"Doin' Something" is the Blue Note debut for the New England trio Soulive. Though far from newcomers to the improv music scene, the three core musicians on this album continue to impress audiences night in and night out with their powerful playing and creative composition. Eric Krasno (guitar), Neal Evans (keyboards), and Alan Evans (drums), draw their influences from a broad source of related genres. At various points on the album, it's easy to make the case that Soulive is an instrumental jazz, funk, soul, and hip-hop band, depending on the song.

The three members of Soulive all have solid resumes from playing in different bands and projects over the years, despite their relative youth. The Evans were both founding members of Moon Boot Lover with Peter Prince, and Alan also went on to drum with Karl Denson in his Greyboy Allstars and Tiny Universe projects. Krasno was a vital player in the band Lettuce from up in the Boston area. Lettuce was so popular that they have already played a few reunion shows to packed clubs in between Soulive tours.

Much like their last album, Turn It Out, which featured John Scofield on two tracks, this album benefits from some outstanding special guests. Fred Wesley, one of the living legends of funk and soul music, has played with everyone form James Brown (who he toured with for many years) to George Clinton, and Count Basie. Wesley lends his masterful trombone skills on several tracks of the album and even wrote the horn arrangements on the title track and Cannonball. The latter track is a moving tribute to saxophone legend Julian "Cannonball" Adderley. Wesley leads a brass mini-orchestra of Jeremy Pelt on trumpet, Sam Kininger and Jacques Schwartz-Bart on alto and tenor saxophones respectively.

The material on the album itself is all original. The influences are not hard to pick out, but those that are obvious only highlight the beauty of well-performed original expression. On Shaheed, the band pays tribute to the producer of A Tribe Called Quest with a bright, upbeat groove number, similar in attitude (if not sound) to what their hip-hop came has come to represent. Hurry UpS AndWait starts the album off in an upbeat manner. It contains a catchy tempo change that helps to define its title.

The title track is also a peppy number. The horn section is in full effect with some really great accents and flourishes to accompany the solid groove laid down by Krasno and the Evans boys. Bridge To 'Bama is the longest track on the album and perhaps the most ambitious. It contains a couple of long, exploratory interludes, but is packed tight with horn solos connecting the give and take between the guitar and organ lines.

Overall, "Doin' Something" is a very strong album, and quite worthy of the Blue Note label. It should appeal to music fans with many diverse tastes. Older soul and funk fans will surely enjoy the well-planned horn parts and spirit of the album, while the younger generation of hip-hop and groove jazz fanatics will also find plenty here to whet their appetite. Anyone who thinks that modern jazz and funk are dead needs to hear this album. It is one for the permanent collection.

"Dick's Picks XX" is the first live Grateful Dead release from the somewhat uneven year 1976. Many Dead fans find the band's playing this year to be rather slow and unsteady, most chalking it up to the difficulties of returning to a two-drummer setup. On the other hand, all agree that this year's shows are refreshingly free of the setlist routines (such as the drums > space segment) that developed a couple of years later, and clearly reflect the band's reinvigoration after their hiatus.

With these two shows (9/25/76 and 9/28/76) the "Dick's Picks" series offers, for the first time, two non-consecutive performances from different venues, complete except for the omission of one repeat first-set song from each. The music reflects little of the former problem -- in fact, although most songs are fairly mellow and sometimes lumbering, some are quite peppy. (The 9/28 Eyes Of The World, for example, is so fast as to be unsettling, almost angry sounding.) They do reflect much of the latter advantage, though, which is probably the main justification for their being picked.

I mentioned in an earlier DP review, there is a distinction between shows which carry the same musical weight as a well-crafted studio project - "Dick's Picks IV" (2/13-14/70) is perhaps the best example of a pair of these shows being committed to disc - and ordinary, day-to-day shows. Of course, most shows fall into the latter category, and these are two of them. There are some great versions here and there (such as 9/25's slow-grooving Cosmic Charlie, the last ever, as well as the stand-alone Scarlet Begonias), but the band is still on its way to the fiery peaks of 1977. Jerry's playing might be the main drawback -- it's fluent, but rarely has the concentrated spaciness of '74 or the rock-and-roll fire he developed soon after. (That being said, his vocals show unusual gusto, Phil is as wild as ever, Bill and Mickey are reasonably locked in, and Keith sounds somewhat better than he would the next two years.)

