A Seamless Tapestry: The Chieftans' Voice of Ages

It's hard to believe that 50 years ago, The Chieftains released their first album. Their tenacious passion to bring ancient Irish folk music to a wider audience was especially brave considering the approaching debut then of a new band from Liverpool, a group that was about to change the sound of the planet. I'm happy to report that Voice of Ages (Hear Music, 2012), The Chieftains new record, is about to do the same in the 21st Century. Produced by T-Bone Burnett, Voice of Ages is a glorious record that captures the unassuming and unpretentious sounds of a band still able to cut through the noise of pop and offer up a genuine, original, non-synthetic sound.

Voice of Ages also features collaborations of the finest order. Unlike the high-strung, record exec match-ups these days, such as Duets II with Tony Bennett, this record brings together musicians whose Celtic sensibility is matched by their respect for the band and its history. Imelda May, the bright new pop singer from Dublin, opens the set with a straight-ahead version of “Carolina Rua,” a traditional Irish folk song. Her buoyant performance of a tune she probably learned at an early age, sets the tone. Right from the start we know this is going to be a serious recording and not simply a frivolous commercial release.

Ferocious and Precocious: Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers

Author Patrick deWitt.

Since I’ve begun writing for Critics at Large it’s become apparent that negative reviews garner a lot more attention than positive ones. Since I love attention, I had my mind made up to dislike this novel. I thought it was a sure thing. Superficially, Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers (Ecco, 2011) is a violent, empty western, dominated by male characters and curtly short chapters. But ultimately, it’s an insightful novel filled with the themes that drive each one of us – family, money, sex and the pursuit of happiness. There are some parts where I cackled garishly; others where I clutched the book to my chest with an understanding sigh.

Having a brother myself, one of the things I most understood was the tacit communication between the Sisters brothers. Throughout the narrative, Eli and Charlie simply have to look at each other to have a conversation. For professional hit men who often find themselves in complicated situations, this is a real asset. Because they are family, the relationship between Eli and Charlie is complex and deWitt does a superb job of depicting this relationship. Particularly in the opening chapters, the characterization of the Sisters brothers is magnificent. We’re naturally drawn to Eli, who narrates the story and attempts to villainize Charlie. However, since deWitt paints Charlie as so full of the logic that Eli seems to lack, it’s impossible to wholeheartedly accept Eli’s portrayal of Charlie as bad guy. Within a few short pages, the reader is shown insights into both Eli’s and Charlie’s individual personalities as well as the way they interact. Eli himself says it best early on as he ponders “the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.”

The Future of the Printed Book?

Over Christmas, one thing I put on my list was a Kobo e-book reader. My decision was purely pragmatic. As a lifelong reader, I will always prefer the traditional book. Nothing can replace the feel of an old or new one in your hands. One of my favourite sounds, too, is the slight cracking of the spine as you open a brand new book. Two of my favourite smells are the inky smell of new books and the slightly musty one you get with older ones. So, my love affair with this tradition will continue regardless if I finally get an e-book reader (Santa wasn't kind this past Christmas).

So, why do I want one? Certain books in the world I just want to read and let them go. Most thrillers, even the good ones, are generally pretty disposable, so though I still like to read some of the better ones (such as The Assassini by the late Thomas Gifford which I wrote about here), I don't necessarily want to have them gathering dust on my bookshelf or stuffed in a box somewhere. On e-book, once I've read it, if I have no intention of reading it again, I could simply delete it. Novels like Arthur Phillips' The Tragedy of Arthur (2011) are a different kettle of fish. Phillips’ book was a wonderful piece of literary fiction with fantastic characters and a compelling plot. It is the type of novel I would happily return to again and I'm glad I have it as a real book. And besides, it's a real first edition. (How can book collecting even be possible if only e-books exist?)

