DVDs are stacking up like cord wood here, and a couple merit attention. I recently wrote about the Robyn Hitchcock retrospective and how, when it comes down to it, I really don’t get him. Because I loved the Soft Boys, I’ll always give Hitchcock releases a chance, and there’s a new DVD from A&E Home Entertainment, Sex, Food Death… and Insects that puts his oddness in a slightly different light. Or, more accurately, it puts his oddness in a very normal light, as he seems like a very normal person who sings surreal songs. Seeing him interacting with bandmates Peter Buck, Bill Rieflin and Scott McCaughey, along with John Paul Jones heightens his regular guy qualities, which in turn makes the songs even more inexplicable. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are present to represent the Hitchcock cult – which I still can’t join – but everything here makes him seem quite amiable, and you’re left with the impression that his songs may be elliptical for you, but he hears a logic as clear and direct as “Be My Baby.”

About a Son, Michael Azerrad and A.J. Schnack’s documentary on Kurt Cobain is also out on DVD, and it has a dreamy quality, with visuals that present the world he grew up in, a buzzing soundtrack, and Cobain’s voice talking about his life. Then again, I might think of it as dreamy because I fell into a light sleep while watching it on a plane. Unlike Hitchcock, you do feel like you know Cobain by the end of it, or at least you know him better. Cobain’s voice comes from a series of interviews Azerrad conducted as research for his book, Come as You Are, and Cobain seems to talk frankly with him about family, Courtney, his image, drugs and suicide, all with lovely, visually evocative footage of Aberdeen, Olympia and Seattle, and all of which he’d likely have found awfully precious.

We also received Jared Arsenement’s Paradise Faded: The Fight for Louisiana, a documentary on the importance of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands. The cause is important, the craft is sound, but the treatment is as earnest as a tax code. People should know about the wetlands, and hopefully a network will pick it up. In the meantime, you can get it and more information here.

               

I just finished Matmos’ Drew Daniels’ entry in the 33 1/3 series, 20 Jazz Funk Greats. He contemplates the album by industrial music pioneers Throbbing Gristle, and I was left wondering if it’s possible to make art that remain perverse and transgressive. On 20 Jazz Funk Hits, the band tried to confront the audience and larger culture, but there comes a point when you wonder if the most perverse thing TG could have done was make an Eric Clapton album.

The Replacements’ Twin/Tone releases were just reissued by Rhino, and yesterday I listened to the Let It Be bonus tracks, particularly the covers of T. Rex’s “20th Century Boy,” the Grass Roots’ “Temptation Eyes” and the DiFranco Family’s “Heartbeat – It’s a Lovebeat.” Hearing them reminded me what was so cool about their cover of “Black Diamond.” The covers were ragged, but none are particularly satisfying as listening experiences. It’s not clear the band even likes the songs based on the performances – “Black Diamond” included – but when they released their version in 1984, those of us who grew up on ’70s metal and thought we had to retire those albums for punk could think again. Those songs and bands were cool again, or, the Replacements were uncool just like us.

               

We do too many obits in OffBeat these days (a function of too many people dying), and it’s lousy to read your mail first thing in the morning and find notices of two more deaths. Today I got the word that E Street Band keyboard player Danny Federici died at age 58 after dealing with melanoma for the last three years, and the Hacienda Brothers’ Chris Gaffney, 58, died from liver cancer. One of my favorite Gaffney moments came when he was last in town with Dave Alvin, and he took a turn at the mic to sing the Invaders’ soul classic “Cowboys to Girls.” Everybody – black and white – stopped to dance, not because the band was soulful, but because he was, albeit in a relaxed, offhanded way.

               

Over the course of the last month, CDs have stacked up that I think I care about – at least enough to try to say something about them. Now with a hopelessly large stack in front me, it’s time to get real. Here’s a real-time trip through the stacks:

Boys Noize: Oi Oi Oi Remixed (Turbo): I really like the raw intensity of Oi Oi Oi, which sounds like a punkier version of Justice’s arena rock-sized techno. Nothing here hits harder, and the only tracks that didn’t blur into bleeps and blips were the ones that turned the volume and power down (the only place left to go, really).

