Monthly Archives: February 2010

Joshua Panda: What We Have Sewn

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Broad range of folk, blues, and adult-alternative pop and soul

Who is Joshua Panda? A North Carolinian old-timey songster, a folkie troubadour or a suspender-wearing vaudevillian who brings to mind Leon Redbone, John Sebastian, Donovan and Paul McCartney? Yes. Perhaps he’s an adult-alternative pop-soul singer in the vein of John Meyer, John Legend, Van Morrison and Dave Matthews? Well, yes again. Panda sings acoustic folk songs with a piercing vocal purity that recalls Phil Ochs, but also arranges himself amid fully contemporary productions. His debut album of eleven originals is a one-man shuffle through an eclectic collection of music hall ditties, soulful slow-jams, acoustic ballads, bouncy blues, thick modern rock, and chamber pop. He sings sunny day reveries, forlorn country farewells and smooth love songs, often leaning on a contemporary blend of pop, blues and soul. The split between roots and smooth soul is a bit disconcerting, but roots listeners will really enjoy the old-timey “Balloon Song,” the acoustic “Vineyard Love Song” and “Over My Head,” the pedal steel laced “Crazy ‘Bout Rue,” and the bluesy “Buttermilk Hollar.” [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | If I Had a Balloon
MP3 | Vineyard Love Song
Joshua Panda’s Home Page
Joshua Panda’s MySpace Page

Sara Petite: Doghouse Rose

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San Diego country singer/songwriter backed by stellar Nashville players

The opening track from Sara Petite’s third album will grab your ears if for nothing else than the phased guitar sound that recalls the soul of Waylon Jennings’ “Are Your Sure Hank Done it This Way?” Petite sings with the girlish lilt and firecracker energy of Rosie Flores, and her crack band (which includes studio hotshot guitarist Kenny Vaughn, bassist Dave Rorick and drummer William Ellis) adds instrumental nuances that really give the productions something extra. Petite’s voice is twangy, perhaps too country for Country, and there’s a lot of rock ‘n’ roll punch in the band’s playing. The slap-back echo of “Baby Let Me In” adds a vintage twist to Petite’s voice, but Vaughn’s guitar is tougher and the rhythm more overpowering than straight rockabilly or honky-tonk.

Petite’s a gifted singer with a lot of texture in her voice, a bit like Texas singer Kimmie Rhodes. She sings the album’s title track with a parched tone that seeks acceptance, and infuses desperate longing into a cover of Harlan Howard’s “He Called Me Baby.” Her band is right there with her, laying back or charging hard ahead as befits each song. The electric guitars provide sympathetic vamps for the sadder tunes and prod Petite to stand up when she’s fallen down. Sasha Ostrovsky’s dobro adds stringy twang throughout, and the rhythm section really adds muscle to the up-tempo numbers. Petite wrote all but one of these songs, and her lyrics have a conversational easiness that makes her stories, observations, realizations and confessions feel intimate.

Doghouse Rose has been out since November of 2009, but like many independent releases it’s only slowly gathering the attention it deserves. Petite’s well known in her adopted San Diego (she’s originally from Washington State) and made connections in Nashville; she’s gained exposure in Europe, opened for Josh Turner, Todd Snider and Shooter Jennings, and won several songwriting awards, yet her third album is still seeking broad release and listeners’ ears. Perhaps she needs to get to Nashville or Austin or North Carolina or New England to find herself a sympathetic label. In the meantime you can find Doghouse Rose in her website store. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Baby Let Me In
MP3 | Doghouse Rose
Sara Petite’s Home Page
Sara Petite’s MySpace Page

Josh Turner: Haywire

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Cautious fourth album from talented, deep-voiced country singer

Turner broke out in 2003 with the throwback single “Long Black Train” and a bass voice that stopped listeners in their tracks. His bottomless notes and Southern accent seemed so innately country as to be resistant to Nashville’s crossover practices. His debut was filled with slip-note piano, shuffle beats, mandolin and fiddle, and even on smoother ballads like “She’ll Go On You” and “The Difference Between a Woman and a Man,” there was an ache in Turner’s voice that remained apiece with Travis, Cash and Haggard. His next two albums, 2005’s Your Man and 2007’s Everything is Fine followed similar templates, decorating his vocals with banjo, blue twang and steel, and mixing up honky-tonkers, ballads and redneck rockers.

