Book Review: I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen by Sylvie Simmons

British- born music journalist Sylvie Simmons has written a comprehensive biography of the poet/songwriter and unlikely rock star Leonard Cohen.  The well respected Simmon’s early work in the 70’s and 80’s covered the likes of Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, Steely Dan and Michael Jackson among others.  More recently she has gravitated toward conducting skillful interviews with quirky, enigmatic personalities such as Tom Waits, Lou Reed and the elder statesman Johnny Cash shortly before he passed on.  There was even another biography of the French pop star Serge Gainsbourg, called Fistful of Gitanes.   What these artists have in common , regardless of what Scott Fitzgerald may have opined, is that they have all managed  to have second acts, and in the case of Leonard Cohen,  a significant transition nearly every decade since the 1950’s.  As you read these lines a 78 year old Cohen is touring the world, selling out large theatres and reaching new audiences.  Since he appeared on the scene in 1956, a relatively unknown Canadian poet in his early 20’s, Cohen has gone on to become a songwriter, a singer, a novelist, and Zen monk, and rather than drop any one of these vocations for another, he has remained active in all of them.

  In the midst of reading I’m Your Man I serendipitously happened upon a PBS broadcast of Leonard Cohen: Live in London 2008.  Seeing the concert footage made it clear that this man has something special to offer his audiences.   His poems are powerful, his delivery is passionate, and the band and backup singers deliver the vision fully realized.  It’s a long time since the 1969 debut of the album Songs of Leonard Cohen, but his songs from that time and beyond have lived on and continue to attract new and younger audiences worldwide.   Had his career in poetry and music gone another way, we might be asking ourselves today   “What ever happened to Leonard Cohen?”  What happened was that this artist created his legacy in a large body of poems, songs, recordings and memories that will endure.   I’m Your Man:  The Life of Leonard Cohen is a rich and worthwhile documentation of that legacy.

Richard Mayer  6-18-13

(This Review Appeared previously in the Brattleboro Reformer)
                                                                                                                             

James Hunter Band at the Iron Horse

James Hunter Band at the Iron Horse
The British Invasion of the 1960’s was a significant turning point in American popular music. Many of the English rockers that came across the pond after the Beatles broke the ice had something of value to offer consumers of American music. Mop Tops and screaming teeny boppers aside, groups like the Stones, the Animals and the Yardbirds offered Americans something they had been largely unaware of, namely , their own musical heritage of Blues and R & B. American radio in the early sixties was a somewhat segregated affair. Though Elvis Presley and Alan Freed had had helped to break down racial barriers in the previous decade there was resistance in the burgeoning pop music youth market to surrender and integrate completely. Without the influence of the Brits, we may have had to wait much longer to know about James Brown, Solomon Burke and John Lee Hooker, to name but a few.
Last night I experienced another British Invasion of a sort, a crackerjack English band delivering a smoking set of early sixties style Rhythm and Blues to an audience that has been deprived of this sort of thing for nearly 50 years. James Hunter and his mates have obviously done their homework to create an ensemble sound that pays tribute, but never copies the sounds of performers like Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, James Brown and others. The good-natured Hunter fronts his band with a journeyman’s precision, served up with a bit of tongue in cheek. Delivering a skintight James Brownian lick with the band, Hunter looks pleased and surprised that they’ve pulled it off. The music is non-stop, the banter is minimal (and could benefit from sub-titles, this guy is totally English except when he’s singing!) and the audience is on board for the ride.
Hunter plays an unaffected guitar, lead licks are interspersed with a minimalist syncopated rhythm style. The band sound is full, with Hammond organ module, upright bass, drums, and a tenor and baritone reed section. The sound conjured up for me a Ray Charles rhythm section from the What’d I Say? era. The drummer played in an understated way, all fingers and wrists, reminiscent of the transition years of pop music when session players were jazz men with studio day jobs. No big fills, no crashing cymbals, just make the music feel good.
Hunter and his “lads” played an hour and a half non-stop set, and said goodnight to the appreciative Northampton audience. The band came back on for the chaser minus their leader for some quality blowing time on a bluesy shuffle that featured the organ and both sax players on extended solos. Hunter returned to the stage for the last chorus and another short tune. As we left the Horse, he could be seen sitting on the sidewalk in front of the band bus, cheerfully scribbling autographs for the fans.
Richard Mayer
6-23-10

