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TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992
Jan. 20, 1992 Why Are Men and Women Different?
ART, Page 60
Seeing Life In Jazz Tempo

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A major show gives the neglected Stuart Davis his due as a great, brash
chronicler of the urban American scene

By Robert Hughes

To understand the career of Stuart Davis (1892-1964), the great American
Modernist whose centenary show is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York City through Feb. 16, you have to imagine a time when American painting
hardly mattered to Europe, and when the idea of an avant-garde scarcely mattered
to Americans--except as a source of laughs.

That time is far back, of course. America, in its eager embrace of the new,
industrialized and academized the idea of avant-garde production so long ago
that the notion of an unpopular, provincial Modernism seems remote. But 60 years
ago it was very much a fact. In 1932 a New York critic urged the Metropolitan to
buy a Davis, suggesting that it should hang on "the landings of the stairways,
or possibly the Tea Room"--obviously not in the main galleries, where the main
art was.

Davis' rise from the stairway is achieved now, but it was slow. When
American Modernism triumphed, from about 1960 on, it did so largely without
Davis: its beneficiaries were the Abstract Expressionists, and later the Pop
artists. Davis' pragmatism, the empirical and logical qualities of his work that
seem so admirable now and connect him back to the best strain in 19th century
American art--Audubon through Homer and Eakins to the Ashcan School--actually
counted against him. What the postwar art world liked was "spirituality" and
"sublimity," the tincture of melancholy elevation. But Davis had always liked
the American vernacular, the look of the street, the jostle and visual punch of
signs, life imagined in jazz tempo, hard-edged, Cubist-based and infused with
optimism. So that left him on the margin.

And then, when Pop came along, his reputation was only a little enhanced by
it. Davis had delved images from the commercial culture of America before the
Pop artists were even born. The classic one is Odol, 1924, in which the
bent-neck bottle of a mouth disinfectant is presented, plain and planar--name
brand, slogan and all--as its own icon, the ancestor of Andy Warhol's Brillo
boxes. But Davis' work was grounded in Cubism, as that of the later artists was
not; the Cubist scheme of fragments of media culture and packaging (newspaper
headlines, labels and so on), absorbed into a painterly matrix, gave Davis his
way of handling the American cityscape. It was brasher than Cubism but far more
attached to deliberate aesthetic construction than Pop--and with none of the new
movement's camp flavor.

So he was shrugged off as a distant relative, at best, of whom the expanded
art audience of the '60s and '70s knew little. In fact, the Met's show is the
first Davis retrospective in a quarter of a century. For the younger half of the
museum public, it should be an eye opener, because Davis' work testifies--as art
historian Diane Kelder says in her catalog introduction--to an "aesthetic
continuity and intellectual integrity...sadly absent from the cynical
eclecticism and self-aggrandizement that has characterized much American
painting in recent years."

Davis' father was a journalist and cartoonist, and the son would later
describe his own role as "a cool Spectator-Reporter at an Arena of Hot Events."
His art teacher from 1909 to 1912 was Robert Henri, realist and member of the
Ashcan School, who confirmed Davis in the populist social conscience that had
been embedded in his work from the beginning, when he drew for the radical
monthly the Masses. The early work shows Davis chewing through a mass of
influences (Munch, Van Gogh, Matisse), absorbing the first impact of Modernism
that came with the Armory Show in 1913. But even when trying on the jackets of
style, Davis comes across as a virile, decisive young painter. There is nothing
hesitant about the broad, sour-colored patterning of clouds and their
reflections on shallow waters in Ebb Tide--Provincetown, 1913.

He went to Europe only once--a stay of nine months in Paris, in 1928-29,
which was just long enough to dispel the inferiority complex of the provincial.
Not for Davis the dilettante expatriate's habit of looking back home with
contempt: Paris "allowed me to observe the enormous vitality of the American
atmosphere as compared to Europe and made me regard the necessity of working in
New York as a positive advantage." But it is inconceivable that he would have
developed his rigorous belief in the integrity of pictorial form without
European models.

He loved the workaday world, the pragmatic scene: traffic lights and
building sites and egg beaters, the bright primary colors of ships' gear in
Gloucester, Mass., anchors and buoys and coils of hawser. Antismokers will be
displeased to find that Davis also exalted smoking as a proper activity in a
man's world. Cigarette papers and Bull Durham tobacco turn up in his still
lifes, and one of his best murals--he loved to work on the mural scale--was
commissioned in 1932 for the men's lounge of Radio City Music Hall. Originally
given the Hemingwayesque title Men Without Women, it features the biggest Havana
cigar in the history of Western art and is now much embrowned by real tobacco
smoke, its whites dulled to ivory.

Walt Whitman, Davis saw, was "our one big artist," and no American painter
had rivaled his achievement as a celebrant of American identity. He wrote: "I
too feel the thing Whitman felt and I too will express it in
pictures--America--the wonderful place we live in." You see him enumerating the
objects of work like Whitman making poetry from the litany of their names:

The shapes arise!
Shapes of factories, arsenals,
foundries, markets,
Shapes of the two-threaded tracks of
railroads,
Shapes of the sleepers of bridges,
vast frameworks, girders, arches,
Shapes of the fleets of barges, tows,
lake and canal craft...
He adored jazz--"It don't mean a thing/If it ain't got that swing," he
wrote in the margin of one of his paintings, quoting Duke Ellington. His
obsession with syncopation and variations on a melodic figure winds into works
like the great housing-project mural of 1938, Swing Landscape, in which familiar
Davis signs for bridge, cable, girder, mast and wall jive and flicker in a
matrix of apoplectically energetic color. In the last decade of Davis' career
the signs take over completely, as in Schwitzki's Syntax, 1961, dominated by the
single name of a spark plug: CHAMPION.

It may be that this word was also a gesture of defiance toward younger
artists. Davis continued to develop as an artist right up to his death, but from
the '40s on, he had troubles. Intimations of old-fashionedness began to rub him
the wrong way. As he passed 50, a new generation of artists was treading on his
tail. And, like many other left-leaning liberals of the time, he was devastated
by the pact between Hitler and Stalin, and by Russia's invasion of Finland in
1939.

Davis' reaction to this brutal display of Stalinist tyranny was to sheer
away from all connection with the artistic left. He gave up on his dream of a
politically didactic avant-gardism--the hope that had haunted American art in
the '30s, as it has come to haunt it again, more weakly, today. There was, he
announced, "nothing like a good solid ivory tower for the production of art."
When the Abstract Expressionists emerged, he rejected them crustily. "Art is not
a Subjective Expression to me," he wrote in his usual flurry of capitals,
"whether it be called Dadaism, Surrealism, Non-Objectivism...But when paintings
live up to these Advance Agent Press Releases, I turn on the Ball Game."
Outpublicized by the new direction of American art, Davis took up a defensive
stance on the periphery. This exhibition should return him to the center, where
he truly belongs.

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
Feb. 15, 1993 The Chemistry of Love
PEOPLE, Page 69
Cosmic Musing

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By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Rap inspired by the writings of Kafka and Camus, set against the classic
jazz of Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey? Believe it. This is DIGABLE PLANETS, a
brand-new hip-hop trio that's been taking the singles charts by storm. Its first
album, due this week, bears the lofty title Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time
and Space) and features a poetic pro-choice tune, La Femme Fetal. At last: rap
even a liberal freshman philosophy major could love.

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990
July 09, 1990 Abortion's Most Wrenching Questions
GERMANY, Page 86
Rap It Up

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By Emily Mitchell

Having fled over the Wall in 1976, Nina Hagen discovered the brave new
world of punk music. Hagen, 35, learned her craft by singing along to tapes of
Tina Turner and Janis Joplin, "although I couldn't speak a word of English." She
got started in East Berlin's jazz circuit and has since emerged as an
international rock star. Meantime, she has made more changes than Madonna,
festooning herself with chains and wearing metal bras, wild wigs and ghoulish
makeup. On her latest album, Hagen pounds out a number titled Gorbachev Rap.
After all, she explains, it's important to encourage Mikhail.

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
Mar. 01, 1993 You Say You Want a Revolution...
TECHNOLOGY, Page 50
The Digital Dilemma

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Consumers must once again choose between competing high-tech sound systems

By PATRICK E. COLE/LOS ANGELES--With reporting by Edward W. Desmond/Tokyo
and Jeffrey Stalk/Amsterdam

As any music lover can tell you, the trouble with sound systems is that
they have this unfortunate tendency to become suddenly obsolete. Remember the
eight-track tape? The LP? Just when you think it's safe to settle on one system,
the electronics industry changes the rules.

