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Sonny Rollins, ed. Sam V. H. Reese
Positive The Brooklyn Rail The notebooks have many vital details, but it’s an open question whether they will reveal much to the reader. This is because they are details of saxophone playing that will be familiar to anyone intimate with the instrument but will likely be baffling to others ... His thinking about himself in the notebooks is self-critical, but there’s no direct line from this to the ideas that come out through his horn. But that’s the elusiveness of the great artists.
Jessica Hopper
Mixed The Brooklyn Rail Liking something doesn’t mean it’s good, those are two different things, and a good critic can dislike something...while also pointing out that it is well made and works on its own terms. This balance is not hard to maintain as long as one starts from a point of self-awareness and is transparent to the reader, but the kind of passions that music inflame work against those habits. Jessica Hopper misses that balance often enough in this collection that there’s a two-steps-forward, one-back feeling to reading through it. But that just means there are things to argue over with this book, which makes it worth reading ... She writes more perceptively than anyone about Miley Cyrus, and she profiles Lana Del Rey in one piece and reviews her album Honeymoon in another, and here is one place where Hopper’s perspective knocks her slightly off balance. The profile is excellent, Hopper has a perceptive eye for how pop culture views Del Rey and how Del Rey shapes herself to exploit that ... Hopper is a critic who, like all of us, is originally a fan, and that delineating is often hazy and, in the space of this book, self-contradictory—not in the way that happens to us all, having an opinion about a thing and then later changing our minds, but in terms of values ... as a guide to how to look at rock and pop from the perspective of half (at least) of the country, Hopper is sincere and true.
C.M. Kushins
Positive The Brooklyn Rail Kushins is a fan, but he doesn\'t assume the reader is a fan. Nor is he any kind of connoisseur, measuring his knowledge against others and rating his own more substantial ... Kushins neither condescends to the reader nor annotates the songs to death, as if Zevon was Ezra Pound. On the contrary, it\'s refreshing to read about how some songs came to be without the clichés of artistic struggle and the baggage of meaning ... Kushin\'s writing is clear and serviceable, it hums along at a pleasant low idle. It\'s not overstuffed, but it could be leaner. There\'s a structural issue where he writes about something that is going to happen—a tour, a recording session—and then when the event comes along, he writes about it again in a way that always contains redundancies. And there are too many sections that end with one-sentence quasi cliffhanger sentences...out of character with the rest of the book. But he tells the story. There are illuminating details ... the book will have you pulling out records, or launching your streaming app of choice, and digging into Zevon\'s exceptional catalog.
Barney Hoskyns
Positive Brooklyn Rail Steely Dan played the Paramount Theatre in Seattle on the first of July, 1974—there\'s a live recording—and the MC introduced the band thus: \'Ladies and gentlemen, here by popular demand and at great expense to the management, you may like them—personally I don’t—from Los Angeles, California, Steely Dan!\' ... Chris Welch describes the Dan in Melody Maker as: \'Really orchestra, designed to present the songs on stage and record in the best way possible\'. The two were jazz fans though not quite jazz musicians, and as professional songwriters before starting the band, they reached back to popular song forms from before the 1950s for their values and models ... There are essentially two different things collected within the book: contemporaneous record reviews and interviews/profiles. Major Dudes covers Donald Fagen’s solo albums and ends with David Cavanagh’s obituary of Walter Becker, published in Uncut in November of last year. For a Dan fan, it’s fascinating to read about what the critics were hearing, which was a combination of baffled satisfaction, baffled ambivalence, and baffled displeasure. One thing that is consistent, especially from the British writers, is how different the Dan sounded from everything and everyone else they were hearing.