Yesterday, Douglas Wolk—whose byline I recognize and who, according to Beaujon and this online encyclopedia thingy, is sort of a dude—published an item on NPR’s Monitor Mix blog to the effect that, dammit, AutoTune and Pro Tools and click tracks and, you know, Twitter are conspiring to kill rock & roll.

Holding up the 48th second of the Beatles‘ “Rain” as an example, Wolk claims that, “if some band of 25-year-olds with radio aspirations wrote and recorded ‘Rain’ today…that take would probably be thrown out, or at least digitally edited to fix the screw-up.”

With respect to Wolk, this strikes me as a hollow, distinctly codger-y argument. (And one that cites exactly zero contemporary acts by way of illustration.) Couple points here:

Read More “Reports of Rock & Roll’s Demise at the Hands of Pro Tools Have Been Greatly Exaggerated” »

Mike West is out this week; here’s some jazz!

Read More “Jazz Set List Nov. 12-18: Elikeh Afropop, Stefon Harris, Joe Sample, and More” »

A Friday item, in which we feature a playlist suggested by one of our critics—or by a friendly guest.

Christian McBride has laid down records with so many jazz icons that to list them here would be sort of obnoxious. (It would also require us to discuss the latter-day work of Sting.) Suffice it to say that whatever jazz greats were alive in the ’90s, McBride played with them—and made their records a better place to spend some time.

Mike West, City Paper’s jazz guy-in-chief, calls McBride “the most revered bass player of his generation.”

More important, perhaps, is McBride’s statesmanlike work as a bandleader and composer. McBride’s new band, Inside Straight, which backs him on this year’s Kind of Brown, represents a return to a traddier brand of music (what the bassist describes as “right down the pike, straight-ahead, swinging jazz”) after the forward-leaning funk of the Christian McBride Band. Not to say that the dude’s playing it safe or anything…but if John McLaughlin wanders into Blues Alley this weekend, he’s not gonna hear anything to turn his hair unwhite.

Still! A man’s allowed his guilty pleasures. In anticipation of his four sets this weekend, I phoned McBride to solicit a playlist of his favorite non-jazz songs. Predictably, they’re heavy on the low end. (Hey, a bassist has to look out for his own.) Also predictably, one of the songs is by Sting.

Playlist & videos below the interview.

Read More “End-of-Week Mixtape: Christian McBride’s Non-Jazz Playlist” »

Dear Arts Desk readers,

As approximately 62 of you know, I’ve been spinning a Friday Soul mix via the old Twitter account. Man is it groovy! I’m even linking to videos. The playlist so far:

1. Otis Redding, “Shake” (live at Monterey Pop, 1967)
2. Raphael Saadiq, “Let’s Take a Walk”
3. Laura Nyro, “And When I Die”
4. James Brown, “Super Bad”
5. Buddy Guy, “Feels Like Rain”
6. Mofro, “Ho Cake”
7. James Cotton, Muddy Waters, Johnny Winter, “Got My Mojo Workin’” (hey, we’re branching out)
8. The Impressions, “Long Long Winter”
9. Rod Stewart, “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher”
10. Bettye LaVette, “You Don’t Know Me At All”
11. Van Morrison, “I’ve Been Working”
12. Curtis Mayfield, “People Get Ready” (some live version from, I think, 1974)

Eclectic, see, yet accessible. But it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings! (No Aretha jokes, if ye please.) Just point the browser of your choice in this direction, make like a lemming, and follow along. Suggestions are appreciated. As are witty remarks concerning my inclusion of Rod Stewart…or the fact that a number of these tracks don’t necessarily qualify as soul.

Below the jump: the remainder of the mix, updated incrementally.

Read More “End-of-Week Mixtape: #FridaySoul!” »

Today, as John Paul Jones announces that Led Zeppelin will no longer seek a touring replacement for an intransigent Robert Plant, D.C. fans can take solace in the imminent arrival of Lez Zeppelin.

The all-female five-piece—after Bonnaroo, no longer a parlor trick but still an oddity—sacrifices little in its sonic parrotry: enlisting Eddie Kramer to produce its self-titled debut; treating the Zep canon essentially as sheet music, “as if it were, I don’t know, a symphony by Beethoven,” guitarist Steph Paynes told the A.V. Club. The group’s performances are noteworthy for the virtuosity involved; for the appropriation of cock-rock swagger; for the fact that they’re, you know, all women; and because unlike Plant, lead singer Sarah McClellan never cracks on those high notes.

(She also refuses to bait the audience with annoying lines like, “Remember laughter?” Possibly because Lez refuses to play Stairway-to-You-Know-What.)

Video & deets below the jump.

