New release roundup + Various Artists + San Francisco Symphony + Sunny Day Real Estate + Emma Townshend A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Eric Stoltz joins "Chicago Hope"; memory lane for "90210" and "Party of Five" The new corporate culture By Tom Frost Silicon Valley's "techie trendsetters" are making the office party the coolest event on your social calendar -- sort of R E C E N T_. M U S I C Sharps & Flats Reviews of new CDs by Del Amitri, Lyle Lovett, Qu-Burns Abstract Message, Throwing Muses, Aterciopelados, Bloque and Archers of Loaf (10/07/98) An accidental obsession By Camden Joy The rock critic as celebrity stalker: an excerpt from "The Last Rock Star Book Or: Liz Phair, a Rant" (10/05/98) A match made in pop heaven By Stephanie Zacharek Elvis Costello's words and Burt Bacharach's music were meant to be together (10/01/98) "Is This Desire" -- or just bad performance art? By Bill Wyman In her first release in three years, Polly Jean Harvey offers sops to a self-consciously hip underground (09/30/98) The Shadow sheds light By Adam Heimlich Josh Davis, aka DJ Shadow, goes on the record about the evolution of hip-hop and his latest project, "Psyence Fiction," the debut album from UNKLE (09/23/98) BROWSE THE MUSIC ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Various Artists TOMMY BOY'S GREATEST BEATS, VOLUME 1-4 | TOMMY BOY RECORDS --> BY ALEX PAPPADEMAS | Tommy Boy Records' new four-disc retrospective, "Tommy Boy's Greatest Beats," starts where it should -- with Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock." The jam that launched a thousand subgenres, Bambaataa's Kraftwerk-copping "Planet Rock" established him as the Prometheus of the drum machine. It put Tommy Boy, once a bedroom-based indie, on the map. And it helped turn New York's multicultural buzz into the '80s version of what Motown used to call "The Sound of Young America." The set shortchanges Tommy Boy's most influential post-Bambaataa act, suburban dialecticians De La Soul. The early hits ("Buddy," "Plug Tunin'") turn up, but on a collection that goes all the way up to Coolio, where are later classics like "Breakadawn"? That's a serious gap, but the set's so full of landmarks (Queen Latifah's "Ladies First," Naughty By Nature's "Everything's Gonna Be All Right") and essential throwaways (Apache's reprehensibly hilarious "Gangsta Bitch," Information Society's Spock-sampling "What's on Your Mind," Force MDs' school-dance classic "Tender Love") that it almost doesn't matter. If a song first blew up as a 12-inch single, rather than an LP selection, the 12-inch version is the one compiled. So you hear these records the way they sounded when they ruled rec centers, lunchrooms and (eventually) malls across a slowly getting-funky nation. This music blurs the lines between playground pop, ghetto bluster and outré experimentation. And it evokes an era when those lines didn't seem so frustratingly solid. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - San Francisco Symphony conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas GEORGE GERSWHIN: THE 100TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION | BMG CLASSICS --> BY STACEY KORS | Sept. 26 marked the 100th anniversary of George Gershwin's birth; and in venues ranging from concert halls to cabarets, Americans have been feting their popular native son with evenings devoted to his music. Among the symphony set, the finest of the centennial celebrations thus far were led by San Francisco Symphony's music director, Michael Tilson Thomas, who has been a key proponent of Gershwin's work in classical circles. Tilson Thomas presented concerts coast-to-coast, opening the S.F. Symphony's season with a Gershwin gala, and then taking the show on the road to Carnegie Hall for its season opener, which aired recently on PBS. In the midst of all this revelry came yet another Gershwin offering by MTT and the S.F. Symphony: a two-CD set titled "George Gershwin: The 100th Birthday Celebration." The second disc of the collection, which features "An American in Paris" and the Concerto in F with pianist Garrick Ohlsson, is certainly deserving of praise. Ohlsson's performance on the concerto is superb, not only in terms of his timing and technique, but in his treatment of the work as well. Unlike the majority of recordings out there that tend to overemphasize the piece's pop panache, Ohlsson instead approaches it with subtlety and seriousness -- as a classical pianist playing a classical concerto. MTT and the symphony take a similarly understated route with "American in Paris" -- it, too, is brilliantly navigated. Disc 1, by contrast, is a great disappointment. MTT makes the odd choice of melding "Catfish Row," Gershwin's five-part orchestral suite from "Porgy and Bess," with four songs from the opera: "Summertime," "Bess, You is My Woman Now," "My Man's Gone