Producer Frank Rogers (who’s also worked with Brad Paisley, Daryl Worley and Trace Adkins) crafted a sound for Turner that was radio-ready without severing the singer’s ties to tradition. Turner showed himself acutely aware of his special vocal charms, introducing songs like “Everything is Fine” with low notes that instantly grab your attention. On this fourth album Turner and Rogers follow the same pattern, and become a bit formulaic in the process. Turner remains a hugely engaging singer, but his songs feel more calculated to satisfy his audience than say something that’s burning deep in his heart or mind. The productions are smart and Nashville tight, but don’t often match the earthiness and singularity of Turner’s voice.

The album’s lead-off track, “Why Don’t We Just Dance,” was pre-released as a single and topped the country chart. Hearing Turner climb up from his low register, you get a palpable sense of how great it feels to sing such deep, chest-rattling notes. Turner sings with an ease that’s quite charming, and the band feels rougher and looser here than elsewhere on the album. His seductiveness is more direct on the ballad “I Wouldn’t Be a Man,” approaching the song similarly to Don Williams’ 1987 hit single. Turner extols his mate on “Your Smile,” but the tranquility and contentedness with which he sings seems at odds with the enthusiasm of the song’s lyrical platitudes.

Turner’s originals include the funky title track in which the singer is discombobulated by a member of the opposite sex, and his existing trio of everyman rockers (“Backwoods Boy, “Trailerhood” and “White Noise”) is extended to a quartet with “Friday Paycheck.” Blowing it out on the weekend is a time-honored topic, but Turner hasn’t anything new to say about the joys one can find in a paycheck-to-paycheck life. Listeners celebrating the end of their own work week probably care, as the song rocks a shuffle beat and has a catchy hook. The New Orleans styled funk of “All Over Me” provides a brief respite from the album’s contemporary Nashville rhythms, though the session players don’t quite hit the second line beat convincingly.

The album’s real highlight is the country soul slow-jam “Lovin’ You on My Mind.” Turner sings with strings and a backing chorus and the production artfully weaves together steel and Wurlitzer. Haywire is offered as 11-track regular and a 15-track deluxe edition. The latter adds two good studio tracks (“This Kind of Love” and “Let’s Find a Church”) and two live cuts (“Long Black Train” and “Your Man”), which are worth the extra couple of dollars. Turner remains a vocalist of distinction, but the head-turning edginess of “Long Black Train” has given way to cautious repetition. This is a good album by a gifted artist who should be releasing great albums full of memorable music that pushes the artistic ball further forward. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

Listen to “Why Don’t We Just Dance”
Josh Turner’s Home Page
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Michael Martin Murphey: Buckaroo Blue Grass II – Riding Song

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Second helping of Murphey’s bluegrass reinterpretations

Michael Martin Murphey’s 1975 single “Wildfire” was only the most public aspect of a long and rich career. He appeared on the country charts throughout the 1980s and subsequently developed a deep affinity for cowboy songs. Over the years he’s revisited key parts of his catalog, and in 2009 produced a volume of tunes reinterpreted in a bluegrass style. A year later he’s back with a second volume that sounds even more confident. His latest concentrates on songs from the early-to-mid 70s albums Geronimo’s Cadillac, Michael Murphey, Cosmic Cowboy Souvenir, Blue Sky-Night Thunder and Swans Against the Sun. He picks up “Tonight We Ride” and “Running Blood” from more recent albums and covers the Glaser Brothers’ “Running Gun.” The latter was originally recorded by Marty Robbins in 1959 for his legendary Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, closing the circle on Murphey’s love of western song.

