Page 8
• DTH • Omnibus
Thursday • February 4, 1993
Rock 'n' roll, romance and a string quartet for Juliet
Elvis Costello and
The Brodsky Quartet
The Juliet Letters
Warner Bros.
•••1/2
Elvis Costello, rock’s resident
iconoclast and social critic, has
skipped some highly eclectic
stones through the years. Yet he
has never made the big commercial
ripple in the music world that he should
have.
The man who begat gems like
“Watching the Detectives,” “New
Amsterdam,” “Radio Radio” and “Less
Than Zero” has done a great service to
the world, and he really deserves re
spect outside of isolated critical circles.
Though Elvis Costello has pursued
many tangents during his career, his
latest venture away from the cult of the
singer-songwriter is quite unexpected
and hard to figure out.
Elvis recently shed the mantle of the
misunderstood, angry young man he
has carried since his earliest sides with
Stiff Records in the mid-70s. His musi
cal collaborations with Paul McCartney
and his marriage to Cait O’Riordan of
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The Pogues have brought out a kinder,
gentler Elvis than we have ever known.
The new album, T he Juliet Letters, is
a decidedly highbrow collaboration with
The Brodsky Quartet that is quite un
like the scathing postpunk sensibility of
his past. The Quartet is a London-based
group of young virtuosi better known
for playing Shostakovich and Haydn
than “Oliver’s Army." But rather than
turning into “Costello With Strings,”
The Juliet Letters proves to be a unified,
interesting and organic piece of work.
The album is a song sequence for
string quartet and voice; brief song-like
forms are linked to form a unified,
pseudoclassical piece. Despite this un
usual instrumental arrangement, the
form presents diverse moods and tone
color contrasts effectively.
The thematic unity of the lyrics is
the glue that holds the album together.
Costello said the songs were inspired by
a newspaper story about a Veronese
professor. The professor, it seems, has
for some time collected all mail ad
dressed to “Juliet Capulet,” and each
song in The Juliet Letters is written in the
form of a letter.
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As usual, Elvis attaches a cleverness
and literacy to his words that’s hard to
find anywhere else. Case in point: “This
Offer Is Unrepeatable” is junk mail for
the ears, a song that confronts the
reader’s neuroses with blaring vocal
klaxons.
True, it’s not as entertaining as “She
speaks double dutch with a real double
dutchess,” or “1 step on the brake to get
out of her clutches,” but Elvis’s past
wordplay would have little place in this
new framework.
The music blends some modem and
neoclassical backdrops with melodies
that are alternately soaring and under
stated. Shades of Bartok in the instru
mental “Deliver Us" and Prokofiev in “1
Almost Had A Weakness” bring to mind
some decidedly non-Costello influ
ences. The ensemble work is highly
refined and well-played, and even Elvis
is on his best behavior, replacing his
standard wail with a pleasing
melodicism.
The best material includes the som
ber “For Other Eyes," the melodically
tricky “1 Almost Had A Weakness," the
pop song “Jacksons, Monk and Rowe”
and the spooky, pizzicato “Romeo’s Se
ance.” The material works, but gener
ally fails in some of its more outlandish
filler. It’s hard to criticize Elvis for tak
ing this ambitious step toward a more
“respectable” type of music. He is will-
Whatever you do, don't pigeonhole
TheloniousMonk
San Francisco Holiday
Milestone/Fantasy
••••1/2
Jazz’s great pianist, composer and
eccentric, Thelonious Monk has
often been pigeonholed as a
bebopper. But Monk is all angles;
the hoppers, curves. His tunes are com
positions, theirs improvisations. Monk
stands at a tangent to every style, but
wherever you place him, he is of tower
ing importance to modem jazz. As the
club and concert takes on San Francisco
make clear, Monk’s music can only be
compared to other Monk. Critic Joe
Goldberg got it right when he called
Monk’s music “a jagged, humorous, pow
erfully swinging music that always
sounds like a wryly amused commen
tary on itself.”
Milestone’s new disk collects 10
Monk performances from 1958-’6l,
none before available except on the
Complete Riverside box set. All but “April
in Paris,” an old standard, are Monk
originals, instantly catchy but endlessly
complex. Soprano sax Steve Lacy said
the key to Monk’s music “is the way
that it rhymes.”
One number, a take of “Bye-Ya” and
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H you played the cello, would you want to play with a guy named Elvis?
ing to pursue classical forms with com
plexities which, at first, seem to be
beyond the scope of his earlier work. 1
review
SCOTT TIMBERG
“Epistrophy,” from Monk’s legendary
tenure at New York’s Five Spot Cafe,
has never seen the light of day in any
form. This track is some of the loosest,
most spontaneous and freewheeling
Monk on record anywhere. It features
both drummer Art Blakey and Johnny
Griffin, self-proclaimed fastest tenor
saxophonist on earth, and at the very
least one of the cockiest. This take was
left in the can because it’s a little sloppy.
But picking at Monk for missing notes
“...ajagged, humorous,
powerfully swinging
music that always sounds
like a wryly amused
commentary on itself. ”
—Joe Goldberg
and playing poorly tuned pianos is like
taking James Joyce to task for his punc
tuation.
The other cuts on San Francisco
Holiday were recorded at San Francisco’s
Black Hawk club or concert halls in
Paris or New York. Their quality is
uniformly excellent, and Monk is well
supported by the tenors of Harold Land
and Charlie Rouse. I usually find Rouse
disappointing; on these tracks, though,
he plays with a rough, bluesy, full
throated tone and a logic that matches
Monk’s own.
Throughout, Monk demonstrates his
signaruteexubetance; use of space, play-
MUSIC
applaud his effort.
But, y’know, in my heart of hearts,
I’d rather hear “Allison.”
• - #>•
- <*’ Hife.
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San Fransisco Holiday
ful hesitation, unexpected accents and
obscure voicings. The record is not just
a collection of oddities the heart of
Monk’s legacy, along with his early
Blue Notes, are his Riverside years.
Few musicians liked to play with
Monk, mostly because they couldn’t.
Miles Davis got in a fight with him after
they tried to team up on 'Round Mid
night, and Coltrane said accompanying
Thelonious was “like falling down an
empty elevator shaft.” But both, like
Sonny Rollins, call their brushes with
Monk catalysts to their own innova
tions. Monk may be the most continu
ously fascinating musician in modem
jazz; San Francisco Holiday is a must for
Monk nuts and a good place for new
comers to start, as well.
ratings
•—forget it
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••• —tape It from a fritted
•••• bey it
••••• bay two copies