I didn’t love the book all that much. In fact, I found it dull in places. Bruce Grossman from Bookgasm.com has assured me that MacDonald’s books get better once the author starts writing in his own voice rather than a Chandler pastiche. Unfortunately, the somewhat dull book created a somewhat dull movie. Not that it wasn’t entertaining. Newman gave Harper a lively appearance and his sarcastic wit shined as brightly as his blue eyes. He made me laugh in places that I didn’t in the book. And the cast was quite good. Lauren Bacall as the invalid wife of the missing husband dripped with barely-concealed venom. A young Robert Wagner as the pilot/hanger-on of the missing husband gives a buoyant and cheerful performance. Shelley Winters plays the older actress who is past her prime with a drunken authority that is hard to believe she’s only four years older than Bacall, the “younger” wife of Ralph Sampson, the missing husband Harper’s been hired to locate. And Pamela Tiffin exudes the overt sexiness that rivals our modern pop stars but with a lot more left to the imagination.

William Goldman, who would later write “The Princess Bride” and snag a couple of Oscars, adapted and updated MacDonald’s 1949 novel. With the story now set in 1966, you get almost everything that you would expect from a movie set just before the tumultuous final years of that decade. You get the cars—Newman drives a beat-up convertible—the clothes, the lingo, the vibe of a decade trying on everything new. You get the teenagers all dancing in sync with the latest jazzy tunes. About the only thing you don’t get is a beach scene with Newman on a surfboard, riding the waves, to the cheering applause of enraptured teens. (Maybe that’s in the sequel?) Actually, the jazz score by Johnny Mandel is one of the best things about the film. His music, not altogether unlike the soundtrack to the recent film "Sideways," consisting of nice and breezy melodies with combinations of instruments that just scream mid-60s (flute, congas) makes the watching of the movie much easier.

Newman does rise above the rote script. In fact, one of the nicest visual touches in the film is how Harper moves from flippant but professional PI to serious and hard-edged PI. His gum chewing is another visual clue to how he does his job. When interviewing the clients, he chews gum like a hood. When it comes times to draw a gun and take action, he chunks the gum. And Newman’s affected accents work to make you laugh, too. Harper is off-putting, and the folks he interviews never quite know that they’ve just revealed something of interest.

“Harper’ is not a bad film. It was enjoyable albeit slow. There is nothing wrong with a slow-burn story. I enjoy them and, frankly, I wrote my first novel in that fashion. But you’d certainly expect the big finish. And “Harper,” like the novel, ends the way it begins: somewhat dull.

Music Review: Two Men and the Blues by Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis

I know what you’re thinking? Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis? Together? I thought the same thing, too, when I saw them on The Tonight Show earlier this year. I mean, we are talking about Willie Nelson, the Texas troubadour who will duet with, well, just about anyone who asks. And then there’s Wynton Marsalis, the jazz purist—puritan?—who disdained even his brother, Branford, for touring with Sting back in the 1980s. How in the world did these two get together?

That’s something I haven’t discovered yet, even in the nice little behind-the-scenes video up on YouTube. Upon closer inspection, the pairing is not as far from left field as you might think. Nelson has covered everything including reggae (yeah, really) but one of his biggest albums was Stardust (1978), an album of standards from the Great American Songbook, that helped to define what Nelson does best: blend many varied genres and elements to create something different, if not original. Marsalis, in the meantime, has spent the bulk of his twenty-five year career bringing back the prominence of acoustic jazz, the jazz before Miles Davis “corrupted” the genre by plugging in and going electric. And Marsalis succeeded, reminding folks (and record executives) that traditional jazz can be good and make money at the same time. The songs Marsalis used to usher in the Young Lions movement in jazz were those from The Great American Songbook.

Beyond the two men drinking from the same well of music, look at their backgrounds. They are both southerners, Nelson from Texas and Marsalis from New Orleans. Southern music is a smorgasbord of sounds and influences. Gospel, blues, jazz, bluegrass, folk, country, Texas swing, and more all can be found in almost any song by a southerner. So it was, two southerners and their band members went up to New York and recorded a concert at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

"Two Men and the Blues" is a live recording. It serves the music well because, I think, the perfection of a studio would have lessened the impact and spontaneity of the performance. You get the sense that these seven men are not on a stage at a prestigious concert hall but in the drummer’s garage. It’s a Saturday night, it’s hot, the door’s open, the beer getting warm in the ice chest full of melting ice, and these guys are just jammin’ for no other reason that they love music.

