RJ Wheaton

Review at PopMatters:

The music… lacks the outcroppings to enable—let alone reward—serious listening.

If this is not merely the result of lack of imagination, or the triumph of marketing taste over musical inspiration, it is presumably drawn from the po-faced introspection of cool jazz—of Gerry Mulligan, Art Pepper, Stan Getz and, above all, Chet Baker. The stance that these artists took in the 1950s, apparently shunning overt artistic creation and concentrating on the smallest inflections in the performance of winsome ballads, has dominated much of the popular imagery of jazz ever since.

Unfortunately it suffers badly out of context: in the 1950s, their attitude bespoke a turning away from the materialism and conformity emerging as mainstays of American culture—not to mention a revulsion at mainstream acquiescence in the inequalities of post-war racial and cultural politics. The cool movement’s suave wounded romanticism was deliberately counterfeit; a tool to suggest how deeply felt was their ostracism from mainstream life. It was a cue taken up by the Beat movement, inspiring much of the cultural radicalism of the following decades.

Review of the new Wayne Shorter anthology, Footprints, at PopMatters:

Shorter’s compositions for Davis took the raw ingredients of hard bop and stretched them out, exploring the modal space that Davis had outlined a few years earlier in Kind of Blue. Shorter’s surprising, angular melodies had a singular and unpredictable beauty. Floating above chords arranged into glistening, half-seen shapes, they sketched out logical figures that tailed off into fluid emotional whimsy. At other times they cut deep into the logical bedding of the music, bringing light to unseen corners. Coltrane proceeded via exhaustion and explosion, never letting any musical or emotional wall remain standing; Shorter and Davis preferred the scalpel.

Album review of Jimmy Behan’s Days Are What We Live In at PopMatters:

Behan has supported Four Tet and Manitoba on tour, and shares much of the sonic vocabulary of “folktronica”. Days Are What We Live In has a crisp, clear upper mid-range; spare, sparse piano and keyboard figures dominate. There are the same splintered fractions of guitar licks and reversed fragments of sound that Four Tet has made its own. The album’s lower range is generally filled with warm, throbbing sounds; the effect should be hypnotic, cumulative. Drum sounds, when used, punctuate the shimmering structure.

And:

There are moments of great prettiness here. They remain opaque, which is both frustrating and quite deliberate: this music is all surface. It is meticulous, measured, finely-crafted. If it fails to move or arouse, that is as much a feature of the genre as it is a failing of imagination.