Paul McCartney
Kisses on the Bottom
Mercury
Even the most distracted student of popular culture has probably learned that pop and its unkempt cousin, rock, came along in the 1960s and swept away all that had come before. Teenagers no longer wanted to listen to the same music as their parents, and their parents before them: that frumpy aural wallpaper known as “the standards.” The Beatles were responsible for much of this melodic overhaul, channeling the energy of rock ’n’ roll and R ’n’ B.
As he reaches his 70s, however, it seems as if Paul McCartney has decided to come clean about some other formative influences. Even the Beatles, McCartney’s new album asserts, were touched by the songwriting of the American hit factory auteurs of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s: Irving Berlin (represented here by the saccharine swish of Always), Harold Arlen (Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive, rather more fun) and Frank Loesser (More I Cannot Wish You), to name but three. No one was immune. McCartney is normally seen as the Beatles’ soppiest traditionalist, the Fab most in hock to the dapper old dreamers. It’s an impression that persists, even though he’s never shy of portraying himself as source of the Beatles’ more avant-garde ideas. On Kisses on the Bottom, however, he accentuates the conservative.
McCartney’s 15th solo album is a jazzy, feather-light collection of standards, punctuated by two McCartney originals (My Valentine and Only Our Hearts) that blend so immaculately into their habitat, they are hard to spot on first listen. Soon, though, My Valentine stands out because it’s the song that reminds you most of those sentimental Beatles tracks, and because McCartney’s voice sounds most at home on it, necktie undone, pouring itself a gin fizz. Covering these orchestral big-band jazz tunes casts pop’s architect in the strangely straitened role of vocal interpreter, having ceded the playing and arranging to jazz people such as pianist Diana Krall and producer Tommy LiPuma. (Eric Clapton is on here too, as is Stevie Wonder, with a Disney bluebird-style harmonica part on Only Our Hearts.) Where there could so easily have been smug studio torpor, the arrangements are airy; all precisely plunked upright bass and brushed drums.
As a consequence you are drawn, perhaps unfairly, towards McCartney’s vocals. These often feel a little papery. And because the renditions are so breezy, the emotional depths of these songs remain resolutely unexplored. Does anyone other than his new wife really need to hear McCartney sing Benny Goodman’s The Glory of Love? Nothing here is ghastly, exactly; merely anodyne. There is a familiar, testosterone-filled version of history that insists music is just a constant churn of rebellion, one in which pop sneers at standards, rock grunts at pop, punk kicks against prog and machines destroy analogue. In contrast, Kisses on the Bottom foregrounds evolving constancy; just as valid a reading.
There might be a wrinkle or two in the notion of McCartney being an arch-traditionalist, but he does grasp something that runs through a century of popular music. We are all still firmly in thrall to melody and love songs. These standards have a lot still to say — if only they sang a little more potently here.
— By Kitty Empire, The Guardian
Tim McGraw
EMOTIONAL TRAFFIC
Curb
In 2005, the year Toby Keith turned 44, he released As Good as I Once Was, one of his most bellicose and smarmy singles in a career that specialized in them, and a declaration of potency in the face of encroaching middle age. Keith, one of country’s most pugnacious characters, figured out that aging gracefully in country music, unlike in many other genres, can sometimes mean becoming even rougher and less warm than you were in your younger years.
Tim McGraw, who is 44, comes from roughly the same generation as Keith, but from a whole other perspective. McGraw was never much of a bruiser to begin with, though early in his career he was sizzling with machismo, a romantic with a troublemaker streak.
That’s just a memory, though. The first single from Emotional Traffic, his 11th studio album, is Better Than I Used to Be, which may as well be a shrugging answer song to Keith’s. Here is the fighter in decline, “Standing in the rain so long has left me with a little rust.” What could keep him in contention, though? That’s right, a little of your love: “I pinned a lot of demons to the ground/Got a few old habits left/ But there’s still one or two I might need you to help me get.”
Admitting that you can’t go it alone is no great insight, but all throughout this often tepid album, McGraw is conceding. A woman only gives him a fraction of her love on One Part, Two Part, and he grins and bears it. The same is true on the Eric Carmen-esque Halo, on which at least McGraw has hired someone to write a metaphor that bites where his voice doesn’t: “Cover me with rage/I’ll take it like a circus lion, silent in my cage.”
The older McGraw has gotten, the more resistant he’s seemed to grit. Texture has been all but absent from his voice since the mid-2000s era of songs like When the Stars Go Blue and Drugs or Jesus. Only Human, a new duet with Ne-Yo, is a smooth slice of 1980s whimper-soul but isn’t as alluring, or as sui generis, as Over and Over, McGraw’s 2004 duet with the rapper Nelly. At some points on this album, as on The One and Right Back Atcha Babe, McGraw appears to be channeling the endless youth of a Kenny Chesney. Even though he’s never been a true stoic on the order of Alan Jackson or George Strait, McGraw has never sounded this casual; it doesn’t suit him.
After a listless several-song run toward the end of the album, McGraw closes with the bold, invigorated Die by My Own Hand, a cover of a song by Halfway to Hazard. It’s a statement of sly regret about how even the sort of love he was leaning on elsewhere on this album in the end isn’t nearly enough. “You changed me, baby/Given enough time, girl, you might have saved me/But then again, you might have just gone crazy.” For the first time, he’s singing ruefully, with real bite. “Girl I don’t blame you for nothing,” he concedes. “I’ll always die by my own hand.” Finally, a real stand.
— By Jon Caramanica, Ny Times News Service
Richard Galliano
NINO ROTA
Deutsche Grammophon
The French accordionist Richard Galliano has been a wild card in jazz over the past 25 years. He’s a virtuoso whose musicianship is complete within itself, almost orchestral; he barely needs anyone or anything else, a bandleader or body of song, to carry out his vision. He can be dazzling with the simplest tune or the most complex.
Yet he’s embedded himself in the conception of other bandleaders, including, recently, Wynton Marsalis; he’s done pretty imposing work with the music of Astor Piazzolla and Bach; he’s made cross-genre records uniting strands of popular music from Europe and South America; and he’s established his own intermittent presence in New York as the leader of small jazz groups. Here he takes on the film music of Nino Rota, particularly themes from Fellini movies and The Godfather, with a quintet including the soprano saxophonist John Surman, the trumpeter Dave Douglas, the bassist Boris Kozlov and the drummer Clarence Penn. It’s post-category: a jazz quintet on a classical label, playing music that remains weirdly beyond era and category.
Galliano gives the melodies their prominence: what stays in your head after they’re over are Rota’s huge, beautiful, whistle-able themes. (Some of the tracks are short, straight-ahead readings of those themes; one is a Rota-esque Galliano original.) Secondly, it’s imitative or impressionistic, approaching idealized notions of circus bands, 1950s New York jazz, the New Orleans jazz funeral. You often feel the playing a little bit restrained by the concept.
But there is some real improvisation here and there on this record — particularly on I Notti di Cabiria and Zampano e la Vedova — and it can be startling when it breaks out. (Over the loose grooves of I Notti di Cabiria both Galliano and Surman absolutely throw down, hesitating and teasing and letting you hear the whole sound of their instruments.)
Those are the places where the record comes into its own and establishes a unique identity. Elsewhere, it leads you to think more about the achievements of Rota, or perhaps about John Zorn. When you hear this group work out its ideas, even in the free improvisation that makes up the first few minutes of this album’s version of Giulietta Degli Spiriti, you might recall the feeling of Zorn’s film-inspired records like Spillane and Invitation to a Suicide: jumpy, precise and mischievous.
— By Ben Ratliff, NY Times News Service
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