music – Page 8 – Hank Kalet

A potential classic for Hanukkah

The paucity of contemporary Hanukkah recordings — aside from the stray song (a few good ones from the Bare Naked Ladies, for instance, and Adam Sandler’s overplayed comic tunes) — has left an opening for musicians with wit, creativity and a real connection with the holiday.

And Erran Baron Cohen, brother of Sacha Baron Cohen of Borat fame, has stepped into the breech with what sounds to me like a holiday classic.

Cohen’s new disc — Songs in the Key of Hanukkah — offers an interesting mix of classics and new tunes rewritten and reconfigured for the new millennium. The album is infused with Cohen’s vast wealth of influences — from trippy beats and samples to spot-on English and Yiddish rapping from Y-Love (a black Jew from New York) and some singer-songwriting stuff.

The new musical clothing suits the material — the stale dreidel song (“Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel/I made it out of clay”) is transformed into a whirling, delirious celebration of childhood and identity. Other songs celebrate Hanukkah’s story of rebellion, of fighting off oppression, and the spiritual wonder of an undying light.

Cohen, told New York Magazine last month that he wanted to take the lackluster songs of the holiday and reinterpret them and reinfuse them with the holiday fun he remembered from his childhood.

To take Hanukkah, which is a great festival that I always enjoyed as a kid singing all the songs. I remember we had this terrible record our parents played with children singing slightly off tune to a really old piano player. As the years went on, I realized they were all really bad tunes and all badly played. So the idea was to use story of Hanukkah and take some of the music of it and update it to make it really cool.

And cool it is.

Here an interview with Cohen on NPR’s Weekend Edition.

Turning me on to Oasis

The song I mentioned before is “The Turning,” from Oasis’ latest, Dig Out Your Soul. Check it out here, at Last.fm

I wish I could afford the ticket

This is a show and a half — no, more than that, much more than that:

Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen will do a benefit concert for Senator Barack Obama’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee next month at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City on Oct. 16.

Mr. Obama will be appearing on stage as well for the event, which is set for the day after his debate with Senator John McCain at Hofstra University on Long Island.

The concert was being billed by Obama fund-raisers as the first joint concert for Mr. Joel and Mr. Springsteen, although they have appeared together on stage at least once before in 1987 during a benefit concert for homeless children at Madison Square Garden with Paul Simon, among others.

Tickets for the fund-raiser, which is slated to be Mr. Obama’s last in the New York area, are not cheap. Balcony seats are going for $500; a “premiere seat” costs $2,500; and a “lounge ticket” is $10,000.

Where rock returns?

This is interesting and probably shows my age, but WNEW has been revived as a high-def radio station broadcasting on HD Radio and on the Web.

WNEW 102.7 FM in New York, which billed itself as the place where rock lives, was the place — and I mean THE place — for rock ‘n’ roll, especially rock that ignored traditional boundaries. When I was in high school, which was at the tail end of the station’s real heyday, you could hear The Beatles and Led Zeppelin mixed with The Vapors, Jim Carroll and Elvis Costello (this was back when he wasn’t considered mainstream). The mix may not seem that revolutionary now, but consider how rare it is — outside of satellite radio — to hear Kings of Leon, The Fratellis and Art Brut, Zep, the Stones and early Aerosmith on the same playlist.

That cross-pollination was encouraged by a management that valued music and creativity.

That came to an end as the ’80s wore on — the station would continue as a shell of itself until the late 1990s — as the changes in the radio world, the return to extremely segregated playlists and an aversion to experimentation, a devotion to marketing at the expense of the music, replaced the creative impulse. The station moved through various rock formats — classic rock, “new” rock, etc. — that gutted what made the station so vital.

The new technology — the expanded HD spectrum, Web broadcasting — may allow an endrun around the marketers and bring back what made WNEW the station it was.

The day the music died

Jerry Wexler, one of the most important music producers in the history of American popular music, died early this morning.

Paul Wexler told the AP his father’s death was “a tremendous loss.”

“The number of artists that he was involved with and helped significantly or just made great records with, the list is almost unbelievable,” Paul Wexler added. “And many of them are gone now.”

Wexler earned his reputation as a music industry giant while a partner at Atlantic Records with another legendary music figure, the late Ahmet Ertegun. Atlantic provided an outlet for the groundbreaking work of African-American performers in the 1950s and 1960s. Later, it was a home to rock icons like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. He later helped Dylan win his first Grammy by producing his 1979 “Slow Train Coming” album.

Wexler helped boost the careers of both the “King of Soul,” Charles, and the “Queen of Soul,” Franklin. Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke and Percy Sledge were among the other R&B greats who benefited from Wexler’s deft recording touch. He also produced Dusty Springfield’s classic “Dusty in Memphis,” considered a masterpiece of “blue-eyed” soul.

Wexler’s influence on music can best be summed up, I think, by this quote from Solomon Burke:

“He loved black music, R&B music and rhythm and blues was his foundation. He had a feeling for it, he had the knack to keep it going in his heart and recognize the talent that he felt was real,” Burke told the AP after learning of his death. “Jerry Wexler didn’t change the sound of America, he put the sound to the public. He open the doors and windows to the radio stations … and made everybody listen.”