Now" and "There's a Boat Dat's Leavin' Soon." The result is confusing, as a familiar melody is played by the orchestra one moment and sung the next. The singers, "Ragtime" cast members Audra McDonald and Brian Stokes Mitchell, also seem like a bit of a mismatch. Though both are talented vocalists, their vocal attacks are strikingly different: Mitchell espouses a smooth, pop-musical style, while McDonald opts for the operatic, heavy on the vibrato. The CD finishes off with Gershwin's percussive Second Rhapsody for Orchestra, with Tilson Thomas as soloist. Here MTT plays the rarely heard original version of the Rhapsody, which he obtained with the help of Ira Gershwin in 1982. It is a somewhat rambling, disjointed work, not sufficiently aided by MTT's lively, virtuosic performance -- or, for that matter, by the insertion of a self-composed cadenza "written in the Gerswhin style." It also makes more than a couple of passing melodic nods to its highly superior predecessor, the perennially popular "Rhapsody in Blue." And herein lies the biggest problem with this collection: That a CD set with such a definitive title as "George Gershwin: The 100th Birthday Celebration" could include the uninspiring Second Rhapsody while omitting the one work that's become synonymous with Gershwin's name seems shockingly negligent. It's a marketing ploy, to be sure: "Rhapsody in Blue" does appear on MTT's other new CD, with his youthful -- and far less salable -- New World Symphony. But its absence from the centennial set doesn't, in the end, leave Gershwin lovers with much to celebrate. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Sunny Day Real Estate HOW IT FEELS TO BE SOMETHING ON | SUB POP BY GAVIN McNETT | Emo-core, they're called. And singer Jeremy Enigk is routinely called worse, thanks to his open-wound falsetto and his penchant for the grand gesture. I should just say the word --"pretentious." To be fair, Sunny Day at their nadir represent a road left, fortunately, unbeaten by the other Seattle bands of their genesis. Imagine a grunge explosion inspired not by sludgy, dopey '70s rock like Bachman-Turner Underwear and Hogfat and the rest of those beer-gutted mustache bands; but by prancy, posey ensembles like the Moody Blues and Jethro Tull. Not very appetizing, huh? But that's where you're wrong. At their zenith, Sunny Day are as sanguine and as clear-eyed a rock band as ever existed. Moreover, with all the putatively risky, edgy stuff flying around the music realm these days, there's very little that takes genuine risks or walks a real edge. What do people fear passionately nowadays? Not evil, tattoos or the inner void. No, people fear exposure and the cruel barbs of ridicule -- that they'll be outed in a careless moment. Sunny Day walks that line in ballet shoes, juggling vases of gardenias. If this were bad art, Sunny Day would suck like no other band in the world. But "How It Feels" is great art, ennobled further by the fact that bullies everywhere can score points off it at will. "Pillars" is haute-formula Sunny Day: Meshed guitars, bashy grunge drumming and hooks and phrasing to kill for, with Enigk's sourish, nasal voice winding, snakelike, around his vowels and spitting out consonants like teeth. "Two Promises" is more detailed, and hence even better -- and even the earnest, cornball chanting of "The Prophet" is delicious beyond measure. Nothing great is ever achieved without risk -- and if anyone ever says anything bad about Sunny Day Real Estate again, I'll kill them. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Emma Townshend WINTERLAND | EASTWEST RECORDS BY ANDREW HAMLIN | Emma Townshend may be best appreciated with lights out, red micropupils of the stereo unblinking underneath a window with shimmering stars or sliding headlights; but you'd also do well to flip through the lyric sheet at some point. "Winterland's" lyrics work as poetics, and while meaning doesn't arrive instantly, knowing them does help diagram her shifts of attitude inside a specific mood. The narrator of "The Last Time I Saw Sadie" can't live with someone else's success, and so dreams first of escape to the country, before she confesses the misery of hearing her rival on "all frequencies, all stations .../Something came and made me a little Hinkley/And now I'm saving bits of picture for my psycho bedroom." Of course, with just the lyric sheet you'd miss the communication of intonation, bearing down on how the midnight rain "Makes you a hunter," then casually throwing away "even if you're vegetarian." Working with piano, some odd electronic embellishments and a voice that swoops over vowels, then lifts off like the angel Gabriel ice-skating, Emma delivers a stalwart audio companion to Nina Guccione's prints of X-rayed roses; the design sometimes obscured in overlapping parts, the whole satisfyingly ponderable. SALON | Oct. 14, 1998