The Grohl Sessions, Vol. 1, by Zac Brown Band
Getting what you need is nice, but getting what you want is best of all. That said, how fortunate that Zac Brown and Dave Grohl have selected each other for gift exchange this year.
The group that carries Brown’s name, Zac Brown Band, is a taut road-tested country-rock outfit that over the last five years has been polished up and shoehorned into mainstream country, its life and vibrancy oozing out of it all the while. What Brown and his bandmates want is the license to rock unencumbered, to place themselves not in the lineage of anodyne country chill-bros like Kenny Chesney but in the rowdy Southern rock pantheon alongside the Allman Brothers Band.
Grohl — onetime drummer of Nirvana, current front dude of Foo Fighters — is a man who would prefer a life that didn’t include the Internet, computer-aided recording technology and possibly electricity. A man who, at the 2012 Grammys, gave a speech emphasizing the primacy of “the human element of music.” What Grohl wants are more bands, more hands put upon instruments, more music redolent of the sounds he grew up on, and that he can be a part of making.
That Brown and Grohl met was auspicious, given their desires. That the two met at a John Varvatos store, home of overpriced and underinspired notionally rock-’n’-roll-inspired men’s wear, says all you need to know about the flavor they share.
Brown courted Grohl to work with his band, and The Grohl Sessions, Vol. 1 is a result, the first of what’s been advertised as a pair of EPs. Four songs tracked live to tape, with no computers deployed — this is the stuff of Grohl’s fantasies, and an opportunity for Brown to reframe his band before Nashville hopelessly freezes it.
These songs, especially the mildly bluesy All Alright and the upbeat and slightly rowdy Day for the Dead embody the best of all parties involved. Overall, the EP has more of the rambling, sparkling energy of Zac Brown Band’s live shows than has been captured on its earlier albums, and the quality of the songwriting is higher here, too.
All Alright opens with pealing guitars, moving into a shimmering, celebratory tone, swiftly undercut by Brown’s sadness: “I’m lost as a feather in a hurricane/ There’s no way to measure/ How far I am from O.K.” As is typical of his group, there are affecting male harmonies throughout the song, partnered here with arrangements that verge on uproarious Southern gospel. The Muse, a cover of a song by the Wood Brothers, has unexpected Celtic flourishes.
Zac Brown Band recorded these songs in a week with Grohl, and the EP was released on Brown’s label straight to iTunes. But even given all this freedom, the songs are still conservatively structured — none are longer than five minutes, and apart from Day for the Dead, none sink into the reverie of an overlong jam, which is the strength of Brown’s band.
Instead, sometimes this EP highlights its weakness: Brown’s voice, which lacks power and nuance, and lays even flatter the goopier the lyric. That liability becomes even clearer as the musicianship around him elevates, not just by his band members, but also guests, like Grohl on drums, or Oteil Burbridge (of the reconstituted Allman Brothers Band) on bass. But the gifts Brown receives here are plenty, and he has spun gold from far less. So happy holidays to him, and everyone else, too.
— Jon Caramanica, NY Times News Service
The Endless Mysteries, by George Colligan
One of the finer piano trio albums of 2013 — released too late in the year, or on too small a label, to make a dent in the critics’ polls — is George Colligan’s The Endless Mysteries. It’s a program of original compositions, most of them sensible and sturdy. And because it was recorded in a few hours with no rehearsal, it’s the product of rough-and-ready postbop expertise, rather than the lived experience of a steady band.
At least, not any band led by Colligan. A pianist of deep harmonic and rhythmic assurance, and sideman credits all over the map, he works here with the bassist Larry Grenadier and the drummer Jack DeJohnette. Each is a long-running member of another piano trio: Grenadier has been in both editions of the Brad Mehldau Trio, going back nearly 20 years; DeJohnette has spent the last 30 with Keith Jarrett.
Whatever the sum of all that experience is, Colligan made it work for him. Some of his pieces on The Endless Mysteries seem designed for these specific partners, especially DeJohnette, in whose band he has played. Song for the Tarahumera, a scrappy modal tune, becomes a roiling drum incantation. Liam’s Lament, a beautifully restrained ballad, features empathic rubato work by Grenadier. (It also features a theme played on melodica, an instrument that DeJohnette has favored on his own albums; I had to check to be sure that it was Colligan doing the playing.)
Colligan, who turns 44 next week, favors an earthy, assertive style, putting him in a lineage that includes McCoy Tyner, John Hicks and Mulgrew Miller. But he has other affinities, as he shows in a pair of spontaneous inventions provoked by the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut which claimed the daughter of a friend and sometime band mate. Thoughts of Ana is a softly chiming solo reflection, with a touch that brings Jarrett to mind; it leads into Outrage, which borrows a page from the Cecil Taylor playbook.
None of these moves feel calculated or rigid, because Colligan and his partners work so fluently. And while some titles sound like the sort of exhortations that Colligan might use with his students at Portland State University in Oregan — see It’s Hard Work! and If the Mountain Was Smooth, You Couldn’t Climb It — he doesn’t seem to be straining in the slightest. He’s past that point by now.
— Nate Chinen, NY Times News Service
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
Even by the standards of Ukraine’s International Legion, which comprises volunteers from over 55 countries, Han has an unusual backstory. Born in Taichung, he grew up in Costa Rica — then one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — where a relative worked for the embassy. After attending an American international high school in San Jose, Costa Rica’s capital, Han — who prefers to use only his given name for OPSEC (operations security) reasons — moved to the US in his teens. He attended Penn State University before returning to Taiwan to work in the semiconductor industry in Kaohsiung, where he
RSS