Reviews: Yo-Yo Ma; Screaming Jets; Jason Rebello; Lajana; Bob Evans
Even by their elevated standards Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble have surpassed themselves.
WORLD/FOLK
Sing Me Home
Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
Sony
5 stars
Even by their elevated standards of musical exploration and achievement, Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble have surpassed themselves. With its latest studio excursion, this enduring US masterminded collective has produced a bona-fide epic that sets a benchmark for excellence in world music and folk synthesis. Unlike so many albums in the flooded plane of global fusion, which founder through lack of cohesion, Sing Me Home flows like a lava field. The ensemble’s sixth release in 15 years is as eclectic as the career of its American-Chinese founder, whose musicianship has graced albums of all genres. Yo-Yo Ma understands the wealth of creative potential that can be unleashed when cultures intersect and traditions evolve.
This multi-Grammy winner not only gives direction to a coterie of Silk Road regulars and award-garnering guests on Sing Me Home, but he binds and earths the album with his educated, inspired cello playing. The ensemble’s widest and wildest journey explodes in a cinematic curtain-raising track written by another virtuoso American-Chinese core player, Wu Man, in tandem with the vocals of a guest US octet, Roomful of Teeth. The set concludes with American electric guitar maverick Bill Frisell in an engaging if cerebral instrumental conversation with Silk Road members on shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) and tabla (Indian percussion), and an arrangement of the pop standard Heart and Soul that brings together singers Gregory Porter and Lisa Fischer. Elsewhere lies a smorgasbord of unexpected delights that includes readings of American folk and blues standards Little Birdie and St James Infirmary, sung by Sarah Jarosz and Rhiannon Giddens, accompanied by Chinese pipa and sheng (lute and mouth organ) and Romanian gypsy-styled accordion and cimbalom (zither).
A Malian folk song embellished by kora (21-string lute-harp) and balafon (wooden xylophone) maestros Toumani Diabate and Balla Kouyate, and a number that comprises several Japanese folk songs knitted together with taiko and tabla, are more orchestral.
In other arrangements, a Balkan-influenced New York vocal trio, a poetic ghazal singer backed by kamancheh (spike fiddle) and sitar, agaita (bagpipe) wielding Galician band and Syrian singer join with ensemble members in tracks that celebrate Macedonian, Indian, Spanish and Syrian roots, albeit with subtle Asian inflection. A rendition of O’Neill’s March, validated by Martin Hayes’s native County Clare leaning, evokes memories of a groundbreaking mid-1980s Sino-Irish collaboration between the Chieftains and a Chinese orchestra. In Going Home, an extract from Dvorak’s New World symphony reinvented as a spiritual by Paul Robeson, American banjo queen Abigail Washburn — a noted Sinophile — joins Silk Road member Wu Tong for a stirring vocal duet in English and Mandarin.
Tony Hillier
***
ROCK
Chrome
The Screaming Jets
Dinner for Wolves
4 stars
It has been eight years since the Screaming Jets issued Do Ya and, while that’s a fair time between drinks for any group, their new album suggests it was well worth the wait. Chrome pushes all the right buttons with a succession of sinewy, guitar-driven tracks that take the band to a new level while harking back to the glory days of Oz rock. From the brawny grunginess of Automatic Cowboy and the dark nihilism of Razor to the reflective Won’t Stop You, this album delivers one strong song after another. Frontman Dave Gleeson’s strident voice is in fine form as it cuts across the guitars to deliver often bleak imagery on tunes such as the atmospheric Cash in Your Ticket and the bluesy Sex and Violence. “She’s lost in her silence / Got no voice left to shout / All this sex and violence / time’s a running out,’’ he tells us on Sex and Violence as the song launches into an anthemic chorus. A nicely structured, multi-layered interplay between guitarists Jimi Hocking and Scott Kingman, who co-engineered the album, reflects a sophisticated approach backed by the pulsing bass of co-founder Paul Woseen and the solid rhythms of drummer Mickl Sayers. This comes at the expense of the brash naivety of early Jets songs but with no shortage of sweeping lead breaks to underscore Gleeson’s gritty delivery. Production values are also high with Steve James again teaming with the band and opting for a chunky but unmuddied sound. Good tunes, good production, good delivery — there’s nothing for hard-rock devotees not to like here and plenty for Jets fans to celebrate.
