Weekly Music Roundup: The Grammys and MInyo Crusaders

This week, Grammy stories you might have missed; and three musical surprises you won’t want to miss.

Behind The Headlines At The Grammy Awards

By now you’ve probably seen or heard the top-line data from the 61^st Grammy Awards. Big wins for Kacey Musgraves (including Album Of The Year) and Childish Gambino (Song Of The Year and Record Of The Year, both for his brilliant and blistering “This Is America”); a surprise appearance by Michelle Obama; tributes, sometimes appealingly messy ones too, to Dolly Parton and to Diana Ross. But a lot more happened, including the following:

1.  Janelle Monae’s live performance. Prince died in 2016, but, to quote a line from Audrey Niffenegger’s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, “he’s not continuously dead.” At least, that’s the feeling I had watching Janelle Monae do “Make Me Feel” early in the show. So much of this performance – the stabs of her guitar while she sang, the neck-swiveling, hip-displacing choreography, even the purple lighting – suggested Monae was directly channeling Prince. But the most impressive part was that it didn’t come off as Prince Lite – here was a woman clearly in control of her music and her influences and her sexuality. If you didn’t watch the telecast, it’s worth seeking out online. 
2. Alicia Keys’ performance. As the evening’s host, Keys was both chill and warm. In her performance slot, she sat between two pianos and played a medley of songs, beginning with Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” with each hand playing a different piano. It was a neat trick, and she immediately gave a shout out to Hazel Scott, which I can only hope sent thousands of people to their phones to google the great Caribbean-American pianist, actor, and activist, who in many ways was the Jackie Robinson of the entertainment business. Scott’s two-piano trick is still hugely impressive. It’s also a mere footnote in a career that should be more widely known. 
3. That “bad-ass pianist” who played with Cardi B. It takes a lot to upstage Cardi B, but her pianist, the classically-trained Choe Flower, sent the Twitterverse into overdrive while the song “Money” was performed. Flower introduced the song with a casually virtuosic flight up the keyboard that owed as much to Liberace (whose piano she was playing) as it did to Debussy. Who is she, everyone wanted to know… I saw two “who’s that bad-ass pianist” tweets and a bunch more that were close variants on the theme. The broadcast is often quite careless about identifying everyone – which you’d think would be a main point of the show – so we had to wait for someone to chime in with Chloe Flower’s name.   
4. Oh, and the awards themselves. You don’t have to look very hard to learn that Lady Gaga and Brandi Carlile won multiple statues. But there were a couple of other notable winners: Jimmy Carter, continuing his campaign to be the best Ex-President these United States has ever had, won the Best Spoken Word Album award for Faith - A Journey for All. Fantastic Negrito, who has told us his astonishing story of near-death and reinvention from failed R&B star to community-based blues-rocker in two visits to our studio, won the award for Best Contemporary Blues Album for Please Don’t Be Dead. The Grammy for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance went to Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet for Landfall, Anderson’s moving, wise, and wry reaction to the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy here in New York. And in a category I personally tend to ignore, Best Musical Theater Album, the award went to The Band’s Visit, the little Broadway show that could, with lyrics and music by David Yazbek infused with the sounds of Egyptian/Near Eastern music. 

What The World Needs Now: Some Of That Ol’ Atonal Music

Merle Hazard has occasionally popped up when we least expected, or wanted, him to. In times of economic crisis, like Clark Kent running into the phone book and emerging as Superman, the investment manager/economist Jon Shayne transforms himself into the country/bluegrass singer Merle Hazard, a superhero who writes songs that attempt to explain things like the Greek debt crisis, or the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policies. (Don’t worry – these links are for songs, not actual economics or anything, you know, useful…) But it turns out that Jon Shayne’s dad was a composer – a composer of complex, Modernist music, using the 12-tone system that broke down traditional tonality and drove listeners from concert halls in the mid-20^th century. And so Merle Hazard is taking a break from singing the economic blues to give us a new take on the “gimme some of that ol’ time religion” trope. His song “Gimme Some Of That Ol’ Atonal Music” is a cheery romp and an affectionate nod to his dad, and the more you know about 20^th century Modernism, the funnier it gets. (The mention of John Cage causes the song to fall silent while Merle looks at his watch – a nod to Cage’s infamous “silent” piece, 4:33.) Best of all, his longtime friend and sometime producer Alison Brown throws down a genuine atonal banjo solo, complete with “extended technique” (she plays the strings behind the bridge at one point). Did I mention she’s playing a banjo?  Genius….

From Tokyo, An Echo of Colombia

The band Minyo Crusaders takes traditional Japanese folk songs and plays them in Latin and African rhythms. Their new album, Echoes Of Japan, includes Japanese folk tunes reinvented as Afrobeat, reggae, or Ethio-groove songs. Now, when I say “folk tunes,” I really mean the body of classical or high-art folk songs known as minyo – hence the band’s name. This tradition is characterized by a highly stylized, virtuosic way of singing, not at all the kind of rough and ready vocals you’d commonly find among “folk singers.” So Minyo Crusaders are trying to make sure these old songs are still being heard, in whatever form possible. Their version of “Kushimoto Bushi” is now completely transformed by a Colombian cumbia rhythm. With its shuffling “boom-chi-cha boom-chi-cha” beat (the distinctive cumbia sound) and its bright, playful horn arrangement, the song is completely convincing as a Colombian dance tune. The album Echoes of Japan comes out on April 26.

From California, An Echo of India

Sid Sriram was raised in the Bay Area on R&B, hip hop, and soul – and it shows in his music. But he was born in southern India, and that shows too. His new album is called Entropy, and much of it features his downtempo, often plaintive singing, with occasional soaring falsetto phrases. But several tracks incorporate the sounds of Carnatic music, the classical music of South India. The song “Paper Plates” is almost two songs in one: first, a spoken word introduction with Sriram accompanying himself with wordless raga-inflected singing; and then, a sampled break with tabla (the tuned hand drums of northern Indian classical music) that Sriram sings over, in both a Western neo-soul and an Indian light classical style. The album includes a couple of tracks, like the lovely single “It Isn’t True,” that will carry the load in terms of making Sriram’s name more widely known. But kudos to an artist brave enough to start his album with a bit of Carnatic music and then to return to it later with a track like “Paper Plates.”