Read More “Tomorrow Night: Lez Zeppelin @ the State Theatre” »

Greetings, readers! As few individuals whose names aren’t Beaujon may have noticed, I’ve been gone for the past two weeks. (In New Hampshire. Writing something other than blog posts.) Hey, the leaves were pretty…there were rabbits to be eaten…there were felled Black Locusts to be sawn through! (And reams of leaden prose, of course, demanding the same treatment.)

But now I’m back. Hell, I may even start twittering again. Still, those bookish weeks up north gave me time for something other than woodwork and typing. After the jump, four books suitable for reading by a crackling woodstove, and one suitable for kindling.

Read More “Five Books I Did, in Fact, Read” »

Just gonna say it: The Dead Weather has really been phoning it in on their videos. You’d think Jack White, a film buff with a track record of excellent White Stripes videos who named his record label after an Orson Welles movie (and who’s expressed his admiration for the guy in other, less subtle ways), would put some creative elbow grease (Ed. note: ew) behind the visual component of his new project.

But no! Take the vid for the band’s lead single, “Hang You From The Heavens,” an exercise in transmitting single-frame doses of cool and little else:

Then there’s “Treat Me Like Your Mother,” a kickass song with  a better, but still repetitive, vid:

Read More “Directing the Dead Weather’s Next Video” »

The F-Word
By Jesse Sheidlower
Oxford University Press
$16.95

Ed. Note: the following post contains a number of naughty words, including Fuck, Cunt, and Goat. If there’s a toddler on your lap, best to blindfold him or her before reading any further.

Having read Erika’s post on the third edition of The F-Word, I was cheered to discover a copy in my mailbox this weekend. “What fun,” I thought, admiring its sleek, unsuggestive firetruck-red jacket, its blurb from Steven Pinker (”You’ll never hear the F-word in the same way again”), and the Henry IV Part II quotation that opens the volume (”‘Tis needful that the most immodest word / Be looked upon and learned”). Also of note: a curiously restrained foreword from Lewis Black (guess we all grow up a bit when the OED comes a-calling); eight (8) pages on variants of the word frig; and a note on “new inclusions” in this edition:
Read More “Eff This Book!
Perusing Oxford’s The F-Word” »

Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution
By Phillip Prodger
($39.95, Oxford University Press)

“The vestigial result of something useful in earlier times”—this phrase can describe a number of things (naked pictures of your ex; the Zagat guide; newspapers; &c.). Phillip Prodger uses it to describe Charles Darwin’s theory of the human countenance. If emotions evolved biologically, Darwin reasoned, so did facial expressions. It’s an idea he put forth in 1872—a year after his Descent of Man—in a treatise titled Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Darwin’s Camera is an engagingly literate survey of the intersection between evolutionary theory and photographic technology at a time of accelerated development for both. Darwin came to depend on photography to bolster his speculative argument because, as Prodger notes:

[M]anually produced pictures were prone to all sorts of error…. Besides, works of art are made to communicate ideas, not facts. Artists trade in viewers’ perceptions, not accuracy for its own sake…. The comparatively new medium of photography offered a possible answer to these problems, so Darwin began to collect photographs….. Expression extended Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural and sexual selection to the realm of the mind; it was arguably his boldest extension of evolutionary theory.

But there’s one thing sexier than Victorian evolutionary theory. And that’s a photographic taxonomy of expressions published to bolster Victorian evolutionary theory! After the jump, witness the five most striking photo juxtapositions to be found in Prodger’s volume.

Read More “The Five Best Photos in Darwin’s Camera” »

On his most recent visit to Busboys and Poets, George Pelecanos wasn’t just selling his own books—he was also hawking a slim New York Review of Books reissue of a 1966 novel whose out-of-focus Ken Light cover photo (above right) exemplifies the undeserved obscurity of its author: Don Carpenter (below right). The novel in question is Carpenter’s debut, Hard Rain Falling. In his introduction, Pelecanos says the book “sent me back to my desk, jacked up on ambition.”

Readers of a less writerly bent will likely experience a similar “jacking up”: Carpenter’s terse, overtly masculine prose, precise vernacular, and above all the unsentimental yearners who populate his book constitute a plausible, troubling world—one from which it’s hard to emerge without a bit of a head rush. The novel follows Jack Levitt, an orphan who bounces around the Pacific Northwest—between an orphanage, pool halls, reform school, dank hotels, and prisons—before marrying and siring an heir in San Francisco. It’s a volume fairly dripping with testosterone—the women get a fair shake, sure, but exclusively through the eyes of the men who sympathize, or try to; not for nothing is the book’s most intense relationship between Jack and Billy Lancing, a light-skinned black pool prodigy from Seattle who rematerializes next to Jack in San Quentin.

Read More “Exhuming Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling:
An interview with Edwin Frank” »