Joe Henry - Blood From Stars - 2009

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Joe Henry - Blood From Stars - 2009

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Joe Henry - Blood From Stars - 2009

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Joe Henry Biography: For more than two decades as a solo artist and Grammy-winning producer, Joe Henry has worked with some of the most celebrated names in music, including Ornette Coleman, Elvis Costello, Allen Toussaint, T-Bone Burnett, Don Byron, Solomon Burke, Brad Mehldau, Madonna, and Ani DiFranco. On Blood from Stars, his remarkable and sprawling new album, Henry has the unprecedented pleasure of introducing the world to a new talent, a young saxophonist by the name of Levon Henry. "I was tempted to put him on my last record, Civilians (2007)," Henry explains of his seventeen-year-old son. "He wasn't quite ready for that –and neither was I. But in the last two years, he's found a voice and begun to speak in wildly expansive and complete sentences. It wasn't a matter of me thinking it would be cute to put him on a record. He was just the musician I most wanted to hear in that chair." It doesn't take long to understand why. An award-winning player in his own right – he's won two soloist awards at the Monterey Jazz Festival's "Next Generation" competitions – Levon lends his velvety tone and lyrical phrasing to songs such as "Truce," and the instrumental "Over Her Shoulder," which his father wrote as a vehicle for him. Nowhere is his playing more incandescent than on "Stars." His soprano sax leaps and darts with a melodic agility and a terse beauty. The album was recorded in Henry's own studio, which is located in the basement of the historic Garfield Home in South Pasadena, where Henry and his family now live. (An historical landmark, it was built in 1904 for the President's widow.) This made Levon's contributions that much easier. "Sometimes we had to do overdubs with him as opposed to recording him live, because he was at school," Henry recalls. "But then he'd come home, finish his homework, and come downstairs to join the festivities. It was lovely and strange, and yet it felt perfectly natural to direct him." But like any Joe Henry record, Blood from Stars is a collaboration, in the deepest sense of the word. Henry has assembled a remarkable cast of players, from his longtime rhythm section (ace percussionist Jay Bellerose, bassist David Piltch, and keyboardist Patrick Warren), to newcomers like Keefus Ciancia, whose murmuring samples lend the proceedings a dreamy, fragmented and cinematic feel.

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Joe Henry - Blood From Stars - 2009

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The sultry coronet riffs that drive "The Man I Keep Hid" and "Bellwether" come courtesy of guitarist Marc Ribot. "Not many people know Marc plays coronet," Henry observes, "and he doesn't do it a lot. He can do anything on guitar, of course, but it was sometimes much more to the point of my purposes that his deep musicality be articulated in a more primitive way. He brings a kind of raw, smeared-lipstick romanticism to whatever he does." Ribot's barbed electric guitar is also on display throughout, as are his flamenco sketches on the torch ballad "This Is My Favorite Cage." And, of course, this being a Joe Henry production, there are all many unexpected turns in the road. He's recruited the brilliant young jazz pianist Jason Moran to deliver the piercing, hymn-like piano work of "Prelude: Light No Lamp When the Sun Comes Down," which opens the album like an overture. Likewise, when the time came to light a fire under the track "Death to the Storm," Joe called upon the Chocolate Genius himself, vocalist Marc Anthony Thompson, whose soulful swagger turns the track's chorus into an ominous house party. Critics have long since given up trying to label Henry's sound. His music spans far too many genres. But the dominant sound on this record stems from blues tonality. Tracks such as "Bellwether" and "All Blues Hail Mary" begin as traditional blues forms ("I observed that structure like it was sonnet"), only to swell into ravishing epics that jump the rails to incorporate folky jazz and bent Sinatra-esque washes of sampled strings. "All the blues sing of love and death and you," Henry whispers in the latter, "As chances yet to take." The line is typical of his lyrical touch. "I've read that I'm supposed to be a very literary songwriter, someone whose songs are short stories set to music. But I can't imagine what where that comes from. I'm not linear…not remotely a reliable narrator," he says. "All I'm trying to do is put a light on something; and sometimes the clearest path is not a straight one." So this is what you can expect from Joe Henry's eleventh studio LP -a tour de force- in addition to all the desperate beauty and hypnotic vamping, the lush arrangements and seductive songlines: the sudden and thrilling illumination of places you've never been, but are somehow intimately familiar.

Product Description: Blood from Stars is the album Joe Henry's been getting at since Scar. He's worked with jazz musicians often, but he's never made a record that employs the form so prominently. His band includes Marc Ribot, Patrick Warren, Jay Bellerose, David … Full DescriptionPilch, and now his son Levon on saxophones and clarinet, as well as vibist Keefus Ciancia. Engineer Ryan Freeland is as important as the players: he managed to give this record its strange yet welcoming sound. It begins with the short "Prelude," played by Jason Moran. It introduces all the characters here, with a note or two here, a chord flourish there. Some are immediately identifiable; others you've never met before and perhaps hope never to. Henry's love of traditional jazz has blossomed – the album sprawls over history, genre, and song forms, but there is no consciously retro aspect in its presentation and it is not a jazz album. Many of these songs are based on the blues (and even folk-blues); some are standards-style pop; some walk out the jazz of New Orleans, St. Louis, and Kansas City from the early 20th century; some even rock – a little. Many are dressed in horn arrangements and offbeat sounds that seem to enter in from the rafters. They drift in and out and are allowed to play a part in the songs. Who cannot relate to the swinging blues (à la "St. James Infirmary") led by piano, upright bass, acoustic guitar, and a minimal trap kit? The music seems to come from antiquity in "The Man I Keep Hid," but Henry's voice is right firmly in the historical present: his protagonist voices his desires and how they are thwarted – usually by himself – as horns, organs, piano, and rhythm section swell and offer the chaos just under the surface of the singer's voice. "Channel" follows it, a love song about disorder that is played as anything but. Henry's character asks simple questions that offer significant difficulties in his inner world, but he embraces them: "I want my story straight/But all the others bend/From wondrous to strange/To beauty at the end…." It's a haunting melody that would be – if we had them anymore – a parlor song. Both songs reflect something lost and hidden in the wires and satellites of modern life: that individuals – no matter how lost, determined, angry, displaced, hopeful, or praying for redemption at any cost – still have human voices that speak, at least on the inside, constantly. Musical traditions bend and blend into and through one another and are painted by the sounds Freeland allowed to enter from the ghosts in the walls, the ceilings, or up from the floorboards. "Death to the Storm" reveals this better than just about any track here, a simple blues with Ribot's electric guitar weaving through Henry's lines and phrases about characters – including the protagonist, who could have come from Steinbeck, Dos Passos, or O'Connor. "Bellwether" – another early 20th century jazz-blues – is a modern tale of Sisyphus. He's climbing a hill, digging a well, changing his name, leaving his shame, etc., until the story gets better. Ultimately, Blood from Stars is the most sophisticated, redemptive, and romantic album Henry's cut; the love songs are simply raggedly breathtaking. It reflects an America that wasn't so much lost as consciously wiped away near the end of the 20th century.

Recording information: Avatar Studios, New York, NY (03/16/2009-03/21/2009); Garfield House, South Pasadena, CA (03/16/2009-03/21/2009).

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Joe Henry - Blood From Stars - 2009

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Review: When you sift through the musical styles, genres, and influences that attach themselves to Joe Henry's wonderful Blood from Stars, what's left is a simmering stew that smacks of blues, jazz, cabaret, rock and other subtler ingredients. I'm not able to muster a blow-by-blow accounting of the songs here–this is one of those few recordings that strike me as something to take all at once, like a spoonful of fish oil–and I find my favorites keep changing depending on when and where or even how I listen. (By "how" I mean, am I listening alone, listening when doing other things, or trying to inflict my musical proclivities on someone else). Mr. Henry commands a crack ensemble of veteran musicians whose talents he puts to great use in these tight arrangements that sometimes yield jaw-dropping moments as when the full band locks step and takes things up a notch in The Man I Keep Hid or Bellwether. Despite the deep traditions that inform these songs, Mr. Henry ups the hip factor with overlays of unusual effects or total change up as with the bongo drumming that end All Blues Hail Mary. The anthem Suit on a Frame crackles with a menacing energy as Mr. Henry repeats "my every breath" and his band plays with an inspired fervor, a true sum of the parts. As noted frequently, some songs share something with Tom Waits' music, particularly his earlier works, though I find this sharing more the result of having a common muse than a common result. Yet I also suspect that the facets I like here–the multitude of influences, expressions, and genres well-played with a retro noir feel–may not command the attention Mr. Henry should garner in a world where music is a commodity that has to be slotted and categorized as though it were mail.

Note: Credit to transgressions, the original uploader.

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Joe Henry - Blood From Stars - 2009

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Joe Henry - Blood From Stars - 2009

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