“Bright Lights Big City” kicks off the set. Wynton’s band—he brought himself on trumpet, Walter Blanding (sax), Carlos Henriquez (bass), Dan Nimmer (piano), and Ali Jackson (drums)—sets up the nice lilting shuffle feel. Mickey Raphael’s harmonica is also there, adding that certain flourish that only a harmonica can. All the instrumentalists take a turn at soloing, even Nelson on guitar. You know going into this recording that Wynton’s band is top notch. If there was going to be a weak link, it was going to be Nelson’s guitar playing. I was interested in hearing if Nelson took a turn on soloing. He did, and, while it’s not superb, this is the type of song where fancy pyrotechnics are out of place. So Nelson did just fine.

The longer you listen to this recording, you realize how close the phrasing of Nelson’s vocals and his guitar really are. His Martin nylon string guitar does not hold the sustain like a steel-string guitar. Nelson usually compensates by repeatedly striking whichever string he’s playing. But on this recording, he doesn’t do that a lot. He lets the struck string fade when it wants to, much like his voice. Nelson is not a singer who can hold a note for a long period of time. Where a singer like, say, Sinatra, would carry his phrasing past the four-measure break, Nelson breaks his vocal phrasing short. As a result, there are usually more silences in a Nelson tune. That’s his style and it really works in this set.

“Night Life” is one of those tracks where you imagine it being played in a late-night jazz club, after midnight but before closing time, the smoke hanging low from the ceiling, all but the die-hard have gone home. It’s the time of night for the faithful, the friends, and for the girls in the audience who want to date a jazz performer. Wynton’s trumpet shines here, opening the track with a long solo that sets the down tempo mood. But it’s his flutter sound during the chorus that really takes the roof off. Out of nowhere, it blasts above Nelson’s vocals. And Willie brings out a better solo on guitar, a nice, soft theme that put my worries about his abilities to rest. He also played a good melody on “Basin Street Blues.”

Since Stardust is still one of Nelson’s most famous records, you knew the band was going to cover some of those songs. They do the title track and, of course, “Georgia, On My Mind.” "Stardust" has a beautiful, lush tenor sax solo, the kind where you can hear the air passing over the reed in the lower register, a nuance that, for me, a sax player, I love. “Georgia” starts off showcasing Nelson’s vocals as the centerpiece but the soloist shine just as brightly. Marsalis’s wah-wah trumpet wails, Raphael’s harmonica sings, and Nimmer’s piano playing bring a new, but slower, energy to this song. If I had to pick a definitive version of this song as sung by Nelson, it would be this one.

When you listen to the record, it’s at this point where the audience and the band start to let loose. From the band side, this is the first tune where you can hear Nelson compliment his fellow players during the song. From the audience, they knew the song as it began and they cheered audibly at its conclusion. I could say the audience was polite but tepid in their applause at the beginning of the set. Perhaps they, like new listeners, don’t know what to make of this seemingly strange pairing. By the end of “Georgia,” they knew they were a part of something special. And they let the band know it. For the rest of the set, you can hear cat calls from the audience as they get into the spirit of the night.

An old Hank Williams tune, “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It,” has the vibe of the New Orleans Preservation Jazz Band, complete with a squeaky clarinet and a drum solo, greeted with whistles and cheers of the audience. They cheer Nelson’s best guitar solo in Cole Porter’s “Ain’t Nobody’s Business. ” They laugh as Wynton brings his only vocal performance on this song, telling Nelson and the audience all the things he might do that are, you guessed it, nobody’s business. The set closes with “That’s All,” a fast blues shuffle where everybody has their last chance to shine. Amid the audience clapping along (wonder if they were standing?), you get a taste of the power of Wynton’s trumpet as he let’s loose with one of his famous long notes, high and a little dirty.

By the end, the band and the audience have relaxed and just let the night sweep them away. And we as listeners can get a taste of what it was like those two nights at Lincoln Center. When performances like this crop up, my immediate impulse is to want more of it. Sometimes, the sequel does not live up to the promise of the original. In this case, however, another CD would be more than welcome. And I’d love to see the band perform down in Austin at the South by Southwest or Austin City Limits festival.

