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Monthly Archives: May 2007

K’naan rocks Boston

K’naan, the Somalian refugee and lyrical poet opened this evening for Stephen Marley on his Mind Control tour. It was great to see him live, just a few meters away as he spit his lyrics at the crowd. He mostly rocked songs from his debut album, The Dusty Foot Philosopher, including “Until the Lion Learns to Speak” and “Soobax,” of EA Sports FIFA video game fame, which happens to be how I happened upon this cat. After hearing the song for the first time I picked up the album, and since then I’ve learned that he’s performed with Mos, which just adds to his credibility in the overpopulated, overhyped, and overdone hip hop rat race in which these are holding it down the way it should be.

While it was good to see him live, he only had one new tune for me – Waving the Flag (step back!), and a bit of energy was lost by rocking out to a couple of songs with a prerecorded harmony. It would have been cool to hear new verses to the cuts from his album, or perhaps even some freestyle – but this wasn’t the audience.

Because he’s opening for Marley, this was a reggae house and the smoke went up right on cue. K’naan wasn’t even billed on the posters and tickets, so no one was expecting to have a rapper come to them like that, but the social content of his message was well received and is eerily at home stateside as it was back in Mogadisho, his old home. Nevertheless, while perhaps the crowd could appreciate the message more or less, they clearly weren’t feelin it.

But it’s all good, caught a great show and got to see K’naan direct and in person. Avalon in Boston is a bit too much venue for me, but it was good exposure for this djembe-beating Dusty Foot Philosopher.

And a grateful nation of soul sighs in relief

Many people are familiar with the “12 for the price of 1″ offers from BMG Music Service, of which I have actually been a subscriber for 7 years. Every once in awhile, a deal comes along via BMG that is hard to pass up, but you have to be patient for these deals to come along. Anyhow, they still have this esoteric system of “featured selection,” which in my experience is an arbitrarily picked album that they probably have too many copies of and just want to send out to their members en masse. After many years of automatically sending these awful albums, they’ve finally devised a better method, which for the last several years has been to assume that I don’t want their bad CDs. Yet if I ever find myself on the site, I make it a point to decline the featured selection just for good measure, and recently it felt particularly good. I think I will, in fact, print this page for my records, thank you very much:

Just one quick, parting shot. The Most Romantic Melodies of ALL TIME? As in, the history of the world? Geez, Kenny, that’s quite the offer.

Simple music to salve the soul

Every once in awhile I’ll run into someone with perfectly normal hearing who swears that they have really no preference for music.

Background stuff.

Whatever’s on.

No favorites.

It blows my mind. Sans music, life would be different. And rightly so, it is something not to be taken for granted or abused. The flip side of this, of course, is the person whose taste in music is so specific that they are pigeonholed into some obscure sub-sub-subgenre like Amazonian indigenous polyrhythmic polka marches from 1887-1889. (It was really all downhill from there.) I’d like to think that I’m somewhere floating in the middle of two extremes, when in reality I tend to err to the side of the Amazonian polka marches.

But in reality, most people have their favorites, and I’m noticing a theme in my favorite sounds that is very straightforward.

The fewer instruments, the better.

This is to say that a solo voice (instrumental or human) really does do it for me. Sarah Brightman unadorned. Maybe, at the end of the day, nothing beats a 90s a cappella group like Shai or, dare I say, Boyz II Men. (Okay, I did say ‘maybe’.)

Small ensembles have enough power to musically convey the most powerful messages, too. My favorite jazz ensemble of all time would have to be based on the piano trio, the standard jazz rhythm section. Comprised of piano, standing bass, and drums, the percussive element is innate while the melodic element is amplified even in the drums. Among these, I guess the Money Jungle sessions certainly rank near the top, with Duke Ellington on the keys, Charles Mingus on bass, and Max Roach on drums.

Even Medeski, Martin, and Wood are a clever, fresh perspective on the piano trio, though they get busy on all kinds of modern variations therein. And of course, Soulive does it downright nasty with a core of drums, electric guitar, and Hammond B3 organ, though it’s really four instruments with Neal also on bass keys and just about any other funky keys he can find.

And there’s certainly a richness in layering and adding of voices, especially when it’s done step by step. But there’s something quite nice about simple melodies. It’s the only thing required to have music. The rest? Just gravy.

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