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Mount Vernon Blues
Label hassles and sonic shifts can’t stop GFS Productions from duly appointed drum and bass rounds.
-A.D. Amorosi

Review: Anner Bylsma
-Peter Burwasser

Bella Morte
-Helen Thompson

Dave Burrell
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Ladytron
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Four Tenors
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The Blood Brothers
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The Post
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February 13-19, 2003

the gig

Nate Chinen on Jazz

In my last column I examined the subject of jazz and popular music -- and their recent interstices, for better and for worse. That was over two months ago, just before Thanksgiving, and in the interim much has transpired. Golden-haired tunesmith Aimee Mann doled out bittersweet disconsolation at the Tower Theater. Torch-song legend Jimmy Scott brought his Technicolor heartbreak to the Tin Angel. Beck's psychotically melancholy Sea Change (Geffen) went from curio to chart-topper (at least, in the CP critic's awards). And Brad Mehldau, in a solo piano concert at the Annenberg Center, brilliantly covered Nick Drake's "Day is Done" and Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover." The common denominator here? Love, or some derivative of it, gone terribly awry. Disappointment, disillusionment, despair, a masochistic urge to plunge back into the pain. And just in time, I should note, for Valentine's Day.

Of course, this is hardly new territory for jazz, which was born of the blues experience. Ralph Ellison once wrote: "The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism." Blues matriarch Bessie Smith epitomized this resoluteness when she keened: "Good morning, blues/ Blues, how do you do?" Later came Billie Holiday and "Good Morning Heartache" -- a direct descendent, blue but not the blues.

Billie understood that the blues stands at some remove from the realm of the aching heart; the two are intertwined but not interchangeable. So it's fitting that her "Good Morning Heartache" opens Verve's timely new compilation, When Love Goes Wrong: Songs for the Broken-Hearted. None of this album's tracks are blues, per se. What we get instead is a panoply of top vocalists -- Billy Eckstine, Helen Merrill, Peggy Lee, the aforementioned Scott -- performing a range of self-pitying Tin Pan Alley standards. The disc just might sell, in this apparently desolate age. Then again, the same public that embraces Norah Jones' gentle melancholy has long cradled Diana Krall and her aluminum-cool dispassion. On Krall's bestselling Live in Paris (Verve), the only tune that strays from the sunny side is a cover of Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You." Mitchell herself, by the way, seems somewhat detached these days; her career-spanning Travelogue (Nonesuch), with its gossamer string arrangements, sounds too rarefied to be subject to human emotion.

So where does that leave us, the would-be brokenhearted? Nursing our aches. Licking our wounds. Writing letters, lighting candles, waiting for dawn. Dropping the needle on the record -- or, as the case may be, merely pushing "play."