I love it when two musicians realize that there are more things that unite them than differences in their approaches to music. It reminds you that music is universal and can bring just about anyone together. And, if the results of unique pairings are like that of this CD—where you can’t help but smile and tap your foot—it really is lightening in a bottle.

Music Review: No Place Left to Fall by Bill Champlin

Bill Champlin wears the mantle of a musician’s musician. He’s a studio wizard. He’s an in-demand vocal stylist and arranger. He shows up in places you’d expect—Toto CDs or on albums from other west coast musicians—and places you may not expect—from Amy Grant’s 1988 “Lead Me On,” Paulinho Da Costa’s 1978 album “Happy People.” He sang the theme song for the TV show “In the Heat of the Night.” He’s won Grammy’s for writing (Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “After the Love Has Gone” and George Bensen’s “Turn Your Love Around”). And he’s virtually unknown to the general public.

Well, except for his tenure with Chicago. And even then, folks might have a difficult time actually naming him. “Isn’t he the other guy singing ‘Hard Habit to Break’ with Peter Cetera?” Yes. “Is he the guy that sings ‘Look Away’?” Still yes. After that, most folks draw a blank. Even his first band—with the hint right there in the band name—don’t give folks a clue as to who Bill Champlin is. That band name? The Sons of Champlin.

Like many artist, Champlin explores other musical ideas in solo albums. And last week, after a thirteen-year absence, Champlin released a new CD of all-original material. Not that Champlin hasn’t been busy. He toured extensively with Chicago every year, played a large role in Chicago’s Christmas CDs as well as 2006’s Chicago XXX, and released a CD of new material with his first band, The Sons. With “No Place Left to Fall,” many of the musical influences that have percolated in his other musical endeavors come to surface and shine.

One thing you immediately notice with any Champlin-touched tune is the impeccable musicianship. These things are slickly produced. Some might argue that they are over produced but, when you consider all the things you can do in a studio, it’s Champlin’s restraint that is a hallmark of his work. The thirteen songs on this new CD have lots of elements to them. It really takes some concentrated listening with headphones to make out all the little nuances Champlin deploys.

A major presence of this album is Champlin’s B3 organ. For folks like me who discovered Champlin’s work via Chicago, Champlin’s B3 organ sound was gradually introduced, first in concert in the early 90s. It showed up on the 22nd album, Stone of Sisyphus but, then that CD was never formally released until 2008. It wasn’t until Chicago’s big band CD, Night and Day (1995) that the B3 organ got it studio premiere. And it’s there, right on track one and playing underneath most every track. Chicago 25: The Christmas Album featured the B3 on more songs, especially on what I now consider to be the definitive take on “The Little Drummer Boy.” The B3 is prominent on Champlin’s other 1990s solo releases (be sure to check out “Mayday,” the live recording from 1997) as well. You can tell when Champlin plays a real one, too. The organic, natural quality of a real B3 is heads and shoulders above anything a synth can produce.

All this is to say that the B3 shines on this new album. Literally, from the opening notes on track one, the B3 is spread like honey over all of these songs, sweetening and making it all just taste a little better. The coolest thing about the B3 is the judicious way most organists play the instrument. It’s little tidbits here, a riff there, a counter melody under a rhythm guitar, the syrupy foundation of a swampy blues song, it’s just there. The smooth, silky quality of the B3 and blue-eyed soul of Champlin’s voice just go together you wonder why he didn’t start sooner. Two highlights of the B3 on the new album is “I Want You to Stay” and the opening, funkified riff of “Tuggin’ on Your Sleeve.”

Speaking of riffs, this Champlin dude can tear it up on rhythm guitar. Not like Van Halen or any of those guys who play thousands of notes per minute. (Remember the Emperor in Amadeus: “Too many notes.”) I’m talking about a competent musician who knows the instrument, what it can do, and, most importantly, how it can compliment the song in question or his singing. I know Champlin collaborated with long-time friend Bruce Gaitsch (the iTunes download does not include liner notes) but I don’t know which songs on which he actually plays guitar. But any Chicago concertgoer of the past couple of years where Champlin got out from behind the keyboard and strapped on a guitar knows what the man can do. And he does it well here.