While everyone is getting comfortable with CDs and cassette tapes, the
industry has come up with two competing options that threaten to make existing
technologies obsolete. One is called a minidisc, the other a digital compact
cassette. Like the popular CDs, they are each digital, which means
electronically perfect sound with no static. But unlike CDs, you can record on
both new devices, and they are very portable.

Sony fired the first shot last October when it unleashed the MiniDisc
player, a $750 gadget that plays or records music on a 2 1/2-in.-sq. disc.
Philips returned the fire the next month with the digital-compact-cassette (DCC)
player, a $799 home tape deck that can use a new type of digital cartridge as
well as old-style cassettes. Now Sony is introducing yet another model: a $1,000
home MiniDisc player and recorder that will hit stores in April.

It seemed only a few months ago that the CD player seemed guaranteed to be
around for a while. Today industry experts aren't so sure. "There is a fear that
MiniDiscs could knock out CDs, which have become a standard," observes Michael
Riggs, executive editor of Stereo Review. "I would really prefer that it
wouldn't happen because it might upset the investment people have made in CDs."
A lot of other people would have that preference too, it seems safe to say.

Sony, which introduced the first home-use CD player in 1982, is counting on
its new minidisc to win over people who use standard cassette tapes. "The Mini
Disc is designed to replace the analog cassette," says Michael Vitelli of Sony.
The key is recordability. By making its Mini Discs recordable, Sony reasoned,
the company could ride the coattails of the CD explosion.

Philips' new digital compact cassette, like comparable products from
Marantz, Matsushita and Tandy, is able both to play and to record on digital and
old-fashioned cassettes. "It makes tape-format obsolescence obsolete," says
Frans Schmetz of Philips Consumer Electronics. The devices include features like
the ability to fast-forward at hyperspeed.

The recording industry has quickly responded by putting software onto the
market. Major record labels such as Warner Bros., Atlantic and GRP, a leading
jazz house, have produced about 600 DCC titles and 350 minidisc titles featuring
such artists as Bon Jovi, Natalie Cole and R.E.M. By comparison, music buyers
had only about 20 titles to choose from during the CD player's rookie year on
the market.

That has helped spark an enthusiastic response among cutting-edge
audiophiles. The Wiz, a New York City-based audio-products chain, reports brisk
sales for its stock of both DCC and minidisc players. Sony says it will sell
about 70,000 MiniDisc players in 1993.

Which one will make it in the long haul? Some industry experts believe the
formats could co-exist but that it's still too early to tell. "We're not rooting
for either one," says Jordan Rost, a Warner Music Group vice president. "The
consumer will have the final vote."

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992
Feb. 24, 1992 Holy Alliance
PROFILE, Page 66
With a Song in His Heart

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A classic composer of sophisticated melodies, Cy Coleman keeps the lights
bright on Broadway with two recent hit musicals

By Wilfrid Sheed

American music has been moving so fast for the past hundred years or so
that it has hardly had a moment to look back. Sure, ragtime was great--but
listen to this. Big bands? Elvis! Hard rock? Soft rock. Acid rock. Get with it.
Even a Mozart would be only as good as his latest hit in such a hip-hop
marketplace as this.

Yet, either because it's the '90s now and rearview time, or because the
stuff is too good to ignore any longer, many Americans have been looking back in
spite of themselves at the incredible trove of Broadway show tunes and pop
melodies composed between roughly 1920 and 1950 and finding it not only good but
great, even classical, in a loose-jointed, informal American sense of the word.

And if it's so good, why not play it again? When Barry Manilow helped open
the new Paramount theater--a symbolic act in itself--back in September with a
volley of his favorite Broadway standards, he was the latest of several Pop
stars to declare for the old-time religion: Maureen McGovern, Linda Ronstadt and
Carly Simon have all issued neoconservative albums, to blend right in with your
Bennetts and Clooneys and Sinatras, while several talented young singers, such
as Andrea Marcovicci, Mary Cleere Haran and Harry Connick Jr., actually seem to
have been born that way.

So if everybody's singing it, is anybody still writing it? No form of music
can be considered fully resurrected so long as people suppose it was all written
by Cole Porter, with maybe a little help from George Gershwin. It has to start
ringing bells with today's geniuses as well--and here the spotlight narrows
sharply to one put-upon hero, the great Cy Coleman, who, with hits like Sweet
Charity and Barnum, already has the honor of the American musical riding on his
other shoulder. His classic songs, such as Hey, Look Me Over, If My Friends
Could See Me Now, Witchcraft and Big Spender, are near the top of the postwar
musical charts.

Not that Coleman is the last American to write good theater songs--not
while Charles Strouse, Jerry Herman and Kander and Ebb are still banging them
out. He just happens to be the latest American to have had two first-run hits
playing on Broadway at the same time (City of Angels and The Will Rogers
Follies) since the glory days of Rodgers and Hammerstein, when America ruled the
boards, and probably the last active one (unless Burton Lane and Jule Styne have
something up their sleeves) to write the classic American jazz song that the
young singers are just now rediscovering.

A visitor to Coleman's office on Manhattan's West 54th Street may feel as
if he's stumbled upon the remains of Tin Pan Alley: over there is the old
upright piano on which Cy has scored most of his songs, and next to it the
thousand-year-old desk, and everywhere theater posters and photographs ("He just
keeps putting them up till the wall is full," says his secretary). And through
the window pipe the New York City street noises that have inspired the American
song ever since Irving Berlin first picked them up in the 1900s on the Lower
East Side.

So how has this throwback to another era managed to survive not only the
rock revolution, in all its geologic phases, but all the distractions of
country-and-western and rhythm and blues? Coleman, who is no fossil but an
immensely energetic and youthful fellow of 61, has the answer wrapped and ready
to go. "Selective hearing," he snaps. To which he adds that he is not writing
imitation '30s songs ("Pastiche is for college kids") but the same kind of
music, as if it had continued to evolve uninterrupted, fed by the latest
developments in jazz--to which he listens voraciously.

It's never too early to begin on a course like Coleman's, and at the age of
four young Cy was already playing everything he could get his ears on on the
family piano in the Bronx. "Did you have any musical relatives?" he is asked.
"No," he responds with a charming non sequitur, "my family couldn't even speak
English."

Coleman's father was, in fact, a carpenter whose sole visible contribution
to his son's art was to nail the piano shut so he could get some peace around
here. "Fortunately, as a carpenter's son, I figured out how to open it." After
which he was left undisturbed, and unencouraged, until the local milkman, who'd
heard him on his morning rounds, somehow talked the family into getting the kid
lessons.

With just this lick of help, it was the work of a moment for Coleman to
become a child prodigy, with a particular affinity for Beethoven. "I could
already do the technical stuff, and I was looking for `feeling'"--an excellent
career choice for a seven-year-old, because to this day virtuosity and feeling
fight it out for attention in Coleman's work, which sometimes sounds almost too
clever to be quite great.

But what his critics are hearing is not emotional coldness (the act of
composition moves him to the roots of his being) but the coolness of modern jazz
laid on top of the type of supersophisticated melody lines he first heard from
his major influence and first great love, the radio.

In those days, announcers seldom told you who wrote what, so Coleman simply
fell in love with the whole period, namely the middle to late '30s, by which
time the American song had reached a pitch of harmonic subtlety and
adventuresomeness. And it is this kind of song that Coleman started playing in
clubs as a teenager ("a school you can't pay tuition to") and still writes today
with whatever refinements Miles Davis, Bill Evans, et al., might have brought to
it.

"I think of myself first and last as a professional pianist," he says, and
this order of things, which he sustains with a few dazzling concerts a year,
gives him the serenity to continue when rising costs threaten musical theater
with extinction. If extinction comes, "I'd probably become my own publisher and
produce my own videos. I would always write music."

Since he can hear a full orchestra in his head, he probably has no choice.
Tunes have come to him unbidden during cocktail conversations, and if there's no
polite way of writing them down, he just remembers them with one ear and fields
dialogue with the other.

And what if somebody else has written that song already? "I just tip my hat
and move on." But he doesn't often bump into familiar stuff as an amateur might,
because his tunes "come from a different place--a very primitive place," his own
private cellar, where the melodies are marked COLEMAN ONLY. And you don't have
to be a professional to spot a vintage one. Witchcraft, The Best Is Yet to Come
would simply never have got written at all if a certain musical milkman in the
Bronx hadn't kept his ears open.