Esperanza Spalding: Esperanza (Heads Up): Hmmm, a jazz vocalist/acoustic bassist playing animated Brazilian jazz. This moves into the review pile for assignment.

The Raveonettes: Lust Lust Lust (Vice): I like this each time I put it on, and I liked them when I saw them, but all I hear are Jesus and Mary Chain sonics put to less menacing purposes. When I can put that aside or listen to the album one track at a time, the big, distorted guitar, ice princess vocals and deadpan drum programming sounds like very good pop. Why would anybody want more than one CD from this band, though? I can’t imagine that there’s any sonic or lyrical difference between this one and the last one.

The Magnetic Fields: Distortion (Nonesuch): More post-Chain music, and the addition of feedback and feedback-simulating sounds reminds me of the piece missing from the Raveonettes’ sound. Perpetual Eeyore Stephen Merritt shows his sense of humor by donning the Jesus and Mary Chain drag – which ought to suit his po-faced songs perfectly – and letting the comic wrongness of his lyrics and voice amid the sound of idustrial gloom stand there ridiculously. The tip-off isn’t “California Girls” (he hates them); its the Christmas song, “Mr. Mistletoe.”

Paolo Fresu, Richard Galliano, Jan Lundgren: Mare Nostrum (ACT): I paid attention to this after Carla Bley made Italian trumpeter Fresu the featured voice on her latest album, The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu. Its post-ECM sound is a little bloodless, but a jazz trio composed of trumpet, piano and accordion works to me. And, Galliano’s accordion solos speak. Another CD I listened to while editing the recent issue. Mojo Magazine asks celebrities about their Saturday night and Sunday morning CDs, and I can see this being a Sunday morning disc if I didn’t wake up with my engine running.

Jim Noir: Jim Noir (Barsuk): I tend to fall for electronica-based neo-psychedelia, which puts Jim Noir right up my alley. Moogs, vocoders and big, lush, soundscapes hooked to attractive melodies appeal to the Beach Boy fan in me, but I won’t argue with anyone who finds this twee or a genre exercise in retro pop.

Robert Forster: The Evangelist (Yep Roc): The tension between Robert Forster’s tense, choppy rhythm guitar, the fragments that constitute his melodies, his reserved, expository lyrics and his evident desire to be heartfelt has always been compelling, but it was moreso when his songs sat next to his Go-Between bandmate Grant McLennan’s. The effortless sweetness of McLennan’s songs set off Forster’s by contrast. This is Forster’s first since McLennan’s death, and it takes a little more effort to hear his songs as distinctive, but so far, each one repays attention when I stop typing to listen more closely.

Dolly Parton: Backwoods Barbie (Dolly): I really wanted to like this record because her roots-oriented albums for Sugar Hill put that voice to good use on songs worthy of her attention. Those albums also seemed like a graceful acknowledgement of her place in the world – older, no longer part of Nashville’s mainstream, but still with a unique voice and more musical wisdom than the albums before them suggested. But Backwoods Barbie presents her once again trying to sound relevant by covering Fine Young Cannibals (really?) and singing about her persona (twice in the first four songs). And with so many songwriters available, you’d think she could get better hooks than these.

Was (Not Was): Boo! (Rykodisc): I’ll stand by “Wheel Me Out” as the Was (Not Was) track – truly absurd, funky with guests from all over the board with some particularly hot guitar from Wayne Kramer. After that, albums rose and fell with the hooks. When they had them, I could get around the self-consciously weird lyrics (often with an uncomfortable misogynist streak), and when they didn’t, I couldn’t. Here – hooks missing.

That’s enough for now.