One interesting acoustic guitar-based piece on the new album is “Look Away.” Yes, it’s the same song that went to #1 in 1988 and was transformed into an acoustic rendition on the 1995 Night and Day tour. Champlin uses the acoustic version as a starting point but basically creates a new song. He takes the song—where the intent of the words can certainly get lost amid the trappings of a power ballad—and brings out its quite personal and painful message. It’s not too big a stretch to say that if Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young ever sang a love ballad, it would not sound too different that this version. Oh, and if you want to know the kinds of jibs and jabs the B3 can add to a song, check out this song after the whole band kicks in.

Another feature of a Champlin-created song or album are the vocal arrangements. The Chicago Christmas CD is infused with multiple voices, layer upon layer, creating a vocal mélange that is greater than the whole. The same holds true here. More often than not, Champlin sings the lead and the harmony. It works although I have to admit it’s always been strange hearing a lead singer being backed up by himself. The opening vocal ensemble on “Never Let Go” is a perfect example of this type of vocal stacking. This song reminded me of the neat experiment Champlin did in the 1990s with Jason Scheff and two singers from Toto. On the CD, “California Dreamin’,” the four vocalist cover famous rock songs a capella with a lead singer and the backup singers (each man takes a turn at lead) doing all the instrumental parts. How cool is it to hear “Hotel California,” complete with the ending guitar solos, all done with voices. It’s a little like Take 6 if you need a different avenue into your memory.

When it came time to ask Champlin to join Chicago in 1981, it seemed like a no-brainer because both Chicago and The Sons of Champlin had horns. All of Champlin’s CDs have at least one song that puts the horns up front and in your face. This time out, it’s the Fat City Horns from Santa Fe and the Fat City Horns. And when they say fat, they really mean it. “Stone Cold Hollywood” is that song on this album. Six horns, bleeting and blowing, complete with a nasty bari sax, man, it’s like a tune from the dirty side of town. Did I mention the bari sax? Man, throw on some headphones and just listen for it. It’ll make you grin like you just ate all the cranberry sauce before the Thanksgiving dinner was supposed to start. You know it’s wrong but, damn, it’s so good.

Bill Champlin emerged from the San Francisco scene in the late 1960s. In his outlook on life, making music, and the music biz, he’s never really left that time. You go on over to his webpage and the forum there—yes, he interacts with fans—and you can get a taste of what I’m talking about. He doesn’t say “thing,” he says “thang.” He doesn’t say “love,” he says “Luv,” drawing it out, nodding and winking, where you know how he’s meaning it. And he doesn’t mince words. There’s a great interview up on YouTube (here’s the link from my page) from earlier this year where Champlin tells you what he thinks and doesn’t back down from it. A nice quality from a member of a business that too often tries to please the suits and the audience with pablum and platitudes.

And it is this truthfulness—in the music, the lyrics, the spirit—of this CD that makes the thirteen-year gestation seem short. “No Place Left to Fall” is a consummate album of songs by an exceptional musician, lyricist, and singer. Bill Champlin may not be a household name but you get the sense that he doesn’t care about that stuff one way or another. Certainly he wishes mid-level artists who never get the recognition they deserve—while the talent-less phonies rake in the dough—and lends his name around. And other musicians know his reputation and bring him in for an assist. All that is well and good and part of what it takes to be a professional musician. But you can tell that it’s the Music that drives him. And it is through his music that he is known…even if you don’t know it.

Later update: I posted the link to this review on Bill Champlin's forum. The man himself read my review and wrote the following back on October 7:

Scott, I read your review and I thank you for the kind words. Not a lot of people get where my stuff's comin' from and you seemed to get it. People like it but not many "Get It". Thanks again, bill c.

Music Review: The Girl in the Other Room by Diana Krall

In 2004, Diana Krall tried something different and was savaged for it.

Up until that year, Krall had been riding high. She crept slowly to the world’s attention although the jazz clan knew of her long before the rest of us did. Her first breakout CD was All for You, a Tribute to the Nat King Cole trio. After another CD devoted to love songs, Krall exploded on the world stage in 1998 with When I Look in Your Eyes. That CD had the distinction of being the first jazz CD to be nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy. She followed with 2001’s The Look of Love, a lush, orchestral album, rich in jazz history with a modern touch. The DVD, Live in Paris, captured Krall at the zeitgeist of this run.