The Inspiring and Frustrating Harry Belafonte

When The Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, they were awarded 13 minutes of air time. A month later, one man would be granted nearly double it. At the time, Harry Belafonte was an even bigger star in North America than The Beatles. He brought calypso music to the fore. His gentle, melodic voice soothed the airwaves whether singing about “Scarlet Ribbons” or complaining about the long hours loading bananas (“Day-O”). He appeared in movies, and on television. He headlined in Las Vegas. And yet, somewhere near the middle of his elegant new memoir, he makes the following claim:

“I wasn’t an artist who’d become an activist. I was an activist who’d become an artist. Ever since my mother had drummed it into me, I’d felt the need to fight injustice wherever I saw it, in whatever way I could. Somehow my mother had made me feel it was my job, my obligation. ‘And don’t ever give in,’ I can hear her say still. ‘Don’t let them get you. You fight boy. You fight.’ So I’d spoken up, and done some marching, and then found my power in songs of protest, and sorrow, and hope.”

Facing the Hard Truths: Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts

From the vantage point of the present day, it seems odd that anyone, other than hardcore racists and anti-Semites, could ever find anything positive to say about Nazi Germany. But back in the 1930s, many people in the West, for various reasons, only sometimes having to do with negative feelings about Jews, did indeed feel receptive to the rise of fascism. For many, it was a movement which they excused as a force that was instilling German confidence, making for a vibrant society and, not incidentally, in a world mired in a great depression, seeming to embody a prosperous economic model that was worthy of emulation, Those views were certainly held by William E. Dodd, the newly appointed – and neophyte – U.S. Ambassador to Germany. It is his slow, horrifying realization that all was not rosy in that seemingly idyllic country that forms the basis of Erik Larson’s powerfully gripping book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (Crown Publishing, 2011).

Soured Lives: Merrily We Roll Along

Betsy Wolfe, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Colin Donnell, Celia Keenan-Bolger & Adam Grupper in Merrily We Roll Along.

The Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along, which was revived over the last two weekends at New York’s City Center by Encores!, flopped on Broadway in 1981, closing in two weeks after receiving punishing reviews. In the intervening decades Sondheim aficionados have struggled to reclaim it as a lost treasure wrecked in the original production by disastrous production decisions. (It ended the partnership of Sondheim and director Harold Prince, who had staged all of his seventies musicals: Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd.) The source material is a play of the same name that George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart wrote together in 1934, their second of their half-dozen collaborations and a distinct comedown after their classic hard-boiled comedy Once in a Lifetime. The subject is the ruined friendship of three once-inseparable comrades, a playwright, a painter and a novelist, and the gimmick is that the action runs backwards, beginning when all three are middle-aged and miserable and winding up with a glimpse of who they were when they started out. It’s a terrible play in which almost every one of nine scenes ends with a melodramatic punch, and the reverse flow of the narrative – the idea that drew Sondheim and book writer George Furth to the material nearly half a century later – is intractable. The characters are so dislikable that by the time we discover what bright-eyed idealists they were in their youth we’ve already written them off.

In the musical the protagonists have become Frank Shepard, a composer, Charlie Kringas, his playwright-lyricist collaborator, and Mary Flynn, a novelist turned theatre critic. Their story, looked at chronologically, centers on Frank’s quickness to trade his integrity for the promise of fame and fortune. First he persuades Charlie to put the political musical they’ve put the best part of themselves into on the back burner and write a commercial musical comedy for producer Joe Josephson and his actress wife Gussie Carnegie. Then he coaxes him to help him turn it into a movie. Finally he abandons songwriting altogether to put his name to superficial Hollywood pictures. Meanwhile his personal life is a shambles. His wife Beth, at one time the third member of a satirical revue trio with Frank and Charlie (which Sondheim and Furth may have based on The Revuers, made up of Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Judy Holliday before they all landed on Broadway in the 1940s), divorces him when he begins an affair with Gussie and she gets custody of their little boy. He ends up marrying Gussie but by the time he’s joined the Hollywood elite their relationship is dead, and so is her career. By this time Frank and Charlie no longer speak to each other because of the public trouncing Charlie gave him on a talk show, satirizing his slavish devotion to financial success and his indifference to the creative process that brought them together in the first place. And Mary, at one time a bestselling fiction writer, has become a helpless drunk embittered by a long unrequited passion for Frank that everyone seems to know about but him.

Comic Book Men: AMC’s Kinder, Gentler Reality Show

Kevin Smith (centre) and the rest of the Comic Book Men

AMC has come a long way since the premiere of Mad Men in 2007. Firmly establishing itself as a destination for original programming, the channel has had its ups (Breaking Bad) and downs (Hell on Wheels). But last Sunday, it stepped decisively into television’s 21st century with Comic Book Men, its first unscripted series. Yes, AMC now has a reality show.