               

The Jazz Fest issue is done, and my soundtrack for it was LCD Soundsystem’s 45:33, Dimitri from Paris’ new mix Return to the Playboy Mansion (particularly his treatment of “Someday We’ll Be Together” and the slow jam conclusion, as the James Caans all move their bunnies from the dance floor to the grotto). Nothing very Jazz Fest about either. I kept trying to listen to the Mission of Burma reissues and Robert Forster’s The Evangelist, but rock ‘n’ roll (if it’s any good) makes it pretty hard for me to write or edit, and albums I had to review for the issue only made concentration harder.

I did keep returning to the Black Keys’ Attack & Release, which is unusual since nothing about their CDs has caught me yet. Guitar and drum duos usually sound thin to me, and as much as I’ve wanted to find them different, the Black Keys suffered the same fate. Here, with Danger Mouse producing, the songs are fully fleshed out with whatever instrumentation suits them best, and not surprisingly, they sound fully developed and engaging. Now I can tell them apart, and there’s a handful that I’ll return to. The bass guitar is not the enemy.

My other current fascination is Soul Messages from Dimona, a new album on the Numero label due out early next month. According to the hype, its “a joyful mix of spiritual soul, jazz and Old Testament gospel psychedelia,” and while I’m not sure about the psychedelic part (unless anything with a wah-wah pedal is psychedelic), this album of American soul musicians becoming Black Hebrews in Chicago and moving to Israel has the endearing relentlessness of good gospel, and the compulsive danceability of good funk. Like most Numero reissues, the story is complicated (far moreso than my sketch here would suggest), but it’s hard to argue with a choir singing “Burn devil burn,” or turning “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Hi Goodbye” into “Our Lord and Savior,” and having funk overpower any message.

               

The EMP Pop Conference took place last weekend in Seattle, with critics, journalists and academics delivering papers on popular music and popular culture. I was there delivering a paper titled “The First Rule of Hurricanes” on post-Katrina songs that will hopefully see the light of day someday. Here’s part two of my thoughts on it. If you’ve already read part one, go back because I’ve found links to some of the music or Web sites I mentioned, and they really are worth checking out.

As much fun as the EMP Pop Conference was in Seattle last weekend, one sad fact is that there are so few venues where people can get paid for writing interestingly and thoughtfully about music that is outside the current news cycle. Daphne Brooks’ examination of Amy Winehouse’s musical roots was funny and perceptive, finding antecedents in vaudeville, jazz vocalists, girl groups – not so much in soul – with them brought to life by ’70s R&B beats, but with the Grammys putting an exclamation point at the end of Back to Black, she might as well have written about the antecedents of Helen Reddy. And it seems like there ought to be a market for Jody Rosen’s proto-Britney Eva Tanguay – a vaudevillian to whom he attributed a “vocal madcap-ism,” the sound of a woman in the midst of nervous breakdown.

SXSW suggested that the only thing wrong with the music business is that nobody can figure out how to make money on music right now, and EMP gave me a similar feeling about music writing. This year’s academics were livelier than they were last year – the first EMP conference I attended – and there were few journalists or critics who were merely glib or clever. Many papers had a clear higher purpose – a series of New Orleans and disaster-related papers, the war-related papers (one of which focused on “Starry Night,” the improvised composition for trumpet and war by Lebanese trumpet player Mazen Kerbaj) and a panel on revolution during which David Rubinson advocated using the P2P technology Napster was based on to render the “pimpmedia” irrelevant (”the revolution will not only be televised; it will be podcast,” he said).

And in an election year where so many of us have to consider our relationship to two unprecendented leaders in Clinton and Obama, sexual and racial identity-related papers seemed particularly on point. It’s fair to wonder if these papers will have any reach considering that the primary audience on hand were other writers, but there is to be something said for putting ideas into the air and seeing where they go.

Ned Raggett attempted to take real time notes/reactions to the papers he heard – including mine – and even if they’re not spot-on records, they give a flavor of not only the papers and the approaches but the creativity in the rooms (his included). So far, his record of who did what is the best I’ve seen.

