Band of Brothers
Willie Nelson
Legacy
Willie Nelson the songwriter reappears on Band of Brothers, his first album since 1996 to feature a majority of his own new songs. It’s a serenely feisty autumnal statement from the singer, who forged his sage, grizzled persona decades ago.
Nelson’s song Funny How Time Slips Away first appeared in 1961, and his relaxed, quavery, behind-the beat vocals and his acoustic lead guitar always made him a voice of maturity. The sly versatility of his style has allowed him to cruise through many albums of collaborations, covers and tributes to vintage country music. But Band of Brothers — with nine of its 14 songs written by Nelson and Buddy Cannon, the album’s producer — is set in the present.
At 81, Nelson has more right to be autumnal than ever. That doesn’t mean he’s retreating. The album starts with Bring It On, which begins, “They say there is no gain without pain/Well I must be gaining a lot/And I’ll give it all that I’ve got.” InThe Wall, with electric-piano chords adding a touch of Fleetwood Mac to Nelson’s steadfast country, he sings about past mistakes and excesses that led him to “hit the wall” but continues, “and the wall came down, crashing down.”
Nelson sings about love — usually lost love — in songs like I Thought I Left You, a ballad smoldering with resentment about a protracted breakup, and in Send Me a Picture, a classic-style country waltz that he sings in a heartbroken near-whisper. The upbeat good-riddance song Used to Her notes, “I could have picked a woman who did not crave other men.” The jovial Wives and Girlfriends is a tall-tale chronicle of marriages and dalliances, wishing, “May they never meet.”
And in Guitar in the Corner, Nelson merges thoughts of women and songwriting:
The guitar used to play
A happy song about a girl
loving me like I loved her
But the strings no longer ring
And things are not the way they were.
Cannon’s restrained but ever-supportive production uses Nashville session players and the harmonica player Mickey Raphael from Nelson’s band, in his perpetual dialogue with Nelson’s vocals, while Nelson’s succinct lead guitar turns up regularly.
Nelson allows some bile in Billy Joe Shaver’s Hard to Be an Outlaw, which sneers at “songs about the back roads that they never have been down/They go and call it country but that ain’t the way it sounds.” But most of the album considers the lessons and scars of personal experience, looking back a long way but concluding, with its last song, I’ve Got a Lot of Traveling to Do.
— JON PARELES, NY Times News Service
Mali Is...
By Mali Music
Storm/RCA
Johnny & Donna, from the gospel singer Mali Music’s new album Mali Is ..., is a classic morality tale for the “Teen Mom” era. A young couple decide to conceive out of wedlock only to discover that they have vastly different ideas of what the next steps should be:
Donna wanted a family, she wanted to do it right
Make Johnny’s house a home, she wanted to be a wife
But Johnny was a dreamer and he had to move around
Yeah, he’d be there for his child but wouldn’t settle down
There would be, in most religious music, an impulse to demonize those who would stray from the flock, who dare call old dogmas into question. Or if not to demonize them, then to heavy-handedly save them.
But judgment is not one of the many things on the agenda of Mali Is ..., the third album by this singer, who has been a rising star in gospel for the last few years thanks to syncretic albums — especially The 2econd Coming — that were near the vanguard of gospel musical evolution, in the same path as artists like Tye Tribbett and the production collective Pajam.
That fidgetiness made him a natural to attempt something like Mali Is ..., which is in essence a nonreligious gospel album, with all the same themes of inspiration and faith but without leaning too heavily on the explicit language of salvation and God.
For much of this album, that makes him indistinguishable from the world of adult contemporary soul — sometimes, as on No Fun Alone, he suggests the grizzled Anthony Hamilton; other times, as on Johnny & Donna, it’s John Legend’s dry reserve that he nails.
Mali Music sings with a gentle tone, and only mild urgency; in a neat trick, he uses digital effects not to make himself sharper, but rather to soften him even more. But unlike his previous work, where he produced songs that marked him as someone willing to fiddle with genre pieties, he mostly remains tame. (He produced a handful of songs here.)
Fight for You is the most promising song, a rumbling, modern R&B number with desperate love at its core. “I won’t let ‘em take you,” Mali Music keens. “I’ll be your protection, I’ll be your direction.” And Mali Music’s rapping on Make It is impressive, clear-toned and earnest, but not groan-worthy.
Only in a few places does Mali Music take on the mantle of faith, most intensely on the album closer I Believe, which is in part about hypocrisy in the church. “I’m just one of them ole’ people God’s got a hold on,” he concludes, not at all apologetically.
But what of Johnny and Donna, then? Their future is uncertain, and so is Mali Music’s appraisal of them: “Whether you’re Johnny or Donna or neither of the two/Just try to make the best of what’s given to you,” he sings, an answer that tries to please everyone, and may satisfy no one.
— JON CARAMANICA, NY Times News Service
Last Dance
Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden
ECM
A faint musk of valediction hangs over Last Dance, the second duo album by the pianist Keith Jarrett and the bassist Charlie Haden, though its detection is mostly a matter of extra-musical concern. Start with the title, which, alas, has nothing to do with the Donna Summer hit. Then consider the sequencing of the last few tracks, all standards: Where Can I Go Without You, Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye, Goodbye.
Finally, factor in an awareness of Haden’s current health: For the last several years he has struggled with post-polio syndrome, curtailing his presence on the scene. Though it’s a new release, Last Dance” was recorded in 2007 at Jarrett’s home studio, a product of the same reunion sessions that brought us the duo’s previous album, Jasmine (which, come to think of it, inhabited its own farewell fog: For All We Know, Don’t Ever Leave Me, another Where Can I Go Without You and Goodbye).
Whether you prefer one of these calmly ravishing albums over the other is simply a matter of taste. Each unfolds in a conversational murmur, depicting two rhapsodists in a state of intuitive kinship: Haden with his pachyderm grace, Jarrett with his lyrical eddies of tension and release. Last Dance, like Jasmine, has exactly one track with a tempo faster than a resting heart rate: Bud Powell’s Dance of the Infidels, handled with requisite boppish aplomb. In this context, its brightness almost feels transgressive.
And yet Last Dance is by no means a dolorous album, resounding as it does with empathy and melodic accord. There isn’t a solo as outright stunning as Jarrett’s on Body and Soul, from Jasmine, but there may be more brilliant flourishes of duologue, starting with the entirety of the opening track, My Old Flame. And the piano improvisation on Thelonious Monk’s ’Round Midnight is as bracing and unimprovable as a glass of ice water: each phrase pointing toward the next, without premeditation.
For his part, Haden could be giving a seminar: in placing the beat and establishing the root, laying a foundation that feels definitive but open-ended. His actions here are inextricable from those of his partner, about whom the exact same could be said.
— NATE CHINEN, NY Times News Service
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