Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” has inspired artists from Orson Welles to Richard Serra. So it’s not surprising that
multimedia performance artist Laurie Anderson, who once said that her work dealt with the
“declamation of language,” should also be drawn to the power and majesty of Melville’s
magnum opus.
One would be hard-pressed to come up with a more incongruous image than that of the
spiky-haired Anderson, with her digitally processed vocals and synthesized violin, sitting in on Melville Society meetings dissecting chapters of this behemoth of a book.
But tackling major themes is nothing new to the keenly intellectual Anderson, whose “adaptation,” “Songs and Stories From Moby Dick,” premiered in Dallas last spring and is now the featured show opening the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s renowned Next Wave Festival. Only partway through its national run, it is already considered by many to be Anderson’s most ambitious and accomplished project to date.
Still, Anderson says, two decades of creating incisive, experimental one-woman shows (“Home of the Brave,” “United States Live,” “Stories From the Nerve Bible”) and collaborations with modern-day visionaries such as Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg, Brian Eno and Wim Wenders didn’t prepare her for Melville and his notorious great white whale.
“The hardest thing about this project is the almost crippling fear that I wasn’t doing justice to a book that I loved,” Anderson confesses from New York during a recent phone interview. “And I’ve never been in that situation — I’ve always been writing my own stuff. So I really was afraid that I was distorting things — and I’m sure I am, in the end. But hopefully the angle that I’m looking at is interesting.”
The initial inspiration for the production came two years ago, when Anderson was one of several artists asked to create a monologue about their favorite books for a DVD project aimed at teenagers. “[The producer] was going to
have Spalding Gray do ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ and Robin Williams do a Dickens book, and Anna Deavere Smith was going to do ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ So I said I’d do ‘Moby-Dick.’”
The then 50-year-old Anderson hadn’t read the novel since high school, and remembered being bored by much of the whaling details and technical jargon. But when she read the book again, she says, she “fell in love with the language.” The DVD project never panned out, but Anderson (forgive the pun) was hooked on the story. “I read it five more times in a row.”
When Anderson told a friend about the project, he showed her a Bible that Melville
purchased just before he began writing his literary masterpiece. Many of Melville’s original pencil notes had been erased by his wife, with whom he’d had a
less-than-perfect relationship. After an unsuccessful attempt to have the erased passages
reconstructed, Anderson pored over the pages herself with a magnifying glass, hoping to find the inspiration behind Melville’s tale.
In Isaiah 27:1, she found what she’d been searching for: “In that day the Lord with his sore
and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.” Next to the verse was a check mark and a long squiggle.
“I thought, ‘That’s it!’” Anderson recalls. “The whale is his snake and the ocean is his garden, the place where he works out good and evil.”
That someone with such a decidedly 20th century sensibility could truly appreciate Melville’s 19th century novel might be surprising to some. But Anderson’s storytelling style is uncannily similar to Melville’s — associative, imagistic, anecdotal. And despite its many biblical references, “Moby-Dick” was quite progressive, even by today’s standards; when it was first published in 1851, it was not greeted favorably. Taking issue with how the novel jumped around from idea to idea, critics called it an “absurd” and “inartistic” book, “as clumsy as it is ineffectual,” the “eccentricity in its style and in its construction” akin to “having oil, mustard, vinegar and pepper served up as a dish.” It was only
in the early part of this century that the book was rediscovered and hailed as a masterwork.
“I loved the crazy stories Melville told in the hundreds of voices that he invented — historian, botanist, dreamer, chemist, librarian,” explains Anderson. “I liked the jump-cutting around, and the way he was so free about saying, all right, now I’ll tell you a story about these old bones, now I’ll tell you a story about a pyramid and now I’ll tell you a story about something
else. And I thought, ‘This is my guy.’”
Anderson insists the story has as much, if not more, resonance today: “It’s about
people working — and that’s pretty American. Another is that you’re trapped on a ship with a captain who’s out of his mind. And this is not an unfamiliar concept to Americans: The guy in charge is crazy, completely crazy. And
the third is that it’s about something that you look for, that you’re never going to find.”
In the spirit of the Melville jump-cut, “Songs and Stories From Moby Dick” unfolds in a mosaic of words, music and images. The show — which will be recorded as Anderson’s first album for her new label, Nonesuch — is a rather broad retelling of Melville’s story, with only about 10 percent
of the text coming from the actual novel. Sometimes Anderson lifts whole passages from the book (“Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn …”); sometimes she uses a single idea or phrase to build a song (“Because in all men there reside certain properties, occult and wondrous and hidden”); and sometimes she simply muses meditatively on her own.