               

The EMP Pop Conference just concluded in Seattle, where I presented a paper, “The First Rule of Hurricanes” – notes on post-Katrina songs. The conference is an odd union of academics, journalists and critics, and perhaps the most reassuring thing about was that the best presentations had at their heart the desire to share some cool, obscure thing the panelists found. In that respect, everybody showed the fan at their cores, which is something sometimes lost in the process of professionally writing or thinking about music.

Three ethnomusicologists talking about music in the Iraq War all had cool stuff up their sleeves – Jonathan Pieslak had Iraqi recruiting videos to help him talk about the role of music in recruiting, Lisa Gilman had recordings soldiers talking about the roles music played for them in Iraq, and Martin Daughtry scored with soldiers’ written transcriptions of the soundscape around them. The poet in me particularly loved “dadadadadada dadadada dadadada.” The papers’ points didn’t always speak to me – Gilman found soldiers’ iPods have a lot of variety on them, including a lot of metal and hip-hop – like so many people their age – but the voices were magnetic.

Wendy Fornarow had a healthy pamphlet’s worth of musician jokes, and Daphne Carr brought a crushingly loud piece of noise the put an exclamation mark on the end of her discussion of volume and noise. Holly George-Warren had a hilarious radio snippet of a Gene Autry radio broadcast where he explains World War II in terms of a range dispute, then meets Uncle Sam, and Greil Marcus surprised everybody when he played a recording of the Roots’ recasting Dylan’s “Masters of War” by singing it first to the National Anthem, then to Hendrix’s “Machine Gun.” If these papers weren’t written around these finds, the finds certainly animated them.

I brought Katrina songs, and WWOZ’s Joel Dinerstein brought photos of the first second line after Katrina. Toronto’s Carl Wilson found a ghastly, racist rewrite of “The Battle of New Orleans” for part of his talk on disaster songs, and YouTube videos were you-biquitous.

I’ll have more to say about some of this – and I suspect this post will be modified in the next few days as I find their finds and link to them. Right now its time to digest it more.

               

When OffBeat did its tribute to Fats Domino, C.C. Adcock and Derek Huston served as musical directors, and we put together a horn line that included Domino alumni Herbert Hardesty, Elliot “Stackman” Callier and the Dirty Dozen’s Roger Lewis. One afternoon, Adcock, Huston and I were planning over coffee when Lewis passed by walking his dog. He joined us and started telling us stories – how when he joined Fats’ band, he didn’t have a baritone sax and faked it by playing low notes on his tenor and hiding from Fats at the far end of the horn line, how Fats gave him the look onstage to say he knew, and how Lewis bought a bari and went out in a field to practice on it far from prying eyes and ears, only to later discover that Dave Bartholomew was watching from his hotel window the whole time.

After he left, Adcock said something to the effect of, “That’s why we’re doing this – for the hang,” the time spent with rock ‘n’ roll history. I think he was paraphrasing Ponderosa Stomp organizer Ira Padnos, but whatever, “the hang” came to mind earlier this week when talking on the phone to soul singer the Mighty Hannibal for our coverage of this year’s Stomp (Apr. 29 and 30 at the House of Blues). I needed a photo of him and the publicist said call him (which I take as a sign that the inefficiency of dealing with the old dudes was wearing him out, though he says not), and everything about the next 15 minutes was pirate treasure, even if it was hopelessly inefficient.

The deep voice at the other end answered, “Hello,” and when I asked for James – Hannibal’s real name – the voice asked who was calling. When I introduced myself, the voice got higher and more animated. “Yeah, baby, what do you want!” He rolled into some shtick that I recognized from out writer’s interview with him, then asked, “You got any Obama supporters there?” When I said yes, he was excited because he’s got a new Obama song that he’s going to lay on us, and he sang me a verse that I can’t remember. When he finished, he said, “and you can print that!”