Book Review-A Thousand Honey Creeks Later

Book Review :Preston love- A Thousand Honey Creeks Later: My Life in Music from Basie to Motown

To a jazz history enthusiast that came of age during the halcyon days of Berry Gordy’s Motown empire, this title practically jumped off the shelf the first time I saw it. I wasn’t familiar with saxophonist Preston Love, but reasoned that anyone who had played in the two disparate settings mentioned in the subtitle just had to have something to say. As it turns out he had plenty to say. That he was a genuine workaday musician, rather than a star, made it all the more appealing. Love tells his story without glamour or complaint, giving equal billing to the music and to the business of music. His is one of the most illuminating accounts ever of life on the bus.

Unlike so many music biographies that are rife with tales of exaggeration and excess, Love’s book treats the music both lovingly and critically, while taking a pragmatist’s view of the business. The impression that emerges is one of a hard working musician with a practical side, one destined to become a leader of his own ensembles. From his early days in Midwest territory bands to his years as musical director for Motown on the West Coast, Preston Love comes across as a genuine soul, willing to reveal his insecurities along with his triumphs.

Like so many books by and about African-American musicians in this culture, this one has at its core the theme of racial tension. There are the stories of segregated theaters, hotels, and restaurants, which Love seems to have taken in stride in describing his most prolific years as a player on the road. There is however a notable change in temperament in the book’s final two chapters, which Love added to the book in the eighties and nineties. (It had originally ended with the chapter on the Motown years.) Particularly in the final chapter, entitled Perspectives, he begins to ramble on a bit about many of the familiar discourses in jazz. He takes white musicians to task for their inability to play jazz and blues, he summarily dismisses entire genres of modern music and complains about the very corporate greed that fed him pretty well as a Motown musical director. The generalizations begin to get a bit tedious at times, but rants can be compelling, and this one is.

Despite the inconsistency, this is a book I highly recommend. Covering such a long period in American popular music, it offers an insider's view of a music in evolution. A companion book I would suggest is Blues Upside Your Head by Johnny Otis. Otis and Love were contemporaries and good friends, and taken together their books offer a comprehensive look at roughly the same period in the history of jazz and rhythm and blues.

- Richard Mayer

Film Review-Calle' 54

Film Review: Calle' 54 - A Documentary Film by Fernando Trueba

Lovers of Latin Jazz will not want to miss this fine film on the hybrid that both influenced and was influenced by American jazz beginning in the 1940’s. Not nearly as publicized as the critically acclaimed Buena Vista Social Club, it covers a broader spectrum of the form that includes but is not limited to Cubano music. Where Buena Vista educated the viewer about a music that had not been available to the American listener until a decade ago, Calle' 54 lets us in on a form that is our birthright but is nevertheless inaccessible to us because of its status outside the mainstream.

Trueba has done a comprehensive job of covering this broad topic by selecting the important figures in the music as his subjects. Thankfully, he lets the music do the talking; live performances are rendered in their entirety and without voiceovers. He even makes a device of leaving out the applause in most cases, letting the music resonate with the listener for a moment before moving on to the next profile.

Some of the exquisite moments in the film are a couple of reunion duets between Cuban pianist Bebo’ Valdes and his son Chucho, and another with the elder Valdes and the virtuoso bassist Israel "Cachao" Lopez. Another is octagenarian Chico O’Farill conducting a performance of the Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite, the recording of which he appeared on in 1950 with Machito’s big band. Still another highlight is watching the Brazilian pianist Eliane Elias, whose subtle motions at the keyboard are the essence of samba.

It is fitting that the Gonzalez brothers, Jerry (trumpeter and conguero ) and Andy (bassist) of the Fort Apache Band should be featured prominently in this film. The brothers grew up in a Bronx neighborhood that was a veritable melting pot of Latin and Jazz music during their youth. Andy in particular is an authority and proud champion of Latin music and probably the most in-demand bassist on Latin sessions of all kinds.