“‘Moby Dick’ is a curiously silent book,” she says in her notes to the show. “For every description of sound there are hundreds of visual descriptions. Instead, the music is all in the words and the way they riff and trip, skip and lumber.”
In translating Melville’s written language into a visual language, Anderson says she restricted herself to a few abstract ideas: words, water, flowing textures. “I do believe that there is such a thing as too much,” she says. “So I’ve really tried to be careful about not trying to make a multimedia extravaganza, but to really feature the words.”
Indeed, the stage in “Songs and Stories From Moby Dick” is awash in the printed word, with sections of Melville’s text — including some from his handwritten manuscript — projected onto a giant screen behind Anderson and the other actors/singers at the rear of the stage. Then, suddenly, the image changes: Ocean waves crash against the shore; palm trees in Warhol colors blow in the breeze; a whale’s skeleton, still, haunting, hovers in the air.
Wisely, Anderson never attempts to actually show Moby-Dick, realizing that the leviathan is better left to the imagination of the audience than to the set designer. Instead, she portrays the whale herself, using instruments
to give the creature the voice that Melville did not. “Melville was unaware that whales can talk and sing,” says Anderson in the program notes. “He compared them to the ‘tongueless crocodiles of the Nile,’ and most of his descriptions of them are visual or spiritual.”
The whale speaks through Anderson’s trademark synthesized violin, as well as through her latest instrument invention, the “talking stick.” Created with the aid of Interval Research in Palo Alto, Calif., the 6-foot-long talking stick is shaped like a harpoon and emits a variety of sounds — including voices, percussion and, of course, whale sounds — when stroked.
“The thing I love about it,” Anderson says, “is that it’s very musical. It’s not like a lot of MIDI instruments where you just push a button and there’s a sound. It’s very physical, which I really like, because it’s about getting away from typing. And it’s just great fun to play.”
Audiences at BAM will witness a somewhat shorter performance than those who saw earlier runs. “It’s so frustrating, because really to do some of those characters, to tell some of their stories, it would have to be 50 hours long. But I’m trying to focus on really what the hunt was about, so this next version is much more streamlined.”
So what are the aspects of “Moby-Dick” that most interest Anderson? “The fact that Melville was willing to ask really big questions, like ‘What are you looking for?’ and ‘What do you want?’ There are not many books that are that obsessive in that way. It’s also the question that I think a lot of people are asking these days. Fortunately, Americans are naive enough to ask those sincerely. If you ask a French person why we live, they’ll say, ‘To drink wine, to eat cheese, to make love.’ For Americans, I don’t know if those are really answers. Maybe,” she says with a laugh, “the wine just isn’t as good here or something.”
Anderson may not have had the opportunity to share her love of “Moby-Dick” with teenagers; but if nothing else, “Songs and Stories From Moby Dick” is getting some adults to take another look at this classic piece of American literature. “The most flattering thing that somebody has said about this,” she says, “is, ‘You know, after seeing the show, I went out and got the book. And thank you so much for reminding me how wild it is.”
Darkly mysterious in his long black cape, Bela Lugosi stands on the staircase and cocks his head slightly. “Listen to them — the children of the night,” he says with a smile playing on his lips. “What music they make!”
The trouble is that in the original “Dracula” those children don’t make too much music. Released in 1931, the classic horror film coincided with the industry transition from silent pictures to talkies, which meant that it had to be available as both. As a consequence, the movie was never presented with a full score. When Universal decided to re-release “Dracula” on video, the studio approached avant-garde composer Philip Glass to write a new accompanying score. Glass is, of course, a sought-after composer for film. His work has appeared in several movies, including the Stephen Hawking documentary “A Brief History of Time” and Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun.” But in the past, the movies Glass has written for have been almost exclusively contemporary. “Dracula” is different because — on paper, at least — it places Glass’ modern minimalist modulations against the high romanticism of an early black-and-white classic. After all, the tiny amount of music that managed to work its way into the original score — “Swan Lake” and the overture to “Die Meistersinger” — couldn’t be more sweeping in orchestration.
But while there’s none of the lush lyricism of Tchaikovsky or Wagner in the new score, it is far more romantic than most of Glass’ work. The composer said that he chose to write the music for string quartet because he “felt the score needed to evoke the feeling of the world of the 19th century.” Indeed there are some moments so richly steeped in Eastern European romanticism that they recall Dvorak. The Kronos Quartet, having worked with Glass several times before, executes the composer’s uncharacteristically warm compositions with expert performances. With the quartet’s help, the music is so expressive that the score alone evokes the familiar scenes between Harker and the Count.
