Partners
Barbra Streisand
Columbia
An invitation from Barbra Streisand to record a duet is still the closest thing in pop to a royal summons. Her newest duets album, Partners (Columbia), with its blurred edges and pastel shades, is even mistier, gauzier and more texturally diffuse than such confections as Guilty. The instrumentation and the vocal tracks are so processed in pursuit of a high-gloss perfection that any sense of two people standing side by side and singing their hearts out is lost.
Some cuts are so swamped in echo that Streisand’s male partners, especially John Mayer on Come Rain or Come Shine, Billy Joel in New York State of Mind, Josh Groban on Somewhere and John Legend on What Kind of Fool are only semi-recognizable. New York State of Mind, in particular, is an exercise in bombastic excess that smothers the song. The only distinctive element of the Mayer duet is a stunted little guitar solo.
Streisand’s voice has noticeably diminished in size, but its signature quality, an ingrained sob, still exerts its pull. The choppy calls and responses between Streisand and her partners, however, lack conversational or narrative flow, and you have an uncomfortable sense that the parts were spliced together after the fact.
Andrea Bocelli (I Still Can See Your Face), surprisingly, is a vocal mismatch. So is Blake Shelton (I’d Want It to Be You). A beyond-the-grave duet with Elvis Presley on Love Me Tender is a crass commercial stunt that should have been omitted. More listenable is the duet with Lionel Richie, The Way We Were. But in general, remakes of songs Streisand has recorded before are inferior to the originals.
Only once, on a moderately swinging rendition of It Had to Be You, with Michael Buble, is there a suggestion of ease and naturalness and genuine enjoyment. The most touching cut is the mother-son duet, How Deep Is the Ocean, by Streisand with Jason Gould. She knows what she’s singing about and really feels it.
— STEPHEN HOLDEN, NY Times News Service
All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller
Jason Moran
Blue Note
The go-to track on All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller, for those who prize Waller as a virtuoso of Harlem stride piano, is Handful of Keys, a signature showpiece played in the same solo format and with much of the same flair.
Jason Moran, the pianist on deck, is a stride enthusiast, though he doesn’t try to mimic the steady bounce of Waller’s left hand. His performance is a respectful but contemporary nod, analogous to what Moran did a dozen years ago with You’ve Got to Be Modernistic, by Waller’s onetime mentor, James P. Johnson.
Of course Moran has other ideas, starting with the core of Waller’s significance — not as a paragon of historical jazz style but as a larger-than-life entertainer and cultural hero, harboring secret wisdom behind a mischievous smile. All Rise could be seen as a reclamation of Waller’s legacy, in that Moran means this music for dancing: it originated a few years ago as The Fats Waller Dance Party, a Harlem Stage commission, and has since been performed a few times.
Moran’s essential partner in this project is Meshell Ndegeocello, who lends coolly ethereal vocals to several tracks, and who produced the album with Don Was. Singing in bustling tandem with Lisa E. Harris, Ndegeocello helps give This Joint Is Jumpin’ a jittery funk makeover, and turns Ain’t Nobody’s Business into a dark-magic incantation. On Ain’t Misbehavin’ the two, following the contour of Moran’s arrangement, work and rework the phrase “for you,” as if part of a live-action remix.
That structural device, which has worked for Moran before, fits naturally here. His stutter-step phrasing during parts of Lulu’s Back in Town and Sheik of Araby, executed with his longtime trio, the Bandwagon, give the unmistakable impression of a DJ’s cuts.
Playing this music in concert, Moran has typically worn a papier-mache mask of Waller’s head, made by the Haitian artist Didier Civil. The album similarly embraces celebratory ritual; one solo interlude, Fats Elegy, on acoustic and Fender Rhodes pianos, creates a feeling of minor-key momentum, movement without destination.
— NATE CHINEN, NY Times News Service
Lathe of Heaven
Mark Turner
ECM
As a sort of new paragon of saxophone technique, and as a tenor saxophonist who had internalized the 1960s tradition of Coltrane, Joe Henderson and Wayne Shorter only to escape into his own calm and original language, Mark Turner was a hero to young musicians around the turn of the century. He’s led his own bands in clubs over the past decade, and recorded as a sideman with plenty of others: Billy Hart, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Enrico Rava. But Lathe of Heaven is his first album in 13 years, since Dharma Days, in 2001.
It’s his best record. It has a group sound, the force of embodied unity. It does something jazz records used to do more: you might hear it, feel there’s really nothing to add, and decide not to listen to records — including this one — for, say, a week.
Turner used to write songs for small, highly advanced groups including a chordal instrument — often the pianist Brad Mehldau or the guitarist Rosenwinkel — that seemed to work through various kinds of scholarly identities, obsessive or relaxed, etudelike or highly sensitized. As an improviser he invested in a kind of ongoing crescendo effect: waves of controlled intensity, surging modulations and patterns that spread through the band. The music had wisdom and patience, but also telegraphed its desire to be excellent: It asked you, are you noticing, and do you understand how important this moment is? And this one? And this?
Lathe of Heaven presents a quartet of musicians who weren’t part of his old crew: the trumpeter Avishai Cohen, the bassist Joe Martin and the brilliant drummer Marcus Gilmore, who often flows in at least four directions at once. There’s no chordal instrument to tie the harmony together, and if Turner was calm before, he’s really calm now. His tone has strengthened and ripened, and his tumbling patterns have become less predictable.
It’s all his own music here: lines and counterpoint written for himself and Cohen that sound succinct and final, clear and articulate in an almost pre-Renaissance way. Turner’s long solos in tracks like The Edenist and Sonnet for Stevie seem to start from zero and contain a great deal of jazz tradition without straining. The band’s sound and the album’s engineering contain plenty of light and open space; at the same time, this remains mysterious music, bordering on dark. It has no particular identity and doesn’t care what you’re noticing.
— BEN RATLIFF, NY Times News Service
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless