David Gans

The Ones That Look the Weirdest Taste the Best

Perfectible Recordings

David Gans neatly bridges the gap between folk-rocker and rabble-rousing protest singer on his seventh self-released album since 1997. The Oakland singer-songwriter is also a veteran radio man, and his best music draws elegant connections between real people and real life in places where individuals and their communities intersect. 

Thus "An American Family" depicts the travails of a family shaken by our failing economy, with one all-too-recognizable character singing, "This family’s ailing fortunes may be more than I can take/I am married to a decent man who cannot get a break."

Gans also makes an elegant case for an agnostic-liberation movement in "Save Us From the Saved."  appears to have penned the local food movement’s national anthem with "The Bounty of the County" (the album title refers to heirloom tomatoes).

With fleet-fingered help from members of the fine New Jersey bluegrass group Railroad Earth, "The Ones That Look the Weirdest" sounds timely, classy, and classic at once.

Various Artists

The Complete Motown Singles Vol. 11A: 1971 Motown

Groovily packaged and musically mind-blowing, Motown Records’ comprehensive ongoing series of reissued singles dedicates volume 11 to just the first six months of 1971. The Temptations’ "Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)" became the year’s best seller, while Marvin Gaye reinvented the Motown sound with "What’s Going On" and "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)."

The 116 other tracks in this informatively annotated five-CD set (with bonus vinyl single) include releases by Sammy Davis Jr. and Bobby Darin, a medley of protest songs, Meatloaf’s debut, and forgotten (and sometimes forgettable) releases from Motown’s rock subsidiary, Rare Earth. It’s a democratic enterprise too, with obscure B-sides and peculiarities (such as Chuck Jackson’s "Pet Names") right alongside some of the best work ever by the Jackson 5, Diana Ross, and Stevie Wonder.

Patti Lupone

At Les Mouches

Ghostlight



"I wanted people to know I was a brown-haired, brown-eyed comedienne, and not a blonde fascist tap dancer," writes Patti Lupone by way of explaining how she decided to perform a cabaret act every Saturday at midnight for 27 weeks in 1980 after bringing down the house in "Evita."

The current "Gypsy" star pulled out all the stops for her devoted Les Mouches audiences, and this collection of digitally restored performances is a wonderful way to relive that fabulous pre-
AIDS era.



In addition to a few songs from "Evita," including of course "Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina," Lupone sang an eclectic assortment of tunes. A brassy belter, Lupone comes off as a sophisticated cosmopolitan on 
this nicely curated collection of standards ("Love For Sale"), campy dance tunes ("Heaven Is a Disco"), rockers ("Because the Night"), hoochie-coochie jazz ("I’ve Got Those Feeling Too Good Today Blues"), 
and psychedelic folk songs (a particularly wistful "Mr. Tambourine Man"). But you can also hear Lupone’s reputation as the "people’s diva" emerging in her nervous laughter, shout-outs to visiting celebs, and awkward-yet-endearing patter between songs.


Warren Zevon


Warren Zevon


Asylum/Rhino



The late rocker Warren Zevon colorfully chronicled the Los Angeles rock demimonde he inhabited on his 1976 breakthrough album, reissued here with an extra CD’s worth of solo piano demos and alternate takes.



Originally produced by Jackson Browne, with musical assistance from pals in the Eagles, the candidly autobiographical "Warren Zevon" opens with "Frank and Jesse James," a song for and about his former employers, Phil and Don Everly. "Mama Couldn’t Be Persuaded" memorializes his parents’ unlikely marriage, "The French Inhaler" sticks it to his unfaithful ex-wife, and the concluding "Desperados Under the Eaves" recalls a particularly low point in his career.



Zevon couldn’t blame anyone but himself for any subsequent career mishaps once Linda Ronstadt covered four of his songs. Not least, she named her hit album after Zevon’s "Hasten Down the Wind." And if the bleak-yet-bouncy "Warren Zevon" sounds a little dated today, it’s primarily because the singer’s raw, naive voice doesn’t meet the current, exaggerated vocal standards.

Brad Paisley
"Play"
Arista Nashville
 

Brad Paisley has included at least one instrumental track on each of his previous six albums, but the country star pulls out all the stops on this exuberant, gleeful, and mostly wordless survey of country-guitar acrobatics. After his high-octane opener, "Huckleberry Jam," Paisley shows off various aspects of his considerable virtuosity in the country-surf number "Turf's Up," a solo acoustic version of "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," the jazzy "Les Is More," and the competitive, "chicken-pick" gymnastics of a star-studded "Cluster Pluck."
 
Even the vocal tracks on "Play" celebrate the fret man's trade. Keith Urban joins Paisley on "Start a Band," B.B. King drops by to "Let the Good Times Roll," and Steve Wariner lends a hand on "More Than Just This Song," in which the duo recall a callous mentor they call Mr. Guitar. "Under his wings I learned to fly," they sing, as though it were a prayer, "on these six strings into the night."
 
 
Stephane Wrembel
"Gypsy Rumble"
Amoeba Music
 
Paris-born guitarist Stephane Wrembel fell under the spell of Django Reinhardt at an early age and has since devoted his life to pursuing and expanding the Gypsy jazz legend's string-driven innovations. California mandolin virtuoso David Grisman joins Wrembel's trio on "Gypsy Rumble" for a lively album devoted to fleet-fingered swing with a French twist.
 
As on Grisman's many duet recordings with Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, the vibe is decidedly relaxed. Wrembel and the mandolinist trade articulate conversational solos on swinging tunes, such as "Swing Gitane," "Swing de Bellevue," and "Swing 48."
 
Smoky-voiced Brandy Shearer joins the pair for "Belleville Rendez-Vous" (the snazzy theme of the delightful animated film "The Triplets of Belleville") and "Dream All Your Troubles Away," a 1931 standard. By the time Wrembel’s rumble's over, you may consider yourself well swung.
 

It's beginning to sound a lot like Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa. As fine as they are, these 10 tunes could hardly reflect everything joyful – and often a tad melancholy – about our mid-winter celebrations of peace, light, and last-minute shopping. What did we miss? Please gift us with your favorites in the comments section below.

Darlene Love has been setting off musical fireworks nearly every December since 1986 with her explosive rendition of "

" on "Late Night With David Letterman." Love's rendition of the tune Phil Spector wrote for his wife, Ronnie, seems to get better every year. But this 2005 clip remains a YouTube favorite.

Comedian Adam Sandler's "

" famously name drops celebrity Jews ranging from David Lee Roth to baseball Hall of Famer Rod Carew ("he converted"). With three versions to date, his list could well be endless.

The sexiest holiday song in the canon may well be R&B singer Charles Brown's "

," an elegant blues number that finds the singer waking up to a perfect day. How great does he feel? "Well, I haven't had a drink this morning/ But I'm all lit up like a Christmas tree."

You can hear a three-hankie movie's worth of love, struggle, and defeat in the Pogues' 1987 "

." Gravel-voiced Shane MacGowan and the late Kirsty MacColl sing of their doomed relationship in the Irish folk-rockers' beautiful and heartbreaking Christmas Eve fantasia. Watch the video here.

"White Christmas" is the biggest pop song ever. Even its writer, Irving Berlin, claimed it was "a publishing business in itself." And while no other song has sold more copies or been recorded as many times, Bing Crosby's version remains the most memorable. (But I prefer New Orleans singer

.)

Beginning in 1992, New York composer Phil Kline has enticed hundreds of boombox owners onto city streets for annual performances of "

" His ethereal minimalist composition will be presented once again this year in dozens of cities around the world. Our family has made a tradition of participating, and I suspect yours would enjoy it, too.

Even though Ernest Tubb waxed it first in 1948, Elvis Presley's 1957 recording of "Blue Christmas" remains the gold standard for this maudlin country classic. Thanks to the miracle of studio technology, Presley solidifies his hold on the oft-recorded tune this holiday season by singing it "with" Martina McBride on his posthumous "

" album.

Who doesn't have "Linus & Lucy" burned into his or her seasonal DNA? In his signature song from Charles M. Schulz's 1965 TV special, "

," pianist Vince Guaraldi conveyed the Peanuts gang's precocious joie de vivre with a spry melody and sophisticated rhythms.

Few songs warm up a long winter's night more efficiently than Frank Loesser's 1944 standard, "Baby, It's Cold Outside." Sung by a male "Wolf" and a female "Mouse," according to Loesser, the duet was heard first onscreen when Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams

in the 1949 film "Neptune's Daughter." Everyone from Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Jordan to

has since recorded it.

Ten years ago, the Indiana University a cappella group performed a hilariously bungled version of "

" in Bloomington, Indiana's Musical Arts Center. Nearly 8 million YouTube hits later, the group has reformed and released a new album, "Holiday Spirits," with a new live version of their hit. Who says there's no Santa Claus?

Ry Cooder

The Ry Cooder Anthology: The UFO Has Landed

Rhino

Drummer Joachim Cooder produced this alternately sinuous, swaggering, and stomping two-CD anthology devoted to his singer-guitarist father, Ry Cooder. The album focuses on the California guitarist’s blues, folk, and R&B side as it skips around among some 17 albums and soundtracks Cooder has recorded since his self-titled 1970 debut album. (An entirely different record might have been programmed from Cooder’s bicultural collaborations with musicians from India, Mali, and Cuba.)

Cooder specializes in transforming the raw sound and spirit of black musicians— such as Blind Willie Johnson in "Paris, Texas," Washington Phillips in "Tattler," and Skip James  in "Cherry Ball Blues"—into something luminous and accessible. –All this he does without extinguishing the magic of the original. There’s joy and sorrow aplenty in these tracks, and in more recent recordings that were inspired by the Los Angeles Chicano experience. Cooder remains true to his roots-music values, as he writes in his notes, "Regional music is what made this country great."

A Technicolor Dream

Eagle Vision DVD

Sometimes it’s fun to jump into the way-back machine and travel through history. "A Technicolor Dream" transports viewers back to London at the height of the swinging 1960s, when stylish young Brits launched an underground movement. It came complete with its own newspaper (the "International Times"), exclusive hot spot (the UFO Club), and house band (Pink Floyd).

The film’s most surprising footage documents a festival of Beat poetry at the Royal Albert Hall, featuring an inebriated Allen Ginsberg. It preceded the "Technicolor Dream," a 14-hour musical "celebration of the coming of age of the postwar generation," as one participant put it, that took place at the Alexandra Palace in April 1967. The event marked the movement’s apex but also its descent into hippie commercialism.

"A Technicolor Dream" also focuses on the sad case of Pink Floyd cofounder, Syd Barrett. After writing much of the group’s early material and reportedly taking massive amounts of LSD, Barrett more or less abandoned consensual reality for a life of mental illness. Whether his breakdown was a symptom or a result of those heady times is left to the viewer to decide.

"Monster Mash" has had a stranglehold on Halloween for far too long. Singer Bobby "Boris" Pickett decided to record his perennial hit after spontaneously impersonating Boris Karloff one night while his band, the Cordials, performed the Diamonds' "Little Darling." Released in October 1962, Pickett's "Monster Mash" today sounds about as dated as the Transylvania Twist. And is it scary? Hardly.

These songs, on the other hand, range from the harrowing to the entertainingly creepy. And don't be afraid to disturb us with your own frightening favorites in the comments section.

10. Led by singer Lux Interior and guitarist Poison Ivy, primitive punkabilly band the Cramps were more gruesome than any single song they performed. However, "Human Fly," a 1978 single, did its movie and rock inspirations justice with the help of a buzzing guitar, a dumb thumping beat, and lyrics like, "I got 96 tears in my 96 eyes."

9. A sentimental favorite whose video dance steps have been performed by everyone from my kids' dance class to 1600 Philippine prison inmates, Michael Jackson's funky 1984 megahit, "Thriller," remains both a great song and a hauntingly prophetic commentary on its creator.

8. Some heard Blue Oyster Cult's 1976 hit, "(Don't Fear) The Reaper," as a seductive endorsement of teenage suicide pacts. Songwriter Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser, however, claims it's merely a love song with a most awesome riff. You decide.

7. Think you've got it bad? War, pestilence, and plague pervaded 14-century Europe. Artists and playwrights responded with the "Danse Macabre," the so-called Dance of Death that became a ubiquitous theme for composers and artists ranging from Franz Liszt, Modest Mussorgsky, and Gustav Mahler to the Kingston Trio ("Zombie Jamboree") Rolling Stones ("Dancing With Mr. D").

6. There are two kinds of people: Addams Family fans and Munsters fans. Of these two awesome shows with memorable theme songs, I always prefer Vic Mizzi's innovative creepy-kooky-mysterious-spooky tune to Jack Marshall's more corporate instrumental effort. (Mizzi also gets bonus points for his "Green Acres" theme.)

5. One of the great cautionary tales of all time, Stan Jones's 1948 masterpiece, "

," has been covered by dozens of artists without ever shedding its chill. Based on Europe's

myth, the song warns cowboys to either change their ways or spend eternity "trying to catch the Devil's herd across these endless skies."

4. Has any rock singer ever sounded as sanguine about end times as John Fogerty does in Creedence Clearwater Revival's 1969 hit, "Bad Moon Rising"? The answer is no.

3. Creedence also covered Screamin' Jay Hawkins's 1957 horrorshow-blues classic, "I Put a Spell on You." But they never emerged from an onstage casket in a cloud of smoke like Hawkins, whose tortured original rendition has yet to be surpassed.

2. The song that launched a thousand bad trips, thrash-metal band Slayer's best-known track, "Raining Blood," conveniently distills an entire genre's worth of senseless rage into four minutes. Released in 1986, the song's thunder and lightning are still very, very frightening.

1. Conventional wisdom long held that blind country songwriter Leon Payne's "Psycho" was based on Charles Whitman's 1966 Texas murder spree. But according to

the 1968 song was actually inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's film of the same title. Either way, this chilling ode to killer's remorse, with its shock ending, is indeed the spookiest song ever recorded. Just ask

Tim Ries

Stones World: The Rolling Stones Project II

Sunnyside

Tim Ries took full advantage of his role as guest saxophonist on the Rolling Stones’ 2005-07 "Bigger Bang Tour." During his travels, Ries recorded 12 Jagger and Richards songs with local musicians in nearly as many countries. Don’t expect typical, loungey jazz covers, however. Ries radically rearranged the duo’s material to blend his strong and expressive improvisations with regional styles.

An India-tinged "Angie," a samba-flavored "Lady Jane" sung by the great Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento, "Brown Sugar" rewritten as a Portuguese dance song, a state-of-the-jazz "You Can’t Always Get What You Want" featuring guitar great Bill Frisell, and a six-woman, multinational "Salt of the Earth," are among this ambitious endeavor’s highlights. Stones fans may be impressed at just how gamely Mick (on harmonica), Keith, and Charlie Watts adapt themselves to unfamiliar settings.

Frigg

Economy Class

Northside

 Frigg, whom you may recognize from their "Prairie Home Companion" appearances, is a seven-piece, neo-traditional Nordic folk group named after the queen goddess of Norse mythology. The youngish group adds twists aplenty to old-fashioned polkas, schottisches, and drinking songs on an album borne smoothly by a handful of violins embellished with guitar, mandolin, double bass, and the occasional dobro or horn section.

As the title suggests, Frigg’s no-frills vitality assures a fascinating journey. The powerful schottische, "Norrsken," and roller-coastering "Kind of Polka" swing weightlessly. Even the mordant "When the Time Comes I’ll Be Ready" possesses an optimistic tilt.

Frigg ends its third album with the ambitious "Lars Lenkelifot," a hauntingly traditional Norwegian song rearranged for orchestra and chorus and packed into four captivating minutes.

Rarely a day goes by when I'm not knocked on my keister by something I see on

. The perpetually refreshed on-demand video jukebox is an Alexandria library of 20th-century music. So why not step into the rare videos room and check out these unexpected treasures?

Arthur Lee and Love are one of the great underappreciated classic-rock acts. Like Jimi Hendrix, Lee was a rare black rocker in a white-dominated field. His music with Love was melodic, baroque, accessibly innovative, and utterly original. The only YouTube footage of the original band is from a 1966 episode of "American Bandstand," when the group performed their hit single

and "

An Internet mystery was solved recently when a writer for the music blog Idolator

Sal Polichetti, lead singer of Christian ska band Sonseed (1978-83), whose wonderful video for

had gone seriously viral. The writer's query to Polichetti elicited a testy, colorful, and surprisingly profane response to the suggestion that the video was possibly a hoax. Hoax or not, it's a terrifically uplifting track.

Some of the best live music ever filmed was performed on "The Midnight Special," which ran from 1972 to 1981. Dutch progressive-rock group Focus out-rhapsodizes Queen in this head-spinning, yodel-riffic version of their unlikely Top-10 hit,

"If all prog rock was even half as good as this we wouldn't have needed punk," observes one commenter.

Charismatic Laura Nyro was only 21 when she appeared on "Kraft Music Hall" in 1969 to perform a solo version of

The New York hippie goddess's glorious blend or rock, gospel, R&B, and musical theater propel a song that sounds more relevant than ever this election year. Nyro's soulful rendition of

on the same show is a study in emotional intimacy.

Was 1969 the greatest year in music or what? Maybe it's the wild background dancers, but everything liberating about '60s music practically bursts off the screen in this clip of Tom Jones and Janis Joplin shouting, screaming, and generally tearing the roof off the sucker while singing

on Jones's TV show, "This Is Tom Jones."

YouTube also offers computer-savvy rascals a place to comment upon some of our hallowed pop moments. One of the best examples of this is

a subtitled and illustrated version of Cocker's epic rendition of the Beatles' "A Little Help From My Friends" at Woodstock. I like the part where he sings, "I gotta get my Fred and Wilma."

Sometimes YouTube is just a place to archive casual audience videos of great musicians in action. Danny Gatton, who committed suicide in 1994, was a remarkably fast and nimble guitarist's guitarist. This video of the Telecaster master performing Joe Henderson's

(with shades of Ray Charles's "What'd I Say") at a Washington, DC, club in 1988 is a seemingly effortless distillation of rockabilly, country, Chicago blues, Western swing, and jazz guitar into six superbly swinging minutes.

Johnny Cash


"At Folsom Prison (Legacy Edition)"


Columbia/Legacy



Fact: Johnny Cash played not one, but two shows in the cafeteria of 
California’s Folsom State Prison on January 13, 1968. Cash’s album of 
his remarkable 9:40 a.m. early show sold more than one million copies 
when it was released later that year.



"At Folsom Prison" marks one of the great conjunctions of artist and 
audience in music history. Cash was cocky, profane, and inspiring 
while performing songs like "Folsom Prison Blues," Merle Travis’s 
"Dark as a Dungeon," and Shel Silverstein’s "25 Minutes to Go."



The triple-disc legacy edition of "At Folsom Prison" includes the 
entire lunchtime show (Cash performs gamely while gradually losing 
his voice), a DVD documentary about the experience, and several 
previously unreleased tracks by guest artists Carl Perkins, the 
Statler Brothers, and June Carter Cash. It’s Cash’s rowdy compassion 
for these society outcasts, however, that shines through more 
strongly than ever.

John Adams


"Hallelujah Junction"


Nonesuch



A superior classical best-of, this two-CD retrospective provides an 
excellent and entertaining introduction to the sophisticated-yet-
accessible work of one of America’s most important contemporary 
composers.



Released in conjunction with his recently published memoir, 
"Hallelujah Junction" successfully maps out the fascinating breadth 
of Adams’s musical concerns, which include minimalism, atonality, 
Shaker culture, opera, cartoon music, rock, the Beats, Old Testament 
prophets, Jewish cantors, Pakistani devotional singing, Handel, 
Schoenberg, and Mozart. 
After you’ve sampled Adams’s work—from his exultant and brooding 
"Harmonium" (1980) to his optimistic 2006 eco-opera, "The Flowering 
Tree"—don’t be surprised if you find yourself in possession of an 
altogether new outlook on contemporary classical music.

The glory days of live television live on at New York's Metropolitan Opera.

You could nearly see Renée Fleming's tonsils when she performed three starring roles – in as many languages and designer gowns – during the Met's opening-night gala on September 22. You could, that is, if you happened to be in one of the 800 or so theaters here and abroad that were screening the season opener in high-definition video. The Fleming-a-thon marked the beginning of the Met's 125th season, as well as the first time the opener has been simulcast as part of

. The series, now in its third year, will deliver 10 more live operas this season beginning with Richard Strauss's "Salome," starring Karita Mattila, on October 11.

The Met's simulcast turned out to be a wonderful way for a neophyte to test the operatic waters. The price (about $20) is definitely right, the dress code relaxed, the bathroom lines nonexistent, and the seating front-row perfect no matter where you plop yourself down. Fleming and her co-stars, 40 feet tall on the screen, reclaimed the heroic stature enjoyed by opera's gods and goddesses of yore.

During her four-hour endurance test, Fleming played Violetta in Act Two of Verdi's "La Traviata," the title role in Act Three of Massenet's "Manon," and the Countess in the final scene of Strauss's "Capriccio." Christian Lacroix, Karl Lagerfeld, and John Galliano supplied the bejeweled diva's respective couture.

The gala provided a rare opportunity to observe how America's favorite opera singer approaches two similar yet ultimately quite different roles. Perhaps the highest of arts, opera is famously populated with "low" women. Both Violetta and Manon are courtesans, "kept" women, who sacrifice themselves for their beloveds before arriving at a tragic demise. Fleming's Violetta was sad yet impassioned as she bid goodbye to her lover, Alfredo, in the country house they shared. Her Manon, however, was haughty, even narcissistic, reveling excessively in her own beauty and happiness during a colorful and festive carnival scene.

After displaying her chops in Italian and French, Fleming turned to German for "Capriccio." The Countess weighs the virtues of her two suitors and their respective careers, literature and music, in a remarkably sensual scene Fleming obviously relished.

Did I mention that the five scenes were fully staged, involving as many set changes and dozens of supernumeraries (opera-speak for extras)? What occurred between acts was almost as entertaining as the evening's onstage doings. Mezzo-soprano Susan Graham (who co-stars in a new multimedia production of Berlioz's "The Damnation of Faust" later in the season) was a busy, bubbly, and knowledgeable source of surprisingly casual interviews on the red carpet, in the lobby, and backstage. She caught Fleming, for example, mere moments after she left the stage, eliciting breathless yet informative comments and a general sense of excitement from her.

The opener was also simulcast on a handful of screens in the middle of Times Square. New York is fairly magical any time, but watching live opera from Lincoln Center being screened in Times Square from one's seat in a Union Square multiplex dozens of blocks away lent the experience an especially dreamlike quality.

Thanks to the Met's Live in HD, my appetite for opera has been thoroughly whetted. I'll be back for an encore.