That said, a fine film score does not necessarily make for a fine CD. While undoubtedly effective when presented together with the movie, “Dracula” as a purely aural experience features too many disjointed-sounding pieces to stand on its own. Instead of buying the CD, try to see the updated movie. Then you’ll understand exactly what Lugosi was talking about.
“Has there ever been a chamber piece written for a transsexual character?” wonders Armistead Maupin. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the gay author and activist boldly broached previously “taboo” subject matter in his beloved, bestselling “Tales of the City” series, a touching and humorous homage to San Francisco in its hedonistic heyday. Now Maupin braves new territory again with “Anna Madrigal Remembers,” a classical composition based on “Tales” and featuring new text by Maupin and music by San Francisco Opera’s composer-in-residence Jake Heggie. The work, which was written for mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade and the male a cappella choral ensemble Chanticleer, receives its world premiere in San Francisco on Aug. 6 and 7, with additional performances and a recording scheduled for later this year.
Maupin, who describes himself as being a “classical neophyte” with a “music hall sensibility,” admits to having felt a bit of trepidation about writing text for a classical composition. “But Jake’s music is extremely lyrical, and there’s a great deal of heart in what he writes,” he tells Salon Arts & Entertainment from his home in San Francisco. “So I thought we might be compatible. Some modern classical music is so atonal that I run screaming from the room; but Jake is not afraid of a tune.”
After toying with a number of ideas, Maupin hit on the notion of revisiting Anna Madrigal, the toking transsexual landlady who presides over Babylon-by-the-Bay’s most famous fictional address. “I thought I should let people know that Anna is still around and still at 28 Barbary Lane.”
When von Stade was approached to sing this unusual role, she was a bit surprised. “I did wonder why, of all people, they thought of me,” she says with a laugh. But the renowned mezzo also says that she genuinely enjoys the challenge of portraying Anna onstage. “What’s fascinating about this character,” says von Stade, speaking from Philadelphia, “is that she spent 25 years as a man and then became a woman, so she has these two different perspectives.”
Heggie found Madrigal’s transsexuality an interesting challenge as well. “Since she is both a man and a woman, I have the whole chorus of men as sort of her inner life, and Anna herself, in Flicka [von Stade's nickname], as the end result. I sort of played with that in the whole piece, so that sometimes she’s having a conversation with herself, and sometimes it’s a unified voice.”
Maupin’s own experiences since first creating Anna Madrigal have had a profound effect on his latest incarnations of her. “She’s 80 this year. She was 56 when I was writing ‘Tales,’ which seems impossibly young now since it’s just a year older than I am. It’s fascinating. When I was working with Olympia Dukakis on the ‘More Tales of the City’ miniseries, I found myself madly rewriting scenes because I felt I understood that character for the very first time. I knew what it felt like to be middle-aged and to have lived a life with a lot of ups and downs. So I loved delving into that character now because I’m able to bring a lot of myself to the table.”
Nonetheless, Maupin says that he has no plans to write another book for the “Tales” series. “I don’t know where I’d start. They’d all be 50 years old and scattered to the four corners of the Earth. I’d have to invent a new cast of characters, and what point would there be in that? It’s not inconceivable that one of these days when I’m starving to death I’ll write ‘Christmas at Barbary Lane,’” he quips, “and they’ll all reunite for a small, piquant book.”
“Monsters of Grace,” the latest collaboration between minimalist composer Philip Glass and theater/opera director Robert Wilson, was hotly anticipated by performance artists and computer geeks alike well before its world premiere at New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music last December. Back in 1976, the avant-garde giants changed the face of 20th century musical theater with “Einstein on the Beach,” a landmark five-hour work with no intermission, no plot, no narrative and sung text that consisted only of numbers and solfhge syllables. Nearly 25 years later, “Monsters” seemed destined to break ground with the use of digital technology in the performing arts — one of the last bastions of anti-digital Luddites.
Touted as a “digital opera in three dimensions,” “Monsters,” which toured the country through April and had a final showing last weekend at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, was a 73-minute-long work in 13 scenes, featuring poems by 13th century mystic Rumi set to music. As the Philip Glass Ensemble performed the score live with singers, the audience — wearing special polarized lenses — viewed large screen 70 mm 3-D computer-animated images created from Wilson sketches by a digital-effects company.
“I realized that we had a unique hybrid here,” producer Jed Wheeler told Salon Arts & Entertainment, “where the special effects world embraces the high art world and vice versa.”
“The idea that a world-renowned duo like Glass and Wilson came to us to realize a new project using our technology was very exciting,” agreed Jeff Kleiser, co-founder of the Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company, which was responsible for the work’s animation. “It’s been a very positive influence on the attitudes of people here in the company.”
