David Francey – So Say We All

DAVID FRANCEY
So Say We All
Laker Music 
davidfrancey.com

As I’ve noted before, David Francey, then in his mid-40s and a carpenter by trade, emerged in the late-1990s as one of Canada’s most significant and accomplished singer-songwriters. His songs are distinguished by their beautifully-crafted, poetic lyrics and memorable, traditional-sounding melodies. On So Say We All, as on the nine previous albums he’s released since 1999, David surrounds himself with a small group of creative acoustic musicians who help bring out the best in his songs without ever getting in the way.

David notes in the CD booklet that he recorded this album following what had been “a very difficult year,” that recording it “was a pathway up and out from under.”

Indeed, several of the songs reflect themes of depression and hopelessness. “Harm,” which sounds like an Appalachian folksong thanks to Chris Coole’s banjo arrangement, captures the feelings of someone at the deepest depths of depression longing to climb out again. “Cheap Motel,” reflects the loneliness that is part of many road musicians' day-to-day life, while “Ordinary Man” presents a series of scenes – the military, a dead end job, prison – in which an ordinary man is trapped, and “Satellite,” shows the emptiness of staring at the ground on a dark night while the wonders of the heavens are there to behold by just looking up.

Despite these, and several others, the album is not all dark. There is the hopefulness of finding love in “Weather Vane” and the renewal of the human spirit reflected in “Blue Skies,” a song inspired by the Blue Skies Folk festival.

Even when David is singing about darkness, there is much to learn and understand about the human spirit – and that is a mark of great songwriting.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Tom Russell – Aztec Jazz

TOM RUSSELL & THE NORWEGIAN WIND ENSEMBLE
Aztec Jazz
Frontera Records 
tomrussell.com

Leave it to Tom Russell – who has given us such groundbreaking albums as The Man from God Knows Where, a brilliant folk opera about immigration and the American dream, and Hotwalker, an equally-brilliantly conceived and executed audio collage of original songs, poetry, stories, rants and outside voices that pays tribute to forgotten aspects of American culture, and many other great albums filled with some of the best songwriting of the past 30 years – to raise the art of the live album to a whole new level.

A year ago, Tom and guitarist Thad Beckman, his regular accompanist over the past several years, performed a concert in Halden, Norway with the Norwegian Wind Ensemble, a superb chamber orchestra featuring 21 brass and woodwind players as well as a bassist, drummer and two percussionists under the direction of conductor Frank Brodhal. Swedish composer Mats Hålling wrote orchestral arrangements for 11 of Tom’s songs and the concert was recorded.

The results are absolutely stunning. Tom’s singing and Thad’s lead guitar playing are magnificent and the orchestral arrangements, while uniquely faithful to Tom’s songs, variously recall some of the works of George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, and David Amram, or Gil Evans’ Spanish-tinged chamber jazz arrangements for Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, or orchestrated New Orleans second lines or Mexican mariachis.

The album opens with a lush version of “Love Abides,” a beautiful song that contrasts tragedy with blessings, hope and love. It was a perfect finale for The Man from God Knows Where and is an equally perfect way to begin Aztec Jazz.

“Nina Simone,” another quiet, song, lushly arranged for the Norwegian Wind Ensemble follows. The song is about finding what you need in a voice that understands. For Tom, once in a bar in San Cristóbal, Mexico, it was the voice of Nina Simone on the juke box. I know I’ve heard Nina Simone cut through to my soul when she sings about being “lost in the rain in Juarez” in a way I think Bob Dylan would appreciate. Sometimes my own “Nina Simones” have been Rosalie Sorrels or Billie Holiday or a dozen other singers who understand.

The pace picks up with “East of Woodstock, West of Vietnam,” in which Tom recalls 1969 when – as the war in Vietnam raged, Neil Armstrong took his small step onto the moon, and 500,000 people sat in the Catskills mud for a three-day music festival – he went to Nigeria as a young academic to teach.

“Goodnight, Juarez” is a Tex-Mex lament for Jurarez’s descent from an open tourist town to the battleground it’s become. The song looks at contemporary Juarez, remembers when it was a very different place and imagines how it could be so again. “Juarez, I had a dream today/ The children danced, as the guitars played/ And all the violence up and slipped away/ Goodnight, Juarez, goodnight,” Tom sings with mariachi tinges to the orchestral arrangement.

“Criminology” documents a series of harrowing experiences Tom lived through in the late-‘60s and early-‘70s in Nigeria and Canada. The arrangement features some nifty West African guitar fills by Thad and R&B horn punctuation by the Norwegian Wind Ensemble.

“Guadalupe,” done beautifully here with some gorgeous guitar lines by Thad and an orchestral arrangement highlighting the oboes, is a song that reveals more every time I hear it. And I’m not necessarily referring to new layers of understanding of what Tom was thinking when he wrote it. I mean what I hear and understand about my own truths and my own quests filtered through Tom’s words and the gorgeous melody.

“Stealing Electricity,” with the orchestra at full throttle, has a hook that could have made it a hit back when pop music was about real songs. Tom tells us that reaching out for love is like stealing electricity, sometimes you’re going to get burned.

“Finding You” is a beautiful love song written for Nadine Russell, Tom’s wife, and is lushly arranged for the orchestra.

“Mississippi River Running Backwards,” is about a world out of whack – the kind of stuff TV evangelists might attribute to an angry God. It’s a song perfectly suited to the big, New Orleans-style horn arrangement it has here.

While most of the material on Aztec Jazz is drawn from recent Tom Russell albums, “St. Olav’s Gate,” is one of my favorites of Tom’s early songs. It was chosen for this album, I assume, because its setting is in Norway. The song recalls a single night and a broken promise. Most of us have been that drunken man waiting in vain at St. Olav’s Gate, even if our personal St. Olav’s Gate wasn’t in Oslo.