Opening the disk with a hot-picked arrangement of 1975’s country-rock shuffle “Blue Sky Riding Song,” Murphey and his assembled musician friends serve notice that there are plenty of instrumental fireworks ahead. Pat Flynn on guitar, Ronny McCoury on mandolin, Charli Cushman on banjo and Andy Leftwich on fiddle warm up to a canter in 15 seconds flat, with Craig Nelson’s bass pushing Murphey’s exuberant vocals along the open trail. The instrumental break gives each player a chance to flash as the others provide progressive, ensemble backing. The group also turns it up for 1976’s “Renegade.” Though it’s lightened from its original country-rock sound, the acoustic instruments provide plenty of intensity as the players, including Rob Ickes on dobro, Sam Bush on mandolin, Charlie Cushman on banjo and Andy Leftwich on fiddle, stretch out for a length instrumental coda.

Murphey’s bluegrass reinterpretations provide a matured consideration of earlier performances, but also bring his songwriting into focus. Laying a bluegrass motif across twenty years of varied compositions highlights the consistent quality of his work. In some instances, like the Hot Club styling of 1985’s “Tonight We Ride,” the retooling is minimal, in others, such as the treatment of “Swans Against the Sun” and banjo lead of “Running Blood” the new arrangements bring out something new. Even the well-trod “Wildfire,” with its echoes of ‘70s soft rock, gets a fresh garland of twang and a powerful duet vocal from Carrie Hassler.

Murphey’s voice has gained an appealing edge over the years, and this set shows off both his adaptability as a performer and depth as a songwriter. His song notes show as much love for his material as does his singing; this is also evident in the feeling performances of songs he’s no doubt sung thousands of times. This is a great album for longtime fans, bluegrass listeners and all those top-40 ears that lost track of Murphey after “Carolina Pines” and “Renegade” slipped out of the Top 40 in the mid-70s. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Track Sampler for Buckaroo Blue Grass II
Michael Martin Murphey’s Home Page
Michael Martin Murphey’s MySpace Page

Randy Kohrs: Quicksand

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Bluegrass basics salted with country, soul and gospel

Randy Kohrs is a multi-instrumentalist who’s backed some of country music’s brightest luminaries, including Patty Loveless, Hal Ketchum, Dolly Parton and Jim Lauderdale. He’s also crafted a solo career that’s brought together his talent as a picker with vocals that are quite compelling. His music is solid on bluegrass fundamentals, but his resonator guitar adds a unique voice to the acoustic arrangements, and his singing ranges from traditional baritone/tenor harmonies to country twang and gospel. Highlights on his latest solo outing include country songs from Webb Pierce (“It’s Been So Long”) and Del Reeves (“This Must Be the Bottom”), up-tempo picking on the original “Time and Time Again,” and the blue gospel “Down Around Clarksdale” and “If You Think it’s Hot Here.” The terrific backing vocals of Scat Springs heard on this latter track can also be found on a cover of Tom T. Hall’s “More About John Henry.” Kohrs’ acoustic country tunes may be too contemporary for bluegrass purists, but with the traditional form well-covered by so many outfits, there’s something to be said for adding new ideas to the original framework. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

Randy Kohrs’ Home Page
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Bill Emerson and Sweet Dixie: Southern

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Banjo legend leads his bluegrass band on a second outing

Bill Emerson is a legendary banjo player with roots stretching back to the late ‘50s. He co-founded the Country Gentlemen with guitarist Charlie Waller, held a featured slot with Jimmy Martin, and provided direction to musicians such as Jerry Douglas and Ricky Skaggs. He spent 20 years in the military, most of it in the Navy’s bluegrass band, Country Current, began recording as a leader in the early 90s, and formed Sweet Dixie for their eponymous debut in 2007. Emerson’s always stretched the edges of the bluegrass canon, mixing traditional material with songs drawn from country, folk and rock. Most famously, he’s credited with adapting Manfred Mann’s “Fox on the Run” into a bluegrass staple.