Yet it's also notable that some of his most characteristic songs were
written with different lyricists. Unlike George and Ira, Gilbert and Sullivan,
Cole and Porter, Coleman changes partners in song, because they all do different
things well, which helps him do likewise. It is no accident that the lyrics for
The Will Rogers Follies, the ultimate in brassy, knock-'em-dead show-biz shows,
were contributed by the stage-wise troupers Adolph Green and Betty Comden,
whereas the cerebral City of Angels was done with David Zippel. The result is
two utterly different scores, held together only by the fact that nobody else
could have written either of them.

You might land one Broadway hit by shooting arrows in the air, but never
two. And Cy Coleman probably knows more about the mechanics of a Broadway
musical than any other composer since Richard Rodgers. "The business, the
politics, the script, the scenery, the transition"--Ira Gasman, a young lyricist
who has been working with Cy on his next show, ticks off a few of the things he
has learned at Cy Coleman Academy. "Songs emerge from him like giggles coming
out of a baby."

Obliged, for instance, to come up with something for a stage-frightened and
vocally challenged Lucille Ball in Wildcat, he dashed off the almost singerproof
Hey, Look Me Over, a number that really tears up the joint and did wonders for
Lucy's nerves. For Sid Caesar in Little Me, he contrived a waltz (Real Live
Girl) well within the minuscule range of that star and every bathtub basso in
the land. Nevertheless, Coleman's greatest claim on the future remains, so far,
the score for Sweet Charity, words by the immortal Dorothy Fields, choreography
by the likewise Bob Fosse, which conveys in every swashbuckling note the
vitality and glittering professionalism that not so long ago made the American
musical the toast and envy of the outside world, like the American automobile.
How does Coleman feel about his responsibilities as a species of one-man Big
Three to the U.S. musicals industry? "I don't mind waving the flag a bit," he
says, and adds, "I am not alone."

He continues to work like three songwriters in one, while apparently
enjoying life enormously. Buzzing back and forth between New York and
Southampton, he has never stopped writing long enough to get married but has
picked up a lot of friends with whom to share the laughter that also comes
pouring out of him--easy, loud and often--between songs.

And if that ever fails him, he can always turn on the radio in his head and
listen to the world's finest music, including--who knows?--maybe the score to
his next show.

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994
Oct. 31, 1994 New Hope for Public Schools
ARTS & MEDIA/JAZZ, Page 86
The King of the Hill

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Two multi-CD sets of recordings by bebop pianist Bud Powell chart the
brilliant, tormented career of a great innovator

By Jay Cocks

There is soul and fuddle here. Heat and hesitation. The grace of real
genius and at times a touch of madness. Among the five CDs that constitute The
Complete Bud Powell On Verve and the four that make up The Complete Blue Note
and Roost Recordings (Capitol), you get a deep experience of his gift and his
torment. It is, much of it, great jazz. All of it is vital. These separate CD
sets are neither monument nor memorial, even though this year marks the 70th
anniversary of Powell's birth. Rather, the recordings provide a map of trails
blazed. There are still some byways only Bud Powell dared wander down, and many
that only he could find again, but a lot of piano players have followed his
path. His work still lights the way. And more, it leads.

It's often said, as a way of orienting anyone coming to him fresh, that
Powell did for the piano what Charlie Parker did for the saxophone. Together,
and with no small assist from Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, they took a
hand in fearlessly turning jazz inside itself, then inside out, as they created
bebop. But Powell found distinctive melodic nuances on his keyboard. He wasn't
as witty and romantic as Nat Cole or as exuberant a geometrician as Art Tatum,
both non-beboppers. But he could find a secret, personal vibrancy on a standard
like Jerome Kern's Yesterdays, or combine a dark heart with a soaring spirit in
such tunes of his own as Crossin' the Channel and Cleopatra's Dream. And he
could make Tea for Two, for God's sake, sound like an entire banquet, with the
Mad Hatter himself doing the pouring.

Born in Harlem in 1924, Earl Powell was, on the evidence, something of a
prodigy. His father was a building superintendent but also had some skill as a
stride pianist, and he started giving his son lessons at the age of three. By
the time Bud was seven, his father claimed, neighborhood musicians would come by
and take the boy out so everyone could admire his chops. At 10 he could play
Fats Waller and Art Tatum. While he was still in his teens, Powell fell in with
Thelonious Monk, who after a time would even let Bud take over the piano for an
evening's final set. Powell made his first recordings with trumpeter Cootie
Williams' orchestra in 1943. He was 19.

His musicianship would grow, but against heavy odds, as Powell was beset by
mental problems. In 1945 he was whaled on by a couple of Philadelphia cops when
he went to a club to hear Monk. "They'd beaten him so badly around the head,"
Cootie Williams remembered, "((Bud's mother)) had to go get him...His sickness
started right there." Powell began showing signs of insanity, and that was
combined with drinking and drug problems. He was periodically confined to
psychiatric hospitals, where he underwent electroshock therapy and was even
sprayed with water laced with ammonia. For a few years in the late 1940s, the
wizard saxophone player Jackie McLean, eight years younger than Powell, spent a
lot of time as a kind of musical apprentice and all-purpose guardian for him.
He'd take Powell to performing dates, get him together with musicians like
Parker who still revered him, and generally make sure he got through the day,
and through the music.

Often enough Powell did need help with that; still, the music could dazzle.
The way McLean recalls it in the notes that accompany the elegantly packaged
Verve set, Charlie Parker "got used to being king of the hill. But when he
stepped on the bandstand with Bud, he wasn't king of the hill anymore, because
Bud was going to give him back as much as he got." And that, of course, was near
as good as it ever gets.

The Capitol set opens with Powell's first date as a leader, recorded on
Roost in 1947, kicking off with a sprung version of I'll Remember April that
betrays none of Powell's troubles. It bursts with giddy invention that could
have tipped the song into anarchy if Powell hadn't been able to restrain his own
abandon. He was so good and so graceful, he could realize his inspirations with
tremendously controlled dexterity. The earliest of the Verve recordings are from
1949, and they end with a 1955 session in which Powell, his bass player and
drummer close out with a heavyweight combination: Gillespie's Bebop and Monk's
52nd Street Theme. The Capitol compilation ranges a little further, giving a
last glimpse of Powell in Paris, where he lived much of his later life, cosseted
and honored. His version of Like Someone in Love has a reckless majesty that
seems to draw a circle back to the exuberance of his youth, then close it,
without a seam showing. He would die three years later, in 1966.

Powell's sad life and wondrous music were in large part the inspiration for
filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier's fond 1986 jazz eulogy, 'Round Midnight, but what
is so imposing about the music on these CDs--immediately, insistently
impressive--is not the sorrow but the vigor. Powell's may have been a troubled
spirit, compromised and violated, but it was never stilled.

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
Oct. 04, 1993 On The Trail Of Terror
REVIEWS, Page 89
Music
The Last Great Set

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By DAVID E. THIGPEN

PERFORMER: Miles Davis
ALBUM: Miles & Quincy Live At Montreux
LABEL: Warner
THE BOTTOM LINE: Nearing the end of his brilliant career, the jazz master
raged valiantly against the dying of the light.

Like a man who had struck a deal with the devil, Miles Davis possessed
astounding creative powers, but was cursed with a dark, heavy spirit. His music
and his mercurial moods--he sometimes performed with his back to the audience,
and a vicious temper coiled behind his hoarse whisper of a voice--made him
jazz's most troubled and intensely gifted star at the time of his death in
1991.

In his lifelong obsession with breaking new ground, Davis revolutionized
jazz time and again. One such turning point was the legendary series of albums
(among them, Miles Ahead and Sketches of Spain) that he recorded in the 1950s
and '60s with arranger Gil Evans. Borne on Evans' rich orchestrations, Davis'
risky improvisational strategies and restless experimentation lifted jazz onto
higher planes of complexity and excitement.

In the late '70s, Davis' pal Quincy Jones began urging him to revisit the
Evans sessions, but for 15 years Davis declined. Then, at age 65, perhaps
sensing that his time was running out, he relented. At the famous jazz festival
in Montreux, Switzerland, Jones assembled the original Evans scores and led the
orchestra with Davis on solo. The result, Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux, is
Davis' final live album. Recorded only weeks before he died, it is an
excruciatingly openhearted struggle by a master defiantly raging against the
dying of the light.