But not, it appears, on everyone else.
“I hated that!” admitted the usually reticent Robert Wilson, when discussing “Monsters of Grace” in a recent New York Times interview. “It was one of the most embarrassing things in my life.” So much for vice-versa.
Perhaps the biggest problem facing artists who choose to employ new technologies in their work is that they usually require a second party familiar with that technology to help realize the artist’s vision. If both parties are not in complete agreement, the result can be disastrous. In the case of “Monsters of Grace,” digital technology wasn’t even part of Glass and Wilson’s original plan — it was introduced by their producer in an effort to solve some of the work’s technical problems. Instead it created a host of aesthetic issues that compromised Wilson’s vision and, ultimately, the integrity of the piece.
When Wheeler, who produced the 1984 and 1992 revivals of “Einstein” at BAM, first approached Glass and Wilson about a new project, the idea was for something tourable, that “would bring the confluence of the Wilson and Glass sensibilities to people.”
Exploring the relationship between objects, light and sound in a theater, the two eventually returned to Wheeler with a complete show. “It was about 90 minutes long, with 13 scenes,” Wheeler recalled. “And it was glorious to look at — except that it couldn’t be done.” Among the images on Wilson’s storyboards were a giant foot landing in the desert, a helicopter hovering over the Great Wall of China and a hand coming out of nowhere and pulling a 35-foot-sword out of the ocean. It certainly wasn’t tourable.
In an effort to offset the astronomical costs of staging Wilson’s fantastical images, Wheeler started asking people about computer programs through which he could have all of the elements designed and the entire production timed out before it ever got into a theater. Someone suggested that Wheeler visit the Kleiser-Walzcak Construction Company, which created digital effects for movies such as “Stargate” and “Judge Dredd.”
“We showed Jed some of the work we’d been doing in stereoscopic computer animation,” said Kleiser. “We started thinking about it as a way of executing certain difficult effects on stage, and then my partner Diana said, ‘Why don’t we just do the whole thing in computer animation?’”
It seemed as if Kleiser-Walczak had found the perfect solution to the problem of turning Wilson’s dreamlike imagery into reality. “We were able to create a mountainscape for him,” said Wheeler. “And in that mountainscape we were able to put the Great Wall of China and a pagoda that looks like the leaning tower of Pisa and then all of that is fractured into little pieces of mica.” And instead of having to teach actors how to execute the glacially slow movement for which Wilson is famous — featured in everything from his Pulitzer Prize-nominated “the CIVIL warS” to his recent staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Metropolitan Opera — Kleiser-Walczak offered him “synthespians,” synthetic people that he could manipulate at will. “It dawned on me,” said Wheeler, “that technology had caught up with Bob Wilson.”
But in many ways, it hadn’t. Creating visuals for “Monsters of Grace” was extremely time consuming, requiring a year of almost nonstop work by a crew of 20 to complete the final 73 minutes of footage. Wilson, who often makes changes at the very last minute, was suddenly working in a medium where even the smallest revisions would require days — if not weeks — of backtracking. The director found his hands tied.
“When Bob turned the work over to Kleiser-Walczak, he really couldn’t put his hands into the piece anymore — and that was a shock for everybody,” Glass admitted to me in early March. “We didn’t realize that we were losing control, in the sense that another process began which we did not have access to.”
Kleiser said they did all they could to keep Wilson involved in the decision-making process, but it soon became apparent that he’d grown frustrated, and began to distance himself from the project. “It was clear we weren’t going to have Bob to say ‘Yes, that’s good,’ or, ‘No, that’s no good,’” he explained. “So we took a lot of the responsibility for designing the later scenes ourselves — based on Bob’s designs, of course. That’s when Diana and I became directors of the project, and we just told Bob that everything was going to be fine.”
Even while the show was on tour, Wilson couldn’t hide his disappointment with the first piece he’d conceived without directing. “Usually I’m the kind of parent who stayed very close to the child even when it grew up,” he told the Times when “Monsters” premiered. “This is like being a dog with a litter of puppies that went away six weeks later. This one left me early. Here I was working with people who didn’t know my work, in a medium I didn’t know.”
Sadly, it shows. While there were moments when Glass’ minimalist music — more exotic and lyrical than in previous projects — and Wilson’s slow-moving imagery combined to create an almost transcendental dreamscape, the vast majority of scenes felt cold and devoid of resonance. When, for example, the giant foot landed in the middle of the animated desert the effect was more Monty Python than meditation.
