Amos Lee: a songwriter for a new generation

The title of Amos Lee’s second album, “Supply and Demand,” might be a jab at the commercial realities of the music biz… or it might be an embrace of them. The Philly-born singer-songwriter found a folk-pop groove on his self-titled debut that hit the sweet spot and reached #2 on the Billboard “Heatseekers” chart and got a track on a couple of TV shows, including the season finale of “Grey’s Anatomy.”

That debut was produced by Norah Jones Band bassist Lee Alexander and featured Jones, who had hired Lee as her opening act on tour, on several tracks. This time out, singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant is at the production helm, but the production is low-key and unobstrusive. Continue reading

“Ray Sings, Basie Swings” is a ghostly concept album

It’s a somewhat goulish idea: take a recording of a late, great artist, and shore it up with new backing tracks. It’s been done before, with Natalie Cole’s “duet” with her father, and the remaining Beatles backing a newly-discovered John Lennon solo track. And if you wanna look at it from a contemporary perspective, digital “mashups” that overlay, for instance, Nirvana with Destiny’s Child accomplish the same idea with spooky success.

On “Ray Sings, Basie Swings,” the legendary vocalist is paired up via technology to the current and living version of the Count Basie Orchestra, and the result is a brassy, sassy and sometimes strange album from the grave. Continue reading

Branford Marsalis’ “Braggtown: jazz for the ages

Jazz as a genre can span the range from big-band swing, melodic pop standards and mainstream funk-rock , to cool, bop, and way the hell out there.

Branford Marsalis is one musician who not only understands, but also appreciates, the big ol’ umbrella that the word represents. The oldest son in a jazz history-making family, the Brooklyn-born saxophonist has played the pure stuff as well as the pop stuff. He played with Miles, and led the “Tonight Show” band. He performed with his brother, Wynton, and toured with the Grateful Dead.

Despite his dabbling with the “dark side” of pop music, though, no one questions his ability, nor his dedication to, the traditions of jazz. Continue reading

Shuffling along in an iPod world

Happy 5th birthday to the iPod.

I was kind of slow to get on the bandwagon, mostly because it was (and still is, although not as much) so damned expensive to join the iPod club.

But like a lot of people, once I got the thing, I was hooked. It’s a cliche to say it but I’ll say it anyway: it changed the way I listen to music, both because it allows me to shuffle through thousands of songs of all genres throughout an entire century of recorded music, and because I can carry all that tunage wherever I go and have private access to the sound library, and not have to listen to the traffic/street noise/supermarket Muzak/lawn mower/sounds of nature. Continue reading

I can’t separate Audrey Hepburn from “Mr. Yunioshi”

muckeyrooney-mryunioshiAudrey Hepburn, one of the great, classic actresses of Hollywood of the ’50s and ’60s, may have died in 1993, but she’s alive and well in American pop culture. Her name, and the 1961 film with which her face is most associated, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” came up in conversation a couple of weeks ago, and coincidentally, a TV series’ plot later that week involved three women dressed as Hepburn’s character from “Tiffany’s,” Holly Golightly, robbing a bank with her trademark sunglasses hiding their identity.

This week, The Gap began airing a pretty cool TV commercial that takes a Hepburn dance sequence from her 1957 musical co-starring Fred Astaire, “Funny Face,” and sets her moves to AC-DC’s “Back in Black.” The commercial is pushing the retailer’s new line of skinny black pants. Hepburn’s character, a Greenwich Village beatnik who becomes a Paris model, is wearing hip skinny black pants in the dance scene. Continue reading