Shopping List: The New and the Notable
A couple of days late due to our New Orleans detour...
Keren Ann (Blue Note)
With lines like, "Come tell me your story to unload your glorious grief/ Where you are the valet of honour and I am the thief," Keren Ann's songs are about as great as those Leonard Cohen wrote for his friend Anjani's recent Blue Alert, which is saying a lot. But Ann's arrangements on the brilliant follow-up to her 2004 breakthrough album, Nolita, are transcendent, luminous, even lapidary. You'll want to wallow forever in these spacious sound pools located "somewhere between the flatland and the Caspian sea."
The Bad Plus, Prog (Heads Up)
Prog is short for progressive, and this rambunctious keyboard trio is nothing but. There's a hectic rhythmic energy to most of what the Plus plays, especially in the extended stop-start section of their "Physical Cities." But the Bad Plus is probably known best for impeccably chosen and extremely entertaining big-tent covers, which here include Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," Rush's own prog hit "Tom Sawyer," David Bowie's "Life on Mars," and Herb Alpert's "This Guy's in Love With You."
Lang Lang, Beethoven: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 4 (Deutsche Grammophon)
The music is perfect for the Chinese pianist's ebullient, hard-hitting style, and Christoph Eschenbach's Orchestre de Paris has to work to keep up with him. You sometimes sense Lang Lang holding back his tendency to overplay, but what can he do? He's the Jerry Lee Lewis of classical music, with all the excess energy that implies.
Barbra Streisand, Live in Concert 2006 (Columbia); Bjork, Volta (Elektra)
Babs's long-awaited 2006 tour may have begun admittedly as "a great way to raise a lot of money for the causes that I believe in," but it apparently evolved into a mutual audience-performer love fest of misty water-colored memories. She sounds terrific, but while listening I couldn't help but compare and contrast her live double-CD album with the Radio City Music Hall performance by Nordic art-pop star Bjork I caught last week. Where Streisand has "popera" quartet Il Divo to help her out, Bjork works with a ten-piece, all-female horn section, the Congolese electric kalimba group Konono No. 1, and the fey-voiced indie crooner Antony. Babs has classical material like "People" and "The Way We Were," while Bjork came out blazing with "Earth Intruders," with beats by hip-hop producer Timbaland. And where Streisand sings of cockeyed optimism yet worries whether she might have stayed too long at the fair, Bjork asks her audiences to "Declare Independence" by issuing their own currency and stamps. I'd give anything to see them tour together.