Dogged by respiratory problems, Davis' once assertive, quicksilver trumpet
tone flickers and flares like an oxygen-starved flame. On Miles Ahead he sits
out long passages, but with trumpeter Wallace Roney backing him up, Davis' pride
and defiance burn through as he suddenly leaps into the final chorus, bobbing
atop the careening rhythm with a tone that begins as a crackle and winds up pure
and delicate as crystal. On the slow-building Solea, he struggles to find
himself, then, catching his wind, lets fly a cascade of notes that arc and
shimmer with the same brassy authority he wielded 30 or 40 years ago. It was a
final courageous flourish, and typically Davis. From struggle and defiance he
drew his power, right to the end.

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994
Jan. 24, 1994 Ice Follies
THE ARTS & MEDIA, Page 71
Music
Rap's New Jazz Messengers

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US 3 takes fusion further than some have ever dreamed

By Christopher John Farley

The young music fan was lying happily on his couch, listening to Hand on
the Torch, the new CD by US 3, when he drifted into a dream about the late jazz
drummer Art Blakey, leader of the influential Jazz Messengers.

"Mr. Blakey!" the fan exclaimed. "I love your work! The things you did to
nurture young jazzmen like Terence Blanchard--just amazing! But you should
really hear what's happened to jazz since you, ah, passed on. There are all
these young performers--such as A Tribe Called Quest, Freestyle Fellowship and
now US 3--who are combining rap and jazz. You know rap: it's a kind of rhythmic
recitation, done to a strong beat."

"Now I'm a little out of the loop on these things," Blakey interrupted. "So
let me get this clear. While jazz music is playing, these clowns are talking? In
my day we called that heckling, not music."

"Hold on, hold on. Just let me tell you about this great new group US 3. It
was started by two British producer-musicians--Mel Simpson and Geoff Wilkinson.
Each US 3 song features a variety of English, Jamaican and American jazz
musicians and rappers."

"US 3? I don't get it."

"`Us two' are the producers. The rappers and musicians collectively count
as one more. Add 'em up and you get US 3."

"Hmmm," said Blakey. "Well, let me hear some of this U2 stuff."

"US 3."

"Whatever."

The fan played his favorite track on the album: Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia).

"Interesting," said Blakey, tapping his toes. "But a total rip-off. That
part in the beginning--it's from A Night in Birdland, Vol. 1, by my own quintet.
And then it flows into excerpts from Herbie Hancock's Cantaloupe Island."

"We call that sampling. On this song, US 3 plays bits from old jazz songs.
Rapper Rahsaan speaks over the music--not staccato-style like most rappers, but
easy and loose, like another instrument. Then, topping it all off, there's a
live trumpeter, Gerard Presencer. His solos slink through the track, linking the
parts."

"You know," said Blakey, "I think I like it! This rocks! Play more."

The youngster played Lazy Day, a Sunday stroll of a song, with a drowsy
trumpet and laid-back raps by Kobie Powell. In the background were R. and B.
vocals, gliding over the song like a bird though a blue sky. "Isn't it great?"
the fan said. "US 3 takes jazz-rap to a new level of sophistication. The Blue
Note jazz label let the producers use its entire catalog as source material."

Next the young fan played The Darkside, a track built around Donald Byrd's
Steppin' into Tomorrow. It starts with a grim, pulsing bass, followed by hard
lyrics about urban life: "Come take a trip through the eye of a black
man/Looking out at life like he really doesn't give a damn."

"I see the possibilities here," said Blakey. "This hybrid combines verbal
and musical expression."

"Right. Simpson, the US 3 producer, says jazz-rap should no longer be
called a hybrid. It's become its own branch of music."

Blakey looked lost in thought. "So how popular is this music?"

"Last week, US 3 was playing in the background on Melrose Place."

"Melrose Place. I think I did a club gig there," said Blakey, wistfully.
"I'll have to remember the name of this group of yours, We 3."

"US 3, Mr. Blakey. US 3."

"Whatever."

Then the young fan woke up.

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
May 24, 1993 Kids, Sex & Values
REVIEWS
MUSIC, Page 80
Arcane Odyssey

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By GUY GARCIA

PERFORMER: Donald Fagen
ALBUM: Kamakiriad
LABEL: Warner
THE BOTTOM LINE: On his first album in 11 years, Fagen revives his
muse--and the quirky ghost of Steely Dan.

Back in the synthetic '70s, when disco and watered-down rock ruled the
radio, a band called Steely Dan was making some of the most elegantly offbeat,
wickedly incisive music ever to sneak onto the pop charts. Hits like Reeling in
the Years and Rikki Don't Lose That Number were only the tip of the creative
iceberg; beneath the taut tempos, cryptic lyrics and refreshingly unfamiliar
melodies lurked an arcane, darkly sardonic intelligence summed up by the group's
name, which was inspired by the moniker for a sexual appliance in William
Burroughs' Naked Lunch.

Never a band per se, Steely Dan was actually a constellation of crack
musicians that revolved around the core of Walter Becker, who played guitar and
bass, and Donald Fagen, whose keyboards and reedy, world-weary vocals helped
give Steely Dan its inimitable sound. The duo reached a stylistic apotheosis
with the 1977 album Aja, a seamless amalgam of rock and jazz idioms that spawned
the single Peg. Three years later, Becker and Fagen joined forces one last time
for Gaucho, before, in Fagen's words, reaching "a dead end."

The parting was amicable: Becker went off to produce a series of jazz
records and Rickie Lee Jones' Flying Cowboys album; Fagen released 1982's The
Nightfly, a consummately crafted solo effort that echoed with the bebop
percolations of his East Coast adolescence. Then came an 11-year hiatus, which
Fagen attributes to a serious bout of writer's block. "I was kind of depressed
at the time," he explains. "And it took me a while to figure out what I wanted
to do."

Kamakiriad is worth the wait. Produced by Becker, who also pitches in on
bass and solo guitar, the album picks up where Gaucho and The Nightfly left off
and goes one step further, meshing Fagen's urbanely elliptic lyrics with the
sonic sass and snap of Steely Dan. The faithful will be glad to know that Becker
and Fagen are already writing songs together for a new album, and plans are
under way for a Steely Dan tour this summer. Meanwhile, Kamakiriad continues the
Steely Dan legacy while deftly sidestepping the quicksand of nostalgia.

From the streamlined funk of Tomorrow's Girls to the bouncy saunter of
Countermoon, the songs find a groove and gather momentum as breezy vocals and
serpentine horn charts glide over a swinging rhythm section. Trans-Island Skyway
builds from a muttering bass line and ice-cool finger snaps to an exhilarating
joyride that derives part of its thrill from the danger lurking around the next
bend. When Fagen sings, "Strap in tight cause it's a long sweet ride," it's like
speeding in a convertible with the top down.

Kamakiriad is described by Fagen as an allegorical journey set in the near
future where "the narrator, instead of having a winged horse, has an
environmentally correct car called a Kamakiri, which in Japanese means preying
mantis." Typically, there are other, unspoken, allusions. Kamikaze for one--the
headlong, heedless plunge into a blaze of glory. But in this case Fagen's muse
has emerged Phoenix-like from the ashes to resurrect the spirit of a brilliantly
quirky collaboration.

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990
Apr. 30, 1990 Vietnam 15 Years Later
RADIO, Page 98
Beyond Headlines and Haydn

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National Public Radio adds some fun--and even some fluff

In fictional Zenith, George Babbitt brags about boosterism. In Boston, a
Tappet brother asks, "Does the transmission go clunk before or after you let in
the clutch?" In Paris, Papa Wemba recalls his days as Zaire's most popular folk
singer. And in New Orleans, Dr. John bellows the blues from the stage of the
Colt 38 Club.

Until recently, people knew pretty much what to expect when they tuned in
to National Public Radio: thoughtful and innovative news programs like Morning
Edition and All Things Considered, with plenty of commercial-free classical
music in between. But no longer. Washington-based NPR, which is celebrating its
20th year, is adding more sounds of fun--and even a little fluff--to its
successful duet of headlines and Haydn. For example, the private, not-for-profit
network last month introduced Heat, a late-night mix of news, music and guests,
to attract younger listeners, already a growing part of the network's audience.
"NPR is not a preserve for the humor impaired," says Heat senior producer Steve
Rathe. "It is for thoughtful people who have not forgotten how to dance."

NPR is bopping right along. Twelve million people tune in each week, and
the number of member stations has grown from 90 in 1970 to 395. Morning Edition,
with its weekly audience of 4.8 million listeners, is public radio's top draw.
Not even Garrison Keillor's new American Radio Company of the Air, which is
produced by NPR's friendly rival, American Public Radio, commands such a large
audience.

