Weekly Music Roundup: Dessa, Joshua Redman, and Mary Lattimore
This week, Dessa dances while the world burns; Lily & Madeleine offer sibling harmony; Joshua Redman’s musical travelogue begins in Baltimore. Also, harpist Mary Lattimore and bluesman Mance Lipscomb.
Dancing At The End Of The World With Dessa
The rapper, singer, and writer Dessa has released a pair of singles that hint at the range you can expect to find on her next album, Bury The Lede. That project, due on September 29, will include poppy numbers like “Chopper” as well as weirdo rap tunes like “Hurricane Party.” This latter track essentially recognizes that things are going to hell and seems to suggest that the most appropriate response would be a wry chuckle and perhaps a rye cocktail. “Desperate times call for desperate pleasures,” she raps. The video doubles down on the party-like-there’s-no-tomorrow feeling, as Dessa takes a typical rapper’s line – “gold dust, sex and Bacardi” – but subverts it with the sight of her carrying a dead fish (red snapper?) through a supermarket. (It’s also full of inside jokes/references to her past songs and videos.)
Lily & Madeleine’s Harmonies Hurt So Good
The folk/pop duo Lily & Madeleine provides yet more evidence for the claim that family ties make for spine-tingling harmony vocals. Sisters Lily and Madeleine Jurkiewicz, from Indianapolis, were only teenagers when they were discovered on YouTube, and 20 and 17, respectively, when they first visited our studio in 2014. Their latest single is “Rolling Rock,” which has a repeating, melancholy piano riff and clear but pensive country-tinged vocals. The chorus, where the two sisters sing in harmony, is predictably fine. What isn’t so predictable is the emotional release provided by the electric guitar solo that erupts halfway through.
The next Lily & Madeleine album, Nite Swim, comes out on October 6.
The Sad Beauty of Mary Lattimore’s New Single
Harpist Mary Lattimore has played with rock musicians like Thurston Moore and Kurt Vile, composed music for the poet Ross Gay, done a silent film score with Americana guitarist William Tyler, and generally made herself indispensable across a wide swath of musical scenes. She’s just announced that her next solo record, Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, will come out on October 6, and accompanied the announcement with a single called “And Then He Wrapped His Wings Around Me.” Lattimore often uses electronic processing and looping on her harp, and here those effects create a sepia-tinged haze of nostalgia, aided by the soft wordless vocals of Meg Baird and the background drone of Walt McClements (who is also in the beautiful if enigmatic video). The title hints at comfort, but the comfort here may simply be the shared feeling most of us have of longing for things that are gone.
Joshua Redman Reinterprets Gabriel Kahane’s “Baltimore”
The day after the 2016 election, singer and composer Gabriel Kahane went off the grid and onto the rails, unplugging his digital devices and traveling almost 9000 miles on Amtrak, talking with whomever he happened to be sitting near and creating a kind of musical travelogue that he called Book of Travelers. Now, the great jazz sax player Joshua Redman has released a version of one of Kahane’s songs, the pensive and lyrical “Baltimore.” It’s part of Redman’s upcoming album called where are we – another musical travelogue that, like Kahane’s, offers a wide angle view of America today. Redman does this through original songs but also inventive arrangements of everything from Count Basie to Charles Ives to Bruce Springsteen. “Baltimore” hews closely to Gabriel Kahane’s original, at first, with Redman’s sax taking on the vocal melody. But pianist Aaron Parks offers a glowing solo, followed by Redman’s own searching take on the theme.
where are we comes out on September 15.
Mack McCormick’s Archives Released By Smithsonian Folkways. It's Complicated.
Mack McCormick was certainly not the first or only white guy to go around the American South recording performances by mostly Black musicians. And he seems to have had a good ear for interesting performers in the territory he staked out in East Texas and the surrounding states in the 1950s and 60s. So maybe give him the benefit of the doubt that he was doing this for the right reasons, but then wonder why he never actually shared most of these recordings during his lifetime. Now, Smithsonian Folkways has released a 3CD / 6LP box set, pointedly called Playing for the Man at the Door: Field Recordings from the Collection of Mack McCormick, 1958 – 1971. McCormick recorded Lightnin’ Hopkins before he became famous, but I’m partial to the tracks by Mance Lipscomb, who would later go on to play big folk festivals; and it’s not hard to hear why as he channels the bluesmen of the 1920s in songs like “God Moved On The Water,” the Blind Willie Johnson song about the sinking of the Titanic.