The most worthwhile moments, though, come in the second set jams. Both nights are interesting in that the band seems even more willing than usual to venture without a map, sometimes stumbling and occasionally hinting at multiple songs at once. The odd jam that links Samson and Delilah to Comes A Time (strange bedfellows) on 9/28 is a good example, as is the equally peculiar one between Eyes Of The World and Dancing In The Streets later on. These transitional bits sound tentative, and undoubtedly would never have made it to CD were the Dead members more heavily involved in the DP release process. For us fans, though, these are the standouts here. Also, note the two rather different versions of Let It Grow, which serve as the penultimate songs in both first sets. (Cassidy, Minglewood Blues and Dancing In The Streets also appear twice.)

So, we have another Dead live release that won't change the world, but is certainly worth a Deadhead's money. And if you play your cards right and make the grade as a JamBands.com reviewer, you might get one for free someday as I just did.

"Music From Rancho deVille" is bluegrass guitarist's Charles Sawtelle's solo debut. Diagnosed with Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia since 1993, it's also a disc he never got to finish. Sawtelle died in March of 1999.

You can draw all kinds of conclusions about someone who was called "The Bluegrass Mystery" not being able to finish his first frontman job. Call it fate, bitter irony, bad luck. None of them do justice to the power of the music on this fine Acoustic Disc offering.

Sawtelle was born in Austin, Texas, and spent his early years bopping around the U.S. and Canada due to his father's career in the oil exploration industry. He started on steel guitar and switched over to acoustic guitar at the same time he discovered the bluegrass of Bill Monroe and the sounds of Leadbelly, the Carter Family, Woody Guthrie and Blind Willie Johnson. Along with Tim O'Brien, Sawtelle was a member of the Colorado-based Hot Rize bluegrass band from in inception in 1978 until it disbanded in 1990. The Rancho deVille in the disc's title is the named after his studio, where he went on to produce albums by Mollie O'Brien, the Bluegrass Patriots, Beausoleil and Leftover Salmon.

Sawtelle's contribution to the disc could never be considered close to complete but the pinch hit efforts by so many of the musicians who he connected with make this a glorious celebration of Sawtelle's career and the old-tyme music he loved. The song credits on "Music From Rancho deVille" read like a "who's who" of American roots music. A partial list of contributors include David Grisman, Peter Rowan (with whom Sawtelle performed after the breakup of Hot Rize), Vassar Clements, Cajun fiddler Michael Doucet, Darol Anger, Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas.

While an essentially different group of musicians on each track doesn't make for the most cohesive of records but it does provide for a wonderful celebration of the forms of music America calls its own. The Butcher's Dog, a Sawtelle original instrumental, opens the disc with an upbeat tempo and precise picking from Sawtelle, fiddlers Jean Ballhorn and Laurie Lewis (a co-producer), Pete Wernick on banjo and Grisman, whose playing is not only inspired on the six tracks he participated in but plugs in some holes that were presumably guitar tracks that Sawtelle couldn't complete. It's noted that his disease had ravaged much of his energy but Sawtelle does provide lead vocals on two songs: his singing on Woody Guthrie's The Ranger's Command are warm, down-home and personal. Rowan provides a wonderful vocal to the break-neck speed bluegrass of Gonna Paint the Town and Norman Blake tenderly reads a pair of Carter family nuggets, the Storms Are On the Ocean and Amber Tresses -- in fact, he sings them like he wrote them.

The disc's finest moments, however, come with things get Cajunized through the contributions of Doucet, who leads the wonderful Beausoleil. His original instrumental The Newz Reel has the chainsaw-like rhythmic drive that keeps audiences dancing at shows far beyond his home of Southwestern Louisiana. He also participates in a trio instrumental with Lewis and Sawtelle on Chez Seychelles, which Doucet says was Sawtelle's favorite Cajun melody, the two also pair off on the disc's only duet, the traditional Grand Texas.