To keep itchy fingers off those dials, the network is leavening its
offerings with lighter fare. News attracts a sizable cadre of thirtysomethings,
but many of them switch off their sets when Eine Kleine Nachtmusik begins.
Increasingly, the network is promoting what Peter Pennekamp, a programming vice
president, calls "culture with a small c."

For one thing, NPR is expanding its lineup of ethnic-, jazz-and folk-music
offerings. In addition to Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz, which for 13 years has
featured guests such as Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea and Peter Schickele (P.D.Q.
Bach), two new shows are getting funkier and further afield. BluesStage
transports listeners to down-and-dirty locales to hear rhythm-and-blues stars,
including the Persuasions. A recent episode highlighted veteran Little Milton
from the gritty B.K. Lounge in Rochester. The emcee and commentator for the
weekly program is Grammy-winning R.-and-B. soul sister Ruth Brown, who also
earned a Tony for her role in the Broadway musical Black and Blue.

Perhaps NPR's liveliest offering is Afropop Worldwide, which is buoyed by
the wide knowledge, melodious voice and infectious enthusiasm of host Georges
Collinet, a Cameroon native. The program explores contemporary African music and
its influence on pop sounds. Among performers recently featured: Brazil's
Gilberto Gil, the Ivory Coast's Alpha Blondy and the "Lion of Zimbabwe," Thomas
Mapfumo.

Traditional radio drama is also getting a wider airing on NPR. The network
broadcast Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis' novel of Main Street shenanigans, complete
with music, sound effects and a cast of 34 readers, including Ed Asner (as
George Babbitt), Richard Dreyfuss, Amy Irving and John Lithgow. Among future
projects: Arthur Kopit's play Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma's Hung You in the Closet
and I'm Feeling So Sad and muckraking novelist Frank Norris' McTeague. Asner,
who was paid a mere $2,300 for his work, which stretched over nine months, finds
it satisfying nonetheless. Says he: "I grew up with radio, and I don't remember
anyone falling asleep before the radio like they do with TV."

Over the past couple of years, NPR has been adding to its lineup of talk
shows. Fresh Air, the most insightful and entertaining interview program on
radio, features an eclectic mix of authors, artists and performers. Host Terry
Gross has discussed with John Updike his love of faces ("a dermal sin") and
explored comedian Martin Short's unusual adolescent fantasies. She got tough
with Nancy Reagan over her memoirs but allowed actor Bob Hoskins (Who Framed
Roger Rabbit?) to wax lyrical about Laurence Olivier. Gross is just one of a
notable number of female voices at NPR. Unlike the commercial networks, she
says, "NPR never bought the idea that women's voices lack credibility."

Car Talk, NPR's offbeat call-in show, gets as much mileage out of the jokes
as the information. Boston's Tappet brothers--actually two M.I.T. grads named
Ray and Tom Magliozzi, who own an auto-repair shop and drive U.S. models--have
turned America's love-hate relationship with the automobile into a stand-up
routine. "Do you know why they call the Volvo the poor man's Mercedes?" Ray once
asked a perplexed caller. "Because the repair bills will keep you too poor to
buy a Mercedes!"

Heat, broadcast nightly from New York City, offers late headlines and
single-issue shows intended to mesmerize young news junkies. One recent edition
addressed the transformation of the South African theater. The guests included
the cast of the play Survival, musician Hugh Masakela and, from Johannesburg,
novelist Nadine Gordimer. "We want to erase the artificial line between
intellectual and creative expression," says host John Hockenberry. "We want the
show to be a place where the left brain and the right brain can unwind
together." That's a tall order. Can the live wires at NPR deliver? Stay tuned.

By J.D. Reed. Reported by Elizabeth L. Bland/Washington and Nancy
Newman/New York.

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992
Mar. 30, 1992 Country's Big Boom
MUSIC, Page 62
COVER STORIES
Country Rocks The Boomers

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Buoyed by fresh converts and embraced by a whole generation facing the
realities of middle age, the new Nashville sound captures the mainstream with a
nourishing mix of tradition, down-home showmanship and up-to-date songs for
grownups

By Priscilla Painton--With reporting by Georgia Harbison/Buffalo

It was a time of new prosperity in the U.S.A.
And all the fortunate offsprings never had to pay
We had sympathy for the devil and the Rolling Stones
Till we got a little older
And found Haggard and Jones
A generation screaming for more room
Kids of the baby boom
-- Bellamy Brothers, 1986

Baby boomers have gone through a strange musical journey. For a time, rock
music was their essential cultural touchstone, a vein of deep feeling that
seemed to flow through nearly every one of them. If the oldest boomers grew up
on early Stones and the youngest arrived just in time to catch Van Halen, at
least they possessed a lingua franca.

Then along came advances in studio technology and radio-station niche
marketing. Leading-edge music is now subdivided into such abstruse and sharply
segregated categories as Christian Rap, Acid Jazz and Grunge Rock, and it can be
created, almost untouched by human hands, with something called a Musical
Instrument Digital Interface. The two major currents of pop today have much to
do with attitude and little to do with musicality: heavy metal speaks to priapic
barbarism, and rap is so belligerent that for some it verges on antimusic.

So who's topping the charts? Well, how about a balding Oklahoma country
singer whose idols include James Taylor and John Wayne, who prances across stage
like a cross between Mick Jagger and Ferris Bueller, swinging from rope ladders
and smashing his guitar, and who brings 40-year-olds to tears with his
existential hymns about accepting life's incidental malice? Rock may be
moribund, but Garth Brooks sure is thriving.

By their sheer demographic weight, the nation's 76 million baby boomers
continue to determine America's musical preferences. And what America currently
prefers is country. Brooks now outsells Michael Jackson and Guns 'N Roses,
country radio is trumping Top 40, and Nashville is churning out new stars so
fast that Randy Travis' six years in the limelight qualify him as an elder
statesman.

Significantly, country has achieved its new luster without abandoning its
heritage: a heritage so stubbornly rooted in storytelling and simple melody that
it has never quite left behind the farm in Poor Valley, Va., where a moody
lumberman named A.P. Carter and his clan picked up guitars seven decades ago and
invented the Carter Scratch. The new wave of country singers is dominated by
artists who have succeeded largely on their own terms, consolidating an eclectic
mix of contemporary sounds with old-fashioned catches in the throat, tinkles of
the mandolin, sugary sobs and vertiginous swoops of pedal steel guitar. This
generation's performers are the first bred on both rock and country who are
consciously choosing Nashville, as Vince Gill did when he turned down a chance
to join the rock group Dire Straits in favor of continuing his country career.

If the baby boomers have discovered country, however, it is not just out of
nostalgia. They have looked across the musical landscape and found a cast of
artists who are very much like themselves. Today's hot country stars, Garth
Brooks foremost among them, are more likely to be college graduates with IRAs
than dropouts with prison records. They put Mercedes and Volvos in their videos
and refer to wine and cafes as much as beer and honky-tonks. They worry about
keeping in shape and, in an era of middle-class constriction, about keeping
ahead. The women sing about their heartbreaks, but they also rejoice in their
sexual independence and ponder their opportunities. Both genders extol the
virtues of marital longevity.

Gill, for one, looks as if he stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalog, and he
loves golf so much that he lives on a course outside Nashville. Cleve Francis,
one of the few black country singers signed to a major label since Charley Pride
in the '60s, is a 46-year-old cardiologist from the suburbs of Washington.
Mary-Chapin Carpenter has a degree in American civilization from Brown
University; she drew the idea for her highly successful When Halley Came to
Jackson, about the appearance of Halley's comet in Mississippi, from a line in
the memoirs of Eudora Welty. K.T. Oslin once made a living as a Broadway chorus
girl, and when she turned to country in her mid-40s, it was to sing about such
nonbucolic topics as older women sleeping with younger men. Even the down-home
Reba McEntire, who spent her youth on her father's ranch and on the rodeo
circuit, went on to college, where she studied classical violin and piano and
"analyzed Mozart every which way."

But more than any other country headliner, Brooks encapsulates most of the
complexities of the baby boomers. He was raised in an Oklahoma City suburb,
where he listened to Kiss and Queen, and graduated from Oklahoma State, where he
was a middling jock and an advertising major. He hides his receding hairline
under his Stetson, and once said, "I'd rather be like Schwarzenegger--perfect
teeth, perfect body, full head of hair." He can be a pop nostalgist who croons
old Billy Joel songs, a country nostalgist who traces his lineage to the
backwoodsy George Jones, or a rock nostalgist who remembers what the back and
forth between a jumping-jack-flash performer and his audience is supposed to be
like. "Like great sex," he says, "where you get wild and frenzied, then turn
that around quick to something gentle, tender and slow, and then get wild and
crazy again and just keep doing that over and over until one of you drops
dead."