All of a sudden, things in her personal life simultaneously fell apart and found new joy. Her mother died in 2002 as did professional mentors Rosemary Clooney and Ray Brown, the man who helped convince Krall to move from her native Canada to Los Angeles to pursue a career in music. These tragedies might have been worse if not for her newfound love interest Declan MacManus. What? You don’t know that name? How about his profession nom de guerre: Elvis Costello. It cannot be coincidence that the confluence of personal loss, personal happiness, and the presence of a brilliant songwriter prompted Krall to try something new on her follow-up. She wrote her own songs.

Krall is, like all artists, a creator. You can’t deny that, for example, the Krall version of “The Look of Love” or gender-swapping of Cole’s “I’m an Errand Girl for Rhythm” are new songs, ones different from other versions out there. But, for all the reasons listed above and others we don’t know, Krall felt the urge to create her own work, to say something in her own voice. And the resulting CD is something very special: The Girl in the Other Room.

Krall wrote half of the twelve tracks on this CD with her new husband, whom she married in 2003. In liner notes on her website, Krall comments that she wrote pages and pages of thoughts, memories, and impressions but it was Costello who trimmed and honed the thoughts into verses and stanzas. What you experience in these songs is an adult woman—not some Top 40 teeny bopper—coming to terms with heartbreak, loss, the meaning of love and family, and romance.

If there’s one song that has it all, it’s the title track. The main character is alone in a room in a house. The silence closes in on her. She’s thinking. She’s remembering her mother. The musical arrangement intensifies this feeling, opening with a simply guitar chords by Anthony Wilson. The aural quality of the guitar evokes emptiness. The funeral’s over, perhaps, because there’s murmuring from a different part of the house. She’s looking at her reflection and questioning herself. Later in the song, the same girl is with her lover as they undress and fall together. She questions whether or not they should be together, but she finally realizes life goes on. The girl in the mirror recognizes herself. She’s different now, but still the same person she was and always has been. In all, this song is a positive song, one about overcoming calamity and still living as well as possible. It’s not a little like us here in Houston as we pick up the pieces after Hurricane Ike and move forward. To stay is to stagnate.

Not every song is about love and loss. There are songs about Krall’s new place in life: as a wife, as a seasoned professional. “I’ve Changed My Address” shows Krall reflecting on her earlier life playing in jazz bars, sharpening her chops. Now, it’s a sports bar. I think we all can relate to this kind of jarring change, where our sepia-tinted memories clash with modern realities. The music evokes the past, coming across as the type of song Krall would have played back in the day, a song that could have found it’s way onto the soundtrack of “The Fabulous Baker Boys.” Not that Krall would ever sulk over a piano. But this song, and her voice, certainly imply that she could.

If you’ve seen a photograph of Krall, you know she is one of the most beautiful performers out there, jazz field or otherwise. Tabloid-wise, you never heard about her relationships until she hooked up with Costello. However, in her cover of the Chris-Smither-penned tune, “Love Me Like a Man,” made popular by Bonnie Raitt, a little of her romantic anger busts out. The words are like lashes of a whip, complaints to which, I suspect, many women can attest:

The men that’s I’ve been seeing, baby
Got their souls up on a shelf
You know they could never love me
When they can’t even love themselves

I come home sad and lonely
Feel like I wanna cry
I need someone to hold me
Not some fool to ask me why

It’s this kind of song that makes us men just mute. We don’t know what to say to a woman who’s singing like this. And that’s the problem. This track features Krall’s touring musicians of Jeff Hamilton on drums and John Clayton on bass, still with Wilson on guitar. There’s an effortlessness present in this song, a knowing something that you can’t get with just studio musicians. These players know each other and push and pull throughout the song like old friends. It’s during Wilson’s solo where Krall breaks out a couple of “yeahs,” something that came from within her. Again, modern, over-produced CDs don’t usually allow this kind of personal statement. But then, that’s what this CD is all about.

“Love Me Like a Man” is not the only timely cover Krall performs. Tom Waits’ “Temptation” comes across as that silky, snaky tune you’d hear on a late Saturday night, when you find yourself faced with something you know is wrong, something you’d have to come to terms with the following Sunday morning in a church pew. But, damn, it’s so good here, in the dark on Saturday night. The Hammond B3 organ, played by Neil Larsen, sneaks in on verse three, a sly reminder of the snake that is temptation. You can’t help but wonder if the temptation Krall sings of is the very album she’s creating, one that is of her and by her, not necessarily what the jazz community thinks she should create. You get that vibe from her subtle counter melody under Wilson’s guitar solo. It’s a question that is left unanswered.