For all the television that I regularly watch, I have to admit that reality shows rarely make the cut. I’ll watch (and enjoy) the odd episode of Amazing Race, but most of the unscripted shows currently on the air are often just too plain loud for me. The shows are too often populated by poorly drawn, unrealistic characters whose problems are usually the result of their own narcissistic reality distortions – quite simply not people I want to welcome into my home, at least not voluntarily. Nevertheless, the best of those shows can often be genuinely entertaining, and, like good film documentaries, can provide insight into people, worlds, and situations beyond the average viewer’s everyday experience. With Comic Book Men, AMC opens the door to the slightly mysterious kingdom of the comic book store. And now that it’s here, it feel almost like an inevitably. The world of comic book and sci-fi nerds is much more fashionable now than it ever has been. After all, the boys of The Big Bang Theory have been making comedic fodder of it for five successful seasons.

The Author's Voice: Chimes of Freedom – The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International

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Film critic André Bazin

The French film critic André Bazin once offered that the reason we get so few great movies from great books is that film directors are intimidated by the author's voice. He speculated that the film adapter, who obviously loves the work of fiction, feels in danger of falling short of the book's greatness. Therefore, Bazin thought, it was much easier for filmmakers to make great movies out of ordinary books, bad books, or even pulp fiction. It's an interesting theory. He's right, for example, that there are few great films made out of classic writers such as Dostoyevsky (remember William Shatner in Richard Brooks' woebegotten The Brothers Karamazov?), Virginia Woolf (let's just give a huge pass to Michael Cunningham's nod to Woolf in The Hours), or Tolstoy (War and Peace with Rod Steiger, anyone?). But Jim Thompson (The Grifters), Cornell Woolrich (Rear Window) and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye) have provided some pretty terrific pictures. Coppola's The Godfather may be the best example of a great film coming out of a mostly lousy book. The only exception to Bazin's rule perhaps is Charles Dickens, celebrating his 200th birthday this year somewhere in the great beyond, who has had more good movies made from his books than any other great writer. But that's likely due to Dickens writing in a popular dramatic style; that is, constructing his stories in a manner that anticipated the model for film narrative which D.W. Griffith would build upon in his first silent pictures. (Outside of Dickens, Henry James and James Joyce might be two other exceptions.)

In considering André Bazin's general observation, I wondered if the same held true for singer/songwriters and the endless number of tribute albums we see these days. The foundation of the American songbook, the infamous Tin Pan Alley, was built solely by songwriters who composed simply so that others could interpret their songs. But this all changed in the Sixties when The Beatles (who wrote and sang their own material) turned Tin Pan Alley into a premature graveyard for the tunesmith. Just consider that you can probably count on the fingers of both hands the number of memorable Beatle cover songs. Which is to say that these four lads from Liverpool were so successful in putting their own distinct voices on their tracks that no one else could claim those songs as their own. Bob Dylan, on the other hand, is in a whole other league. Besides being one of the best modern songwriters, as well as the most prolific, and one who has put a very distinct voice on his own material, he also wrote his songs for others to sing. And sing them they did. From Joan Baez, to the 1910 Fruitgum Company, to William Shatner, to The Byrds, they've all tackled Dylan - good and bad. But in performing his songs, each artist has had to deal with Bob Dylan's canny and incomparable voice, to claim it, reject it, or risk failure in trying to do both.

The new omnibus 4-CD set Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan, a vast selection of Dylan songs that features 73 cover tracks by over 80 artists, has its fair share of both successes and failures. But its sheer range of both material (from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan to Time Out of Mind) and genre artists makes it a fascinating listen. Chimes of Freedom, which includes indie rockers (Silversun Pickups), young pop hit makers (Miley Cyrus, Adele, Kesha), reggae favourites (Ziggy Marley), punk bands (Bad Religion, Rise Against), rappers (K'naan) and veterans (Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Pete Townshend and Steve Earle), also celebrates 50 years of Amnesty International which, given their sometimes paradoxical political agendas, makes them an interesting bedfellow for Dylan who walked away from leading charges to the barricades. Be that as it may, no other songwriter could provide a more nuanced selection of social and political material than Bob Dylan. After all, he basically took the topical folk song, which traditionally served the social cause by denying the singer a subjective role in singing it, and turned that tradition inside out. For Dylan, the topical song was purely subjective, where he performed it from his own perspective and not with a socialist realist objectivity. But he also wrote love songs, surreal adventures, blues and gospel, which opens up the territory for such a variety of performers that populate Chimes Of Freedom.