When we got around to business, he asked me which photo from his MySpace page I wanted, but I started to describe it, he stopped me. “What am I wearing in it? I’m blind.” He asked me to give my name and number to a friend of his and she’d take a message for his manager, “but she doesn’t speak any English.” Then he shouts off-phone, “Young lady! Young lady!” I can’t guess at their relationship now, but a woman takes the phone, asks, “Yes?” And as I spell “A-L-E-X” she repeats “A-E-O-X.” I briefly, patiently correct her, but I knew that message wasn’t going anywhere.

After our spelling bee, Hannibal gets back on the line and instructs me to hang on, that he’s going to hang up and the phone will go to his voicemail, where I can leave what I need and he’ll make sure his manager gets it. Not surprsingly, when he hangs up, the phone went to a dial tone and stayed at a dial tone. No voicemail. As business goes, it was a wasted 15 minutes, but it was great hang.

               

I was looking through George Wein’s autobiography Myself Among Others to see if I remember correctly that when he produced Newport Jazz Festivals, that they leaned on older jazz guys and tributes to older jazz guys in the 1960s when there was a lot new Newport was missing. The tributes at the upcoming Jazz Fest to Mahalia Jackson, Clifton Chenier, Kid Sheik, George Lewis, Earl Turbinton and Willie Tee, Dinah Washington, Nat King Cole, jazz drummers, Alvin Batiste, Max Roach, the Hackberry Ramblers and Count Basie (admittedly, performed by some version of his orchestra) are unprecedented in my 20 years here. Some of those are natural – Turbinton, Willie Tee and Batiste died last year – and some special performances by single artists – Phillip Manuel sings Cole, Topsy Chapman sings Washington – but still, that’s a lot of looking back.

While skimming the book (and not finding the answer I was looking for yet), I ran across this line: “The obligation to present artists just because they are ‘new’ is not high on my list of priorities.” Clearly, Quint Davis and Jazz Fest bought into Wein’s philosophy, but there are some new, young acts this year – Brett Dennen and the Zac Brown Band, the latter sounding awfully linked to Jimmy Buffett based on Brown’s online hype. For years, I’ve been riding Jazz Fest for its oldness, and how ironic it is that headliners have to wait until they’re past the age when they made the songs everyone wants to hear to be invited to Jazz Fest. The models of musical greatness – the Beatles and Rolling Stones – made their defining records in their 20s and early 30s. As did Robert Plant, Sheryl Crow, Burning Spear, Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder (earlier in his case), but they’ve all had to wait until they no longer mattered (with the exception of Plant, based on Raising Sand to appear.

But my issue isn’t simply age. The other issue is the festival’s resolute retro-ness in its musical values, and it shuns post-modernism as much as possible. Admittedly, this year we do get the Raconteurs’ version of ’70s arena blues rock as Jack White continues to explore his musical past in public, and we get Plant and Alison Krauss doing their version of George and Tammy with T Bone Burnett as their Billy Sherrill. But Dennen and Zac Brown aren’t transpositions of older values into contemporary forms; they’re old wine in new bottles made to look like old bottles. If I want to hear group improvisation, I’ll hear far more of it at Rob Wagner, Hamid Drake and Nobu Ozaki than I will at Widespread Panic, who are closer in spirit to the Doobie Brothers than the Dead. If I want to hear a band jam on guitars, I’d rather hear Sonic Youth, where there is genuine group exploration.

I seem to be chewing hard on this year’s festival, perhaps because it’s being hyped as such a great lineup and it seems pretty same ol’, same ol’ to me. One last age-related thought, though. Evidently if you’re young, not even Grammy nominations can help you. Lost Bayou Ramblers still open the Fais Do-Do Stage one day and the Pine Leaf Boys still play second one day. The nomination might mean something out of town, but at Jazz Fest, experience always counts.

[A late addition: a note on Wein and the JVC Jazz Festival in New York.]

               

If not for Madonna’s painful need for significance, she’d make a record of dance pop as much fun as Kylie Minogue’s X.