His essence, above all, is in a ballad like The Dance, a palliative for a
generation that has begun to lick old wounds as it approaches middle age. "I
could have missed the pain," he sings. "But I'd of had to miss the dance." The
video of The Dance shows images of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and
the song's autumnal, retrospective tone is what seems to touch millions of
listeners. Says Sue Thayer, 43, a machine-shop secretary from Grayling, Mich.,
and a convert to country music from rock: "It's about love affairs gone bad, and
death--the finality of relationships."

Aging rock 'n' rollers have been quietly defecting to country for years.
But since 1990 the process has accelerated sharply. "Elvis Presley was the first
time I saw this kind of reaction," says Jimmy Bowen, whose Nashville-based
Liberty Records distributes Brooks. "Then I saw it again with the Beatles. And
now I see it with Garth Brooks. When you turn on millions of people in a short
period of time, that's called a phenomenon."

Brooks has yet to prove he has the imagination of John Lennon, much less
the death-defying charisma of Elvis, but he has broken all of Nashville's sales
records. Until his 1991 Ropin' the Wind, no country album had ever entered
Billboard's pop chart at No. 1. Since his recording debut a short three years
ago, Brooks has moved more albums with more velocity than anyone else in the
history of Nashville: when the figures for Ropin' are added to those for Garth
Brooks and No Fences, his first and second releases, he has sold more than 16
million records.

Even without Brooks, the country sound has upset the cosmopolitan
assumptions of Los Angeles and New York City, which said drawl-and-twang music
would never acquire a mass audience. Country music was, after all, the sort of
rube industry that made a vamp out of the cowboy by putting him in rhinestones
and that churned out corn pone-ography like TV's Hee Haw, the show where banjo
pickers and celebrity fiddlers would pop out of a field to joke about henpecked
husbands and lazy cousins. Worse, the last time country flashed across the
national consciousness, it was propelled by the 1980 movie Urban Cowboy,
starring a mechanical bull and John Travolta. The crowd that had infested discos
was suddenly squeezing into tight-fitting jeans and into pseudo-kicker saloons
from Cambridge to Beverly Hills. Five years later, the boots were tucked away
next to the platform shoes, and the New York Times was declaring that country
music might soon be "as dated as the ukulele."

This time the boom is different. "A connection is really being made between
the audience and the music," says Bill Ivey, director of the Country Music
Foundation. "In the '70s and '80s, with the excesses of the sexual revolution
and the excesses of an out-of-control speculative economy, everybody lived as
though they could have it all today and all tomorrow. Now, with the collapse of
the savings and loans, the specter of AIDS, and a weak economy in which anybody
who has a job considers himself lucky, I think everybody realizes we are going
to have to live like grownups. Country music is definitely music for grownups."

Lest there be any lingering doubt, grownups, or at least people over 35,
buy more records than teenagers do. They account for 29% of the units sold,
compared with 18% for the 15-to-19 age group, according to the Recording
Industry Association of America. Until last year, the effect of that purchasing
power was disguised by the sketchy oral reports drawn from record stores
canvassed for the Billboard pop charts. But last year the charts began relying
on SoundScan, a firm that compiles computerized bar-code information from cash
registers. On the May 25 pop chart, the first based on the SoundScan data, 15
more country albums showed up in the Top 200. In 1984 the country category
showed only eight gold (500,000 sales), four platinum (1 million sales) and
seven multiplatinum (multimillion sales) albums; last year an astonishing 24
country albums went gold, 21 went platinum, and eight went multiplatinum.

But the story is not just in the sales. Wynonna and Naomi Judd's
pay-per-view TV special in January drew more viewers than did similar specials
by the Rolling Stones and New Kids on the Block. In a year when the income from
the top 10 rock or pop tours declined 32%, country acts increased their revenues
40%. The recently published autobiography of Ralph Emery, Nashville's answer to
Johnny Carson, who is the host of Nashville Now, a live show on the Nashville
Network (TNN), has been on best-seller lists for 17 weeks. In just two years,
the magazine Country America has doubled its circulation to almost 1 million.
Even the arbiters of hipness have begun paying attention: both Spin magazine and
Michael Ovitz's Creative Artists Agency have new outposts in Nashville. And
Saturday Night Live this month featured Brooks as its musical guest.

Above all, country is reaching deeper than ever into the lives of
Americans. Since 1980 the number of country radio stations has gone from 1,534
to about 2,500 nationwide. By one measure, country has become the nation's
second most popular radio format, after adult contemporary. Country stations
rank in first place in 45 of the top 100 radio markets, including Buffalo,
Kansas City and Orlando. Without much fanfare, discos that used to play Top 40
tunes have been converting into country music clubs, where cowboy wannabes pull
up in Hondas to dance the Slappin' Leather, the Tush Push or the Texas
two-step.

But perhaps the most obvious sign that country has achieved a mainstream
acceptability is its new and high profile on prime-time television. First came
CBS's Country Music Association Awards last October, which unexpectedly landed
in the Nielsen Top 10. Then NBC got into the act: it launched a weekly
prime-time variety show called Hot Country Nights and in January aired the
special This Is Garth Brooks, which helped push the network to its highest
Friday-night ratings in more than two years.

Television in fact has worked a revolution in the dissemination of the
Nashville sound. The Nashville Network, which serves as an almost
round-the-clock showcase for country music performers and their videos, has in
nine years gone from 7 million subscribers to 54.5 million. On the strength of
this success, TNN's owner, Gaylord Entertainment Co., formed a partnership last
January with Group W Satellite Communications to acquire Country Music
Television, a service with an ambition to do with country music what MTV did
with pop and rock. In just 14 months its subscriptions have jumped 31%, to 15.7
million households.

The small screen quickly dispelled some further myths about country. "The
image that people had of a country performer was Porter Wagoner--a guy in his
60s who wears spangles and a highly tailored cowboy outfit," says Lloyd Werner,
who heads sales and marketing for Group W. "But country fans discovered that
country performers looked just like them." And cable executives discovered what
they had already suspected--that, in Werner's words, "a country music fan is not
over 60 and does not wear bib overalls, drink Lone Star beer from a long-stemmed
bottle and drive a 20-year-old pickup with a shotgun rack in the back."

Actually, the country music lover long ago abandoned the Southern holler
for the middle-class suburbia of satellite dishes that politicians like to call
the heartland. (Appropriately, the cornfield on the set of Hee Haw was recently
transformed into a mall.) Republicans have understood this ever since Richard
Nixon became the first President to visit the Grand Ole Opry in 1974. George
Bush campaigned with country music stars Loretta Lynn and Peggy Sue, and made a
pilgrimage to Nashville last year for the Country Music Association Awards. In
many ways, the voters Bush was after are those who make up the majority of TNN's
audience: 32% have an income over $40,000, and 13% make more than $50,000. They
are in their 30s and early 40s, own their home, have one new car and one old one
that they work on themselves, and when they travel, it is by car to places like
Walt Disney World.

Country is also benefiting from the determined eclecticism of the twenty
something generation. At a Nashville concert by country hunk Alan Jackson,
Brandi Byrd, 19, arrived with her hair teased into a punk sculpture, wearing a
replica of an artfully threadbare Aero smith outfit. At home she puts her
Jackson and Brooks tapes alongside the work of groups like Whitesnake, Poison
and Motley Crue. Says Julie Hall, a 23-year-old clerk at TNN: "I'm just as
likely to buy the Black Crowes as I am to buy a Travis Tritt tape. I like good
music. I don't care what it is."

But country's message makes the music belong, first and foremost, to the
baby boomers now coping with being in their 40s. Twenty-year-olds, says record
executive Bowen, "are having their first romance, and we're talking about the
third divorce over here." If rock is about feral impulses, country is about
spiritual nourishment. Cultural critic Camille Paglia, who has celebrated the
Dionysian power of rock music in her writings, believes the genre suffered an
identity crisis as it moved further from the rural immediacy of folk and blues
and lost its restless, questing spirit. "In rock you're getting middle-class
suburban kids who have no experience of anything except what they hear on the
radio," she says. "Country music speaks emotional truth. Rock has drifted from
it." Says Paul Shaffer, David Letterman's bandleader: "Country is soul music for
white people, and people always return to soul music, because that's where the
feeling is."

