Weekly Music Roundup: Bob Dylan, Kandace Springs, and Dirty Projectors
Week of March 30: This week, a blast from Afropop’s past, the future of Afrofuturism, new music from both Dirty Projectors and Bright Eyes. Plus, new music from Kandace Springs of whom Prince once said, she “has a voice that could melt snow.” and Bob Dylan’s surprise.
Bob Dylan Unexpectedly Releases A 17-Minute Ballad About JFK
Late last week, Bob Dylan released “Murder Most Foul,” a baffling, epic ballad that somehow starts with the Kennedy assassination and along the way – over a journey of 17 minutes – becomes a meditation on music and culture in a time of national tragedy. He released it with the somewhat cryptic note: “This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting.” And you will. You may spend hours trying to decipher all the references, which include references to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (not the only time that piece will be mentioned in this week’s roundup), jazz greats like Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, silent film stars, The Beatles, Queen, and on and on. Musically, it is both simple and chilling – a rumble of distant piano with plaintive touches of bowed strings; the music cycles over a repeating, dirge-like sequence of chords. Lyrically, it contains moments that, for me at least, clang on the ear – the early descriptions of the assassination seemed at first blunt and obvious – but also moments of enigmatic brilliance (“it’s 36 hours past Judgment Day”) and verse after verse of Dylan stitching quotes and allusions together and somehow making them his own. He doesn’t sing, exactly – he sounds like he’s conducting a séance, or preaching to a choir that hasn’t fully woken up yet. I couldn’t decide whether I liked it, or hated it, or both. But when it ended, I immediately wanted to hear it again. If we’re all going to be housebound for an extended period of time, wrestling with a work of art like this is not a bad way to spend part of it.
Colombia’s Ghetto Kumbe Presents A New Take on Afrofuturism
The trio called Ghetto Kumbe blends old with new, acoustic with electronic, and pulsing dance music with biting social commentary. They’re going to release their debut LP later this year, but for now they’ve put out the single “Vamo a Dale Duro” (“Let’s Go Hard”), which features the three Colombian musicians working with the UK producer known as The Busy Twist. The resulting song makes prominent use of the gaita, the flute of the indigenous people of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, married to Afro-Caribbean rhythms and the sounds of Western house music. The vocals are a modern take on the old call-and-response: lyrics calling out class inequality are delivered in a style that falls somewhere between rap and traditional chant, and trade off with a sung chorus that simply urges us to go hard. Meanwhile, the video is a riot of color and movement, featuring a trio of astonishing dancers, who clearly know the meaning of going hard.
Pioneering Musician Manu Dibango Dies at 86
The coronavirus pandemic has claimed an important figure in the world of music. This past week, Manu Dibango died in Paris after contracting the virus; Dibango had a long and hugely consequential career in music, one that impacted millions of listeners who have no idea who he was. In one of these roundups back in 2015, I wrote the following:
Maybe you don’t know who Manu Dibango is. But you probably know who Michael Jackson was, and who Eminem, Rihanna, Kanye West, and Will Smith are. All of them, and many others, have quoted from Manu Dibango’s huge – and hugely surprising – 1972 hit song, “Soul Makossa.” Dibango is from Cameroon; he is a sax player, songwriter and bandleader. Not the sort of person you’d find on top of the Billboard charts. But “Soul Makossa,” with its irresistible sax hook and its chanted “ma-ma-ko, ma-ma-sa, mako-mako-sa,” climbed the charts steadily, and by 1973, because Dibango was so obscure, dozens of bands had scrambled to release covers of it. This led to a singular moment in music history when nine different versions of the song were in the pop charts at the same time, which partly accounts for Dibango’s lack of name recognition. In retrospect, it is often referred to as one of the earliest disco songs. But Dibango was not aiming to create a disco song: “Soul Makossa” was an inspired blend of American soul/funk and the Afropop dance genre called makossa.
Dibango would go on to have a fruitful career, mostly in France, and would collaborate with everyone from jazz pianist Herbie Hancock to multiple Grammy-winning African singer Angelique Kidjo. But “Soul Makossa” was important: an early example of global pop music, created decades before the American market began making room for the occasional non-Western or non-English-language pop. I have never forgotten the feeling of being a kid in the summer of ’73 and hearing this strange but irresistible tune coming from the radio. If you’re too young to remember it, check it out now. You may be surprised at how familiar it sounds…
Bright Eyes Returns With A New Song And A New Sound
It’s been nine years since the last album by Bright Eyes, the band led by singer/songwriter Conor Oberst. But he, Mike Mogis and Nathaniel Walcott announced their reunion in February, at which time they also announced a planned tour. That has been shelved, of course, but a new album will be coming, and this past week the band released its first new song. It’s called “Persona Non Grata,” and the lyrics suggest that if there’s anything worse than a breakup, it’s a reconciliation that you can just tell is doomed from the (re)start. That seems to be the case here, but Oberst’s emotive singing is buoyed by some telling and unexpected chord changes, and by the use – for the first time in a Bright Eyes song – of the highland bagpipes. It’s a new sound, and in a statement to fans, Oberst promises that the songs on the new album, whenever it comes out, will be “all quite different.”
Dirty Projectors Issue New EP With New Lead Vocalist
The art-rock band Dirty Projectors has always revolved around the singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist David Longstreth; but on the group’s new EP, Windows Open, he cedes all of the lead vocal duties to guitarist Maia Friedman. Still, the resulting songs, like this one called “Search For Life,” have all the earmarks of a Dirty Projectors record: the wayward melodies, the spacious and often surprising arrangements (here, a ukulele and a lovely string arrangement by Oliver Hill), and of course, the vocal harmonies which may be the Dirty Projectors’ most immediately identifiable sound. “Search For Life” is a ballad, and far closer to an art song than a rock tune; in fact the ending, given over the strings, gets into genuine chamber music territory.
Kandace Springs And Norah Jones Deliver a Torchy “Angel Eyes”
The singer and pianist Kandace Springs has just released an album called The Women Who Raised Me – a tribute to the great female singers who inspired Springs’s bluesy, velvety delivery. The album is full of songs made famous by Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sade, Nina Simone and more. So quite a few of them are familiar, and the major challenge for Springs was to make them her own. This she does with some inventive arrangements, and a stellar cast of guests. For me the album has two absolute highlights, and it was hard to pick just one for this week’s roundup. Her version of “I Put A Spell On You” (the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins song, but apparently learned from the Annie Lennox version, without the screaming) is built on a quote from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. It’s an unexpected mashup, but one that is, yes, spellbinding. But I’m gonna go with her rendition of “Angel Eyes” (learned from Ella Fitzgerald, though many will associate it with Frank Sinatra). It’s a duet with Norah Jones, and the two singers trade verses in their smokiest voices, while Jones plays piano and Springs the Wurlitzer organ. The arrangement was worked out largely on the spur of the moment, apparently, but the chemistry between the two singer/keyboardists is obvious.
