Pages tagged “issue 22”

Director: Abel Ferrara
Writers: Abel Ferrara, Mario Isabella, Simone Lageoles, Scott Pardo
Cinematography: Stefano Falivene, Abel Ferrara
Starring: Juliette Binoche, Forest Whitaker, Matthew Modine, Heather Graham
Studio info: Surreel, 83 mins.

Over-the-top Biblical mess intrigues as only Abel Ferrara can

Louder and more chaotic than its material seems to warrant, Abel Ferrara’s Mary seems like the condensed version of a much larger movie. It includes scenes from a religious epic, TV interviews, street fights, limo rides, infidelity, hypocrisy, apostasy and conversion, but at a mere 83 minutes it’s over before it really begins.

Forest Whitaker plays a TV host examining the historical Jesus on a nightly broadcast, and Matthew Modine is the director and star of an unconventional Biblical film. Modine agrees to appear on Whitaker’s show, boosting both their careers, but one person they can’t yoke to their PR efforts is Juliette Binoche who plays Mary Magdalene in Modine’s movie. She’s been so transformed by the experience that at the shoot’s end she drops everything and heads to Jerusalem.

Very little of this mess works in any conventional sense, but as the performances begin to redline—as Whitaker bottoms out and begs God to save his child and Binoche takes to the water like a fisher of men—the movie examines the relationship between performance and contrition. All the characters are actors; some are trying to open a channel to God while others are putting on a show intended to earn some grace. It’s a fitting topic for Ferrara, whose movies frequently embrace the same contradictions. They’re all here in Mary—the excess, the guilt and the search for truth. Intriguingly jumbled with some assembly required.

Director: Matt Lipsey
Writers: Matt Lucas, David Walliams
Starring: Matt Lucas, David Walliams, Tom Baker, Stephen Aintree, Anthony Stewart Head
Studio info: BBC Video, 2 discs

Eccentric British export is the dog’s bollocks

The Office’s primary contender for awards and audience when both were searing embarrassing images onto retinas for the first time, Little Britain captures the madness beneath the stodgy British exterior and pushes the boundaries of sketch comedy (and good taste) to the limit. Where The Office was embarrassingly real, Little Britain is embarrassingly surreal, with eccentric characters like two on-the-dole friends (one of whom scams his way through life pretending to be confined to a wheelchair) and two 19th-century transvestites with prominent facial hair. Distasteful, cringeworthy, horrific and absolutely hilarious, Little Britain takes up where Canadian sketch show Kids in the Hall left off.

Hometown: New Orleans, La.
Members [l-r]: Darren King (drums, samples), Greg Hill (guitar), Paul Meany (vocals, keyboards), Roy Mitchell-Cardenas (bass)
Fun fact: Meany, Mitchell-Cardenas and King previously played together in Earthsuit, a band that combined rock, reggae, funk, hip-hop and jazz.
Why they’re worth watching: Mute Math is a grassroots, Internet-fueled sensation, selling more than 30,000 albums from their van, without a label. And their live show has tongues wagging.
For fans of: Radiohead, The Police, U2

Mute Math’s story already has the narrative arc of a TV melodrama. The quartet was confronted with the destruction of its hometown of New Orleans, then turned around to face label woes, with Warner Brothers sitting on the band’s completed full-length in a struggle for creative control.

“A lot of us had lost our day jobs, and our wives were out of work, and they were holding down the bills while we were off playing rock band,” says keyboardist Paul Meany of Mute Math’s Fall 2005 tour. “When the whole Katrina thing happened, it felt like a sink-or-swim time in our lives. We had finished the record and we were forced to dive into it full-time because we had no other choice.”

Fortunately the band has built a staggering cult fanbase with its swirling anthems and pristine atmospherics—full of fractured shards of guitar distortion, complex tempo changes and sparkling keyboards. Live shows, which begin with Meany’s classically pop, soaring vocals, often take an experimental direction, with extended codas, homemade instruments and occasional crowd surfing.

Meany is at a loss to explain the band’s rabid following. “People try to poke and prod, like, ‘What exactly are you doing?’”

While waiting for the lawyers to resolve its label issues, (“Hopefully this thing will end pretty soon,” Meany says.) Mute Math is hitting the summer-festival circuit, with scheduled slots at Lollapolooza, the Warped Tour and Bonnaroo. “We’d play in an open field if that was our only option,” Meany laughs. “As long as people are still interested, we’ll keep going.”

Gruel, S.C.—Where’s William Tecumseh Sherman when you really need him?

No doubt about it, the rural community of Gruel, S.C.—“somewhere in the middle of nowhere, between the towns of Forty-Five and Cross Blood”— has seen better days. Folks are hard to find even downtown, either inside Roughhouse Billiards or around the crumbling statue of Colonel Dill, Gruel’s only Civil War hero.

George Singleton, five books into a wickedly funny career, is fast becoming the literary laureate of downtrodden, over-educated, heartsick Southerners. Drowning in Gruel is yet another smart, goofy, nearly brilliant take on big dreamers who settle marvelously below expectations.

Singleton’s best stuff—including the sly “The Novels of Raymond Carver,” starring an English professor gone to seed who teaches a popular college course that requires no reading (Carver never wrote a novel)—mixes gleefully detailed prose with quirky insights and unexpected, epiphanies. Many take place inside the pool hall, where bartender Jeff serves up chili-dogs and tells those suffering from low spirits not to worry, that “he’d met more desperate people in Gruel.”

There are a few stories here and there that seem more like situations than sustained narratives, but few readers will find a more comfortable, easy place to hang than Singleton’s drowsy burg.

[ED—Singleton is an occasional contributor to Paste.]

Yo, ’sup. Me n u b safe, blud, innit?

Jas has almost got the street talk down. But sometimes the brainy 18-year-old Indian living in London’s Hounslow district slips up with an educated “poncey” word, a vulnerable gesture.