Sweet Dixie’s new album includes a few traditional sources, such as Alton Delmore’s “The Midnight Train,” Hazel Dickins’ “I Can’t Find Your Love Anymore,” and Tompall Glaser’s “I Don’t Care Anymore” the latter drawn from the catalog of Flatt & Scruggs. The nostalgia of Lionel Cartwright’s “Old Coal Town” is also a good fit, and the English folk of “The Black Fox” is augmented with mandolin and banjo spotlights. More inventively, the group reworks Marty Stuart’s rolling country-rock “Sometimes the Pleasure’s Worth the Pain” (originally from 1999’s The Pilgrim) into an up-tempo acoustic arrangement, and Chris Hillman’s “Love Reunited” is shorn of its original ‘80s production sound, trading the Desert Rose Band’s crystalline guitars for a more timeless banjo.

Highlights of the group’s new material include Vince Gill’s grievous “Life in the Old Farm Town,” reflecting the dismantling of American life in the parting out of a foreclosed farm. Sweet Dixie plays with tremendous group chemistry, adding solos that are compelling without giving into the flashiness that plagues many bluegrassers. They can pick up a storm, as heard on “The Midnight Train,” but “Grandpa Emory’s Banjo” and the instrumental “Grandma’s Tattooss” celebrate the musicality of their instruments rather than the breakneck speed at which the players’ fingers can fly. The latter features Emerson doubling the song’s writer, banjo instructor and fellow-picker Janet Davis.

Guitarist Tom Adams handles most of the lead vocals, with bassist Teri Chism and mandolinist Wayne Lanham each taking turns up front; the group’s energetic harmonies seque smoothly with the instruments. Lyrics of lost love, suicide, and a child’s funeral are sung with the tenderness of hope rather than the bleakness of depression. As the group’s visionary, Emerson balances innovation and tradition, pulling new material into the bluegrass orbit without sacrificing the warmth and comfort of tradition. His band has the confidence to let their playing serve the material, and though Emerson’s not written any new songs for this album, his ear for other writers’ works is unerring. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Track Sampler for Southern
Bill Emerson and Sweet Dixie’s Home Page

Raeburn Flerlage: Chicago Folk- Images of the Sixties Music Scene

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Previously unseen photos of 1960s folk, blues and bluegrass scene

Raeburn Flerlage, who passed away in 2002 at the age of 86, was as much a record man as he was a photographer. His decades of work in writing about, promoting, distributing and selling records gave him both an insider’s collection of contacts and a fan’s undying love of musicians and their music. Moving to Chicago in the mid-1940s he placed himself at a well-traveled crossroads for touring artists and, later, ground-zero of the electric blues revolution. He began studying photography in the late-1950s and was given his first assignment (a session with Memphis Slim that found placement in a Folkways record booklet) in 1959.

Flerlage worked primarily as a freelancer, capturing musicians and their audiences at Chicago’s music festivals, concert halls, theaters, college auditoriums and clubs. He was welcomed into rehearsal halls, recording and radio studios, hotel rooms and even musicians’ homes. His photographs appeared in promotional materials, magazines (most notably, Down Beat), and illustrated books that included Charles Keil’s Urban Blues and Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues. In 1971 he started a record distributorship and mostly stopped taking photographs. When his company closed in 1984 he found the demand for his photos increasing, and spent his “retirement” fielding requests from all around the world.

In 2000 ECW elevated Flerlage from photo credits to photographer with the first book dedicated to his photos, Chicago Blues: As Seen From the Inside. His pictures evidenced the comfort and familiarity of someone who’d mingled with musicians on both a professional and personal level, and who’d developed a feel for their lives and their places of work. Fellow photographer Val Wilmer wrote him “No one else has taken the kind of moody action shots that you took in Chicago, so full of atmosphere and so full of the blues.” His photographs were more than just documentation, they were a part of the scene in which musicians created music. Studs Terkel (who’s included in four photos) pointed out that Flerlage was more than a photographer, he was a companion.