In addition to those already mentioned, there are concert appearances and more intimate performances by the likes of Tito Puente, Gato Barbieri, Paquito D’Rivera, Michel Camilo, Patato Valdes and many more. The best thing about this film is that there is not one bit of pretense in the entire 105 minutes. This one is purely about the music.

- Richard Mayer

BOOK REVIEW-Positively 4th Street- David Hajdu

Positively 4th Street: The Life and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariňa by David Hajdu

When Mimi Fariňa died of cancer a few years ago, her passing scarcely caused a blip on the radar screen of American popular music. Though in the early days the more musically proficient of the two Baez sisters, Mimi was always the understated one. Celebrity is something that more often happens to those who want it badly enough, and unlike her sister, her husband, and the kid from Hibbing, all of whom yearned for the limelight, Mimi was content just to be a player. In classic little sister fashion , she was swept along first on the momentum of Joan's rise to folkie fame, then on the energy of her husband, the novelist and self conceived folk legend Richard Fariña. It is perhaps fitting that Mimi, in the years following the short history of the folk fad, lived a life of service for which she will be remembered fondly, if not notoriously.A beautiful human spirit, Mimi devoted 25 years to her Bread and Roses Foundation, providing quality musical inspiration for the sick, the homeless, and institutionalized members of society.

A biographical sketch of Mimi and her three companions during a few short years in the early 1960's before they became known as "THE SIXTIES" is the subject of this offering by David Hajdu who also wrote Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn. In this book Hajdu skillfully deconstructs the relationships and explodes the myths of Dylan and Joan Baez, and introduces us to the lesser known but no less driven Richard Fariňa. We learn for example that Joan Baez lifted her whole act from the repertoire and style from a little known Cambridge folk singer named Debbie Green, explaining away the theft with the rationalization that Debbie Green wasn't going anywhere anyhow. Similarly, we are informed that Bob Dylan originally copped Woody Guthrie's homespun persona, but that he "did" Guthrie so poorly that he was pressured by his peers into reinventing himself, something he's been doing ever since.

The character of Richard Fariňa, whom we know so little about anyway, turns out to be the most interesting of the profiles. Fariňa, like Joan Baez and Dylan, is a self absorbed artist hell-bent on fame, and with enough innate talent to make it happen. Even more enigmatic than Dylan himself, Fariňa was prone to tall tales about his past and huge ambitions about his future. A competitive spirit pervaded everything these three egomaniacs attempted, and was part and parcel of the impact they had on popular music.

Hajdu succeeds mightily in articulating the relationships between these fab four of folkdom. The book is well researched, mostly through interviews and correspondence with colleagues of the four, and he is insightful and fair in the treatment of his subjects. Among the literally hundreds who contributed their recollections are folksinger Eric Von Schmidt, Tom Paxton, Odetta, and author Thomas Pynchon.

Musicologically this is a book that needed to be written, for it covers a brief yet significant period in popular music that influenced much of what was to come in the lyrical content and attitude of rock music in the sixties and beyond. The impact of Dylan, Joan Baez, and the Fariňa's on the music is a combination of politically aware (if sometimes naive) lyrics, and a rhythmic sensibility coming out of black rhythm and blues that suited the post cold war youth environment to a tee. Bob Dylan has been called the spokesman of his generation and even if we didn't always know what he was talking about, Viet Nam Era youth identified with his attitude and swagger. Joan Baez lent an air of earnestness and integrity to the youth culture; starstruck though she was, she really believed in the causes she championed. Richard Fariňa, with child-bride Mimi as his de facto musical director, created himself first as a novelist (and a good one at that), then as a folksinger whose fire burned brightly and burned out tragically in James Dean fashion. Fariña died in a motorcycle crash in 1966 at the height of his literary success with the novel Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me.

There is something utterly American in the tale of these four modern day troubadours. Like Elvis Presley a decade before, their collective story is a strange mix of talent and hype, of craft and craftiness, of art and show business. Ultimately Hajdu has succeeded in telling it.

