Yann Tiersen
Irving Plaza
Friday, April 27

Better than: Most of the Philip Glass and Stephin Merritt music I've heard.

Skyline, Yann Tiersen's seventh studio album, is only the second album of his current deal with Anti- and, like 2010's Dust Lane, it pioneers sonic territory structurally different from the old-fashioned chansons that have been on heavy rotation in downtown Manhattan bistros for months. Gone are the sparse, folk-inflected dreamscapes people remember from 2005's Les Retrouvailles or the twin 2001 releases of L'Absente and Yann's score to the French film Amélie. Fewer acoustic instruments appear, and those that do are distorted or displaced by vintage synthesizer textures. Instead he gives us propulsive drums and wailing guitars hot enough to rival early Roxy Music.

Did ticketholders who considered themselves early fans of Yann's work feel betrayed last night by this new direction? Judging by the mild discontent I overheard among Irving Plaza standees during an almost-two-hour show, the shift will be a risky experiment as he strives to increase his U.S. following. Not that he's worried. Even while securing his place in the lucrative world of film scoring, Yann puts his muse before money, a strategy that seems to have served him well. (And it's worth noting that Saturday's show in Brooklyn sold out in advance.)

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Etta James used to tell a story about meeting Billie Holiday in which Holiday told her—fatherless wild child to fatherless wild child—not to let the bad men and drugs that were going to come her way destroy her. Something about that brief conversation must've stuck, because despite many misadventures with drugs and men over the years, James was sober by the time I met her in the early '90s and carefully planning the comeback which won her new contracts, tours, awards, and laurels. James lived to see her role as a musical pioneer boldly re-inscribed in America's public memory, then capped her legacy with a magnificent final album mere months before her death in Riverside, Calif., on January 20, just five days short of her 74th birthday.

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To supplement this year's Pazz & Jop launch, Sound of the City asked a few critics to expand on the reasonings behind their voting. This dispatch comes from Carol Cooper, whose ballot went far beyond the boundaries of the United States and its pop charts.

These days American pop music sounds too fat and happy, so full of its own global importance that would-be anthems like "Born This Way" and "Run the World (Girls)" come across as insular and petulant, rather than triumphantly universal. Even their companion videos look more like carnival rides than artistic expression. Which is not to say that contrived artistry never works—the country scene is notorious for overthinking how certain singers, concepts, and songwriters might go together. Acts like the novelty trio Pistol Annies hit a sweet spot between humor and truth that brought to mind the Roches and inspired longing for the Dixie Chicks. Big & Rich, meanwhile, gave teens their own hip-hop hillbilly theme song with "Fake I.D.," replete with bluegrass fiddle and banjo riffs. I also love the typically country juxtaposition of soft voice/hard lyric as illustrated by Ronnie Dunn's mournful pragmatism on "Cost of Livin'" and Sunny Sweeney's deceptive bravado on "Drink Myself Single." It's hard for my r&b homegirls to match country candor when singing through so much routine signal processing, but Nicki Minaj's Rihanna-assisted "Fly" proves how sweet two bionic babes can sound once they unleash their inner TLC on the perfect power ballad.

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"Weather" isn't the first Meshell Ndegeocello single to fall into the category of "freak folk," but the album of the same name (Naive) is her first that can be comfortably filed under that genre. Classical and country elements have often enhanced Ndegeocello's melding of jazz, rock, global funk and hip-hop; since 1993, her live shows have included acoustic string cameos and interludes. She used banjo loops and a harmonica on the jazz instrumental "Luqman" in 2005, and made Chris Bruce play country banjo over flanged keyboard pads and vocals on 2009's "Crying in Your Beer."

Even when making Cookie—arguably the smartest r&b album of the '00s—in 2002, she borrowed ideas from '70s jazz-fusion pioneers who embraced trippy instrumentation and augmented harmonies as much as today's freak folk vanguard. And although Weather Report and Return to Forever are the first groups I think about whenever Ndegeocello gets spacey and psychedelic in the
studio, retro-hippie Prince efforts like Around the World in a Day are equally important reference points. While Ndegeocello might be a far less mellow multi-instrumentalist and spiritual seeker than, say, Sufjan Stevens, if there's any justice, the 13 elegant arrangements on Weather should attract a big chunk of his target audience.

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The Creole Choir of Cuba.

