DECEMBER 1995
BACK IN THE HIGH LIFE AGAIN
A musician's horn is an "axe" in jazz vernacular, but Wayne Shorter's saxophones could more accurately be likened to scalpels. Shorter applies his tenor, and especially his soprano, with surgical precision on High Life (Verve), cleaving his nine original compositions with countermelody and improvisation.
In his first album since 1988 Shorter enriches the terse forms that have long characterized his music. Rather than creating symmetrical structures for solos, he has passed concise melodies through harmonic prisms and then orchestrated the results for combo plus twenty strings and woodwinds. The textures are by turns warm and ominous as Shorter confronts the massed ensemble, often in evocative unison with the producer Marcus Miller's bass guitar or Rachel Z's synthesizer.
The pop rhythms that the drummer Will Calhoun sustains throughout High Life put the album closer to the fusion Shorter pioneered with Weather Report than to the hard-swinging power of his earlier work with Art Blakey and Miles Davis. Yet the lyrics and mystery of this music convey far more substance than does the typical pop-jazz concoction. Shorter's conception has grown more poetic as his musical gestures have approached essences. The pithy lines he embroiders upon his orchestral latticework place him in a select lineage, with Miles Davis and Stan Getz, as one of jazz's modern troubadours. -- B.B.
The surgeon himself
Photo: Chris Cuffaro
CATCHING THE RETRO WAVE
In the early 1960s southern California had one of the most vibrant music scenes in rock history. Played for the most part by Aryan young Republican types, surf music purveyed the dreams of a strange little subculture to the entire country for a year or two, until the pale-faced barbarians from Liverpool wiped it off the charts. Indeed, so overwhelmed were the surfers by the longhairs that a lot of their best music was never even released. Until now. Rare Surf Volume 1 and Rare Surf Volume 2 (AVI Records) document some of the finest "South Bay" bands you probably never heard of unless you were developing your secondary sexual characteristics in Orange County between 1961 and 1964. Where the Beatles sang about love, these surf bands didn't bother with voices at all. Everything was stinging lead guitar with heavy reverb that gave way occasionally to a honking saxophone or a "cheesy" Farfisa organ. Their motivation wasn't young love. It was the exhilaration of riding a wave or driving your hot rod fast. And damned if this isn't still incredibly exhilarating. The best band here is probably PJ & The Galaxies, who have fourteen songs (out of twenty-five) on Volume 1. They have a little of that high school marching-band ethos of hitting each note precisely, but they still manage to generate plenty of rock-and-roll adrenaline. If you prefer rougher edges, you might favor the Nocturnes (eleven cuts on Volume 2), who have a couple of growling saxophones and a Latino influence. But with either volume you'll be fighting to keep a lot of new melodies out of your brain. -- C.M.Y.
P.J. & The Galaxies
Photo: Paul Johnson
RHAPSODY IN A BOX
I Got Rhythm: The Music of George Gershwin (Smithsonian Collection of Recordings) is another argument for the merits of the boxed set. Gershwin's importance across the spectrum of American music is clarified by these four discs.
The popular songs on disc one present the basic Gershwin, with "Somebody Loves Me," "Love Walked In," and twenty additional classics sung by the great, the unjustly neglected, and the obscure. Beyond illustrating changes in singing style, the roughly chronological performances reveal how vocalists with taste created a Gershwin canon after the composer's death, in 1937. Disc two, Gershwin on Stage and Screen, generally avoids overlap and concentrates on original-cast and soundtrack recordings featuring the likes of Al Jolson, Fred Astaire, and Gene Kelly, plus excerpts from the first rehearsals of Porgy and Bess.
Gershwin in the Concert Hall places great emphasis on the composer's own performances of Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, and three piano preludes. It also includes Variations on "I Got Rhythm," a later work indicating that Gershwin was reaching beyond his inexhaustible melodic gifts for more-complex effects in his concert works. His songs were already inspiring monumental creations among improvisers: the final disc, of jazz performances, includes a sampling of what Benny Goodman, Erroll Garner, Miles Davis, and so many others were able to build upon Gershwin's popular material.
Surveys of this type inevitably invite second-guessing, especially when such obvious choices as Nina Simone's "I Loves You, Porgy" and anything from Ella Fitzgerald's Gershwin songbook have been omitted. What is included, however, more than makes the case for Gershwin's genius. -- B.B.
Cover artwork courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution
Bob Blumenthal is a jazz critic for The Boston Globe and CD Review.
Charles M. Young reviews popular music for Playboy, Musician, and other publications.