In this much-heralded debut novel by Gautam Malkani, Jas—a young journalist for Financial Times—finds status by hanging with a violent gang of “desi” rudeboys from moneyed families. School and career plans plummet while he tonks up in a posh gym, leads a lavish high life with money from the gang’s stolen-cell-phone scam, and finds his first girlfriend. She’s Muslim, he’s not. And that’s when more serious criminals reveal themselves.

The novel’s disaffected young Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims coexist in a Britain of divided cultural enclaves while rejecting assimilation to white “gora” culture. A mix of filthy but amusing hip-hop, Punjabi, British and American slang pullulates as Jas seeks to frame his own confused teenage thoughts about peers and immigrant parents and to learn the perennial “art of being a guy.”

Malkani is weakest on character and plot, but his comic grasp of “bling-bling urban youth culture” is wikid. His lodestars are cell phones, texting, e-mail, the Web, MTV and conspicuous affluence. Londonstani begins as a daunting curtain of dialect, but ends as a dazzling tour-de-force mirror of the Absolute Now.

Is there high drama behind the swinging doors of a New York kitchen? Mamma mia!

Insatiable curiosity and an encounter with a legendary chef led Bill Buford, a staff writer for The New Yorker, to a job in the prep kitchen of Babbo, Mario Batali’s three-star Italian restaurant in Manhattan. Buford found working in a hell-hot kitchen punctuated by the staccato chop-chop-chop of razor-edged knives and the endless sizzle of sautéing meat is no piece of cake, but it does provide the ingredients for a juicy story.

Heat folds one tale into another: Batali’s odyssey through the Italian countryside, honing his chops in a series of traditional cucinas, and Buford’s eye-opening experience in the kitchen, where tempers often run hotter than the fiery grill, and where exacting detail—such as the zero-tolerance specifications of cubed carrots—is the recipe for Mario’s mantra: consistency, consistency, consistency.

Buford’s transparent reporting drops readers into the thick of the soup. Heat is delectable. You won’t read it without salivating.

Van Hunt blends funk, rock and R&B into soul panopticon with pop appeal

The slick, monochromatic R&B dominating today’s charts bears little resemblance to the supple, sonically diverse music minted by the Isley Brothers, Marvin Gaye and Al Green. Contemporary R&B, with its rigidly booming beats, is indistinguishable from rap until the vocals enter. This is partly a matter of pragmatism—after all, the perfunctory rap cameo is a staple of the genre. But the sensitive ladies’ man with a knack for tasteful innuendo is a dying breed; R&B slants ever more toward giddy materialism and belligerent sexuality. Terse, repetitive catchphrases engineered to lodge stubbornly in the brain get more play than languidly unfurling devotional narratives. The “rhythm” aspect is left intact, turbocharged even. But the “blues,” those ragged jolts of pure feeling, are largely suffocated by glossy digital production.

It’s not derogatory to call such music superficial because it’s deliberately superficial, presenting a frictionless surface for the ear to skim across. When done well, the formula can produce incredible pop music—Chris Brown’s “Run It!” swaggered with heartbeat urgency; Ciara’s woozily pulsing “Oh” was immeasurably enhanced by the chameleonic Ludacris’ “picture perfect” cameo; Amerie’s “1 Thing,” with its totally insane drums, sounded more alive than anything on mainstream radio last year. Nevertheless, given modern R&B’s cultivation of the plastic persona, it’s hard to regard it as “soulful” in the traditional sense. “Wanna go platinum? I’m who you should get-get-get-get-get,” Luda boasts on “Oh,” a baldly mercantile sentiment that moves the song even further from anything resembling soul and closer to rap’s sales-as-validation aesthetic. There’s scant leeway for insecurity, for humor, for mixed feelings—in fine, for human specificity.

So while I love a well-crafted, magnificently obvious banger, it’s good to know that a more nuanced take on R&B can still thrive. I posit Van Hunt’s sophomore LP, On the Jungle Floor, as an alternative, not a corrective. Hunt is a pop auteur whose variegated songwriting is reminiscent of visionaries like Prince; equally comfortable opening for Coldplay or Kanye, his music effortlessly spans rock, funk, soul and beyond. If the 12 seconds of studio goofiness that open On the Jungle Floor seem superfluous, they aren’t: they establish the playful spirit that’s writ large throughout the album. The intro rolls into the compressed funk stomp “If I Take You Home (Upon…),” an intricate braid of Rick James ad-libs, splashy handclaps, chuffing drums, fluid bass, silky falsettos, glassy synths and lilting guitars. Despite this teeming abundance, the track never seems crowded; it’s sleek and fleet and turns on dimes. “If I take you home, will you respect me in the morning?” Hunt inquires. “Will you write my name in a song?” But these aren’t rhetorical questions; they’re immediately answered by a raucous chorus of “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” The production is rich yet spare and immediate: when so much R&B sounds assembled by committee, this song conveys a real sense of individuality—of an actual artist in the studio, having a blast.

Hunt embellishes many of his funk and soul tracks with fillips of rock guitar. On the occasions when he turns his musical viewfinder more directly toward the rock idiom, it’s remarkable how seamlessly he’s able to integrate it into the album’s flow. The most brilliant transfiguration comes with his cover of The Stooges’s “No Sense of Crime,” although it’s given something more like full reconstructive surgery than a mere eyelid tuck. “One, two, three, four,” Hunt counts off in a nod to the song’s rock origins, a tribute that’ll be carried on by his clipped, emphatic vocals. But instead of churning guitars, we get a wash of silvery reverb and lusciously off-kilter woodwinds. “Good evening,” he says in a radio-DJ simper, that abiding playfulness rearing its head again, “you may call in and request any song that you want as long as it’s one of mine.”

If “No Sense of Crime” transmutes rock into soul, a reverse alchemy takes place on “At the End of a Slow Dance.” Tumbling drums, a keening synth lead, splintered rock guitars and Hunt’s commanding vocals roll toward a stately power-chord chorus. That such a convincing rock song can fit sensibly alongside staccato funk jams like “Hot Stage Lights” and “Being a Girl” is a testament to Hunt’s versatility and unique songwriting flair. It becomes clear that he’s less interested in genre limitations than in moving the listener emotionally and physically, using the entire vast range of musical idioms at his disposal. By pursuing a vision instead of a style, hopscotching with abandon through the various musics of his lifetime, Hunt delivers an album so rich, deep and all-encompassing that it successfully embodies not just the genre of “soul,” but the ineffable concept itself.

A melancholy travelog from indie rock’s restless provocateurs

International travel might be exotic and glamorous, but it also has a dark side: the isolation of being immersed in unfamiliar languages, oceans apart from loved ones. This backpack paranoia drenches The Fiery Furnaces’ latest, a record less overtly conceptual than its predecessors but no less challenging and rewarding. Listeners sent fleeing by the eccentricity of their Grandma opera Rehearsing My Choir can warily creep back, as Bitter Tea scoops out its share of sucrose Motown-inflected melodies filtered through the Friedbergers’ keyboard fetish. But devoted followers need not fear a compromise, as the Furnaces throw in a couple of their characteristic multi-song suites and resist anything resembling traditional song structure. Most thrilling is their dissection of the backwards vocal—an ancient rock cliché utilized as both avant-garde atmosphere and skewed pop tool—before culminating in the brilliant forward/reverse duet of the bittersweet “Nevers!”

Earnest Minneapolis folkie bogs down in platitudes

Sensitive folkies have emerged from Minneapolis in the past, and Mason Jennings clearly patterns his work after the one who journeyed to Greenwich Village in 1961. Like Dylan, he has a nasal, slightly off-key delivery and a penchant for sweet fingerpicking. Unlike Dylan, he also has a penchant for Hallmark sentimentality and easy rhymes. Boneclouds has its share of pleasant ballads, particularly the lovely “Moon Sailing on the Water,” and the requisite but fine anti-war anthem “Where The Sun Had Been,” which kicks up a righteous fuss. But songs like “If You Ain’t Got Love” and “Which Way Your Heart Will Go” tell all-too-predictable greeting-card tales, and “Jesus Are You Real”—Mason’s nod to vague spirituality—sounds earnestly dippy. Donovan might be proud. Dylan would yawn.

Willie’s crucial transitional works collected in one fine anthology

Willie Nelson only made two albums for Atlantic Records—Shotgun Willie and Phases and Stages—but both were absolutely crucial. It was the early ’70s, and Willie had just capped more than a decade in Nashville penning hits for other artists (“Crazy” for Patsy Cline, “Hello Walls” for Faron Young), and releasing a string of marginally successful Nashville-friendly albums of his own for Liberty, Buddah and RCA. But by 1971, Willie was bucking the Nashville establishment. He was in his late 30s and his slicked-back countrypolitan hairstyle had given way to a shaggier look. He’d just released the best album of his career, a conceptual meditation on aging called Yesterday’s Wine—easily comparable to Frank Sinatra’s great concept work September of My Years—but RCA, Willie’s label at the time, chose to ignore it. He and RCA soon decided the relationship was over.

This is where Willie was when the great Atlantic Records R&B producer Jerry Wexler met him at a party in Nashville. Willie was at work on another concept, Phases and Stages, about a broken relationship, and was trying out some of the songs on the partygoers. Wexler was starting a country-music division at Atlantic and liked what he heard. But their first project together was Shotgun Willie, another milestone for the songwriter and interpreter. That’s the album that kicks off this fine three-disc anthology documenting Willie Nelson’s transition from little-known Nashville maverick to American country-rock icon.

Having moved from Nashville to Austin in his home state of Texas, Willie set out to record a musical autobiography, using a mix of his own songs with material written by others, like Johnny Bush’s “Whiskey River” and Leon Russell’s “You Look Like the Devil,” which Willie made his own. Shotgun Willie begins with the horns-fueled title song, a witty window into the creative process he wrote in a motel on deadline. “Shotgun Willie sits around in his underwear / Biting the bullet and pulling out all of his hair,” he sings over a funky shuffle, and it’s immediately apparent he could never have gotten away with this in Nashville. The first 12 songs on disc one of The Complete Atlantic Recordings comprise the original album in all its glory. You can hear Willie in the process of developing his trademark phrasing on these songs, particularly on his gentle, aching version of another Leon Russell tune, “A Song for You.” You also can see Willie taking ordinary life details and making poetry of them, as he does in the post-breakup weeper “So Much to Do”: “My oatmeal tastes just like confetti / The coffee’s too strong so forget it / The toast is burning, well let it / There’s just so much to do since you’ve gone.”

As powerful as the Shotgun Willie disc is, Phases and Stages, on disc two, is even stronger. Phases, recorded with The Swampers of Muscle Shoals, Ala.—the guys who backed the likes of Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding—documents the devastation of a breakup equally from the points of view of the man and woman. No one who’s ever lost true love could listen to this cycle of songs, particularly the chilling “I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone,” and not come away traumatized—it’s just that emotionally affecting.

The first five songs come from the woman’s perspective. Willie sensitively enters her psyche, and with his expressive phrasing he once again turns everyday details into poetry: “Washing the shirts and never complaining / Ironing and crying / Crying and ironing.” Phases is perhaps the most sensitive, intelligent set of songs ever written about the demise of a relationship. Simple lines contain complex human challenges (“Sister’s coming home / Mama’s gonna let her sleep the whole day long”). The songs’ focus shifts from her anger (“Pretend I Never Happened”) to his disbelief (“It’s Not Supposed to be That Way”), and finally to wide-eyed resignation (“Sometimes it’s heaven / Sometimes it’s hell / Sometimes I don’t even know”). The extras on disc two are similar versions of most of the songs, but recorded with Willie’s own band rather than the Muscle Shoals studio guys. While each alternate take is strong in its own right, they collectively underscore just how important it was to have this song cycle wrapped in the warm, gentle, bottom-heavy musical molasses of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.

Disc three is just balls-out live Willie Nelson, recorded in 1974 at the Texas Opry House in Austin and produced by Wexler. It’s the template Willie has used in his live performances in the more than 30 years since. He includes his obligatory medley of hits (“Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Crazy” and “Night Life”) as well as now-time-tested crowd pleasers such as “Whiskey River,” “Stay All Night” and “Good Hearted Woman.” The final track is a delightfully spare, woozy, jazzy instrumental studio jam called “Willie’s After Hours,” which clocks in at just under 14 minutes.

Within a year after the release of Phases and Stages, Atlantic would close its country-music division and Willie Nelson would be on Columbia Records, releasing his third concept album in five years, the classic Red Headed Stranger. By then, Willie was already working with Waylon Jennings on their landmark Wanted! The Outlaws collection that fully captured the rock crowd and changed country music forever.

Director/Writer: Gandulf Hennig and Sid Griffin
Cinematography: Boris Becker
Starring: Peter Buck, Emmylou Harris, Keith Richards
Studio info: Rhino Entertainment, 90 mins.

Former Byrd, Flying Burrito Brother finally gets filmic workup

Fallen Angel, the first documentary film to dissect country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons’ gothic legend, is hardly short on tragedy: Parsons’ father committed suicide in 1958 while Gram’s mother—the daughter of citrus magnate John Snivley—surrendered to alcoholism in 1965. Throughout his career, Parsons paired Nudie-suit country twang with drug-infused psych-folk, and Fallen Angel features laudatory chatter from famous fans, commentary from family members, and the half-bitter diatribes of his former bandmates. Refreshingly, Fallen Angel isn’t all hearts and flowers: the film flatly acknowledges how Parsons piddled away a semester at Harvard, a considerable trust fund and remarkable talent in favor of yipping at the heels of The Rolling Stones and chugging booze.

Parsons overdosed at a roadside motel in September 1973. Desperate to fulfill what they contend were Parsons’ final wishes, two of his buddies (road manager Phil Kaufman and friend Michael Martin), drunk and righteous, snatched the body from LAX, drove it deep into the California desert, dumped a gallon of gasoline in the coffin, and left Parsons, half-cremated, by the side of the road. Parsons’ family eventually recovered what was left of his remains, but the story is still a fittingly twisted cap to a life riddled with heartbreak.

Bill Evans changed the face of jazz. But in typical self-effacing fashion, he did it quietly and unassumingly, presiding over a musical revolution characterized by gentleness and lyrical romanticism rather than bombast and self-promotion. His many innovative contributions whisper rather than scream and are cloaked in understated beauty.

Bespectacled and painfully shy, torn by the self-doubts and insecurities that eventually led to decades of heroin addiction, Bill Evans played the piano as if he were trying to tame a fearsome beast. In his typical concert pose—hunched over the keys, head bowed low—he looked more like a humble supplicant than a star. But make no mistake. Bill Evans is a jazz giant, as influential as any musician in the genre’s history, and he casts a large shadow over pianists as diverse as Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Brad Mehldau. His nuanced touch is unparalleled, and he plumbed the depths of a highly evocative lyricism that remains uncommonly intimate, yearning and lovely.

Trained on flute and piano from an early age, Evans majored in music during college and later pursued graduate piano studies in New York City. He seemed destined for a teaching or classical-performance career. But an exploratory stint in Tony Scott’s Quartet and an encounter with modal-jazz theorist George Russell set him on another course. After two fine but largely unnoticed albums as the leader of his own piano trio, Evans got his big break in 1958 when Miles Davis asked him to join the now venerated sextet that included John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly. The yearlong apprenticeship in Davis’ band was a marvelous learning laboratory. Just as importantly, though, Evans added his own distinctive stamp to Miles’ music, and he was instrumental in steering the group toward the modal experiments that culminated in 1959’s Kind of Blue, arguably the greatest, most important jazz album ever recorded. If he’d stopped there, his place in the jazz pantheon would’ve been assured.

But he didn’t stop there. Restless, and eager to pursue his own musical ideas, Evans soon recruited drummer Philly Joe Jones and bassist Paul Chambers from Miles’ band to record Everybody Digs Bill Evans, a fine but still somewhat tentative album of standards and originals. Severing the Miles connection entirely, he quickly replaced Jones with drummer Paul Motian and Chambers with bassist Scott LaFaro. The results were more far-reaching and sublime.

Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby—both culled from a Greenwich Village concert in 1961—showcase Evans at the top of his game, with his finest working trio. Evans brought the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel to jazz, and his solos are wonders of construction, by turns melodically ruminative and sweeping, impossibly romantic and beautiful. But for all its nuanced delicacy, Evans’ piano work still swings in the best post-bop fashion, and there’s an insistent pulse to the music that belies its genteel exterior. “Accompaniment” is too weak a word for what bassist LaFaro and Motian contribute to the proceedings. Here they’re egalitarian collaborators, and the almost telepathic interplay between the instruments is thrilling. If you want to hear the jazz-piano-led trio at its finest, you can do no better than to pick up these albums.

