Weekly Music Roundup: Sudan Archives, Mura Masa, and Dom La Nena
Week of Nov. 11: This week, one song celebrates new life while another takes a dim view of the future. Plus a posthumous song from George Michael.
A Posthumous Song From George Michael
The late English singer George Michael had a widely publicized battle with substance abuse throughout his career (although his death, at 53 on Christmas Day 2016, was ruled to be due to “natural causes”). That makes this first posthumously-released song all the more bittersweet. Released as part of the new film Last Christmas, which was apparently inspired by his music, “This Is How (We Want You To Get High)” is a thinly veiled bit of autobiography: a song about battling the causes and triggers of his behavior. But identifying them isn’t the same as beating them. As he sings in the chorus, “I will always try to get my life together/Guess we always knew that it would be stormy weather.” A genial, Latin-flavored dance beat does what it can to offset the dark mood of the lyrics, and the song won’t make anyone forget their favorite George Michael hits (mine was “Freedom”), but it is a telling addition to his catalogue.
Dom La Nena Returns With a Dreamy New Song and Video
The singer, songwriter, cellist, and producer Dom La Nena was born in Brazil but is based in Paris, where she has created several albums of indefinable but eminently likable music that blends elements of pop, jazz, and chamber music. Her newest album, Tempo, comes out early next year but she’s just released the first single, called “Oiseau Sauvage.” Over the years, La Nena has sung in Portuguese, Spanish, and French; here, for the first time, she mixes all three into a single song. The entire record, made while she was pregnant, is built from layers of La Nena’s voice and cello, with occasional piano. (There is one exception – a recording of her daughter’s heartbeat made in utero.) In this song, her vocals add up to a dream-like choir while plucked cellos and piano sketch a soft but jaunty two-step beat. The video is a striking affair as well, with its flying ghosts and concluding imagery of pregnancy and birth.
Sudan Archives Releases A Genre-Blurring LP
The singer, violinist, and producer Brittney Parks has been releasing singles and EPs under the name Sudan Archives for a couple of years now, but she’s just released her first full-length LP. It’s called Athena, and it contains a track called “Black Vivaldi Sonata,” which I mention here because it basically gives the game away: Sudan Archives uses the violin (and lots of looping) to explore musical territory that’s far from its classical music home. So she incorporates African-American music styles like R&B and hip hop, as well as African sounds, specifically the folk fiddling traditions of Ghana in West Africa, and, unsurprisingly perhaps, Sudan in the northeast. In the track called “Confessions,” her violins have a reedy sound that says folk music rather than concert hall. At least, they do until the chorus; “There is a place I call home,” she sings, “but it’s not where I am welcome,” at which point the violins suddenly fall into an uncomfortable dissonance. There are lots of examples of this attention to musical detail sprinkled throughout Athena, but “Confessions” is a good place to start.
Mura Masa Isn’t Hopeful About The Future Of Britain
The Grammy-winning British producer known as Mura Masa has had a busy week, releasing two singles. One, called “Deal Wiv It,” is an F-bomb-laden response to London’s gentrification crisis done with the rapper Slowthai (and sporting a single-take video). The other is a surprisingly guitar-oriented rocker called “No Hope Generation.” In its title and its dim view of the future for anyone who’s not wealthy, it echoes first generation punks like Richard Hell and the Voidoids, but the sound is somewhat reminiscent of early 80s dance-rock bands like New Order. “No Hope Generation,” it turns out, is the name of a “new hit sensation craze sweeping the nation,” according to Mura Masa’s chorus. The video implicates alcohol abuse, video game addiction, and soulless living quarters (although it was not shot in one of London’s council estates, but in Belgrade, Serbia) for the wave of ennui and hopelessness, but the song doesn’t absolve us from the responsibility of doing something about it.
Keith Jarrett Plays “It’s A Lonesome Old Town”
Pianist Keith Jarrett made history with his album The Köln Concert, recorded in that German city in 1975: the album, although improvised, was clearly unmoored from what a “jazz pianist” was expected to do; and the sense of following a musician on a quest for the music he wanted to play on that day at that time created a magical experience. The album set sales records, put Jarrett and ECM Records on the map in a big way, and set the stage for countless other solo piano performances (by which I mean, outside of the classical world, where Jarrett would also make a name for himself). In 2016, Jarrett returned to Germany to do a concert in Munich. As usual, most of the evening was given over to a single musical journey, one that wandered and meandered and occasionally doubled back. The recording, called simply Munich 2016, came out last week, and at the end of the journey, Jarrett offered a couple of encores – jazz standards like “It’s A Lonesome Old Town,” famously recorded by Frank Sinatra. But Jarrett opted for neither a swing sound nor a torchy ballad; instead, he went for the feeling of a Chopin Nocturne. Anchored by a repeating left-hand figure (a favorite Jarrett device), the song feels both lonely yet somehow comforting.
