Julia Dollison has put out her first CD, Observatory. I wrote the liner notes:

“There’s this singer I want you to meet. She’s really, really good.” I must hear at least three variations per month on that tired old theme, but when Maria Schneider spoke those words to me five years ago, I took them seriously. What kind of jazz singer, I asked myself, would be interesting enough to catch the ear of the outstanding big-band composer of her generation?

Here’s the answer.

It starts with the voice: warm, airy, dappled with summer sunshine, technically bulletproof from top to bottom. (Check out those honking low notes in “Your Mind Is on Vacation.”) Such voices are born, not made, and Julia Dollison has one. Yet she never coasts on her chops. Instead, she sings like a horn player in love with lyrics, the way Lester Young knew all the words to every ballad he played. Her solos are pointed and meaningful, little musical stories that take you to places you’ve never been.

Then comes the style, an alchemical blend of jazz and pop that makes Harold Arlen and Rufus Wainwright sound not like strange bedfellows but the oldest of friends. Don’t call it “fusion,” though: that might smack of calculation, and there’s nothing calculated about Julia’s singing. She grew up listening to all kinds of music, and now she just sings what she hears, naturally and unselfconsciously.

Did I mention the arrangements? Actually, that’s not quite the right word for her root-and-branch deconstructions of standards. They pass through her mind like light through a prism, emerging refracted and transformed. “In a Mellotone” is nudged into a joltingly ironic minor key, while “Night and Day” is superimposed atop a Coltrane-like harmonic steeplechase. “All the Things You Are” becomes a spacious, Latin-flavored soundscape decorated with the pastel washes of overdubbed vocals that are Julia’s trademark.

Her own beautifully crafted songs contain the same surprising twists and turns, and their presence here, far from being an indulgence, is an indispensable part of the large-scale compositional scheme of Observatory. For this is no mere string of unrelated tunes but a painstakingly wrought musical self-portrait, one whose organic unity is embodied in the sonic collage with which the album begins. Its meaning is revealed bit by bit and song by song, then made fully manifest at the end, like Rosebud in Citizen Kane.

It says a lot about Julia that she chose to record her first album not with a supportive, semi-anonymous journeyman pianist but in the perilously fast company of Ben Monder, the avant-garde jazz guitarist whose obliquely tilted solos have long been one of the brightest colors in Maria Schneider’s palette. Monder is a major instrumental voice in and of his own right, and his powerfully individual playing could easily have blown a lesser singer right out of the studio. Instead, Julia floats serenely above it like a morning star, wafted aloft by the propulsive yet thoughtful interplay of Matt Clohesy and Ted Poor.

As I watched Observatory take shape, I thought, This isn’t going to be your ordinary debut album. And sure enough, it isn’t. Julia Dollison has something arrestingly new to say. Listen and marvel.

To order Observatory or listen online to excerpts, go here.

“We look to books not only for stimulation but for reassurance. There is no mention in ‘By Its Cover’ of Edward Gorey and the quiet, hand-lettered, crosshatchy covers he executed in the fifties for Doubleday Anchor books, but they spoke reassuringly, in the fledgling days of the paperback revolution, of dependability. A wealth of previously hard-to-find treasures, from Melville’s ‘Redburn’ and Gogol’s tales to Kierkegaard’s ‘Fear and Trembling’ and Stendhal’s long essay on love, were poured into the same staid yet impish mold, the Gorey style of cover.”

John Updike, “Deceptively Conceptual: Books and Their Covers”

(Almost a year ago, I thrilled to find a cache of Gorey-illustrated Anchors and Vintages at my local used bookstore.)

– Coleman Hawkins’ asking price for a week-long nightclub engagement in 1962: $1,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $6,175.21

(Source: John Chilton, The Song of the Hawk)

“Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged must end in disappointment.”

Samuel Johnson (quoted in James Boswell, Life of Johnson)

On Friday I took the night off from my normal playgoing duties and went to hear Nickel Creek at the new Nokia Theatre in Times Square. I brought along Sarah–it was the payoff for having previously subjected her
to a press preview of Lennon–and when the concert was over, she happily agreed that the slate had been wiped clean.