Unlike his compatriots Davis and Coltrane, Evans’ musical vision didn’t evolve significantly over the years, and you won’t find the dizzying stylistic changes that characterize their music. There’s a temptation to think that the Evans catalog is somewhat monochromatic, and that if you’ve heard one Bill Evans album, you’ve heard them all. But the flip side of this argument is that Bill Evans made one great album after another, and that his collected work—now anthologized in numerous box sets—is an extraordinary monument to uncompromising excellence. He did what he did, recording countless illuminating takes on the standards of the day, writing several dozen original compositions (a few of which—“Waltz for Debby,” “Turn Out the Stars,” “Peace Piece”—are now themselves recognized as standards), and playing them all with a prodigious technique.

Evans died far too young, in 1980, his body finally rebelling against the decades of abuse he’d inflicted on it. When I heard the news I returned home and listened to “Peace Piece.” It’s a work for solo piano, improvised in the studio, and it emerges fully formed as something altogether fragile and miraculous. When he wrote it, Evans was deep in the throes of heroin addiction. He had no money, no food; the electricity had been shut off in his apartment because he was unable to pay his bills. I don’t know what was on his mind. I don’t know what inarticulate groanings of the heart emerge when a genius places his hands on piano keys. But “Peace Piece” sounded then, as it sounds now, like a whispered prayer. It’s a quality that permeates all of Evans’ music—in the quiet, in the stillness, beauty shines forth.

Hometown: Ashfield, Mass.
Fun Fact: Kitchell’s debut—as a 10-year-old—took place at the Special Olympics. Her graphic-designer mom created the event’s logo and told promoters her daughter liked to sing.
Why She's Worth Watching: Kitchell sets herself apart from other pop vocal prodigies by penning original material strong enough to match her delivery.
For Fans Of: Joss Stone, Joni Mitchell, Norah Jones

Like many 17-year-olds, Sonya Kitchell is easily distracted. “I’m sometimes so in my own world, I wouldn’t be surprised if I walked into a wall,” she says, giggling. But being a self-proclaimed ‘space-case’ is where any evidence of her young age ends. If you catch the gifted singer/songwriter with her head in the clouds, she’s likely dreaming up lyrics or complex, jazz-informed melodies for her next album. “I need to write in order to process things and in order to stay sane,” she says.

Early on, Kitchell learned to tap into her deepest emotions while writing. “Part of me enjoys being depressed because I know I’m going to write a good song. I like to feel things completely and wholly because then it’s just so much easier to write about.”

Seems like Kitchell hasn’t had much to be depressed about lately. Days away from the April release of her debut, Words Came Back to Me, she’s confidently serene. “Apprehension about life in general,” she pontificates, “is pretty common.”

If Kitchell sounds like a grizzled pro, it’s because she’s been studying and performing jazz since she was 10. Taking her cue from the ‘old guys’ (as she refers to them) of jazz—Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald—she likes to keep her songs mellow and expansive. “There’s a sense of space in older music that there really isn’t now,” she says.

But the singer isn’t ready to let go of her teen years just yet. In opening Words track “Let Me Go,” she begs her parents for more independence. Yet Kitchell manages to strike the perfect balance between her youth and the cool-jazz sophistication of her influences, and ultimately between adolescence and adulthood.

“I try to write and have my songs be universal,” she says, “I want everybody to be able to find something in them.”

Director: Patrick Creadon
Starring: Will Shortz
Studio info: IFC Entertainment, 90 mins.

Edge-of-your-seat documentary about… crossword puzzles?

Similar in structure to the recent movie Spellbound, Wordplay is a fun documentary about an American institution and national habit: the New York Times crossword puzzle. Wordplay answers questions you never knew you had, like where crosswords originated and how they’re constructed, and then—after a brief lull—it comes around to a truly exciting conclusion at the national tournament. Along the way it provides plenty of chuckles and a few little puzzles to solve, but most interesting is what happens after the filmmakers interview not only hardcore, competitive puzzle solvers who can tackle a Friday puzzle in minutes, but also celebrities who are fans of the Times’ puzzle, like comedian Jon Stewart, filmmaker Ken Burns, President Bill Clinton and Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina. What’s interesting is which group we’re made to identify with: the presidents and filmmakers, naturally. It’s the magic of cinema.

Director/Writer: David Jacobson
Starring: Edward Norton, Evan Rachel Wood, David Morse
Studio info: THINKFilm, 125 mins.

Modern-day cowpoke out of touch with both his surroundings and reality

Down in the Valley begins as a promising subversion of the Western genre but swiftly degenerates into an overlong, disoriented conceit that never manages to resolve its ambivalence toward its central character. Harlan Carruthers (Edward Norton) is pumping gas in L.A. when he meets typically disaffected teenager Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood) and her friends, who find his cowboy hat too hilarious not to ridicule. “Are you for real?” they ask when he sidles up to their car. “I think so,” he drawls, an answer disarming enough to start a swift, intense romance with Tobe. It turns out Harlan is not in a position to judge his own reality, and in strict and literal adherence to the logic of Chekhov’s gun, a pistol hanging on the wall in act one goes off in act three. A warped Shane-type, Harlan is an outsider who gets the girl, emboldens her timid younger brother (Rory Culkin) and runs afoul of the local authority figure (David Morse, misused), who’s the kids’ single father. The film’s most impressive insight is that these forms of so-called empowerment are self-flattering manipulations on Harlan’s part, a dramatic dynamic perfectly executed by Norton’s patented mixture of “aw shucks” innocence and thinly disguised menace. But as the film drags on, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell whether Down in the Valley is supposed to be an indictment of the values embodied by the classic Western hero or a character study of someone whose origins and motivations are too vague to command much interest in the first place.

News Flash: Black prom queen wakes up white in Mississippi

The title of One Mississippi is a bit deceptive, as this novel actually plunges us through multiple layers of Southern life during the 1970s. You’ll be immediately drawn to the coming-of-age central character, Daniel Musgrove, who elicits laughs, worry lines and deep parental urges to send advice fast, page after page.