The end of the year brings a flurry of world music albums with commercial intentions ranging from the archival to the optimistically opportunistic. Some, like the Creole Choir of Cuba's Tande-La or Vlada Tomova's Balkan Tales, accompany tours by the outfits that made them; others are heavily branded theme compilations—brain candy for collegiate introverts, mood music for bars and boutiques.

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People were so busy comparing Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" to Madonna's "Express Yourself" earlier this year that they didn't notice the similarities between the lead single from Gaga's new album and French DJ/producer David Guetta's 2009 Kelly Rowland collaboration "When Love Takes Over." Indeed, when you strip both artists down to their sonics, the cultural revolution represented by Guetta's two most recent records could be potentially more significant than anything yet manifested by Gaga.

Guetta, neither a prissy purist nor a smug segregationist, is effortlessly bringing the mutually embattled worlds of rap, r&b, pop, rock, and underground dance music together in ways only hoped for by America's most idealistic DJs. His new album Nothing But the Beat (Capitol) solidifies his bid to be the Quincy Jones of contemporary groove pop, even while his critics dismiss his admiration of seminal experiments in American rap and underground disco. But Guetta never wholly replicates his favorite atavisms; he merely evokes and pays passionate homage to them.

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Boogaloo! with Spanglish Fly, DJ Turmix
Nublu
Friday, July 8

Better than: Paying twice as much to watch the same crowd drink and not dance.

It could have been a disaster—subway service to Loisaida was screwed up (again), it was raining, one of the club's turntables was on the fritz, the band had had mere hours to warn Facebook fans to feed their own heads since the club would serve no booze due to a sudden (but temporary) problem with their liquor license. Not only did people from different age groups, classes, races, and boroughs come, they cheerfully paid to dance their asses off in a dry bar roughly the size and shape of a large railroad flat.

The second Friday of every month at Nublu is dedicated to resurrecting Latin boogaloo, a teen dance trend from the mid-1960s that helped various forms of Afro-Cuban swing compete against the then-reigning Motown, Stax, and Brit Invasion singles. Latin boogaloo bands were famous for re-arranging hot singles by the Meters or the MGs, and for Latinizing anything useful Motown or the Beatles had to say. It was the sound of young, tri-cultural musicians having fun.

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In the '60s and '70s danceable jazz-pop in foreign languages made American radio more exciting: Jorge Ben's "Mas Que Nada" charted when recorded by Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66; it was followed by Miriam Makeba's remake of "Pata Pata" in 1967, Tito Puente's "Oye Como Va" when covered by Santana in 1970, and Manu Dibango's irresistible "Soul Makossa" in 1972. Something about each single's arrangements, rhythms, and vocals allowed these crossover miracles to seduce stateside listeners who only understand English.

Don't be too surprised if it happens again with Spanish singer Concha Buika and French high-concept hip-hoppers Les Nubians; they seem uniquely positioned to win America's love, even though Buika normally sings in Spanish while Hélène and Célia Faussart record mostly in French.

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During the first episode of HBO's Treme, members of the Rebirth Brass Band and the show's trombone-playing character Antoine Batiste end a jazz parade in front of a neighborhood bar owned by Batiste's ex-wife, LaDonna Batiste-Williams. The uncomfortable nature of their reunion is underscored when the younger band members try to flirt by asking why she left Antoine. "You wanna know what went wrong?" she replies, dryly. "Married a goddamned musician. Ain't no way to make that shit right!"

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The wildly inventive and passionately polemical science-fiction writer Philip José Farmer quietly expired at home, Ash Wednesday morning, at the ripe age of 91. I and many others first became aware of Farmer's work in the 1970s, shortly after the first volume of his legendary Riverworld series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go won the Hugo Award for best novel. The central conceit of Riverworld is that all existing religions are wrong about the afterlife: In Farmer's work, earth's luckier dead reawaken in fresh adult bodies on a magical planet far, far away where all the most influential or memorable personalities of human myth, literature and history are reborn (memories intact!!) to coexist. Provocative collaborations and personality clashes ensue.

The potential of this premise left a lasting impression on several generations of subsequent new-wave, cyberpunk, steampunk, and metafiction writers. Readers never felt limited to the conversations Farmer engineered among his anachronistic characters; rather his scenario encouraged us to do our own historical research--the better to imagine more illuminating chats protagonists like Jesus, Mark Twain, and Sir Richard Burton might have after being resurrected to do something collectively constructive on a strange new world.

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