Word: strangers
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Things are different now. Everything is hurry up and go. No one has time to linger at the big democratic center table at Bartley's Burger Cottage. Few diners slowly sip their lime rickeys while reading the sports page or striking up a conversation with a stranger sitting at the next chair...
...adults was taken to its furthest frontier in recent days when a Michigan court heard the case of Nathaniel Abraham, accused of first-degree murder. Two years ago, the then-11-year-old Abraham borrowed a .22 caliber rifle, sat on a hillside in a Detroit suburb, and shot stranger Ronnie Greene, Jr. in the head. Abraham's lawyers claimed the shooting was accidental; they said he was taking potshots at some trees. The prosecution said he bragged to pals that he was going to kill someone. The trial ended Tuesday with a verdict of second-degree murder...
Haden's most recent album with his Quartet West, the ravishing The Art of Song (Verve), is a lyrical excursion across a landscape that embraces classical music (Rachmaninoff's Moment Musical), folk (Wayfaring Stranger), American popular song (Kern's In Love in Vain) and contemporary jazz (Jeri Southern's Theme for Charlie and Haden's own Ruth's Waltz). The only thing these disparate pieces have in common is Haden's singular vision, his insistence that this music beats with a single heart that pulses as steadily as his bass swings...
Besides the quartet (pianist Alan Broadbent, drummer Larance Marable and tenor saxophonist Ernie Watts, along with Haden), there are guest vocalists on a few of the cuts (Shirley Horn and Bill Henderson) and a chamber orchestra on others. But it is Haden's spooky, unpolished vocal on Wayfaring Stranger, the closing track on this superb album, that provides a surprising but characteristically intrepid coda, a valedictory from a musical explorer who can find new territory anywhere he wanders...
There's a sadness at the core of this CD that trails every beat like a heart murmur. At age 12, Apple says, she was raped by a stranger. Images from that attack creep across her songs, shadows angling along a wall. In Fast As You Can, she sings, "I fight him always and still." In real life, Apple says, she's happily dating filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights). But on this CD, her heart is a chunk of meat in a fridge: unloved, unlovable, freezer-burned. Violated once, she says romance races "right through" her. So she writes...