That’s not to suggest, however, that the scenes couldn’t have succeeded on stage, since the images employed by Wilson were originally chosen with theater in mind. What makes Wilson an interesting director is that he overturns conventions and plays with one’s expectations of what normally occurs in the theater, manipulating actors and objects to create scenes and situations that a viewer wouldn’t expect to encounter on the stage. A giant sleeping polar bear and a Sikorsky-size helicopter hovering over the Great Wall are certainly unusual items to see in a theater. But special effects in movies like “Jurassic Park” and “The Phantom Menace” have made digital images almost rote. To assume that carefully imagined stagecraft can be transferred to a computer-animated film and elicit the same visceral response is, frankly, demeaning to both artist and audience. It’s like trying to play golf with a soccer ball.
“Monsters of Grace” was an interesting experiment, a bold artistic exploration of the new digital frontier. But until artists have a better understanding of technology and its capabilities — and limitations — and until there’s a more genuine dialogue between practitioners of the fine arts and the doyens of digital media, the future’s still a long way off.
Well before “A Streetcar Named Desire” had its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera September, it was evident that Andri Previn’s first opera was in for a bumpy ride. In the months prior to its opening, more than a few critics grumbled about the idea of setting Tennessee Williams’ renowned drama to music. No surprise, then, that the majority of those same critics reviled the work in their reviews — the setting was unsuccessful, the music nothing new. And, of course, there were the countless comparisons to the Marlon Brando film, which is so ingrained in our cultural psyche. When the opera was broadcast on PBS and released on CD in December, the complaints resurfaced.
The most common criticisms were also the most unjustified, based on preconceived prejudices regarding the opera’s concept more than its actual execution. Many thought it a mistake for librettist Philip Littell to use the text of the play almost verbatim, arguing that the musical setting couldn’t possibly do justice to the power of Williams’ words. Yet what would have been the reaction if Littell had actually altered those immortal words? And as for the music of “Streetcar” being derivative, does anyone really expect that, in this age of musical postmodernism, a contemporary opera will sound completely fresh and innovative? After all, Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” was labeled “derivative” when it premiered back in 1949.
These criticisms aside, how does “Streetcar” hold up as an opera? The performances on this live recording are quite good: Rodney Gilfry makes a virile Stanley; Renie Fleming plays a psychologically compelling Blanche; Anthony Dean Griffey offers a heartfelt portrayal of Mitch; and Elizabeth Futral is phenomenal as the emotionally torn Stella — in fact, the young soprano’s performance was one of the few things in the opera that was universally praised. Some of the music in “Streetcar,” like the jazz-inspired opening theme and the haunting final chords as Blanche is led away, is extremely evocative and cinematic. And, to his credit, Previn also picks up on some of the more subtle aspects of the play — especially its humor — that were lost in the famous film adaptation.
But “Streetcar’s” major flaw is that its music lacks cohesion. This may be due in part to the score’s odd amalgam of musical styles, but it’s probably more directly related to the absence of set pieces and ensemble work. There is only one real set piece in the entire opera — Blanche’s beautiful aria, “I Want Magic!” — and even that wouldn’t have existed if Fleming hadn’t specifically requested it. Set pieces are what make opera so engaging — and what help staged works like operas and musicals make successful transitions to audio recordings.
It’s not, as many critics have suggested, that Previn’s version of “A Streetcar Named Desire” fails because Williams’ powerful play shouldn’t have been turned into an opera. Rather, it fails because it wasn’t turned into one.
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Silver Jews
AMERICAN WATER | DRAG CITY
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–>By Meredith Ochs | Silver Jews were formed by David Berman, Steven Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich during their college days, before the “side project” of the latter two, Pavement, pretty much defined indie rock for a generation of overeducated underachievers. So archetypal was their slacking that the Jews’ first recordings consisted mainly of just turning on a tape machine while the players ambled about their house. Over the years, though, the boys have honed their twangified experimental rock into something as pointed as whittled wood, while still retaining the spacious, untidy feel of a palatial Southern mansion gone to seed. This is the essence of “American Water.” Though the Silver Jews are primarily an outlet for Berman’s ramblings and rumblings, he and Malkmus are soul mates after a fashion, sharing a knack for clever word play that can make even dumb jokes sound smart (who says English majors are only suited to drive cabs?), as well as a warble that gives voice to post-Prozac babies everywhere. Setting indie’s angular melodies to prairie rhythms, “American Water” is what would’ve happened if the Velvet Underground had turned “Lonesome Cowboy Bill” into a full-length album.
