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The great pretenders Let's hear it for tribute bands everywhere (except the ones who wear stupid wigs)
John L Walters
Friday August 13, 2004
The Guardian.
Pop tribute bands leave me cold: sitting in some National Trust garden or sweaty club listening to bewigged, couterfeit versions of Oasis or Abba is my idea of purgatory - if not quite as awful as having to watch the real thing. Classical soundalike bands don't seem to exist - the very idea of the "Shamadeus Quartet", "Phony Kronos" or "a tribute to Thomas Beecham" (complete with off-colour jokes) seems ridiculous. But jazz musicians can almost get away with it. The Belgian band Travelling Joni Mitchell did a good job of covering those spine-chilling songs from Heijera, Mingus and Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. The vocals were OK, but the real star was fretless bassist Micel Hatzigeorgiou, who played every ripe note with relish.
Nearly Dan don't attempt to reproduce the tonsorial, sartorial or vocal styles of their heroes (Steely Dan), but play the arrangements pretty well note for note, with an enthusiastic relish for Becker and Fagen's melodic and harmonic sophistication. (Though their drummer has to deal with fans helpfully pointing out that he didn't play the famous "Steve Gadd mistake" in Aja.)
Tribute bands don't come much heavier than Henry Kaiser and Wadada Leo Smith's Yo Miles! Their album Sky Garden (Cuneiform, £18.99), a double album with a big, hard-hitting line-up, includes some of the most enduring pieces - It's About the Time, Great Expectations, Directions - from the electric Miles Davis bands of 1969-75. The 10-piece band includes saxophonists John Tchicai and Greg Osby (featured at this weekend's Brecon Jazz Festival) and keyboard player Tom Coster; guest players include tabla player Zakir Hussain and the Rova Saxophone Quartet. Leo Smith, whose trumpet-playing is consistently good and idiomatic without copying Miles, contributes several new tunes. And they largely succeed in making this curiously misunderstood form of improvised music work for a new era. At times Steve Smith's drumming is a bit too "miscellaneous" (to employ Joe Zawinul's useful put-down) for its own good: you long for the cool pulse or raucous clatter that Davis's best drummers generated.
Nevertheless, Kaiser, Smith and co make a good noise that is beautifully recorded (and also available in Super Audio CD format). Yulduz's Bilmadim (30 Hertz, £13.99) is an album of songs by Yulduz Usmanova and Jah Wobble. It has a pop feel, featuring the deep, repetitive bass that has become Wobble's principal trademark. We also get spunky rhythm guitar courtesy of jazz-reggae veteran Ernest Ranglin. Usmanova, originally from Usbekistan, yodels appealingly and the album noodles along nicely with a trancey, dubby atmosphere.
Connoisseurs of the novelty immigration songs (cf Goodness Gracious Me, or Walter Becker's Hat Too Flat) will be anxious to add Yulduz's Kiss Me to their collections: "Kiss me, kiss me, squeeze me tight/I don't speak English but I know my rights." There are two bonus remixes (by Bill Laswell and Philippe Verge) of this convincingly poptastic song, which also features a sparky accordion part by Clive Bell. Though Wobble's unfeasibly low bass is prominent throughout, this is definitely a pop album, with tunes that wouldn't be out of place at the Eurovision Song Contest. Not the British entry, I hasten to add. Tango Crash (Galileo, £13.99) looks at first glance like another album put out in the wake of the Gotan Project's success, such as the patchy Piazzolla Remixed, or the Bajafondo Tango Club. But there's much more to it, partly because it is so musical, with a highly original approach to rhythm (the percussionist and co-producer is the talented Marcio Doctor).
The prime movers are two Berlin-based musician/ programmers: cellist Martin Iannaccone and pianist Daniel Almada, who also contribute most of the material. The atmosphere they generate is dark and occasionally unsettling. Two bandoneon players provide the broken heart of tango myth; Rodrigo Dominguez's soprano sax implies a more positive outcome; Iannaccone's pleading cello is elegant and erotic. It's an album with many layers.
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