Daniel and his family recently moved from up north to embark on a new life in Minor, Mississippi. Here, Minor’s integrated high school becomes the stage on which Daniel lives out his adolescence, as well as a microcosm of a South trying hard to maneuver through the upheavals brought on by integration and other sweeping social changes.

Daniel’s inquisitiveness highlights this book, a long-awaited new novel from Childress, author of Crazy in Alabama, one of the finer novels on race written in the ’90s. Daniel’s keen curiosity allows us to come of age with him, to travel from the loss of his sexual innocence all the way to the strange case of amnesia suffered by the first African-American high-school prom queen, who awakens from a prom-night accident with the notion that she is undeniably, inarguably… lily white.

We can be grateful for filters like Daniel, trying his best to be an enlightened man in a world so shadowed by the past.

The man who discovered... everybody: John Hammond’s knack for finding talent made him a legend to everyone but John Q. Public

A good music producer remains invisible, working behind the scenes to allow artists to shine. Perhaps that’s why John Hammond, who produced an impressive roster of American musicians, never fully takes center stage in this thorough yet somewhat superficial biography.

Reporter Dunstan Prial has done a bang-up job of researching Hammond, and the very impulse to provide a biography of such a seminal figure in the music business—whose name is unknown to most laypeople—is to be applauded. Hammond possessed a knack for identifying great American musical talents, including Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin. At Hammond’s 1987 memorial service, one Hammond discovery, Bruce Springsteen, expressed his gratitude by performing a song by Bob Dylan, another Hammond discovery. Name a major American musician of the 20th century and Hammond pops up, Zelig-like, to play a role in his or her career. And Hammond was more than a mere talent scout: He also helped found the Newport Jazz Festival and he worked tirelessly for racial equality.

Prial recounts all this in smooth, readable prose that occasionally sings. (Eagle-eared Hammond “seemed to be perpetually standing at the door, waiting and listening for the knock.”) However, at times, Prial fails to get under Hammond’s skin and figure out what made his metronome tick. And it’s a pity because when the author, an Associated Press reporter, actually steps away from rote listing of Hammond’s achievements to consider not just the who, what, when and where, but the why of his subject, he inevitably touches on intriguing images and ideas.

Hammond was born in 1910, to an almost cartoonishly rich family (his mother was a Vanderbilt). They listened to classical music on a Victrola in their five-story house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—equipped with its own squash court—and kept a box at the opera. Young John, however, preferred to hang out in the basement with the servants, who spun blues and jazz records. Prial theorizes cogently that these basement listening sessions ignited Hammond’s twin passions for civil rights and good original music, especially what at the time was known as “race” music.

Interesting, too, is Prial’s discussion of why Hammond never met with much success as an actual producer—despite this book’s promising title. For example, Hammond produced Aretha Franklin’s second record, Aretha, which was most notable for its lack of coherence, including everything from a cover of “Over the Rainbow” to the gospel song “Are You Sure?”

Prial notes, “Even Hammond’s detractors, those who for whatever reasons felt he got more credit then he deserved, have never seriously challenged his uncanny ability to spot raw talent. But the perception that he didn’t know what to do with that talent once he got in the studio was more widespread than he might have been aware. Indeed, several of his peers—some of them big admirers—thought as much.”

These are particularly high notes, but so long as Prial is following Hammond’s career, first as a journalist and then as a music-industry insider, he hits his marks solidly, if not always spectacularly. When he turns to Hammond’s personal life, however, his aim wavers.

I’m not a fan of histrionics and grasping connections in biography, but it’s plain stingy to gloss over the death of Hammond’s second child from a “serious infection” in a page and a half. Hammond, in the army at the time, didn’t leave his base for the hospital immediately, he claimed, because he didn’t receive a telegram alerting him to the boy’s condition, but his wife “somehow concluded that her husband had been attending a concert the day the telegram arrived and chose to remain at the concert rather than return home.”

That’s a huge bomb to drop and then scurry away from as quickly as Prial does. What kind of husband could Hammond have been that his wife would assume such a thing, even if it was incorrect? Prial doesn’t pause to ponder the possibilities; on the next page Hammond attends another performance (this one featuring trumpeter King Kolax), and the reader is quickly borne away from the tragic incident. (Hammond and his first wife later divorced.)

Prial had no lack of sources, including Hammond’s 1977 autobiography, John Hammond on Record. He also scored interviews with individuals who knew Hammond, but the results of these—or at least the quotes cited here—are strangely distant. Take Bruce Springsteen, who offers such lackluster insights about Hammond as, “He just exuded love of music” and “I think he was just instinctive, you know.”

As an interviewer, if Prial went for the jugular, he missed and caused a paper cut at most. You might say the same of his work as a biographer. The result never rivets the way it should, given the charisma and uniqueness of its subject.

Hammond sought music that would “hit him in the solar plexus” and “make the hair on the back of his neck stand up.” This biography rarely has that effect. In it, Hammond remains partially obscured.

Old sins snarl at the end of this rising Mississippi writer’s long leash

In his thoroughly American novel, The End of California, former Pen/Faulkner nominee Steven Yarbrough draws on fried chicken, football, and Baptism to tell a story rife with moral predicaments. When Dr. Peter Barrington’s affair with a patient jeopardizes his career and family life, he moves with his sophisticated wife and daughter from California back to his hometown of Loring, Miss., where an even older transgression catches up with him.

The tension is high as model family man, staunch Baptist, and Piggly Wiggly owner Alan DePoyster licks some unhealed wounds. Unbeknownst to Barrington, DePoyster’s blood still boils over a scandalous incident that happened when they were teenagers, and some 25 years later, this good man’s grudge takes a dangerous turn. Despite Yarbrough’s potent ingredients—adultery, racism, alcoholism, incest, murder—he writes with surprising subtlety about ordinary tragedies: a doctor who can’t heal his own wayward behavior, and a believer who falls hard from grace.