A Delicate Gem: Monsieur Lazhar

Mohamed Fellag stars in Monsieur Lazhar

Though Quebec is one of Canada’s more multicultural and diverse provinces, largely because of Montreal's population mix, its cinema has usually failed to reflect that reality. That’s partly because Canada’s cultural policies too neatly divide Canadian film funding into French and English increments: French for Quebec and English for the rest of the country. Thus Montreal Anglophones wanting to make movies in Quebec are usually out of luck, and Francophones wanting to shoot movies in Ontario, which has some sizable French-language enclaves, are equally so. And since that’s the case, Quebec’s French filmmakers are much more likely to make films about their own communities with less attention paid to the other cultures they bump up against. That was the source of some controversy when Anglophone filmmaker Jacob Tierney (The Trotsky) complained – in a French language newspaper interview – that Quebec cinema wasn’t reflecting the multicultural realities of the day. (He did, unfortunately, feel the need to distance himself from the late Mordecai Richler who famously and accurately commented that Quebec nationalists who spoke of Quebec for Quebeckers did not envision people named O’Reilly, Ginsberg and Wong among them. While French filmmakers weren’t being racist so much as myopic, the salient point and end result is identical.) The other reason that a cultural omission exists in Quebec cinema is likely because majorities tend not to try to understand or feature the concerns of minorities. That however is beginning to change. Denis Villeneuve’s excellent Incendies dealt with an Arab family trying to make a new life in Quebec. And Philippe Falardeau’s very fine new movie Monsieur Lazhar is filtered through the prism of a refugee interacting with, and trying to make his way through, a dominant French Canadian landscape.

Elementary: BBC's Sherlock – Season Two

Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson

One of the great joys of writing for this website is discovering hidden treasures that you can share with the reader. Sometimes you can also warn folks, too, about the dreck that litters the popular culture landscape. But for me the biggest pleasure I get is when one of my colleagues unearths something, writes about it and turns me on to it. That is exactly what Mark Clamen did nearly two years ago when he reviewed the first season of the new BBC TV version of Sherlock Holmes, called simply Sherlock. Up until Mark reviewed it I didn't know it existed. And until that moment I'd also never heard of Benedict Cumberbatch (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; National Theatre’s Frankenstein) who was cast as Sherlock Holmes.

Because of his review (he'd seen it in advance of its Canadian premiere), I was able to keep my eye out for it when the first season was finally broadcast on the Canadian cable channel, Showcase (it played on PBS in several markets, but not on my Buffalo-based PBS station for some reason). I won't rehash Mark's review, but suffice it to say that adapters – Mark Gatiss (who also plays Mycroft Holmes on the show) and Steven Moffat (creator of another fascinating but finally unsuccessful updating with his version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, called Jekyll) – have brilliantly updated to our current era these stories based on Arthur Conan Doyle's. Some of the updating is inspired with twisty variations to the original stories. Some of the updating is incredibly simple, but very effective. For example, Dr. John Watson (a really good Martin Freeman) is a veteran of a war in Afghanistan, just as the Dr. Watson was in Doyle's original stories. Some things never change.

A Short Excursion into the Novel: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

When I first read The Eyre Affair (Hodder & Stoughton, 2001) a decade ago, its whimsical world enthralled, yet also perplexed me. Certain that many of its quips and literary references had flown clear over my young head, I felt inspired to go brush up on classic English literature. For The Eyre Affair is a book lover’s book, as Jasper Fforde weaves the familiar with the outlandish to create a novel that pays tribute to the cultural legacy of stories, while crafting a tale that’s remarkably original and unexpectedly smart.