My favorite song is a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Black Crow.” In this song, Krall sings of highways, of constant movement, diving down for that “something shiny,” searching for love and music, trying to find it in every nook and cranny she can. She laments “How’m I ever going to know my home when I see it again.” You can’t help but hearken back to the character in “The Girl in the Other Room” questioning herself as well. It’s a well-chosen cover and the soaring solo Wilson delivers is fantastic.

I have mentioned other musicians but I need to turn to Krall’s own musicianship on the piano. She is an accomplished piano player but not one who knows only one thing or one style. What this collection of songs—and, by the way, Krall is credited with the music for all twelve songs—demonstrates is Krall’s ability to pull from the piano exactly what the lyrics require. That’s a benefit of being a composer, singer, and player. She brings out breathy notes for some slower, emotional songs, evoking Vince Guaraldi’s sound on “Almost Blue.” She bangs out octave-based accompaniments in other, broader songs. And her solos express a command of the instrument that rivals few in the jazz world.

After listening to the album, you have to wonder why this CD earned such mixed reviews when it came out and in the four years since. The folks in the jazz tribe certainly loved it when Krall covered old songbook titles but balked when she struck out on her own. Why? Do they just want to pigeon hole her? Ditto for some of the folks who reviewed the CD on Amazon. They loved her previous CDs when she sang love songs but didn’t like this one. Why?

One reason could be our society’s tendency toward the simple. We don’t often like to think and The Girl in the Other Room requires thinking. Sure, there are a couple of tunes where you can check your brain at the door but the rest, the autobiographical material, calls for listener involvement. There’s a saying that a book is never finished until a reader reads it. The same could be said for an album’s worth of music. And in The Girl in the Other Room, Diana Krall has challenged us as listeners. She wants to show us her painful journey through the loss of a mother, something we all have to deal with a sometime in our lives. She shows us that loss hurts, it can be debilitating, but there is always hope. A line from “Narrow Daylight” compactly expresses this hope: “Is the kindness we count upon hidden in everyone?”

And if you don’t want to think too hard about one woman’s journey from the valley to the mountaintop, just listen to the music. It’s stark, it’s expressive, it’s tentative, it’s soaring. As is this CD. I, for one, hope that Krall delivers another album’s worth of songs she herself pens. She’s a mother now. I can’t help but wonder how that experience has affected her muse. I don’t expect it to have the resonance the The Girl in the Other Room has but, then, this CD was a complete surprise. I look forward to being surprised again.

NOTE: The DVD, Diana Krall: Live at the Montreal Jazz Festival, is the visual document of the tour promoting this CD. Nine of the twelve songs from The Girl in the Other Room show up on this DVD. The songs are expanded to allow more soloing and interpretation. Some of the tracks exceed the studio tracks. It’s a nice comparison piece to the 2001 “Live in Paris.” Same artist, different vibe. She’s visible happy during both shows but you can’t help but wonder if she’s just a little more excited about playing her own songs on the Montreal DVD. As a creator, I certainly would be.

Music Review: Chicago XI

If you really stop and think about it, listening to Chicago XI can be difficult. You see, the album was released in September 1977. Four months later, Terry Kath, original guitarist and the soul of Chicago, died from an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound. Chicago has not been the same since.

Why is it hard? Because during these sessions, these guys really tapped back into what made them a unique band in rock history. They were not the band that exploded on the music scene in 1969 with Chicago Transit Authority. They had aged, evolved, and assimilated newer types of music into their overall sound. They had gone from progressive artists willing to experiment to a band that regularly produced Top 40 hits at a rapid pace. And then there was “If You Leave Me Now.” For all the longer, experimental, complex musicianship Chicago had demonstrated on their first nine albums, their first #1 hit was a simple ballad. How’d that happen?

Many bands, authors, movie stars, just about anyone who make a hit are quite willing to keep repeating said hit over and over. They think “Well, if it worked once, it’ll work a thousand times, right, and the public will just buy it over and over again.” To be sure, Chicago had moved away from the longer songs into shorter, radio-friendly tunes. But if you take Chicago XI as a response to “If You Leave Me Now,” you will discover that they were not going to keep producing the same song over and over again.

