Hood Billionaire, Rick Ross, Maybach Music Group/Slip N’ Slide/Def Jam
Rick Ross may never again reach the heights of Teflon Don, the 2010 album that announced his arrival as one of hip-hop’s essential characters: a mountainous man with a mountainous ego with the mountainous songs to match. Maximalism was his mode, and it served him well.
Yet for some reason, he’s never been quite so large since. He’s tried introspection. He’s tried a return to scraped-up street narrative. And now, on Hood Billionaire, his seventh album, he’s turned into a curator of eclectic sounds.
Maybe that was Ross’ true weapon: an ear for the unexpected. When he worked with Lex Luger all those years ago, he staked out a sound few others were prepared to use. But not all inspiring sounds are the right ones, and Hood Billionaire is a collection of beats that don’t always suit Ross’ skill set.
Mostly on this album, Ross turns slow and syrupy. The title track is a turned-down version of his old megahits. (No wonder; Luger is one of that song’s producers.) Trap Luv is velvety and calm underneath paranoid lyrics. On Elvis Presley Blvd., Ross is shouting atop a flamboyantly slow soul beat. Quintessential creeps along at snail’s pace.
When the beat has attitude, Ross knows how to complement it, as on the staggering, clangorous Coke Like the 80’s, or on the weepy Family Ties, which showcases Ross’ aptitude for narrative, one of his skills that’s sometimes overshadowed by his gift for boast.
But not all the songs here are so well matched. Ross is trying hard to find new ways to present himself, making this an ambitious album, but not always one with the right ambition.
— Jon Caramanica, NY Times News Service
Hamburg ’72, Keith Jarrett/Charlie Haden/Paul Motian, ECM
Jazz is a long continuity, respirated by new energies but steadied by an understanding of what it came from and where it’s been. That continuity is almost exactly as long as the business of recorded sound; jazz and records grew up together. It’s not surprising, then, that discoveries from jazz’s archival past can sometimes feel as if they have so much to do with its present. Hamburg ’72, a partly unreleased and otherwise little known live recording of Keith Jarrett’s trio with bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian, is one of those times.
Jarrett has led a trio for more than 30 years with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, a group that takes up a lot of space in the understanding of recent jazz, and of Jarrett. But he had an important and much less documented trio between 1966 and the early ’70s, with Haden and Motian. This album helps us remember what that trio was, or — more to the point — what it proposed, what it suggested.
Back then, Jarrett was a virtuoso in his mid-20s, unwilling to be defined; his playing suggested an interest in jazz of the moment and all the way back to ragtime, as well as rock, gospel, Baroque and Indian music. Haden and Motian, 8 and 14 years older, had been parts of two of the greatest small groups in jazz of the early ’60s: Ornette Coleman’s and Bill Evans’.
A lot happens in Hamburg ’72, which was recorded with clear, spacious sound for German radio during the band’s first European tour. Here, songs change their character profoundly and emphatically. (Jarrett wrote specifically for this band, but he let it take its own shape; he didn’t hold it to a defined or consolidated sound.) Rainbow begins as a jazz-ballad waltz and gradually becomes agitated. Jarrett’s rhythmic phrasing starts to shift and wobble, his phrasing turning into long, unbroken runs; Motian’s drumming starts becoming weirdly, excellently loud; and the piece ends with two minutes of unaccompanied piano, alternating thundering and very quiet chords. Throughout, the band is always reminding you, almost threatening you, that it can go where it wants.
And that’s early into it, before Haden plays his grave concerto Song for Che and before Jarrett produces his flute (on Everything That Lives Laments) and his soprano saxophone (on Piece for Ornette and elsewhere), both of which he plays with passion and a kind of wild focus. You’ll have to hear it to know why that’s not a contradiction in terms. This is a record you’ll play for others to watch their reactions.
—Ben Ratliff, NY Times News Service
Room, Nels Cline & Julian Lage, Mack Avenue
To begin to understand Room, Nels Cline and Julian Lage’s first dual-guitar album, it may be useful to rattle off some of the things that it isn’t. A fretboard jazz klatch, as in the revered series of records made by Herb Ellis and Joe Pass. A provocation in sound, as in past collaborations between Cline and other guitarists, like Thurston Moore. An object lesson in folksy erudition, as in Lage’s continuing duo with Chris Eldridge. A cutting session; a “conversation.” Even, despite appearances, a study in contrasts.
Where does that leave us? Somewhere in the region of an agreeable and deceivingly effortless union. There are stark and obvious differences between Cline, who’s 58 and known both for his avant-garde credentials and his role in Wilco; and Lage, who at 26 has grown into his youthful promise, making inroads in jazz and roots music.
Room doesn’t erase these distinctions, but it brings the artists onto common ground, meshing their styles in an assertive but often delicate interplay. It’s the result of a rapport developed over the last couple of years, with song craft receiving an admirable share of the focus. Freesia/The Bond is a balladic suite made radiant with lyrical purpose; Whispers From Eve achieves something analogous, all glimmer and chime. Calder has all the somber, unhurried beauty of a piece by John Fahey.
Elsewhere, the guitarists latch onto more demonstrative ideas: attacking the cascading slant of Odd End, and the multiphase plot of The Scent of Light, which could serve as a representative showpiece. Blues, Too, inspired by Jim Hall, a mutual touchstone and mentor, ranges far from its frisky melody, meandering with purpose.
A certain type of target listener for this album will want to know that Lage can be heard on the left channel, playing either his Manzer archtop guitar or his 1939 Martin acoustic. Cline, on the right channel, alternates between a 1965 Gibson Barney Kessel arch top and a 1962 Gibson J-200 acoustic. Parsing the action between channels can be absorbing, but this is music that by definition reaches a higher gear in person, one more reason to note that the duo performs at SubCulture on Tuesday.
— Nate Chinen, NY Times News Service
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