The first half of Yarbrough’s book, fraught with apprehension, is much stronger than the second, when the author brings too many characters to the fore, and dips too often into overly clever dialogue. Taken as a whole, though, the novel paints a complex portrait of small-town America, and, without judgment, asks hard questions about righteousness.

The Boss serves up a batch of good-time folk for normal, hard-working folks

Bruce Springsteen’s best albums combine comedy and drama; for every serious moment like “Born in the U.S.A.” or “The River,” there’s a moment of wise-cracking, self-deprecating humor like “Glory Days” or “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch).” His new album, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions boasts the same blend, with heartbreaking songs like “Jesse James” and “Shenandoah” balanced by delightful nonsense such as “Old Dan Tucker” and “Froggie Went A-Courtin’.”

All four of these tracks are real folk songs—not the earnest confessions of a singer/songwriter with an acoustic guitar and a website but the backyard party music of working folks whose names are long lost to history. These four tunes and the nine others just like them on this album were collected and adapted by Pete Seeger, who began as Woody Guthrie’s sidekick, enjoyed hit singles as one of The Weavers and became godfather of the folk-music movement from the ’50s through the ’90s.

Springsteen arranges the tunes not as the bare-bones folk music of The Ghost of Tom Joad nor as the anthemic rock ’n’ roll of Born To Run but as his own backyard party music with loose, off-the-cuff vocals backed by accordion, fiddle, banjo, washboard and horns. It’s as if an old-time string band from the Smoky Mountains met a Dixieland brass band from New Orleans at a New Jersey picnic. At long last, Springsteen has realized that not every album has to be an attempted masterpiece; sometimes it’s better to imitate Willie Nelson and record the results of wherever your curiosity leads you.

Singer/songwriter releases his most ambitiously eclectic record yet

Four albums into a solidly workmanlike career, David Mead’s ability to spin a plaintive tune and clever verse has kept him in business, albeit perennially lost in a vast sea of like-minded singer/songwriters. Always an exceptional tunesmith, Tangerine is the first album Mead has cut that be?ts an artist of his talent, with producer Brad Jones adding warm piano, swooning strings and lush harmonies to color every blank piece of compositional canvas. Previously a songwriter who emphasized the Big Picture over subtle details, Mead’s emphasis here on slight shifts in tempo and texture are dazzling, from the gorgeously eerie a cappella harmonies of “Reminded #1” to the laidback strings and clanging xylophone of the disarmingly straightforward “Choosing Teams.” His writing, too, is sharper, more observational and cautiously sentimental. Tangerine is the sound of a singer/songwriter finding his voice.

Dance dance resolution

Since Pretty Girls Make Graves emerged in the thick of the recent post-punk revival—angular guitars and all—they would’ve been forgiven for packing it in or revamping once the genre’s popularity waned yet again. But on the band’s third album, Élan Vital, it makes a natural progression from the sketchy art-core of its earliest records to something like 21st-century fusion. The album takes some weird chances: pairing muted speed-metal guitars and accordion on “Selling The Wind”; marching bands and New Wave on “Pyrite Pedestal”; and funk, prog and the sound of housecats in heat on “The Magic Hour.” Not all the pieces ?t, but lead singer Andrea Zollo’s innate sense of pop and theater holds it together, while the addition of keyboardist Leona Marrs adds variety and a lighter touch. Élan Vital has a catchy, beat-happy center, but it also transcends genre on songs like “Parade,” which makes worker unrest sound like a jaunty stroll in the park.

Judee Sill - 4 stars
Heart Food - 4 stars

Ill-fated songstress leaves behind rich musical legacy

Despite a troubled life that included the early deaths of her father and brother and a stint in prison, California folk songstress Judee Sill produced some of the most beautiful songs this side of Pet Sounds and Pink Moon. As an early signing to David Geffen’s Asylum Records, she was marketed as the next Carole King when in fact she was closer to Brian Wilson: intricate vocal harmonies, Bach-in?uenced melodies and a quasi-mystical bent radiated from songs like “Kiss” and “Donor,” both from 1973’s Heart Flood. Judee Sill (1971) featured the indescribably warm “Jesus Was A Cross Maker,” which was, ironically, a perceptive, mature breakup song. Produced by Graham Nash (whose Hollies later covered the song), its gospel-tinged arrangement suited Sill’s clear, unpretentious voice to a tee, and somehow turned a bitter goodbye into an optimistic, if slightly purple, hello. Tragically, Sill died of a heroin overdose in 1979, but her music lives on.

[You can hear Rachael Yamagata’s cover of Judee Sill’s “Jesus Was a Cross Maker” on Paste Sampler #20]

We had a gig in Liverpool the night he was shot… well, the night we heard the news,” says XTC’s Andy Partridge, plunging immediately into the two topics I was warned he might not want to talk about—performing live and the inevitable comparisons of his band to The Beatles. “When we did ‘Towers of London’ we turned the coda into ‘Rain,’ which is my favorite Beatles song, and I cried my eyes out onstage,” he says. “Nobody could tell, because my tears were mixed with sweat, but I cried my eyes out.”

Much has been made of Partridge’s refusal to tour, following a nervous breakdown on French national television that left him curled in the fetal position on the floor of his dressing room. Subsequent flirtations with the stage have been met with an almost Pavlovian response—anxiety, stomach cramps and temporary amnesia which, some have suggested, may have cost the band a larger measure of success.

“These days, you have to have a ringtone or be in a soap to make it in the music biz,” Partridge quips. “Back then you had to perform live. When we quit touring, people thought we’d either died, split up or moved into a nunnery.”