This second volume of photographs, despite its title, is not strictly limited to Chicago musicians or folk singers. “Chicago” covers natives, transplants and those touring through the Windy City, and “Folk” encompasses a variety of roots musicians, including guitar toting singer-songwriters, folk groups, blues and gospel singers, bluegrass bands and more. Even those who know Flerlage’s work – either by name or by sight – are unlikely to have seen this part of his catalog. Among the 200-plus photos here, most have never been published before and none duplicate entries in the earlier Chicago Blues.

There are many well-known musicians depicted here, including Odetta, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Doc Watson, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, Furry Lewis, the Weavers, Mother Maybelle Carter, Mississippi John Hurt and Bob Dylan. They’re captured in the act of creation: playing or singing, entertaining an audience or conversing with fellow artists. Big Joe Williams is shown seated, staring off camera in concentration as his right hand blurs with motion. The Staple Singers are depicted with their mouths open in family harmony and their hands suspended between claps. Flerlage focused on a musician’s internal intimacy, but also expanded his frame to add the context of stage, auditorium, spotlight and audience.

Beyond the most easily recognized names, Flerlage made pictures of lesser-known musicians, as well as those instrumental in Chicago and folk’s music scenes. Highlights include rare shots of blues busker Blind Arvella Gray, radio legend Norman Pellegrini, Old Town School of Music co-founders Win Stracke and Frank Hamilton, Folkways label founder Moe Asch, Appalachian artists Roscoe Holcomb and Frank Proffitt, children’s folk singer Ella Jenkins, field recordist Sam Charters, Sing Out editor Irwin Silver, one-man band Dr. Ross, and dozens more. Flerlage also captured record stores such as Kroch and Brentano’s and Discount Records, blending his work as a photographer with his career in distribution.

The photos range from careful compositions that frame artists in stage light to spontaneous grabs in adverse conditions. Whatever the circumstance, Flerlage caught something about each subject that remains vital on the page fifty years later. The book is printed on heavy, semi-gloss stock, and it’s only real weakness is the lack of expositional text. The 12-page introduction by Ronald D. Cohen provides context on the photographer, but the photo captions provide little detail on the photographed. The pictures are worth seeing on their own, but they would come alive for more readers if the subjects, particularly the local heroes and lesser-known artists, were given a few sentences of explanation. Buy the book, enjoy the photos, and spend some quality time with Google to dig up the stories. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

Chris Bell: I Am the Cosmos (Deluxe Edition)

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Expanded reissue of Big Star founder’s posthumous solo album

Big Star founder Chris Bell, like his band, is an enigma whose mystery has endured even as his details have been dispensed in retrospective bits and pieces. At the time of his greatest achievement, Big Star’s #1 Record, he and his band’s fame extended only to the rock literati. By the time the Big Star cult began to build, stoked by the reissue of their first two albums in the summer of 1978, Bell was only months away from death, at the age of 27, in a single vehicle car crash. At the time few had sought out his artistic details or inspirations, and musical archaeologists piecing together the strands of Big Star originally had to work from scant materials: the iconic Big Star album, a solo single of “I Am the Cosmos” b/w “You and Your Sister,” a few fanzine articles, and reminiscences of his friends and family.

Interest in Big Star continued to grow, but with Alex Chilton avoiding the press and Bell no longer living, details had to be divined from bits and pieces added retrospectively to the group’s legacy. Chilton released an EP, Singer Not the Song, in 1977, the long-delayed release of Big Star Third came in 1978, along with Bell’s single, and Chilton then released a string of solo albums that diverged further and further from his work with Big Star. It would be another eight years until the first two Big Star albums would appear on CD in 1986, and another six years until additional archival material was made available. In 1992 the floodgates opened with Ryko’s release of Big Star’s vintage radio performance, Live, and Chris Bell’s mid-70s solo album I Am the Cosmos.

The genesis of Bell’s solo recordings lay in the same aftermath from which Chilton bred Big Star Third. Bell had departed Big Star after the failure of #1 Record in 1972. From all reports, including Rob Jovanovic’s Big Star: The Short Life, Painful Death, and Unexpected Resurrection of the Kings of Power Pop, Bruce Eaton’s Radio City 33-1/3, and Bob Mehr’s lengthy essay in this deluxe reissue, Bell took the failure of #1 Record harder than anyone else, and by the sound of his solo recordings, he didn’t seem to have ever fully recovered. Recording in Memphis, France and England in 1974, and continuing to tinker with the recordings at Ardent for several more years, the results aren’t as anarchic as Chilton’s post-Big Star sessions, but they’re often as edgy. Most of the adolescence and winsomeness of Big Star had been rubbed out of both singer-songwriters by this point.

Several of Bell’s post-Big Star performances sound stressed, as if he’s striving to find meaning among ruined expectations for #1 Record and a mental state that wasn’t always sunny. The recordings can fatigue listeners’ ears with the high-end of Bell’s voice and the piercing splash of cymbals, but there are moments of musical art that match anything he’d achieved before. The album’s title track, presented in both its finished form and a slower version that extends over five minutes (two minutes longer than Ryko’s 1992 edit), can be read simply as a plea to a departed lover, a reassessment of the musician’s attachment to his former musical mates, or as a metaphysical song to Bell’s own youth. It’s a powerful song whose interpretations deepen with time.

Another of the album’s aces is the ballad “You and Your Sister,” featuring Alex Chilton on backing vocal. Here the yearning in Bell’s lyric and voice, framed by a pair of delicately fingerpicked acoustic guitars, underlined by deep bass and filigreed by a string quartet will stop you in your tracks. Two alternate versions, both present on Ryko’s 1992 edition, show how the song developed. An earlier take from 1974 is busier, with double-tracked vocals and a mellotron in place of the strings; a demo, also from 1974, lays out the song’s emotion in a stark acoustic performance that’s equally as effective as the final production. The inward searching and outward seeking heard here, along with a general restlessness and sense of despair echoes throughout the album.

“Speed of Sound” features lushly strummed acoustic guitars, accompanied by bass, volume-flanged electric guitar, and primitive moog behind a lyric of romantic defeat, disappointment and devastation. An alternate version recorded during the same sessions is sung deeper and more wounded than the master take, and without the moog the focus stays squarely on the vocalist’s pain. Bell reunited with his former Big Star rhythm section of Andy Hummel and Jody Stephens for “I Got Kinda Lost” and “There Was a Light,” the former a guitar-driven rocker, the latter a mid-tempo piano-and-guitar ballad. Bell’s growing relationship with Christianity is heard in “Better Save Yourself” and “Look Up,” and by 1976, his last known track “Though I Know She Lies” finds his voice is remarkably restrained; it’s hard to tell whether he’s comfortable or defeated.

Bell shopped the tapes around, but even with several top-notch singles and strong album material he was unable to get anyone to release his solo album. Chris Stamey issued “I am the Cosmos” b/w “You and Your Sister” as a single in 1978, but the rest of the material sat in the vault for another fourteen years. It wasn’t until Ryko issued a CD in 1992 that Bell’s post-Big Star voice was widely heard. Rhino Handmade’s 2-CD reissue includes all of the material on Ryko’s original CD and adds a dozen extras that include pre-Big Star tracks from Icewater (“Looking Forward” and “Sunshine”) and Rock City (“My Life is Right”), alternate recordings and mixes of album cuts, early demos, and Bell’s contribution to the Keith Sykes Band on “In My Darkest Hour.” The set closes with a moving acoustic instrumental, “Clacton Rag,” showing off the emotion of Bell’s guitar playing.

The discs are delivered in a six-panel digipack alongside a 32-page booklet featuring an extensive essay by Bob Mehr and track notes by Alec Palao. Casual fans will be satisfied with the original Ryko single disc, but anyone trying to build a more detailed picture of Chris Bell will want to listen to and study the extra tracks, historical notes and photos presented here. [©2010 hyperbolium dot com]

Stream selected tracks from I Am the Cosmos