Fforde's first novel, The Eyre Affair shows us mid-80s England through the looking glass, as described by police detective Thursday Next. In Thursday’s world, literature remains the pop culture medium of choice, the Crimean war rages on, and dodos make excellent pets. When an unusual book theft turns out to have links to Thursday’s past, she’s called in to help investigate. What follows is action-adventure that ranges from gripping thriller to Monty Pythonesque lunacy, climaxing with a voyage into Charlotte Brontë’s opus itself.

Two Hearts: Contrary Views on Valentine's Day

Note to Readers: Since today is Valentine's Day, which always brings out strong feelings in just about everyone, we thought we'd address this romantic celebration from two completely different views. What is perhaps uncharacteristic about the following two posts, from Laura Warner and Mari-Beth Slade, is that the single woman still embraces the sentiments of Valentine's Day while the married one could just as easily give it a pass. As always, we leave the reader to choose for themselves. Enjoy.

Why We Go to the Theatre: Rosemary Harris and David Hyde Pierce

Jim Dale, Carla Gugino, and Rosemary Harris in The Road to Mecca

In the Broadway revival of Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca by the Roundabout Theatre Company, the luminous Rosemary Harris plays Miss Helen, an aging Afrikaner widow in a small South African village (in an arid section of the country known as Karoo) in the mid-1970s who reaches out to a younger friend, Elsa Barlow (Carla Gugino), a Capetown schoolteacher, at a time of personal crisis. Miss Helen is an artist whose fanciful sculptures of animals and other creatures fill her yard and have unsettled her conventional neighbors for years. She and Elsa became friends when the younger woman, passing through the Karoo, stopped to admire the art – and Miss Helen, used to a mixture of disdain, mockery and dismissal from the other villagers, warmed to her enthusiasm. Elsa, too, is a renegade: she keeps getting in trouble with the school board because she encourages her students, who are black, to speak and write about equality. She loves Miss Helen because she sees her as that rarity, a truly free spirit, and that freedom is manifested in what she calls her Mecca, that yard full of wild creations that the close, churchgoing village of New Bethesda finds creepy, even shocking. But Miss Helen hasn’t been able to make any art for some time, and she fears that her inner vision – the images that appear to her, guiding her hand – may have stopped for good, leaving her in darkness. The desperate tone of her last letter has drawn Elsa to her cottage for a visit. She arrives just at the point at which the local minister, Marius Byleveld (Jim Dale), has almost persuaded Miss Helen to give up her solitary house and go into a home.

A Spy in the Cinematic House of Peril: Nobody is Safe

Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds hit the road in Safe House

If you’re looking for a current movie about clandestine government operatives who betray their brethren, go see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. If you’re looking for a current movie about clandestine government operatives who betray their brethren starring Denzel Washington, Safe House is your best bet at the moment – though not necessarily one that will stick with you beyond that juncture. The former thriller, adapted from a 1974 John le Carre novel, keeps its bloodshed to a minimum and adheres to the great British tradition of allowing tension to build under an otherwise laconic surface. The latter film revels in splatter, ramping up dastardly deeds with typical Hollywood adrenaline.

Washington employs his usual charisma and clever thespian chops as Tobin Frost, a CIA agent gone rogue for the past decade. The question is whether or not he’s really a sociopath, like the corrupt cop the actor essayed in Training Day (2001). When his Safe House antihero gets a chip containing a hush-hush file, he injects the damn thing under his skin to escape detection before beginning a 115-minute chase scene. There are actually numerous chase scenes, but the unrelenting action becomes a big blur. Frost is targeted by a seemingly never-ending supply of generic mercenaries so downright evil that the story almost veers into horror-flick territory, in which a monstrous entity continually rises from the dead. There’s one chief bad guy in particular (Fares Fares, a name so nice he uses it twice) who I thought had at least a dozen bullets pumped into him, yet the thug manages to pop up unscathed in the final denouement.

Dmitri & Michael: Michael Bates's Acrobat

Michael Bates is originally from Canada’s West Coast, namely Vancouver. For the past decade, he’s been living and working in New York as a jazz bassist/composer. But I met him in the mid-90s at a record store, the first choice for employment by any struggling musician, when he lived in Toronto. (Even though we were paid low wages, we enjoyed the luxury of listening to music 40 hours a week). In those days, Michael worked part-time while continuing to play jazz in the evening, when he could get a gig. He was a friendly young man, full of energy, humour and a strong focus on being only one thing in life: a working musician. He loved to play and he loved to talk about music, especially jazz.