"Music from Rancho deVille" is a wonderful collection that will make listeners dance to high-lonesome sounds with abandon, sit back an marvel at the beauty of an acoustic instrumental and, hopefully introduce a whole new group of people to a guitarist that would have become a bluegrass heavyweight. Acoustic Disc and the Sawtelle family are donating proceeds from the sale of this album to various community organizations including The Bluegrass Trust, a non-profit fund to help musicians in need.

I have an ongoing search for the perfect morning album. The variety I look for are ones that usually end up being ambient with the morning, the ones that suspend me between standing and lying down, slumped in my desk chair. For responsible parents and those generally concerned with health, a good solid breakfast is an important way to start the day, potentially having the ability to mold the shape of the entire day. For those of us who don't go in on that food trip, the first album of the day can be equally important: something that organizes our brains and configures our heads for the tasks of the day. The choices that I tend to go for are peaceful albums - "Blood On The Tracks" by Bob Dylan or "Astral Weeks" by Van Morrison - usually acoustic and bright -- something weirdly optimistic.

Recently, though, I've discovered something new. I got out of bed, shuffled to the stoop to check the weather and the mail, and found a package from Atlanta. Inside were two Col. Bruce Hampton albums that I used to have on tape (and probably still do somewhere). I knew it was risky, but I put "One Ruined Life Of A Bronze Tourist" into the CD player and tentatively hit play. What followed was the strongest morning album I've ever heard, twisting my head thoroughly into some kind of exotic sailor's knot and properly breaking my brain for the oncoming day. It was like a cup of coffee, a beer to cure a hangover, a bong hit, and a cold shower all at once.

This is music that doesn't let the listener get a grip anywhere. It's hard to listen to straight through, which is why I recommend it as morning listening: if you put it on first thing in the morning, you'll be too weak to turn it off. That's exactly as it should be. If you're too conscious, too awake, thinking about the music too much, you'll want to turn it off. And this is music that is good for you, though it's not classical, and it's not any of the kinds of things that teachers or parents inflicted on you.

It's more like this: mushrooms are a great drug, but they make you really nauseous. Therefore, the only righteous way to eat them is to get religiously stoned beforehand so you have the munchies already and can insure that they're the only things around. At any rate, you might want to vomit them up - "the threat of vomit", as Col. Bruce himself elucidates in "Outside Out" - but you won't, and they'll end up warping your perspective for the next few hours.

The threat of vomit is ultra-important -- but you have to make yourself forget the threat. After all, who wants to vomit, at least at first? Play this as a morning album until you feel like you get it, then start to assimilate it into the rest of your day. It'll work. You'll be a better person for it.

At first, this may come off as freakish music, shitty music, but that's just it. It's like this: check out this section from "Geek Love" by Katherine Dunn, during which Olympia the hunch-backed dwarf is pulled onstage to dance at a strip club that features deformed strippers:

"The twisting of my hump feels good against the warm air and the sweat of my bald head runs down into my bald eyes and stings with brightness and the spirit of the waggling hump moves over the stage and catches red pants, hairy bellies, and all while I stamp on my buttonless blouse, slide on the tangled elastic harness, and open my near-blind eyes wide so they can see the true pink there - the raw albino eye in the lashless sockets - and it is good. How proud I am, dancing in the full air or eyes rubbing at me uncovered, unable to look away because of what I am. Those poor hoptoads behind me are silent. I've conquered them. They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born" (Dunn 21).

Col. Bruce is a true freak, perhaps the truest freak we will ever know in our incestuous little music scene. I won't go so far as to call him a genius, but he's certainly a man with a perspective. Even if it's just meaningless babble that he's spewing, listen for a moment to the content of the babble. It's nothing that anybody I've met would ever call into being. If it's random, spewing forth from a subconscious, it's amazing. If it means something to Bruce, it's even more amazing. Even if it's just some southern wiseass trying to pass himself off as a sage, well, why not run with it?

The difference between Col. Bruce and unlistenable music is the distinction Dunn makes between freaks and impostors. Bad music - the kind you'd find on a teen-pop station - is made bad because of your own predilections, your own tastes. Bad music, in the Col. Bruce sense, is inherently out, aware of its own place in the universe and quite confident that it belongs there. It never pretends to be anything else. In fact, it is so confident that it belongs there that it can gain leverage over unsuspecting listeners through sheer existence.

This is not ironic music either, for that matter. No one is being made fun of. Irony presupposes some kind of standard form to deviate from. While there might be musical allusions to blues, jazz, or other genres, it's done so in an utterly reconstituted way. There are tales of isolated tribes in Africa that, after coming into contact with Western armies, built full-scale replicas of war planes. These replicas were correct in shape, but wrong in content: they didn't have any of the mechanics that made them work. When Col. Bruce's music takes form at all, it's like this. Usually, though, it just involves gargling and babble.

Let Col. Bruce break your brain. You know it's about high time for a good paradigm shift.

There's a whole lot that goes into formulating a successful tribute album. Though "Sketches Of James" might not be called a tribute in the truest sense, there's no questioning the admiration that the 10 artists and groups on this album have for the music of James Taylor. The emotion and creative juice needed to make this album special is evident on each and every track. What makes this tribute more complex than the usual fare is the fact that producer Tim Weston called on musicians and singers from the jazz tradition to paint this visceral picture of Taylor's work. Not every song on the album is one of his greatest hits, but each one gets a definitively unique treatment to keep even the casual James Taylor fan's attention.

It should be no real surprise that Taylor's material provides rich fodder for skilled players like Flora Purim, Airto Moreira, Robben Ford, and Tower of Power. Rooted in blues and melodic rock and roll, each of the songs are molded in the vision of the performers. Purim, Moreira, Oscar Castro Neves, and Poncho Sanchez (who leads his Latin Jazz Band here) throw a healthy dose of South American soul into the mix, while Ford and the New York Voices offer contrasting vocal interpretations of popular Taylor tunes.

There are delicate nuances at play that might be lost in the interpretation of less than competent musicians, further reinforcing the logic that jazz music is a great way to hear James Taylor. Gerald Albright explores some unusually complex chord progressions with his alto saxophone rendition of Your Smiling Face. Sanchez's interpretation of Fire And Rain is also one of the more unique arrangements on the album. He takes the melodic vocal lines of the song and transforms them into a lush instrumental interlude, perhaps concocted deep within the heart of the rain forest.

Only A Dream In Rio offers similar treatment, only this time Flora Purim sings sweetly in both Portuguese and English while Airto creates a rhythmic milieu supported again by Albright on sax and sweet vocal backing by Carmen Twilly and Mary Hylan. Robben Ford's treatment of You Make It Easy works particularly well as Ford and Taylor sounds like they are in the same vocal register, at least to the untrained critic's ear.

This is a very inviting album. Obviously, James Taylor fans will enjoy it, but even those that are not lifetime members of his fan club will find something to enjoy with these jazzy, Latin-inspired charts. The vocals are superb on the tracks with singing, and as Tim Weston explains in the liner notes, the song choices all work because each musician got to pick which song he wanted to sing. The net result is 10 tracks of quality music, created by inspired musicians who were originally inspired by one of the best singer-songwriters of our time.

The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's", and "Revolver", Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks", the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds", the Rolling Stones' "Sticky Fingers", and the Mother Hips' "Green Hills of Earth." Sounds strange, a band unheard of by the Eastern forty-five states being added to a list featuring the five dubiously titled "greatest albums ever". However, the Mother Hips deserve such hyperbolic placement. In fact, the most ineffable question facing many first-time listeners will be "How the hell did a band this good slip under the proverbial musical radar?"

There are many reasons, the most paramount being the Mother Hips refusal to pander to any labeling, and most specifically the irritating "jamband" label forced upon the band in 1995. Given the fact the Northern California quartet live never noodles and refuses to fall into the self-masturbatory exile of a ten-minute guitar solo, an astute individual can comprehend their indignation towards inaccurate classification. Instead, the band creates tightly crafted songs which lyrically rival the works of Lennon/McCartney, and feature harmonies conceivably better than Brian Wilson's bubble-gum harmonic symphonies.
Titling the album "Green Hills of Earth" creates a literary connotation as if the band remains foreign to Earth, which becomes an attempt to attach the album to a previous epoch where great albums did exist. The group, estranged from Earth, must be looking down on our current musical depravity and feel as though they have the antidote. They do, but are we listening?

Still confused or uncertain about the rather lofty territory and names being connected to the Mother Hips' "Green Hills of Earth"? Being blunt and succinct, the Mother Hips have crafted the best album in nearly twenty years, and as a result will force listeners to examine the works of the Beatles, Beach Boys, Bee Gees and Kinks in a far more intellectual light -- an album, not a collection of singles, nor a work which has one stupendous jam then ten really soporific tracks, but an album, with a vibe, a concept and a presence of literary acumen.

However, a paragraph to paragraph, song to song summary seems not only rudimentary but damaging to the music being created by the Mother Hips. Can writing truly express jangling guitars, tape loops, perfect harmonies and lyrics loaded with literary allusions? Paul de Man stands over my shoulder and cries about the genocide of language, allegory versus symbol, melody versus harmony, the sign and symbol do not coincide.

Hopefully a serious aura surrounds my tone and the reader can understand my trepidation. "Green Hills of Earth" deserves such immediate literary respect, as extra commentary may destroy one of the more valuable musical releases. As with most music which has been siphoned and distilled to an immediately palatable and commercial form, destruction and analysis can be rather easily written. Listening to the newest pop/rock/jam/hip hop act of the month, most writers are so sick of the standard, socially anticipated chord changes, that destruction and analysis may actually aid the artwork.

When the Mother Hips resurrect the sounds of the Beach Boys on Singing Seems to Ease Me, Channel Island Girl and Sarah Bellum or the equally ancient genius of John Lennon on Given For You and Pull Us All Together, sincerity, not nmetonics, becomes readily conspicuous. The music exists on another level, in another time and in a way which belays standard classification. A writer, when faced with analyzing Ryan Adams' "Heartbreaker" - an album which ended up on the top five lists of every major publication in the country and ventured into similar Bob Dylan/Beatles musical territories - felt he could only make one statement about the album, "fucking perfect" [1]. My only amendment might be another adjective, to add some necessary emphasis, and even there I might be overstepping my boundaries; if only I could write with Blanchot's impersonality.

Notes.

1. A recent trip to my local record store allowed me to touch base with owners and managers, who - receiving a promo - have heard the same music -- all of whom could not help but discuss the music. People who claimed Tortoise and God Speed You Black Emperor! are the only acts worth listening to, were enamored by the music; vivacious, reactionary, genius music which surpasses the quote "great albums" released by Son Volt, Wilco and Whiskeytown. The trip also revealed to me the album's ineffability. Hours of conversations left me mumbling about pop music's heroes; which says something.

"Main Street" is a new film by writer/producer/director Clay Harper starring Kevin Kinney of Drivin' n Cryin', and is being released by Casino International Pictures. The soundtrack (like the inner-city) has a decidedly Spanish flavor to it from the first song. In fact, there is a piece of raw urban poetry to open the disc, setting the tone with its accent, its attitude, and the background din of the city itself. From there we are launched, via horns and soul, onto Main Street by Broken Window - The Main Street Theme, a simple mood-setting instrumental that communicates fully with a few mere blasts of the trumpet. The percussion-flavored Salsa feel is only enhanced by the very next cut They're speaking Spanish in the kitchen (and Love is in the air).

It seems that when career musicians are responsible for not only the soundtrack, but most or all aspects of a movie's production, we get a finer tuned, more directly representative soundtrack than we would get from anything the Hollywood sausage factory could ever try to spoon-feed us. It is almost expected that I wouldn't have a chance to see the movie before having to review this soundtrack, but - in many ways - that is precisely how a soundtrack needs to be reviewed these days -- independent of the movie itself. Does the soundtrack portray a distinct image to me? Do I get a feel for what the movie is about, or where it is headed? And, most importantly: does it have enough good music to stand on its own as a release. Gone are the days where the movie soundtrack is released as a post-script accompaniment to a film. These days, soundtracks are released prior to, and sometimes even despite, the movies themselves. Often, they are chockfull of blockbuster hits by unimaginable superstars who, by virtue of names alone, sell scores of discs that end up subsidizing the films themselves instead of complementing them. Enough of my sarcasm; how's the soundtrack Dave?

Based on my little rant there, I would like to point out that Clay Harper set out to combat those images precisely. His job - and I am paraphrasing here - was to produce a movie whose music was not only important to the film, but synergistic with it. "Main Street" is inspired by the great situational musicals of the past, specifically things like "West Side Story", where the music not only enhances the plot, but is relied on to communicate it as well. Most of the characters are based on real people in Harper's life. That in itself always lends itself to an element of realism that cannot be reproduced with any degree of accuracy, no matter how talented the writer.

Songs like Carolina (You ain't superstar material) take me back to watching Starsky & Hutch and the inevitable chase scene, with a specific waka-waka guitar sound. Before each cut there tends to be some sort of intro/sound clip from the movie: the silky smooth radio announcer's voice of Dr. Word, the aging hippie monologue, as well as the aforementioned situational poetry. All of these help keep the listener grounded, envisioning the daily grind of someone just like him, or who could be by some minor twist of fate.

The underlying tone is one of unavoidable, or sometimes even expected, loss. The producer himself claims to be trying to express a people, educated in college, moving into a life littered by corruption and seediness: the American dream lived out on the street, without conscience or emotion except for what can be expressed in the music.

The Motet covers a lot of ground. That needs to be said first. "Play" tests the limits of their self-applied Electric Americubafrican Groove appellation, traversing the soundscape from the rich rhythms of the islands to uplift-the-people funk to African drum exercises to the kora music of Western Mali. As often as not, their reach exceeds their grasp in this multilingual, polyrhythmic second effort from the Coloradan ethnomusicologists and rhythmatists.

As Guinee Kan proves, the Motet can layer a groove with the best of them. When their rhythm machine starts churning, the walls seem to dance. Slapping, rapping, and tapping on a wide array of toys, they build and maintain a hypnotic and entrancing underbelly that seems instinctive to them. Stack a guitar, organ and bass atop three full-time drummers, throw in the occasional dash of horns and a range of male and female voices and you have an idea.

The album opens with Chicken Scratch, a brief but promising instrumental gambit that brandishes the rhythmic prowess that slashes across the disc like a fiery sword. The carefree roll slides into Do What You Want, the first of several empowerment/I gotta be me-I gotta be free tunes, which also includes the Lesson and Givin' What You Can. While these tunes are decidedly danceable, at times the group's trite aphorisms prove distracting (such platitudes seem more effective from the mouth of someone such as Sly Stone).

While it is entirely possible that the Portuguese and Spanish tunes share similar lyrical shortfalls, they still serve as better showcases of the band's many and varied talents. The quickened pulse of Minha Mae Ochunmare is infectious and proven to incite gyrations of every manner. The primarily vocal call and response of Ellegua/Chango features some of the album's finest singing, and the jazzy El Muy Nervio that follows rollicks and swings with the best of them. The riveting bass line churns beneath the zigging and zagging interplay of the guitar and organ. The, "Yo necessito el mango," lines that close the song are superfluous, but the melody is nice. Bobo heats up behind it with atmospheric organ sounds that grate or delight, depending on your tastes and perhaps your opinion of Ozzie Allers.

Nothing stretches the edges of the Motet's canvas more than their faithful interpretation of Toumani Diabate's Keimbeng. Their rendering captures the blithe and captivating rhythms of West Malian kora music and features soloing that extends well beyond the rhythmic framework of the exclusively instrumental tune. While it serves merely as a dreamlike interlude within the context of the album, it speaks to the Motet's occasional willingness to faithfully render the music of other cultures, where the majority of their work assimilates elements of Cuban and African rhythm into their own sound.

Rhumbata closes the ride with all that is best in the Motet. The rhythmic octopus slaps down another irresistible Afro Cuban rhythm and invites the rich and weighty brass into the mix. The acoustic piano and later the more grounded organ shine brightest on this track, and the guitar work is at its most inspired. The male and female vocalists mesh, melt and inspire, and the rhythm breaks build the surge, bring the flood, and crash the dam down. The reemergence/hidden track features a pair of authentic and inspiring voices dueling over the bevy of drums again, fading into a close.

"Play" is uneven with decided dips as the songs lean toward more familiar American funk, but the collective's ability to render authentic music from a variety of cultures, create dense rhythms, and spill out lines that force the body into motion all bode well for the future. As the band develops and fuses the disparate elements of its scope, the emergent sound promises to shake and move you inside and out.