Australian popular art–or at least the Australian popular art that becomes popular in the Western world these days–relies heavily on images of the apocalypse. This appears to come naturally to many Australian rock bands and movie directors, but it also tends to be what we expect them to deliver us. The most popular Australian band […]
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Leonard Cohen: gifts of light from the warrior of love
Irony flows like a bittersweet river through the poetry and music of Leonard Cohen. The self-styled “patron saint of envy and grocer of despair,” so often satirized as a gloomy merchant of suicidal visions and apocalyptic self-pity, on closer analysis reveals himself as the harbinger of a strange but vibrant optimism. At the heart of […]
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The well-trained pianist
From the early days in the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans, blues and jazz have always provided both entertainment and an opportunity for personal expression. A kind of ecstatic longing that informs both the most joyful and the most mournful blues–as it did the spirituals that were the blues’ immediate precursor–brings the two poles together. […]
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Let’s Active
On his third full-length record, Every Dog Has Its Day, prodigy producer and ultrapop songster Mitch Easter continues his search for the perfect hook. There’s a drama to his efforts and a poiignancy as well: it’s a noble task but a hopeless one too, and sooner or later one realizes that that’s not really what […]
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More Songs About Politics and Sex
Halfway through his show at the Riviera, Billy Bragg, as is his wont, digressed into a short monologue before his new song “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards.” This song is the standout track on Bragg’s new record, Workers Playtime; it’s a luminous, transcontinental fantasy that begins in Cuba, rockets out to a nuclear test […]
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Chicago Sinfonietta
CHICAGO SINFONIETTA at Orchestra Hall September 27, 1988 The Chicago Sinfonietta, which prides itself on being an affirmative action organization, is the latest in a long line of midsize orchestras that have sought recognition despite the lengthy shadow of the Chicago Symphony. It faces formidable odds. As far as I can recollect, no other professional […]
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Fear of rocking: Camper Van Beethoven and the limits of absurdism
On the basis of fairly extensive experience with Santa Cruz, California, I report that the students of the University of California there can be divided cleanly into four distinct groups. In steeply descending order of group size, they are: those who like it there and take drugs; those who don’t like it and take drugs; […]
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Serkin and Solti
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA at Orchestra Hall September 28 and October 1 The word “legendary” is thrown around so often in the arts that one hesitates to use it even when it seems deserved. Yet two of the figures who opened the Chicago Symphony’s 98th season in a special nonsubscription fund-raiser on September 28 are legendary. […]
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New Works by Local Composers
CHICAGO PRO MUSICA Ramsey Auditorium, Batavia It is always a rare and welcome occasion when works by area composers are heard locally. But it is a rarer and even more welcome occasion when such works are given a first-rate performance–as when the Chicago Pro Musica, the Grammy Award-winning chamber ensemble made up of virtuoso musicians […]
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The Bach Way
THE CITY MUSICK at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall September 18 One of the main problems that has plagued the City Music, Chicago’s 18th-century period-instrument orchestra, has been finding a hall where the subtleties of the group can be clearly heard. But solving that problem, at least for the new Evanston series at the Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, […]
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Billy Branch’s blues: a foot in the past, an eye on the future
It’s getting to be more difficult for blues musicians to carry on a legacy and remain contemporary. Master-apprentice relationships and clear lines of musical descent connected earlier southern traditions with the blues of the mid-50s Chicago heyday, and reflected a time when musical changes occurred slowly, over years and generations. An artist like Muddy Waters, […]
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James Cotton–Recorded Live at Antone’s Night Club
JAMES COTTON RECORDED LIVE AT ANTONE’S NIGHT CLUB Antone’s Records and Tapes ANT0007 Harmonica player James Cotton has a reputation as an exhilarating live performer whose high-energy, boogie-laden blues has never been accurately captured on record. During the mid-70s, he carried what was arguably the tightest working blues band of its day–featuring Matt “Guitar” Murphy […]
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The world’s most advanced rock star
Who could have predicted that black stars would so dominate the 80s pop firmament? Any accounting of the decade’s most important acts would have to include at least three black acts in the top, oh, four or so, by my reckoning–Prince edging out Bruce for number one, the two of them followed closely by Run-D.M.C. […]
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Rock’s early raunch: Joe Houston saves the wails
The heart of rock and roll is not the beat, but the iconoclasm. Those early, rude sounds in the 1950s shattered a lot more than white middle-class illusions of security; despite the music’s obvious debt to traditional black blues and R and B, some of its harshest criticism came from the jazz community. Suddenly adherents […]
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Stuff enough: Raful Neal and the bluesman’s dilemma
Even the most accomplished blues musicians often face a great challenge: to put together a show that will remain unique and interesting through an entire evening, especially if the musician’s own body of work is small. The usual standards by Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Junior Parker, Z.Z. Hill, et al have been covered by so […]