Apropos of nothing: new Joe Henry album available on NPR
In a feature I hadn't paid attention to while overseas, NPR has over the past year offered "
Exclusive First Listens" to entire new albums on line. Today: an hour's worth of
Blood From Stars by the wonderful bluesy guitarist-singer Joe Henry.
The trick is that the full-length streaming audio is turned off once the album officially goes on sale. Thus the past-events listing includes full-length sessions from Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Moby, etc -- but none of the music is still there. (The oldest still-available entry is from one week ago.) If you click on the older sessions, you're taken to an Amazon or iTunes purchase site. Fair enough: this is one more interesting twist in the vast, varied, and necessary series of experiments now underway to see how "content," from music to movies to news articles, can be "monetized" in the age when so much of it can be copied or used for free.
I mention it for that reason -- and also because anyone who, like me, hadn't known of the feature might find it worthwhile. Certainly this Joe Henry music is great. Check it out while it is there.
Why isn't Bireli Lagrene a household name?
I know, it's a cliche: cranky Boomer-era guy thinks kids today should like jazz better. Still, as a Father's Day indulgence I'll express my surprise that more people in the US don't know about the French/Gypsy jazz guitar phenom Bireli Lagrene.
He's a star in Europe, but I don't see that he has really entered the US consciousness or appeared on any of the main interview or talk shows. (Fresh Air bookers???) Maybe he doesn't speak English? He can sing with a completely convincing American accent -- Frank Sinatra's accent, to be specific -- but everyone sounds American when singing. If language actually is the barrier, he could fake it, with the ever-appealing French accent. Or just play.
A search on YouTube for Bireli Lagrene will turn up a rich assortment of his concerts in Europe, in such different styles as this in the cool, slow mode and this with warp-speed virtuoso fingering and much in between. And here, via the Amazon listing for his wonderful Blue Eyes CD of Sinatra songs, is a minute-long sample in Windows Media format of I've Got You Under My Skin. For me, all of these are slow to load, but I think that a China problem.
This is the kind of thing you like or you don't. My theory is: you should. But that brings us back to the first line of this post.