If, as in Shaffer's description, country's appeal has something to do with
race, it is because pop has rarely been as racially polarized as it is in the
era of rap. Country fans, who, like their stars, tend to be white, are not shy
about describing their music as the musical equivalent of the urban escapism
known as white flight. "Thank God for rap," says Bowen. "Every morning when they
play that stuff, people come running to us." Says Ralph Emery: "Rap music speaks
only to black issues, and has turned a lot of white people off."

But much more than race is involved in country's success. At the end of a
decade marked by lip-synching scandals and Material Girlhood, Americans are
reclaiming their right to sentimentality, civility and a little bit of cellulite
on the dance floor. Take, for example, some patrons of the Golden Nugget, a
night spot in Buffalo's flourishing country-and-western scene. "In a disco, if
you're not a size 3, forget it," says Heidi Fisher, 28. "They're into spandex
heaven. And your hair has to be out to here with hair spray. I only wear spandex
in a dark gym. Here it's more relaxed and I can be myself. And if someone bumps
into you they're more likely to say, `Excuse me.'" Danny Beal, a 27-year-old
dairy farmer from nearby Darien, says, "It's the only place I can be in public
and show my feelings." And now that promiscuity is out, says Gary Marcinkowski,
25, who owns a Buffalo-area painting business, the atmosphere in a country bar
offers another advantage: "It's less of a pickup scene."

Country music seems right on time for the abstinent '90s. Randy Travis'
first hit single, On the One Hand, set the tone in 1985, in an ambivalent lament
that "on the one hand, I count the reasons/ I could stay with you/...But on the
other hand/ There's a golden band/ To remind me of someone/ Who would not
understand." Today the title song of Mike Reid's album Turning for Home is a
tribute to his baby daughter; George Strait is praising the immutability of
paternal love in Love Without End, Amen; Alan Jackson is chanting to his wife
that I'd Love You All Over Again.

Marriage counseling is in, and so is staying sober. The barfly characters
who cried in their beer in classic country songs have been displaced by
yuppified drinkers who, in the words of a Reid song, are content to be sitting
on their porch and "sippin' some wine/ from my coffee cup." That is, if they're
drinking at all. In the video Travis Tritt made last year for The Whiskey Ain't
Workin', the character he plays pointedly refuses to drown his sorrows in
alcohol.

The women of country music used to wait for their wayward husbands to come
home, or stand by them even when they didn't. But to country music's
postfeminist performers, both scenarios seem a waste of time. The middle-aged
women in K.T. Oslin's work are busy warning their lovers that they are
chronically fickle, are having careers while their ex-husbands have custody of
the child, or are just plain contemplating the legacy of their past revolts. "Oh
we've burned our bras and we've burned our dinners/ And we've burned our candles
at both ends," is her bittersweet assessment in 80's Ladies. Meanwhile, Trisha
Yearwood sings about a woman with such a sense of autonomy that she demands men
"who will cry on my shoulder" but won't "follow me around." And in the new video
for the song Is There Life Out There? Reba McEntire refuses to let a too early
marriage be an occasion for whining: she goes back to college and gets a
degree.

"Things don't always work out all right in country songs," says Kevin
Phillips, author of the 1990 book The Politics of the Rich and Poor. "What a
perfect backdrop for a recession that is undercutting the American Dream." Clint
Black's One More Payment is a classic hard-times complaint about the rent, the
banker at the door, and a roof that is crumbling. But the current country songs
also hurl Molotov cocktails at the upper classes and the system that favors
them. Brooks succeeded last year in making a national barroom anthem out of
Friends in Low Places, which turned an abandoned lover's revenge into an act of
social protest. "Blame it all on my roots," he sang. "I showed up in boots/ And
ruined your black-tie affair."

Country's appeal is not a function of the leading economic indicators,
however. It draws its power mostly from people like Jyne Kubas, 52, an Alan
Jackson fan who is not embarrassed to say she still hurts from her divorce 10
years ago. "`Cowboys don't die and heroes don't cry,'" she says, repeating the
sardonic opening lines of Jackson's song Here in the Real World. "He says life
is not like the movies. I used to tell people he took a phrase out of my life."
For Kubas, as for many of the nation's still growing ranks of country fans, the
songs are precious musical absolutions, forgiving them for the vanities they
cherished and lost, and gently nudging them through middle age.

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990
June 11, 1990 Scott Turow:Making Crime Pay
MUSIC, Page 79
He's Finger-Pickin' Good

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Bela Fleck takes the banjo from bluegrass into jazz and beyond

By John Elson--With reporting by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

The Paganini, or maybe the Jimi Hendrix, of the five-string banjo recalls
the first time he heard that instrument. "I was four or five years old," says
Bela Fleck. "My brother and I were on my grandparents' bed watching TV when The
Beverly Hillbillies came on. The theme music started, and I had no idea it was
the banjo. It was Earl Scruggs in his prime. I only remember hearing something
beautiful. It called out to me."

And Bela answered. At 31, Fleck has surpassed the semiretired Scruggs--who,
with guitarist Lester Flatt, fronted the nation's best-known bluegrass band from
1948 until 1969--as a banjo virtuoso, taking this jangling folk instrument into
jazz, classical music and beyond. Three times a Grammy nominee and a perennial
winner of the Frets magazine poll as banjoist of the year, Fleck now has a
potential crossover hit: a jazz-inflected album called Bela Fleck and the
Flecktones (Warner Bros.). Released in March, the album has been bulleted on the
jazz charts and has sold a respectable 55,000 units so far.

To anyone who still thinks of the banjo as suitable only for rippling
accompaniment to high-pitched country harmonies, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones
is pure revelation. As a technician, Fleck is hummingbird-fast, whether picking
with three fingers, Scruggs-style, or with the back-and-forth,
thumb-and-forefinger method pioneered by Don Reno. Yet his technique is always
at the service of a sophisticated musical imagination that can make the
instrument sound as if it were born to play jazz. Unlike a guitar, a banjo
cannot sustain a note for very long. ("Pop, ping, and then it's gone," Fleck
says.) Yet on his ballad Sunset Road, Fleck creates an illusion of satiny,
legato plangency. If you want one word for the album, call it mellow. Says Tony
Trischka, his former teacher: "Bela Fleck is making the banjo safe for mass
consumption."

Musically speaking, jazz banjo is a long way from where Bela began. He was
born in New York City. His mother was a public school teacher. "I never met my
father," Fleck says. "He taught German for a living but was crazy about
classical music. He named me after Bela Bartok, the Hungarian composer. He named
my brother Ludwig after Beethoven. It was rough. The torture started in
kindergarten."

Growing up, Bela fell in love with the Beatles, fooled around with guitar
and took up the banjo at 14, after seeing the movie Deliverance, with its
Dueling Banjos bluegrass theme. "The sound of the banjo just killed me," he
says. "It's like hearing mercury."

The instrument offered more than aesthetic satisfaction. "My brother and I
were overweight as kids," Fleck recalls. "So I didn't have a great self-image,
but I found this thing I could do that made me feel good. I played banjo all the
time and stopped eating for satisfaction. I almost feel that I have a deal with
the banjo, that if I put the time in and take care of it, I'll be thin and have
something. And if I don't, part of me is afraid it will all fall apart."

Fleck attended Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, where banjo was
not considered a serious instrument. So he studied privately, first with Erik
Darling, onetime member of the Weavers folk quartet, and eventually with
Trischka, an urban bluegrass whiz. Even then, Fleck was an eclectic, trying to
absorb everything from salsa to jazz. Especially jazz. "I bought a Charlie
Parker record, and I thought, "Wow! This is incredible." I tried to learn
Parker's licks on the banjo, but I couldn't find the notes." One day, in a high
school jazz-appreciation class, the teacher played pianist Chick Corea's
Spain--for Bela, another revelation. "It was just so immediate. It was a light
going on and a door opening for me."

In 1979 Fleck moved to Lexington, Ky., to help start a group called
Spectrum. Exposure to bluegrass--the real thing--was a "big culture shock," he
admits. "I was a little cocky, but down South, they didn't think I sounded so
great because I lacked tone and I didn't have a great sense of rhythm. They were
right." In 1981 Fleck moved to Nashville and joined the group that would be his
musical home for the next eight years: the New Grass Revival, which played what
Bela calls "high-tech bluegrass with a lot of heart and intensity; the singing
was like R.-and-B. soul, like Motown."