I’ve been talking up Nickel Creek ever since I first wrote about them in the New York Times four years ago:

At 19, 20 and 24, the fiddler Sara Watkins, the mandolinist Chris Thile and the guitarist Sean Watkins (Sara and Sean are brother and sister) are young and cute enough to guest-star in an episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Friendly, giggly and almost alarmingly uncynical, they speak the it’s-like-you-know patois of southern California, where they grew up together and started playing bluegrass as children. If you were to run into them on a crosstown bus, you wouldn’t guess that they play in a musical idiom closely associated with the rural South. But, then, their sophisticated sound isn’t exactly rural–and neither are many of the fans who have bought their debut album, Nickel Creek.

“We play boundaryless music,” Mr. Thile said in an interview during a recent visit to New York, and his bandmates nodded in emphatic agreement.

Like Alison Krauss, the angelic-voiced fiddler who produced Nickel Creek, they blend hard-charging bluegrass with sweetly sung acoustic pop; like Edgar Meyer, the protean bassist-composer who moves from bluegrass to Bach and back again, they write carefully structured instrumental pieces that owe as much to classical music as to country. On stage, they ignite this volatile mixture with a high-energy performance style reminiscent of rock ‘n’ roll. The pencil-thin Mr. Thile chops wildly at his amplified mandolin, flapping and flailing like the tail of a kite in a high wind, flanked by the serene, apple-cheeked Ms. Watkins, who bobs with the beat, and her older brother, a no-nonsense fellow who stands stock still while he plays in the sober-sided manner of John Entwistle of the Who….

Sara, Chris, and Sean haven’t changed all that much since I wrote those words, except that their music has grown considerably darker and tougher, as you can hear on their newly released third CD, Why Should the Fire Die? In addition, the influence of Radiohead on their postmodern bluegrass-pop sound is even more apparent now (“We love Radiohead so much it’s stupid,” Chris told the audience on Friday). But they’re as friendly and giggly as ever, and they still put on a devastating live show. As the packed house shrieked over their last encore, I turned to Sarah and said, “I feel like I’ve been to a spa.” And so I did: it had been a hell of a long week and I was dead tired when we arrived at the Nokia, but three hours later I was as fresh as tomorrow’s bread.

A good thing, too, since I took the train to Boston first thing Saturday morning (well, at noon, anyway) to kick off a two-day theatrical sprint. It started with a performance by the Actors’ Shakespeare Project of King Lear starring Alvin Epstein, a legendary veteran of the American stage who co-starred with Bert Lahr, E.G. Marshall, and Kurt Kasznar in the Broadway premiere of Waiting for Godot in 1956, the year I was born. The next morning I took a cab to Logan Airport and flew from there to Washington, where I saw a matinee of Leading Ladies, Ken Ludwig’s new farce, at Ford’s Theatre (yes, that Ford’s Theatre). The cast included, of all people, John Astin (yes, that John Astin). I then hightailed it to Union Station and caught the next train back to New York, arriving just in time to spend a few minutes purring contentedly over the Teachout Museum’s latest acquisition, an etching by Hans Hofmann that I knocked down for an embarrassingly reasonable price, before falling into bed.

And that’s how I spent my weekend. How about you?

P.S. I also found time to update the Top Fives (don’t ask when, though). Take a look.

July 2003:

It’s not a popular view among my colleagues, but I think most of the best critics–not all, but most–have had at least some professional experience in at least one of the arts about which they write. I know I try to write not as a lofty figure from on high, smashing stone tablets over the heads of ballerinas and prima donnas, but as someone who has spent his entire adult life immersed in the world of art, both as a critic and as a practitioner. I was also fortunate to have served my apprenticeship as a critic in a middle-sized city, because it taught me that criticism is not written in a vacuum. It touches real people, people of flesh and blood, and sometimes it hurts them. If you don’t know that–and I mean really know it–you shouldn’t be a critic. And you’re more likely to know it when you’ve lived and worked in a city small enough that there’s a better-than-even chance of your meeting the people you write about at intermission….

(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)

– Price paid by the Phillips Collection to Alfred Stieglitz’s Intimate Gallery in 1926 for Arthur G. Dove’s “The Golden Storm,” the first painting by Dove to be acquired by a museum: $200

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $2,113.25

(Source: In the American Grain: The Stieglitz Circle at the Phillips Collection)

“Sir Edgar smiled. ‘For a man of your years you have a curious expectation that life runs smoothly,’ he said.”

Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes