Audio and Classical Files

By GINA VIVINETTO, SCOTT CHRABAS, ROBERT FRIEDMAN, JEFFREY S. SOLOCHEK and JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times,
published September 2, 2001

ALISON KRAUSS, NEW FAVORITE (ROUNDER) You don't have to be a hick to love the music of Alison Krauss and Union Station. Though Krauss initially made her mark as a bluegrass fiddler, she eventually opened her mouth and the world heard her angelic voice.

Why, just the other day I informed yet another recent convert to the cult of Krauss that the girl with the beautiful voice was an instrumental musician first. Listening to New Favorite, the first album in four years from AKUS, as the band dubs itself, I held a finger up when that fiddle kicked in. "That's Alison," I said. My companion, someone more down with Korn than cornfields, looked stunned.

Krauss is a bona fide crossover artist, and though she's pictured in red leather pants and a cooler-than-thou layered hairdo in snapshots on this album, Krauss sacrifices none of her artistry or authenticity as her audience grows. She and Union Station delighted the bluegrass contingent with their peppery, crucial contributions to the Americana adventure that is the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack.

On her latest CD, you'll find some of that bluegrass sass and plenty of the kind of somber adult pop Krauss favored on Forget About It, her 1999 solo album. New Favorite is filled with the gorgeous sounds of dobro, banjo and Krauss' feisty fiddle. She begins by breaking our hearts with Let Me Touch You for a While. A peerless interpreter -- that is, if you keep Emmylou Harris in the wings -- Krauss again uses favorite songwriters Robert Lee Castleman and Mark Simos. There's even a number by Dan Fogleberg. Krauss steps aside to let Union Station's Dan Tyminski show off his earthshaking tenor on two of the album's strongest cuts. B+

-- GINA VIVINETTO, Times pop music critic

Q-BURNS ABSTRACT MESSAGE, INVISIBLE AIRLINE (ASTRALWERKS) Despite the implications of his protracted pseudonym, Orlando-based DJ-producer Michael Donaldson's Invisible Airline is a light and generally accessible dance disc right from the irresistible disco call of Hey! Star City, its siren song/boarding call inciting all manner of body rockin'.

Donaldson shares the floor with a good mix of featured performers on the disc. Imprisoned Glitch places rapper Swamburger under digitized cyborg voice effects and electrofunk rhythms. He remixes Elmo Williams in a marriage of blues lament and electronica in the key of Moby on Mother's Dead. Percussionist Eugene Snowden pits his drums against Q-Burns' synthesizers on Asa Nisi Masa to rapturous effect.

His most fruitful collaboration is with vocalist Lisa Shaw, and it covers nearly half of the album. She co-wrote her tracks with Q-Burns and lends an athletic delight to her intonations of "You're gonna love, love, love me." She wraps breezy heartache around Donaldson's syncopated beat whorls (Shame) and drops asides like Deborah Harry on the triumphant Drifting Off. Theirs is a gilded pop union. B

Q-Burns Abstract Message performs along with DJ Boomerang and the Boats at 9 tonight at the Lobby Bar in downtown St. Petersburg.

-- SCOTT CHRABAS, Times staff writer

SAM PHILLIPS, FAN DANCE (NONESUCH) Sam Phillips is the most formidable woman in rock since Marianne Faithfull came back from the dead 20 years ago to scare the hell out of everybody with Broken English. Or at least Phillips and Lucinda Williams could have a stare-down for the title.

Phillips started out in Christian music, but her songs raised too many uncomfortable questions to fit in that complacent format. When her mind turns to more earthly concerns, she's probably a handful for hubby T-Bone Burnett, too. As she complained on 1994's masterful Martinis & Bikinis: "I need love, not some sentimental prison. I need God, not the political church."

On past records, Phillips' angst was swathed in late-Beatles sheen, thanks to Burnett's dexterous production and session musicians such as Marc Ribot, Peter Buck and Benmont Tench.

Fan Dance is sparer, starker, shorter. Burnett wisely backs off, creating a mood intimate enough to induce gooseflesh as Phillips peels away layers of her soul. The intermittent accompaniment -- Gillian Welch's background vocals, Van Dyke Parks' string arrangements -- adds sinew instead of sheen.

Fan Dance won't make Phillips a big star. The more uptempo Martinis & Bikinis should have done that. But some of these songs, such as Five Colors and Love Is Everywhere I Go, are gorgeous, and the rest make for the best kind of uneasy listening. A-

-- ROBERT FRIEDMAN, Times staff writer

JOE STRUMMER & THE MESCALEROS, GLOBAL A GO-GO (HELLCAT RECORDS) It's been 15 years since Joe Strummer quit his gig as lead singer of seminal British punk band the Clash, and two years since his last release. But for him the beat clearly goes on with the Mescaleros.

The 2-year-old group released Global a Go-Go in late July and quickly got lost amid the hype of 'N Sync's Celebrity. Now take a listen. The CD proves an eclectic blend of tropical, Celtic, punk and more, all fused effortlessly behind the voice that called our attention to London's ghettos and warned us about the violence brewing at the casbah.

Strummer still fumes with anger at the plight of the working class.

"Burned out cars in the Valley, there are 17, an' boom goes the refinery. . . . Where do nomads go when the Dow Jones falls too low?" he wonders in At the Border, Guy. He sings about freedom denied (Johnny Appleseed), the Balkanization of the world (Mega Bottle Ride) and the exploitation of the poor (Cool 'n' Out).

Strummer didn't record from 1989 to 1999. His return to the music scene is welcome. B+

-- JEFFREY S. SOLOCHEK, Times staff writer

CLASSICAL FILE

INGRAM MARSHALL: KINGDOM COME (NONESUCH) -- American composer Ingram Marshall has been cultivating his corner of the electronic postminimalist garden for at least 25 years, but he is no household name. So it came as something of a revelation to me, a newcomer to Marshall's music, to discover works of such strange, alluring distinction in Kingdom Come.

The title piece is especially striking, a seamless incorporation of taped material into a lush, complex orchestral texture, performed by the American Composers Orchestra under Paul Lustig Dunkel. Written as an elegy to Marshall's brother-in-law, a journalist killed in the ethnic wars of the former Yugoslavia, Kingdom Come uses recordings the composer made in Croatian and Serbian churches, plus a Bosnian Muslim chant.

Manipulated almost beyond recognition by electronics, these sounds from the "real" world mesh with slow-moving minor chords in the orchestra to create a deeply mysterious atmosphere. Inspired by the Sibelius tone poem The Swan of Tuonela, the 16-minute work is tranquil and anguished at the same time. It has the dark, shimmering beauty of a velvet shroud.

Death is also a theme in Hymnodic Delays, in which Marshall embroiders fragments of 18th century hymns into an intricate canon, superbly sung by Paul Hillier's four-member Theatre of Voices. Again, electronic delays and echoes contribute to the richly layered effect.

Marshall's most popular work, Fog Tropes, has been recorded twice previously by brass sextet with tape. Here, a new version for strings features the Kronos Quartet and the original tape collage of foghorns, sea birds and other ambient sounds from San Francisco Bay.

The CD booklet has informative program notes by Marshall and evocative photographs that go with the music. A

-- JOHN FLEMING, Times performing arts critic

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