Not that “If You Leave Me Now, Part 2” isn’t there. It is. It’s track 2. But you have to get past one of Chicago’s killer tracks first. The opening track, “Mississippi Delta City Blues,” opens with Kath laying down a shuffle riff on guitar that Peter Cetera (bass) and Danny Serephine (drums) picks up on. In one of Kath’s more personal moments on tape, as the song kicks in, you actually hear him laughing. Many folks have postulated the meaning of the laugh. The general consensus is that Kath is laughing in pride at how kick-ass this song is. And for it finally to get on tape. They had been playing this song for years. An early version of it shows up on Live in Japan and as a bonus track on the Rhino re-issued Chicago V. I’m glad they waited.

The horns are fat, in your face, and all over the place. Kath’s guitar is funky and always present. You can just feel the swamp humidity when listening to this song. During the horn break, the blues feel makes way for a straight-ahead rock tempo and Kath changes his guitar sound to a traditional rock distortion vibe. You listen to this song in headphones and you can really hear all the rhythm guitar activity Kath is playing. It’s remarkable. By the end of the song, you, too, are laughing in pride. They nailed it.

“Baby, What a Big Surprise,” is, basically, “If You Leave Me Now, Part 2.” Strings: check. Acoustic guitar: check. Horns that are there but not in your face: check. Peter Cetera’s high tenor: check. It’s a good song. Cetera can write these ballads as good as anyone out there. It blasted up the charts. But it helped to solidify in the general public’s mind that Chicago was a ballad band. True, “Colour My World” (1970) was the first wedding song Chicago produced but it was the twofer of IYLMN and BWABS that pidgin-holed Chicago. And they ran with it in the 1980s. (See earlier comment about artist doing the same thing over and over again.)

“Till the End of Time” is another example of ‘give the mic to a horn player’ syndrome that took hold of Chicago in the 1970s. In one sense, it’s a sign of a willingness to experiment and that’s a good thing. But, when you realize that James Pankow (trombone; singer of “Till the End of Time”) and Lee Loughnane (trumpet, singer of “This Time”) and Cetera all have one song apiece out of a ten-song set, you might interpret that as another reaction to the success of “If You Leave Me Now.” Keep Cetera down. I’m not saying that’s what happened but you gotta believe that there might have been a few unrecorded Cetera tunes left in the vaults that could have made the cut above this song. What makes “Till the End of Time” important is the ending: Kath’s lead guitar makes its first appearance. Kath’s sound here, unlike his guitar sound in “Mississippi Delta City Blues,” is pure rock and distortion. It was a preview.

Robert Lamm makes his first vocal appearance on Chicago XI with track 4, “Policeman.” In another sign that these guys were mellowing as they aged, this is the same Lamm who put sound clips of protesters chanting outside the 1968 Democratic convention. Now, eight years later, he’s singing the virtues of law enforcement. Good, simple tune and one of the few times after their early period where a horn lays down an improv on tape.

The other main hit from Chicago XI was “Take Me Back to Chicago” and it rounds out what was side 1 of the LP back in the day. Danny Serephine co-wrote the song and it was a loving, wistful look back at the good old days in Chicago. Not unlike Chicago VIII’s “Old Days” but a lot less sappy. Lamm sings this one and his mellow voice really adds to the sepia quality of the lyrics. Another brushstroke added was Chaka Khan’s vocals. The Pointer Sisters hold the distinction of being the first female singers to perform with Chicago but Khan, here, gets a chance to belt it out. The closing sequence, underlined by a constant loop of the chant “take me back” is not unlike John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” where he does the same thing. Here, Khan lets loose while Lamm ‘preaches’ about all things Chicago. It’s a great song, one that was butchered during the editing process to make it palatable for Top 40 radio.

Side two opens with the third Lamm song in a row and a type of song that increasingly was left off of Chicago records: social message song. “Vote for Me” is a tongue-in-cheek riff on modern politics with Lamm acting as the candidate promising everything under the sun just to get elected. Granted, all of his promises are old-school Democratic ones but, then, that’s where Lamm comes from.