I lost touch with him after I left the record store in 1996; hearing through the grapevine that he relocated to New York and was pursuing more formalized study and the art of composing. Occasionally I’d see his name in the paper or at a gig in Toronto, usually with his group, Outside Sources. In recent years, he became inspired to issue his own recordings as a leader on Sunnyside Records, an independent label established in 1982. On his new recording Acrobat (Sunnyside, 2011) , his inspiration comes from the superlative Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 -1975). The subtitle of the album is Music for and by, Dmitri Shostakovich and it offers up a challenge to any listener, whether you are a classical or jazz fan.

Strictly Genteel: Michael Sucsy's The Vow

When you fall in love, it can strike out of the blue, in serendipitous ways, totally out of your control. Michael Sucsy's The Vow, on the other hand, is so predictable and controlled that you can set your watch to it. The picture is also based on a true story, but usually when a movie has to remind you of such things it offers the opposite. Now I've seen a lot worse romantic dramas, including popular ones that are especially disingenuous and effective in wooing audiences (Sleepless in Seattle immediately springs to mind), but The Vow isn't one of those. It wants to wear its heart on its sleeve, but it falls victim to its lack of conviction even in its own formula plot.

The story follows a happily married couple, Paige (Rachel McAdams) and Leo (Channing Tatum), artist bohemians out of Chicago, whose lives are shattered one night when a car accident seriously injures Paige. After coming out of her coma, she wakes up with severe memory loss without remembering that she is married to Leo. Since we quickly discover that Paige originally came from a wealthy family that she abandoned for reasons explained later in the picture, we know that the film is going to be a battle of wills between the sensitive artist husband she's forgotten and the rich rotters who want her back. Guess who wins?

Lilyhammer: Netflix’s Impressive Entry into New Original Programming

Steven Van Zandt stars in Lilyhammer on Netflix.

It’s been a big week in new media: as speculations about the future of Apple iTV reached a fever pitch, and Amazon announced a new partnership with Viacom that adds over 2000 new titles to its service, Netflix, the granddaddy of streaming media, premiered its first original television series: Lilyhammer, a low-key wiseguy-out-of-water comedy starring The Sopranos alum Steven Van Zandt. This is only the first of three series that Netflix will be offering exclusively to its subscribers. Last week, it was officially announced that Netflix would air an original new season (with full original cast and writers) of Fox’s beleaguered but brilliant sitcom Arrested Development (2003-2006) in 2013. And later this year, 26 episodes of David Fincher and Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards will be available exclusively on Netflix. Spacey will star and Oscar-nominated director Fincher (The Social Network) is directing the pilot.

But its innovative delivery system is fortunately not the only original feature of Lilyhammer. The show, a co-production by Netflix and NRK1 (the main channel of Norway’s public broadcaster), is a quirky black comedy, starring one familiar television face and a whole cast of Norwegian actors. What was completely unexpected, at least for me, was the fact that it is very much a Norwegian show, and much of the show’s dialogue is in Norwegian. When the show premiered on Norwegian television at the end of January, it broke all ratings records for the country with one in five Norwegians tuning in.

Revisting the Past: Peter Gabriel's New Blood

I've never been one to see a singer/performer more than once, maybe twice in concert. I've always felt why ruin the wonderful memories of the first time, especially if the concert knocked me out. So I've only seen David Bowie, Genesis, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, kd lang, Femi Kuti, Youssou N'Dour, Chicago, Sergio Mendes, Tito Puente, Santana, REM, Jethro Tull, Ultravox, Jamie Cullum and The Guess Who and others just the one time. (Okay, maybe I saw The Guess Who twice, but it was 15 years apart; and I saw N'Dour three times, but only once fronting his own concert.) The exception? Peter Gabriel. Between 1978 and 1988, I saw him in concert 5 times. Each concert was as good as the others, sometimes the next one topped the one before. The last time was during the Amnesty International tour in 1988 (that is also where I saw Sting, Springsteen, and kd lang).

