The Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern, Tony Bennett & Bill Charlap, RPM/Columbia
There’s a track on Tony Bennett’s new album, The Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern, that suggests a return to form: I Won’t Dance, which recently served as a his-and-hers set piece in his marquee collaboration with Lady Gaga.
This new version of the tune, arranged as a springlike waltz, features Bennett alone on vocals, with a sparkling piano trio. He sounds crisp but at ease, maybe a touch relieved — like someone given the chance, at last, to trade klieg lights for candle-glow.
The reality is probably less cut-and-dry for Bennett, who has stood squarely at the intersection of jazz and popular song since the advent of the long-playing record. At 89, he retains the boyish spark in his tenor, and a remarkable degree of the plangency. So while The Silver Lining pulls him back to modest scale after big productions — including two No 1 albums, Cheek to Cheek (with Lady Gaga) and Duets II (with her and others) — it doesn’t carry a feeling of meek retrenchment.
It does convey a trademark commitment to the American songbook; a proud constancy, undaunted by notions of obsolescence; and a spirit of conversation, with the album’s premise and personnel, and with Bennett’s own career continuum. The album is jointly credited to the jazz pianist Bill Charlap, and its voice-and-piano intimacy recalls The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album of 40 years ago.
Jerome Kern turns out to be the ideal touchstone for Bennett: He was a suave melodist who married classical form with jazz inflection, and many of his tunes have long been standards. The Way You Look Tonight and All the Things You Are are each rendered here as a duet, with Charlap in exquisite form.
Several other tracks incorporate two pianos, played in an expert tandem by Charlap and Renee Rosnes, his wife. And half the album features Charlap’s spruce trio, with Peter Washington on bass and Kenny Washington (no relation) on drums. The shining precedent on those performances is Bennett’s nearly half-century bond with pianist Ralph Sharon, who died in March at 91.
An implicit awareness of mortality lends the album a subtle, crucial poignancy: At this stage in his career, Bennett knows the weight he brings to a song like Yesterdays, or even the stubbornly sunny title track. On Pick Yourself Up, he injects Dorothy Fields’ pep-talk lyrics with special gusto: “Will you remember the famous men,” he sings, “who had to fall to rise again?”
He radiates pluck and purpose, a conviction that what matters is the drive to keep going. It’s not a message to take lightly now, if indeed it ever was.
— NATE CHINEN, NY Times News Service
Allas Sak, Dungen, Mexican Summer
The first condition for appreciating the new album from Swedish rock band Dungen might be how you feel about the sound of the flute. There it is, lithe and sensitive in the beginning theme of Sista Gasten, then blown out with reverb in Franks Kaktus, as played by Gustav Ejstes, the band’s songwriter, soothing singer and primary force. It’s a sound, but it’s more than that, isn’t it? A quality of backdated, enlightened mellowness? Can you deal with it?
And then the clean tone of the Fender Rhodes keyboard, telegraphing sensitivity; congas and strummed acoustic guitar; a piano altered to sound like a harpsichord; Reine Fiske’s overdriven electric guitar, spiraling upward in modal patterns through En Dag Pa Sjon; and above all, the production, with argumentative guitar buzz and clanky drums, as if this album were recorded in 1966. These elements are signifiers. You don’t need training to know this.
The reason that Allas Sak — which means “everyone’s thing” — contains joy and confers it on to the listener could be that Ejstes doesn’t really hear those things as signifiers. He seems to love them as sounds, developed in a specific time by specific people. In Allas Sak, as in the last Dungen record, the great Skit i Allt from 2010, English-language ears might hear Jimi Hendrix and the Who; Swedish ears might hear early 70s records like Mikael Ramel’s Till Dej, which was also full of strumming and congas and laser-focus soloing. (Someone should reissue Till Dej here — the import CD, from 2003, goes for US$639 on Amazon.)
To those sounds he adds his own: flowing, almost theatrical songwriting with stirring chord changes and, on this record, some low-register saxophone arrangements. The affective extremes — the mellowness, or aggressive blowout jams, or contemplative sprawl of Sova — are well-wrought. But they’re the easy parts. What’s special is the less cosmic parts: the hard, self-contained compositions at the center of these tracks. There was more of that on Skit i Allt. This record is grander on the surface, but I’m not convinced Dungen is about surfaces.
— BEN RATLIFF, NY Times News Service
Cass County, Don Henley, Capitol
It is not enough simply to age. One must age with patina, that layer of imperfection and soot that indicates that not all has gone as planned, but you’ve survived.
For many singers of a certain age, the world of country music — the older kinds, generally, but sometimes the modern ones — offers a sort of built-in weathering, a patina starter kit for squeaky-clean elders.
Country is also perceived as a soft place to fall for those who might only be seen as shadows of their former selves in their home genres. Country, the thinking goes, is forever grateful.
But country is hard, as is plain on Cass County, the fifth solo album by Don Henley. Fifteen years after his last solo effort, Henley is gamely trying to distance himself from the smoothed-out country-rock of his Eagles past: “Though no-stal-gee-uh is fine/ I respectfully decline/ to spend my future living in the past,” he yodels on No, Thank You, while Vince Gill’s guitar sizzles behind him.
Crucially, though, Henley underestimates his adoptive home. Most of the songs here are Henley originals (with a handful of writing partners), but Waiting Tables reveals the cracks of this project: It’s lovely but not complex, and a more progressive Nashville songwriter like Shane McAnally or Luke Laird would have added flesh to this skeleton.
Henley’s tortured quaver, a hallmark of later Eagles material and his solo work, is intact here, largely applied to songs about the cruelty of time: the obvious but effective Take a Picture of This, or The Cost of Living, a dim duet with Merle Haggard.
Haggard is one of many Nashville luminaries who show up to bolster Henley on this LP, the finest American roots music album money can buy: the rough-edged scalawag Jamey Johnson sings background vocals on two songs, Martina McBride breezes through the duet That Old Flame and Dolly Parton is sterling even while underdelivering on a cover of the Louvin Brothers’ When I Stop Dreaming.
The number and potency of these guests sometimes make Cass County sound like a tribute album to someone not yet gone. They also take away from Henley, now 68, whose voice has decayed nicely, though it now lacks the wise punch it had on The End of the Innocence, his excellent 1989 album.
Perhaps that’s why he placed the Tift Merritt cover Bramble Rose first on this album — his guests are Miranda Lambert, who doesn’t try too hard, and Mick Jagger, who sounds otherworldly and aggrieved, as if someone were reaching down his throat and manipulating his vocal cords while his eyes bulge wildly and he gasps for air and reason. By contrast, Henley sounds like an old pro.
— JON CARAMANICA,, NY Times News Service
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