BOOK REVIEW-Bob Dylan Chronicles (vol.1)

After a 40 year career during which he has reportedly reinvented himself a half dozen times, Bob Dylan remains one of the most enigmatic popular artists ever. He has seldom granted interviews and was cryptic and sometimes insolent on those occasionswhen he did. And as familiar and well-loved as his music has been to us, let's face it, half the time we didn't know what he was talking about. The media, playing to fans hungry for any news about His Vagueness has created a larger than life mythology that is really all we have to go by. First there was Electric Bob at Newport (was he booed? was he not?). After that there was Bob the Recluse After the Motocycle Crash, Born-Again Bob,Hasidic Bob and Bob the Actor.

The first third of Dylan's long awaited memoir (with 2 more volumes promised) is an intimate, if at times unfocused look at whatever the author happened to be thinking about at the time. In this stream of consciousness style, he takes the reader on an odyssey that begins with his arrival in Greenwich Village, spends a considerable amount of ink musing on his influences both musical and literary, offers two chapters on the genesis of the New Morning and Oh Mercy recording sessions in the seventies and eighties, and then it's back to New York City where seemingly only two years have elapsed.

In this short book (I read it in two evenings), Dylan reveals himself as a man in love with and thoroughly knowledgeable about American folk music, and that includes American popular music in all its forms. He shows himself to be a vulnerable, complex artistic personality, at times insecure and at others grandiose. He consistently lets the reader know what a burden it's been to have had so much attention focused on him, and yet he seems to draw attention to himself by this introverted stance. He is at his impersonal best when doing character descriptions. Whether he is creating a loving portrait of one of his musical mentors, or describing the clerk at the general store, he still has a colorful and poignant way with language. What emerges in Bob Dylan Chronicles Volume I is a somewhat clearer picture of the man, although by no means does he give us anything to dispel the mythology that surrounds him. What's more, it's unlikely that he'll give it all up in Volumes II and III. The mystique has served him well.

(this review previously appeared in the Brattleboro Reformer)

BOOK REVIEW-Why New Orleans Matters

WHY NEW ORLEANS MATTERS by Tom Piazza (HarperPerennial 2005)

In the months following the evacuation of New Orleans due to the wrath of Hurricane Katrina, author Tom Piazza wrote a tiny masterpiece of tribute to his beleaguered city. Piazza, who has lived in New Orleans since 1994, had relocated temporarily to Missouri, where he got to work on this extended essay while the fate of the city was still unknown. In the absence of having fully processed the feelings of loss associated with such a trauma, Piazza's recounting of the experience reads like a diary, as he attempts to digest day by day the enormity of what has just happened.

I first encountered Piazza's writing as a music journalist in his Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz, after having the privilege of hearing him lecture at the Williams College Jazz Festival in 1999 on roughly the same topic. Piazza's enthusiasm for the music was infectious, the lecture setting feeling more like a group of old friends listening to records together. An old soul where music is concerned, Piazza's preferences fall pretty squarely in the years 1920 to 1970, that which he refers to as "in the tradition" like another New Orleanean, one Wynton Marsalis. It's easy to see how such a man would be drawn to the culture and values that define New Orleans, his passion for the life of the city beyond Bourbon Street, of the music, the cuisine, the architecture, and perhaps most importantly the attitude that says we will survive all this. Still, within these pages are moments of fear and doubt over the city's ability to recover given other forces at work, such as corrupt and inept government, big money development interests, racism, crime and economic disparity. Piazza doesn't hold back when taking on the villians of Katrina, speaking directly to the callousness of Barbara Bush, the ineptitude of mayor Ray Nagin, and the system failure spelled FEMA. His anger is cathartic however, and he always returns to an attitude of hopefulness that pervades throughout the book. The afterword that was updated in 2008 takes inventory of what has demonstrably changed in the three years since the levees broke, and what still needs to be done. Piazza leaves us with reason to believe that New Orleans is surviving, and that those intangible attributes that make it unique will indeed prevail.

(this review previously appeared in the Brattleboro Reformer)