Radios in Motion

Partridge spent the summer following his breakdown recuperating in his backyard garden with the help of his guitar. Stagefright was just one of a laundry list of concerns. XTC’s management was siphoning money from the band, drummer Terry Chambers had vanished to Australia in frustration and Virgin Records was suggesting the band adopt a sound like ZZ Top to sell more records. It was under these conditions that Partridge steered XTC into vibrant new territory.

“Quitting touring allowed us to go Technicolor,” he says of the shift that revealed a McCartney-esque gift for melody that he and the band’s other writer, Colin Moulding, share. “I think Colin’s songs are melodically more instantaneous than mine, whereas I focus a little more on the words,” he says. “I sweat bullets over lyrics.” The interplay has given post-touring XTC albums like Nonsuch, Apple Venus Vol. 1, The Big Express and the gorgeously verdant Skylarking their sprawling, succulent flavor. Like a popping sunburst or an incredibly sweet nib of bubblegum, XTC’s is a pure pop sensibility that delights the senses in a full panorama of psychedelic bliss.

Contrary to what listeners might infer from the mind-trips-on-tape by XTC side project The Dukes of Stratosphear, Partridge claims that novelty songs and showtunes gave him his psychedelic perspective, not drugs. “Weird-sounding tape loops, reverb, loads of echo and spoken-word pieces … that was the stock-in-trade of the novelty record,” he says. They’re also the tools Partridge uses to create a mood—from the paranoid, angular rhythms that set afloat “Seagulls Screaming, Kiss Her! Kiss Her!” to the warped organs and warbling insects that drown “Summer’s Cauldron” in a sweltering, humid press, leaving the listener feeling like a bug in brandy.

Wrapped in Grey

“I blunder into music and try to describe what it sounds like with my lyrics,” Partridge says. “I’ll strum a chord and think ‘oooh, this sounds smooth—like eggshells,’ and suddenly I’m writing a song about eggs, or ‘this chord sounds like dirt,’ and suddenly ‘Easter Theater’ is coming out.” More often than not, what Partridge ends up describing is England—but not the roundabouts and blue suburban skies of Paul McCartney’s “Penny Lane” or the foggy subway stops of Ray Davies’ “Waterloo Sunset.” Partridge’s songs usually find him in a pagan England of rolling hills, harvest festivals and early English settlements. And he’s unapologetic about where his feet land.

“It’s probably always England as I wish it was rather than the England that is, because England—the sort of un-messed-with England—can be incredibly beautiful,” he says. “I can’t say anything particularly attractive about modern-day England. It’s just motorways, mobile-phone masts and McDonald’s. But I guess it’s nostalgia, isn’t it?” He muses for a moment.

“Someone once said that nostalgia is the heroin of the old,” he continues. “You start using that stuff after about the age of 30 and you just drift off. You nod out into a nostalgic bliss, which can be dangerous. But my music is English, because I’m English. And as much as I deal with a sort of imported, American style of music, by the time it gets worked through my bowels and hits the other end, it’s going to come out rather English.”

That year there seemed no place to keep warm. Wintertime in New York town, the wind blowing snow up and down the streets, sleet spinning against the glass storefronts, wind coming gritty and razorous out of the mouths of alleys, cutting through your clothing to the bone. This was the last of 1963, the cusp of ’64; Kennedy was in the graveyard and Johnson in the White House, and something was in the wind. The first hints of disquiet in the air. Some dire chord had been strummed, the vibrations were rolling outward, wars and rumors of wars.

Drunk on the rhetoric of Thomas Wolfe, I had left my home in the South and come looking for experience. I had determined to open myself to everything the world had to offer, good and ill, to accumulate life and hoard it like a miser and, at some more contemplative point, try to make sense of it. I had joined the Navy, and now I was in Brooklyn, where Thomas Wolfe had walked the midnight streets and chanted: “I wrote ten thousand words today.” The Navy had promised travel and experience, and so far it was working out. I was new at the job, but already I had been hassled by cops and hustled by folks in the financial end of the love business, beaten up by Canadian Airmen in Esquamalt, by a street gang in Brooklyn and by a surly bartender in Long Beach. Experience was unfolding itself to me like a flower.

I even had a girl. Her name was Sara and she had almond eyes and long, straight chestnut hair. She was a freshman at a city college and she was into social causes like the burgeoning civil-rights movement. She loved poetry and books and music. She even believed me when I told her I was going to be a writer. We had met in the summer and been together as often as we could through the fall and winter. It was understood that we were soulmates, that we would always be together.

We hung out mostly in the Village, looking for the already ancient footprints of Ginsberg and Kerouac, listening for the fading chants of the Beat Poets, listening to jazz and folk music and blues in the cafés and coffee houses. I was in my civilian clothing, trying to blend, but already the world was aspiring toward a hip scruf?ness the Navy wouldn’t tolerate and I had to make do with my regulation haircut and polished shoes.

One night we were in a coffeehouse when a girl sang a song unlike anything I’d ever heard. This place was a basket-house, a club where musicians who didn’t have paying gigs could perform a set then pass the basket around the audience. If you liked the songs you’d drop in a half-dollar or handful of change.

This song seemed to be called, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”—that was the refrain that ended every chorus. It sounded full of contradictions—traditional in form yet new in sentiment, a love song and a kiss-off, hard and soft, tough and tender at the same time. It was a way of looking at things, a way of turning a hard exterior toward a world always looking for your weaknesses, and it came at you from all over the place. It was bathed in a gothic twilight, roosters crowing at the break of dawn, with more departures down long lonesome roads than a noir novel. It was love and bitterness swirled together: “Goodbye’s just too good a word, babe. So I’ll just say fare-thee-well.” I have to talk to her, I told Sara. I want to know where she learned that song.

I don’t think so, Sara said. You just want to meet that singer.

We met her anyway.

Haven’t you heard of Bob Dylan? This is a Bob Dylan song. He’s got a lot of others, too, and they’re all great.

Bob Dylan. I had a vague memor