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The Black Crowes
BY YOUR SIDE | COLUMBIA
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–>By Julene Snyder | Ever seen the bumper sticker that reads, “Rocker dudes will never die, they just smell that way”? It’s a safe bet that the Black Crowes sweat up a fairly smelly storm when playing, judging by the swaggering cock rock of “By Your Side,” their much-anticipated return to the roots-rock mixture of vintage Stones-ian rawk and phlegm-filled Faces-ish vocals that got them noticed in the first place.
When they first came out of Atlanta with their 1990 debut, “Shake Your Money Maker,” hardly anyone was making raunchy rock records anymore, except maybe a few holdouts like Guns N’ Roses (and, of course, the Rolling Stones themselves, who won’t quit until they’re hunted down and physically forced to stop). Now, years later, the Black Crowes have gone back to the basics they started with: Lead singer Chris Robinson sounds uncannily like Rod Stewart in his poofy-haired heyday, and his brother, Rich, does the riff-heavy guitar thing with bombast and gusto, if little imagination. The current lineup includes drummer Steve Gorman, Eddie Harsch on keyboards and bassist Sven Pipien; bassist Johnny Colt took flight in late 1997, just a few months after guitarist Marc Ford exited the group.
Abandoning the psychedelic stylings that found them headlining 1997′s Furthur summer tour — which, by all accounts, attracted more than a few lost, ever-twirling Deadheads looking for an engine to hitch their collective caboose to — the Crowes have put together a solidly mediocre record with “By Your Side.” While none of the 11 songs here are terrible, none are particularly noteworthy either. One blends into the next, leaving an amorphous blob of secretions that smells all too familiar.
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Kalyanji, Anandji and Dan the Automator
BOMBAY THE HARD WAY | MOTEL RECORDS
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–>By Adam Heimlich | Brothers Kalyanji and Anandji Shah were but cogs in the staggeringly productive machinery of the Indian film industry in the ’70s, when “Bollywood,” as the Bombay film center is called, was making a transition from Busby Berkeley-style musical super-extravaganzas to low-budget James Bond-inspired thrillers. Their job was to extrapolate a culture-specific version of the new genre’s music from the Western original. Apparently, Kalyanji and Anandji spent a lot of time locked in a room with nothing but the scores from “Dr. No,” “Shaft” and “S.W.A.T.,” a Casio keyboard and a sitar. What they produced, with the help of an orchestra of Bollywood session players, outstrips mere imitation. Like the best Bollywood films, it presents a reinterpretation that is at once shamefully derivative and proudly original. Folks with a less critical ear might simply call it “bizarre,” and they wouldn’t be wrong.
While Kalyanji and Anandji’s suspended animation of opposing musical values is part of the East’s version of the birth of hip-hop, the tricky part comes in reinterpreting their reinterpretation for young Westerners. “Bombay the Hard Way,” a selection of Bollywood soundtrack music composed by Kalyanji and Anandji set to hip-hop beats, arrives at the very moment when cultural difference itself is becoming a selling point, no reconfiguration required. New Agers buying Tibetan chant CDs and college kids getting off on Japanese muzak are, as we speak, replacing the old problem of fashion-focused aesthetics with culture-focused fashion. This doubles the challenge faced by a label trying to put interesting foreign music in discerning domestic hands. The album is like a needle in a field of exotic haystacks — and the people who like needles have stopped looking.
“Bombay the Hard Way” has intentionally degraded its exotica pedigree by hiring Dan the Automator — producer of Dr. Octagon and a few tracks on the last Cornershop and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion albums — to re-engineer Kalyanji and Anandji’s tracks. His trademark is a hermetically-sealed quality that envelops the music’s many out-of-context samples. The result is closer to that of the neo-lounge projects. The album doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with the Indian originals, but that’s for the best. “Bombay the Hard Way” would be no more a purely Indian artifact if left in its ’70s form. It makes more sense to build on the composers’ original project and tweak it, again, to fit another world. In this spirit, the album tags its “new” Kalyanji and Anandji tracks with names like “Fists of Curry” and “The Good, the Bad and the Chutney.” To the Automator (aka Dan Nakamura, a Japanese-American from the Bay Area), this process of snowballing recontextualization must be the essence of beat science — he’s pictured in the “Bombay the Hard Way” booklet wearing a lab coat and safety goggles.