The album concludes with “Jai Alai,” a brilliant, fast-paced flamenco piece about passion: for the game of jai alai – and for love. The Norwegian Wind Ensemble offers a deeply layered and exciting arrangement and Thad’s guitar echoes the intensity of the flamenco masters.

Although these songs might already be familiar to followers of Tom's music, the way they are reimagined and reinterpreted with the Norwegian Wind Ensemble makes Aztec Jazz an essential Tom Russell album.

Aztec Jazz will be released in June but can now be ordered via Village Records. 

Note: Some of my comments about the songs are drawn from reviews I’ve written about the Tom Russell albums they originally appeared on or from my booklet essay for Veteran’s Day: The Tom Russell Anthology.

Pictured: Thad Beckman, Mike Regenstreif and Tom Russell in Montreal (2012).

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--Mike Regenstreif

Sid Selvidge 1943-2013

I was deeply saddened this evening to learn that Sid Selvidge, the great Memphis folk and blues artist, passed away today after a battle with cancer.

Sid had an astounding knowledge of traditional and contemporary roots music. In addition to his solo work, he played in several bands and was the executive producer of the Beale Street Caravan radio program.

I first discovered Sid in 1993 when Sing Out! magazine asked me to review an album of Sid’s called Twice Told Tales. Although he was a veteran performer by then, it was the first time I heard of him. The album, now long out-of-print blew me away – the Sing Out review is below – and it’s been a favorite of mine ever since. “Watch and Chain,” a song from Twice Told Tales was the first thing I played on the pilot edition of the Folk Roots/Folk Branches radio show on January 16, 1994 on CKUT in Montreal.

I met Sid and hung out with him some when I visited Memphis in 1998 for the Folk Alliance conference. And when Folk Alliance came to Montreal in 2005, I did an astounding program of all live-in-the-studio performances with a bunch of great guests: Full Frontal Folk, Andy Cohen & Ragtime Jack Radcliffe, Natalia Zukerman, The Kennedys, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, Tracy Grammer & Jim Henry, Anne Hills & Michael Smith, and Sid Selvidge. Sid played great versions of “Long Black Veil,” “Buffalo Skinners” and “Judge Bouche.”

Sid was not a prolific recording artist and when his next album, A Little Bit of Rain, came out in 2003, I eagerly reviewed it for both Sing Out and the Montreal Gazette. The Sing Out review of that one is also below.

SID SELVIDGE
Twice Told Tales
Elektra Nonesuch 

(This review appeared in Sing Out! magazine in 1993.)

Because we hear so much dross, record reviewers are always delighted to come across a terrific album.  Doubly so when the album is by an artist that we're previously unfamiliar with.  This is one such album and Sid Selvidge is one such artist.

He's no Johnny-Come-Lately though.  It turns out that Selvidge, an anthropologist by vocation and musician by avocation, has had a long history on the Memphis music scene dating back to the early 1960s when he met, befriended and learned from such blues legends as Furry Lewis, Bukka White, and the "Mississippis": John Hurt and Fred McDowell.

On about half the album, Selvidge, who acknowledges his sources, plays solo with terrific interpretations of traditional blues and folk songs.  On the rest he delves into close-to-the-roots gospel, blues, swing and rock and roll with subdued backing by four or five other musicians.  Three of the 13 songs are from Selvidge's own pen.

On occasion, most notably on Mississipi Fred McDowell's version of "Watch and Chain" and on the traditional western ballad "Buffalo Skinners," Selvidge achieves a powerful intensity that is downright scary.  Elsewhere, he does a playful, swingtime version of the classic Hank Williams hit "Lovesick Blues," that sounds like he's having a lot of fun.  On "Tell Me Why You Like Roosevelt," Selvidge seems to have absorbed what made early-Sam Cooke such a great gospel singer and on "Since I Met You Baby," he shows his facility as a band leader on a more jazzy-than-delta kind of blues.  This album merits a strong recommendation. –Mike Regenstreif

SID SELVIDGE
A Little Bit of Rain
Archer

(This review appeared in Sing Out! magazine in 2003.)

A decade ago, Sing Out! asked me to review Twice Told Tales by Sid Selvidge, a Memphis-based artist that I was not previously familiar with.  It was a great album, one that I’ve returned to often over the years.  Finally, 10 years later, Selvidge, now the executive producer of the syndicated Beale Street Caravan radio program, has done a follow-up.  Beginning with a sweet version of Fred Neil’s title song, and ending with “Arkansas Girl,” a lovely country waltz and the only Selvidge original, the CD is a seamless blend of blues, traditional country, folk music, rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll in settings that range from solo voice and guitar to a cooking full band with horn section and backup vocalists.  There are few performers with the musical vocabulary to so convincingly sound like he’s at home with all of these different styles.

One of my favorite tracks is “Swannanoa Tunnel,” a haunting Appalachian song associated with traditional artists Roscoe Holcomb and Bascom Lamar Lunsford that Selvidge performs solo with just his guitar.  Interestingly, he points out that Lunsford is the great uncle of his daughter-in-law.  He also does a nice version of “Hobo Bill,” a song recorded more than 70 years ago by Jimmie Rodgers.  Selvidge is particularly adept at the blues and offers a fine arrangement of “Mama You Don’t Mean Me No Good,” that’s halfway between urban sophisticate and down home jug band.  His version of “Long Tall Mama” recalls Big Bill Broonzy’s early Chicago period.  Lets hope that Selvidge’s next record won’t take another decade.  –Mike Regenstreif

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--Mike Regenstreif