If any one song was a diametric opposite of “If You Leave Me Now,” it’s Kath’s “Takin’ It Uptown,” the second song on side two. The blistering guitar work that had only been hinted at during the first six songs exploded here. Incidentally, there is no brass in “Uptown.” Kath’s vocal stylings shine here, with him howling in places only to be answered by his own howling guitar. Listening to this track makes you pine for the rumored lost tracks Kath laid down in preparation for a solo album. Kath’s loss is felt most acutely here.

“This Time” is a simple, mid-1970s love song sung by the trumpet player. It’s got horns, a decent lead vocal, and that distinctive electric piano sound made famous by Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are.” What really makes this track stand out is Kath’s solo. With the hard rock guitar sounds still echoing in your ears from “Uptown,” Kath breaks out a solo that demonstrates his ability to script a solo. That is, with “Uptown” and other songs, you get the sense that Kath was merely improving in the studio. With “This Time,” Kath went for a feel, a mood, but not merely one. His solo is in three parts with three distinct guitar sounds and motifs. Remember, the mid 70s featured folks like Frampton, Tom Scholz (Boston), and others who were moving guitar solos forward in the wake of Hendrix’s absence. Kath showed on this solo that he could do it all, and in one extended sequence. Kath’s performance on “This Time” is one of his all-time best.

The album closes with a mini suite, the kind that made Chicago II and Chicago III so good. A short orchestral introduction (“The Inner Struggles of a Man”) segues into a Serephine-penned tune “Little One.” Serephine, a father by 1977, wrote this song to his kids explaining why ‘daddy’ always had to be away on the road, performing. Serephine wrote about his own longing to be with his family and his willingness to do anything for his kids. “Say the word and daddy will make it disappear.”

The song is wonderful, one of the best parent songs out there. The sentiments are common but easily conveyed in short couplets: “Don’t live in fear of the future/’Cause I will always be there.” The next verse explains why ‘daddy’s’ always away:

Oh my little one
Music is my life, I hope you understand
Traveling on the road with me you can see the way we live
Oh my little one
I will always cherish these days with you
As time goes by I hope you see the love I tried to give.

Finally, the last emotion is revealed: “Someday you’ll have your own little one/And you will always be there.”

Lyrically, the words shine. But what gives the song it emotional heft is that Terry Kath sings the song. He brings his soulful voice to bear on the joys of parenting and children. His own daughter was born the previous year so you know it was not too difficult for him to channel his own feelings. And they are plainly evident on the recording. During the ending vamp, Kath speaks things like “we’ll always be together” and “I love you so.” The strings fade and you are left with a pleasant smile on your face. It’s that good a song.

But then you realize that this is the last song Terry Kath ever recorded. Listening to it now, thirty-one years later, it’s heartbreaking to know that Kath would soon leave this world and his daughter. Knowing what we know now, it’s one of the most poignant songs in Chicago history, if not rock history.

Chicago XI is a milestone. It’s the last Chicago record with the original members. For all the success that came to them later, they were fundamentally changed by Terry Kath’s absence. Arguably, Chicago lost its soul when Kath died even though they did not lose their passion. His record as one of the best rock guitarist is laid out on the albums he made with Chicago. Perhaps some spirit was with the guys when they made Chicago XI because it’s a fitting ending to Kath’s career. It shines with the things we knew at the time—phenomenal guitar abilities, soulful singer, good songwriter—and, yet, it leaves us wanting more. If you listen to Kath progression as a guitarist from Chicago Transit Authority to Chicago XI, you witness a musician evolving, learning, and getting better and better. You pine for the lost opportunities, the lost music.

The music business, like any business, can drag a person down. The constant grind takes it toll on anyone. Some writers have said, in the years since, that Kath was unhappy in Chicago as his influence diminished as the sound of Chicago changed. Band members refute this. Kath loved music and loved Chicago. You could certainly interpret the lyrics of “Taking It Uptown” as Kath’ disillusionment with the music business or the band or even a premonition of his impending death. But I’ll point you in a different place that better demonstrates Kath’s approach to his life and music. Listen again to the opening seconds of “Mississippi Delta City Blues” and hear Kath’s chuckle as the song starts. Maybe he had some intuition of his demise. Whose to say? But that one chuckle says more to me than any lyric. To me, it’s Kath saying “Can you believe I get paid to have this much fun making music?”

Yeah, I believe.