The Automator’s slick segueing makes for the first reasoned, Western response to the jarring anti-narratives of Hindi pop. The “Mission Impossible theme collapses into a snippet of raga performed by a staid string quartet on “Fear of a Brown Planet”; a bit of dialogue from a Bollywood movie (“Now let’s walk English style!”) introduces “Satchidananda,” driven by an electric bass mimicking the sound of a finger skipped across the head of a tabla drum. “Ganges a Go-Go” sounds startlingly like something off “Nuggets” (with English lyrics “I’ve got no time to think/Cause I need somebody to love,” it could be an outtake from the “Wild in the Streets” soundtrack), but with a bit of badly dubbed film dialogue, the whole bit comes off no stranger than your everyday Wu-Tang kung-fu/rap juxtaposition. “Theme From Don” introduces a blaxploitation funk theme, then (without warning) a classical Hindu theme, and then bravely merges them, all over a steady beat.
There’s someone else who speaks Kalyanji and Anandji’s language of odd rests and alarming changes. When “Bombay the Hard Way’s” dozens of Bombay surf-rock and Parliament-by-way-of-Loony Toons interludes give way to longer, more grandiose cinematic material, they come off a lot like the restless soundscapes of DJ Shadow. The restrained precision of the beats from “Fists of Curry” and “Satchindananda,” for instance, boast a vision every bit as three-dimensional and peacefully progressive as Shadow’s “Midnight in a Perfect World.” Those beats make the best argument for the notion that DJ culture can make sense out of the gaps in music history.
While opera stars like Dawn Upshaw and Thomas Hampson have done much to revive interest in the American song, it is nonetheless rare to find American singers making albums of American opera arias. And who’s to blame them? After all, most people would be hard-pressed to come up with enough repertory for an entire CD. But there are, in fact, some noteworthy set pieces out there just waiting to be heard; and who better to give voice to this long-neglected American music than soprano Renie Fleming, who has performed in the world premieres of American operas such as John Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles,” Conrad Susa’s “Dangerous Liaisons” and, just a couple of weeks ago at the San Francisco Opera, Andri Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
“I Want Magic!” is a superbly sung collection of highly lyrical arias from mostly forgotten American works, including Bernard Herrmann’s “Wuthering Heights,” Douglas Moore’s “The Ballad of Baby Doe,” Gian Carlo Menotti’s “The Medium,” Samuel Barber’s “Vanessa” and Carlisle Floyd’s “Susannah,” which Fleming will introduce at the Metropolitan Opera this spring. It also features, as its title track, the world-premiere recording of “I Want Magic!” — Blanche Dubois’ haunting aria from “Streetcar.” If there’s one disappointment on this CD, it’s Fleming’s rendition of “Glitter and Be Gay” from Leonard Bernstein’s comic operetta “Candide.” Though meant to be sung in an exaggerated manner, it is done so here to the point of embarrassment. But it seems a minor mistake in the context of this otherwise exquisite offering.
In “Streetcar,” Blanche tells her suitor Mitch that “magic’s what I try to give people.” With one spectacular recording of arias after another, Fleming succeeds in doing just that.
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Robbie Fulks
LET’S KILL SATURDAY NIGHT | GEFFEN
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–>BY MARK ATHITAKIS | “Fuck This Town,” Robbie Fulks sang about Nashville on last year’s “South Mouth,” and he meant it. Here’s a songwriter and guitarist who, across two brilliant indie records, finally tapped into all the fear and dread and tragic ironies that mark the greatest country music, with a voice that matches flattop-era George Jones, and Music City wouldn’t give him the time of day. But like Bob Wills said, time changes everything: Not only was “Let’s Kill Saturday Night” recorded in Nashville for a major label, but Fulks got genuine country heroes helping out, with Lucinda Williams adding backup vocals for the bitter ballad “Pretty Little Poison” and NRBQ’s Al Anderson assisting on the honky-tonk “You Shouldn’t Have.”
The irony here is that Fulks is now using his Tennessee meal ticket to focus more on country rock than straight country, using his harsh, booming voice to grand effect on “Little King,” “She Must Think I Like Poetry” and the magnificent title track, which meshes themes of love, joy and desperation in a perfect package; Alan Jackson’s going to beat down the doors to anesthetize it, just you wait. Fulks is at his best, though, when he sings quietly, and of desperation alone. “God Isn’t Real” renders an ocean of loss and fear, and “Night Accident” is the ultimate country-song tragedy: Lying on a railroad track is a car that flipped off a highway, filled with a dead driver and a trapped passenger who gets to tell the rest of the story. And while you can guess how the story ends if you’ve ever heard a country song, Fulks’ voice does what only great country songs do: It keeps you wishing that things would turn out for the better, but in the absence of hope, it keeps you listening.