Gabriel's music first captured my attention around the time he left Genesis in 1976. As the years rolled on he pushed himself by embracing world beat, reggae, jazz and, of course, rock, As his interests changed, so did mine. He introduced me to the wonders of African artists like Youssou N'Dour, Salif Keta, Thomas Mapfumo, King Sunny Ade and several others. His discoveries became my starting point for other discoveries. His concerts continued to attract me because, like his musical tastes, his presentations evolved and morphed from one idea to another. No one concert was the same as another. Eventually, as Gabriel stopped recording actively, my interests drifted away. My musical tastes began to evolve and change as I experimented with jazz, hip hop and sounds and music from countries all over the world. But, that curiosity and interest in exploring different music was first inspired by the works of Peter Gabriel.

On Our Minds and Playlists: Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr

The Beatles are a big part of why I listen to music at all. Twist & Shout (a compilation Capitol Records in Canada made out of their official UK releases) was the first album I ever owned. I was going to write, ‘the first album I ever bought,’ but of course my Mom and Dad bought it, and my brother Al and I shared it until the grooves were worn down. In fact, we didn’t even have a record player that would play 33 1/3 vinyl albums when it came along. We had to sit and stare at the sleeve for a week while my Dad took the old 78 rpm turntable into the local radio shop and had a new multi-speed turntable dropped in. The excitement was palpable as we came home from school that afternoon and counted the minutes ‘til Dad walked in with the new and improved record player! It was soon after hearing The Beatles that I asked for (and received) my first guitar. It was a Sunburst with a neck that was already warped, which made it very difficult to play. Lessons were frustrating, focusing on songs like “When the Caissons Go Rolling Along” instead of the really important tunes like “Anna” or “Boys,” “Please Please Me” or “Love Me Do.” Soon enough though I was able to strum along. That first Beatles’ album gave clues to the later development of the Four Mop Tops. Here we are nearly fifty years later … and in one week we’ve seen the release of new albums from Ringo and Paul.

John Lennon was gunned down in the street outside his apartment in New York over thirty years ago, but his son Julian just issued his fifth album. And George, who was claimed by cancer in 2001, was recently celebrated in a long-form documentary by Martin Scorsese. Paul and George featured on two Mojo magazine covers in 2011, and Rolling Stone issued two different special editions devoted to the band. The Beatles continue to be on our minds … and on our playlists. So let’s look at these two new releases.

Befogged: On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

David Turner, Jessie Mueller, & Harry Connick Jr. in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (Photo: Nicole Rivelli)

It’s rather fascinating to sit through the new Broadway revival of the Burton Lane-Alan Jay Lerner musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever because you keep trying to get into the heads of Peter Parnell (who revised the book) and Michael Mayer (who re-conceived and staged it). They must have thought it would work, but it’s hard to imagine how, even given the level of delusion on which the Broadway musical theatre sometimes operates – think of Twyla Tharp’s Bob Dylan musical The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and didn’t someone just close a musical based on Bonnie and Clyde? On a Clear Day has a sumptuous score, but the book has always been trouble. When it began in Boston in 1965, before the original leading man, Louis Jourdan, had been replaced by John Cullum, Lerner was struggling with so many plot strands that the show ran nearly four hours, and after he’d trimmed it down to a presentable length for its Broadway opening it felt truncated, still excessively busy and random, as if he’d taken an axe to whichever overgrowths he could get at rather than melting the whole scenario down to a viable dramatic form.

The premise is complicated, to say the least. A psychiatrist named Mark Bruckner is approached by a nervous, chattering young woman named Daisy Gamble who hopes he can hypnotize her to stop smoking. He puts her under – she’s so susceptible that he barely has to say anything before she’s snoozing in his chair – and when he regresses her he discovers she had a previous life as an aristocrat in late-eighteenth-century London whose sexy portrait-painter husband wouldn’t stay faithful to her. In the course of interviewing Daisy’s witty, literate, elegant, independent-minded alter ego, Melinda Wells, Mark finds himself falling in love with her. So he spends as much time as he can with Daisy, who falls for him, mistakenly believing he’s courting her twentieth-century self – the only personality she’s aware she possesses. Mark is certainly a relief from her square fiancé Warren, who’s looking for employment with the company that can offer the best pension and who is happiest with Daisy when she’s at her most conventional.