Television provided Fleck with the chance to escape what he eventually felt
were the Revival's constraints. Two years ago, producers of the Lonesome Pine
Specials asked him to do a solo show. Bela Fleck and Guests began with the
tux-clad banjoist joining the Blair String Quartet in a four-movement classical
work by Fleck and composer Edgar Meyer. It ended with a jazz section riffed by
Bela and the trio that became the Flecktones: Howard Levy on keyboards and
harmonica, the brothers Victor and Roy ("Future Man") Wooten on bass guitar and
Drumitar (a guitar wired to electric drums). Bela Fleck and Guests was one of
the series' most popular programs and led to the record album. "I want to give
people stuff they can move to and that is melodic, and that is also complex and
satisfying for us to play."

Fleck can be as eloquent talking banjo as he is playing it. "There are
things I want to play that I haven't been able to yet," he offers. "Like
improvising. That can be a very spiritual experience. Stuff you don't even know
pours out. I want to become more tuned into pulling off the notes I hear in my
head at the exact moment I hear them. It's a lifelong goal." Stay tuned.

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994
May 16, 1994 "There are no devils...":Rwanda
ARTS & MEDIA/MUSIC, Page 89
Jazz Goes to the Movies

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Trumpeter Terence Blanchard skillfully sketches mood and emotion as he
swings between recordings and film scores

By David E. Thigpen

Halfway through song from his new tribute album, The Billie Holiday
Songbook, trumpeter Terence Blanchard abruptly shifts the mood from
brokenhearted to defiant. Reflecting the emotions of a jilted lover, he blows
swirling, gathering clouds of sound. Then, suddenly piercing them with a barrage
of sharp notes, he dashes off a few steeply ascending riffs, bending his notes
until they cry and yowl. Throughout the album, on solo after solo (Strange
Fruit, In My Solitude), Blanchard's compact, mournful-sounding melodies evoke
the desperation and broken dreams that tortured Holiday, who died at 44 in 1959
of drugs and drink.

Few can match Blanchard's precision and flair in evoking emotion. In the
course of two albums on his own, and five others with various collaborators, he
has developed an expressive style reminiscent of the mid-1960s Miles Davis. He
has also distinguished himself by his sideline as one of Hollywood's busiest
composers: three movies with Blanchard scores--Sugar Hill, Inkwell and
Crooklyn--are now playing in theaters.

Born in New Orleans, Blanchard grew up saturated in music. His father was
an insurance man and aspiring opera singer, and his early career paralleled that
of Wynton Marsalis, another hometown musician. Blanchard studied composition and
classical and jazz trumpet at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, then
moved to New York City, where he landed one of jazz's most enviable jobs:
trumpeter in the Art Blakey Band.

Unlike Marsalis, who devotes equal time to classical music, Blanchard
turned himself fully to jazz. He recorded five albums with saxophonist Donald
Harrison (beginning with New York Second Line in 1984) and then two others
leading his own quintet (Terence Blanchard and Simply Stated, both released in
1991). In the New York City club scene, he established himself as a composer and
soloist with a silvery tone and a gift for majestic phrasing.

It is as a film composer that Blanchard, 32, is now reaching wider
audiences. In the gangster drama Sugar Hill he uses the sparse, bluesy sound of
a jazz quintet to underline the flavor of tragedy and urban decay that permeates
the story. "These characters pull the trigger at the drop of a hat," says
Blanchard, "so a massive score would have overwhelmed the starkness I wanted to
convey." In The Inkwell, a coming-of-age comedy set in a beach resort in 1976,
and Crooklyn, Spike Lee's drama about family life in 1970s Brooklyn, Blanchard
sketches dreamy melodies with strings and piano to emphasize the films'
nostalgic undercurrents. "The instruments have to have the right timbre," he
says, "to hit the mood you want."

Blanchard's movie work began in 1987 when Spike Lee heard one of his albums
and asked him to compose the music for School Daze. Blanchard went on to score
Lee's next four films and followed those in 1992 with music for Malcolm X,
written for a 55-piece orchestra, a big band and a jazz trio--all at different
times varying and elaborating a single, stately theme to capture the turbulent
flow of Malcolm's life.

Blanchard says his film experience has sharpened his work in jazz
composition as well as performance. "Anybody can play a pretty melody," he says,
"but in the confines of a movie scene, you only have a few seconds to get to the
heart of the matter, to phrase the emotion you want. Jazz helps me take an idea
and vary and develop it; film helps me focus my ideas." That kind of thinking
can only mean good times for both jazz and movie music. In fact, with Billie
riding at No. 6 on the charts, and with all those Blanchard movie scores to
listen to, maybe the good times are already here.

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994
Sep. 19, 1994 So Young to Kill, So Young to Die
ARTS & MEDIA/MUSIC, Page 76
Young Man with a Horn

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Wallace Roney didn't have a trumpet, so Miles Davis gave him one of his
own

By David Thigpen--Reported by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles

Jazz trumpeters who are making a name for themselves are often like a
teenager who's just got his driver's license. They love speed for its own sake,
blowing fusillades of notes that show dazzling enthusiasm but no sense of
judgment. Leading his own septet on his fine new album Misterios (Warner Bros.),
Wallace Roney proves an exception to the rule. His amber tone and patient,
considered phrasing echo the mature works of Miles Davis.

Misterios marks the coming of age of a musician who endured his share of
lean times. A dozen years ago, Roney, then 22, sold nearly everything he
owned--"my books, my records, my jacket," he says--to leave Boston for New York
City, the world's jazz oasis. But when he arrived, it was more like a desert. He
couldn't afford the $500 to buy his own horn. "There weren't too many gigs
coming my way," he remembers. To practice, he had to borrow an old instrument a
friend was using to hold flowers. At night he slept in the backseat of his car.

After a year, Roney finally had some luck. He played at a tribute to Davis,
the trumpet's reigning genius, and the honoree was in the wings that night. He
was impressed. "He asked me what kind of trumpet I had," Roney recalls, "and I
told him none. So he gave me one of his."

Roney's real breakthrough, though, didn't come until 1991, when he played
alongside the ailing Davis onstage at Montreux, Switzerland. Davis was too weak
to play entire solos, so Roney would finish them for him. Davis died a few
months later, and Roney's performance became legendary. Misterios, Davis-like in
its jazz-pop blend, is dedicated to the legend. "He taught me to treat every
note like a precious emotion," says Roney. Listening to Misterios, you know he
learned his lessons well.

TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
Jan. 01, 1990 Man Of The Decade:Mikhail Gorbachev
MUSIC, Page 83
BEST OF THE DECADE

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Bruce Springsteen: The River (Columbia, 1980). Born in the U.S.A. was the
record that made the Boss a legend, but the bleak majesty of this two-LP set
shows the bedrock of his talent.

The Unknown Kurt Weill (Nonesuch, 1981). Acerbic rarities from the composer
of The Threepenny Opera, sung by opera's sexiest soprano, Teresa Stratas.

Wynton Marsalis: Think of One (Columbia, 1983). The award-winning album of
a trumpeter who was jazz's hope of the decade, as well as its hottest, coolest
talent.

Bob Marley and the Wailers: Legend (Island, 1984). Marley died in 1981, but
this collection of some of his best songs was no epitaph. It was a perpetual
baptism of Jamaican soul.

Prince and the Revolution: Purple Rain (Warner Bros., 1984). Not only the
best rock sound track ever written, Purple Rain is the most contained and
passionate work to come from this protean regent of R. and B.

The Mapleson Cylinders (Distributed by Metropolitan Opera Guild, 1985).
Calve sings! And so do Nordica, Sembrich and De Reszke on these treasures from
the Met, recorded on wax cylinders by the company's librarian between 1900 and
1904.

Bob Dylan: Biograph (Columbia, 1985). A premature but timely career
retrospective of rock's most formidable writing talent, Biograph was also a
welcome reassertion of Dylan's primacy. Was great, is great, will be great.

U2: Rattle and Hum (Island, 1988). In which the rockers with the decade's
biggest reach and most tender conscience discovered America, and outdid
themselves, besting even their breakthrough The Joshua Tree album of 1987.

John Adams: Nixon in China (Nonesuch, 1988). The decade's most exhilarating
and accomplished new opera: a waltz across the Great Wall with Dick, Pat, Henry,
Mao and his missus.

Jerome Kern: Show Boat (Angel/EMI, 1988). With a cast that boasted the
likes of mezzo Frederica von Stade, the landmark American musical was revealed
for what it is: a landmark American opera as well.

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