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Jerry Seinfeld
I’M TELLING YOU FOR THE LAST TIME | UNIVERSAL
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BY DOUGLAS WOLK | Comedy records have it tough. They have to be funny, but they can’t stop there. To work as records, they have to get funnier with multiple hearings. Otherwise, you might as well be listening to a book-on-tape: What’s the point of playing it twice? That’s probably why very few of the best comedy records are straight-up transcriptions of stand-up routines — and the few that are, like the ones from Richard Pryor to Steve Martin to Emo Phillips, are gems more because of their timing than because of their content.
So pity poor Jerry Seinfeld, who goes into his first album unarmed with most of what made “Seinfeld” great, specifically its cast of perfectly synched actors and their knack for interacting with their environment. Seinfeld’s stand-up routine is a neurotic, barely modulated rush — warmed-over Borscht Belt at best, amusing cousin at a party at worst. It can be funny in the moment, but it doesn’t reward especially close attention. His forte is the keen little observation about something quotidian or trivial; the genius of his show was to put those observations into all the characters’ mouths, but presented as a one-man monologue, they’re nothing that every other comedian on the stand-up circuit hasn’t already worked to death (track titles on “I’m Telling You” include “Air Travel,” “Late TV,” “Doctors” — essentially, the comedy equivalents of “Louie Louie”).
Seinfeld is more verbally dexterous than a lot of his mike-and-spotlight brethren, and the variations on old chestnuts come out smoothly (in his spiel about how men and women will never understand each other, etc.: “Women have two types of orgasms — the actual ones, and the ones that they make up on their own. And I can give you the male point of view on this, which is: We’re fine with it”). Still, he never quite manages to come up with a turn of phrase that’s worth remembering, or a way of delivering it that ranks with the stand-up greats.
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Joni Mitchell
TAMING THE TIGER | REPRISE RECORDS
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BY BILL HAYES | “I‘m a runaway from the record biz,” Joni Mitchell sings in the title track from “Taming the Tiger,” the 20th release in her 30-year career, “from the hoods in the hood and the whiny white kids.” But for the moment Mitchell has returned, and she has rarely sounded better or more passionate. On the first half of the disk, the 54-year-old artist is in a feisty mood: Recounting an argument with an industry “suit,” “Lead Balloon” kicks off with Mitchell crying, “Kiss my ass!” and throwing her drink at him. “Must be the Irish blood,” she adds, unapologetic. The emotions shift with “The Crazy Cries of Love.” A sly, playful tune about the noise-making of love-making, it captures her voice at its most sensuous. “Stay In Touch” is a delicate bid for contact — presumably, to the daughter with whom she’s been reunited — both tentative and hopeful. In “Face Lift,” unexpected humor lightens the story of a tense encounter with her mother. And “My Best to You” is Mitchell’s touching rendition of an old Sons of the Pioneers tune — a deeply felt, sentimental farewell.
“Taming the Tiger” ends on a bittersweet note, with an instrumental version of the title song. Plucking her idiosyncratically tuned guitar, she strips the song to its bones, with anger, joy, sorrow and wit. Mitchell, who has long considered herself a jazz vocalist (even before her 1979 album “Mingus”), here effortlessly proves herself a seasoned one. “Taming the Tiger’s” suite of songs is among the loveliest she has ever recorded.
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Soul Coughing
EL OSO | SLASH/WARNER BROS.
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BY EMILY ZUZIK | It’s hard to believe that while working as a doorman for New York City’s Knitting Factory, Soul Coughing front man M. Doughty had all but given up on musical stardom. Five years, one “Super Bon Bon” and hundreds of shows later, the band is one of the best in the industry. And “El Oso,” its third release, primes it for the international recognition it deserves.
With the return of Tchad Blake, who produced the group’s 1994 debut, “Ruby Vroom,” “El Oso” is Soul Coughing’s most accomplished album to date. The band continues to blend multiple musical genre in tracks ranging from the dark “Maybe I’ll Come Down” to the driving beats of “Monster Man” to the radio-friendly single “Circles.” Fans may miss the quirky pace of albums past, but the newest multi-tiered compositions go beyond previous efforts.
Musically, “El Oso” takes the traditional deep, low-end bass, snappy drums and wild sampling from “Vroom” and 1996′s “Irresistible Bliss” and adds a new element of U.K. jungle beats. Drum ‘n’ bass sounds pop up throughout the album courtesy of maestro Optical, who co-produced “Blame” and “The Incumbent.” Doughty pushes each track with an amazing range of rhythmic, almost mantralike, lyrics. Combined with his powerful, moody melodies, stream-of-consciousness lines like “Pensacola’s” “waves in which you drown me shouting” take Soul Coughing’s songwriting from mere modern rock storytelling to exciting sound composition.