Steve Creedy
***
JAZZ
Held
Jason Rebello
Edition
3.5 stars
Pianist Jason Rebello emerged in Britain in the early 1990s with a string of critically acclaimed albums. He also spent six years as pianist with Sting and another six in Jeff Beck’s band. His debut album, A Clearer View (1990), was produced by Wayne Shorter. Rebello also has worked with Jean Toussaint, Tommy Smith and Branford Marsalis, and presented Artrageous! on BBC television. This latest solo piano album features 10 originals plus a perky version of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s Blackbird with quick flowing passages of improvisation that perfectly suit the tone of the original. Rebello often incorporates a contrapuntal left hand, as in the opener, Pearl, where the piece streams in a semiclassical way before the tempo lapses and jazz influences appear to carry it to conclusion. The title track is a slow-tempo drifter with elegant treble figures against sombre chords, evolving into a melancholy but attractive theme. Happy But For How Long? is at a bouncier tempo, using quickly moving chords and a bright melody with some swinging solo work. A subdued statement with a vaguely Asian connotation opens Tokyo Dream and continues in an introspective narrative that manages to combine Eastern influences with a faintly bluesy approach. Quick rippling begins Salad Days ahead of a tuneful theme that evolves into a fast-running jazz-inspired solo. The closer, Dissolve, does just that in a pensive, almost hesitant way, ending in deep, satisfyingly complex chords. Rebello’s work is flush with fresh ideas and a soothing tranquillity, producing unexpectedly attractive melodies. His capable jazz sensibility and proficient technique translates into a pleasant piano recital of relaxed and sensual playing.
John McBeath
***
FOLK
Frontier Lullaby
Alesa Lajana
Independent
4 stars
Some hitherto latent Australian history surfaces in nomadic singer-songwriter Alesa Lajana’s imposing new work. As the first word of the album moniker may suggest, Frontier Lullaby conveys stories from the country’s pioneer days — truly tragic tales in the title track and Take My Sorrow, which allude to respective 19th-century massacres of Aborigines in Queensland and western Victoria. As Lajana incants, to a military drumbeat, in the former: “Gonna lay my sins down before him / Bury my troubles in the ground.” Equally stark, Raiding the Tide draws on the artist’s research into the nefarious activity of so-called blackbirding around Broome, where first-nations people were enslaved by the pearling industry. Wild Rivers, co-written by Shane Howard, alludes to the Stolen Generations while doubling as a paean to the Murray-Darling confluence. In a lighter vein, My Little Darlin’ recounts an almost surreal 19th-century love story surrounding Lutheran missionaries in northeastern South Australia. While it may address Australian themes, the playing is Appalachian styled, appropriately so in the homesick study Birds Don’t Sing in Nashville (“the way that they sing back home”). With Lajana’s clawhammer banjo and classically informed acoustic guitar allied to her soulful singing, augmented by the Cooder-esque slide of axeman Kirk Lorange and Luke Moller’s fiddle and mandolin, the soundtracks are richly atmospheric. A lilting Celtic-tinted instrumental, The Lonely Shepherd, features Lajana in duet form with banjo maestro Bela Fleck. Frontier Lullaby is a bona-fide journey album, not just a collection of songs thrown together.
Tony Hillier
***
POP
Car Boot Sale
Bob Evans
EMI
4 stars
During the past 13 years Kevin Mitchell has carved a significant career from his alter ego, Bob Evans, creating a handful of albums such as Suburban Songbook (2006) and Familiar Stranger (2013), pop-heavy foils to his slightly more frenetic output as frontman and songwriter for West Australian favourite Jebediah. On this fifth Evans outing the pop hooks are in abundance once more, not least in the opening piano-driven love song Don’t Give Up on Yourself and its successor, Cold Comfort. Produced by Tony Buchen (the Preatures, Montaigne), Car Boot Sale plays to Evans’s strengths of combining Beatle-esque melodies (Race to the Bottom, Ron Sexsmith, Matterfact) with elements of folk and country music. Ron Sexsmith, named after the Canadian artist of whom Evans is a fan, is a beautifully constructed narrative not on Sexsmith but about a conversation Evans had with one of his own fans backstage (“He asked me what I’d been listening to / I said ‘Ron Sexsmith’, he said ‘who?’). That’s also one of the tunes given an air of melancholy — another of Evans’s trademarks — by the addition of strings. In contrast the ballad Open Wound is exquisitely stark, Evans’s vocal floating over brushed snare, piano and flute. Just occasionally, such as on the overtly poppy Happy Tears, the influences (ELO, Traveling Wilburys) are a tad obvious but, overall, Car Boot Sale is another fine example of the singer’s knack for well-crafted, rootsy pop.
Iain Shedden
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