Music Monday: Ancient Africa, CLIFFS, and Greetings

It’s either the last day of winter break or the first day of the spring semester depending on when you start teaching and whether you’re a glass half-full or glass half-empty kind of person. My semester certainly gets underway today with a meeting at 10 am and a veritable swarm of teaching and editing relating emails both received and sent out. In other words, stuff is going on!

Stuff going on means that I need some “get out the door music” as my friend Sharon Carson calls it.

I’ve been enjoying Abdullah Ibrahim’s Ancient Africa (1973) a good bit lately, especially the eponymous first track. It’s a solo piano album and the track “Ancient Africa” is dense. A driving rhythm propels melodies informed by the blues, Classical, and traditional music. Ibrahim’s vocalizations serve only to emphasize that this track (and the rest of the album) arises from deep within his soul:

Of course after Ibrahim’s occasionally rollicking storm through ancient Africa, I felt like I needed something that was a bit more exploratory or, at very least, abstract. I turned to James Brandon Lewis’s improvised outing CLIFFS which saw him teamed up with French bassist Floy Krouchi and drummer Benjamin Sanz. I don’t know those guys, but the trio produced some pretty magical moments that soared, stuttered, thundered, and glided across a half dozen tracks. “Three Streams” is probably the most probing of the album:

It’s worth listening to the entire thing and “The Door to the Cliffs” will certainly get you going.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how much I’ve enjoyed listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Greetings from Ashbury Park, NJ which celebrated its 50th birthday last week. I never really enjoyed Springsteen, and while I “got” his music on some level, I found it either moved me in (socially? politically? regionally?) uncomfortable ways or not at all. So I more or less ignored it and turned to Neil Young or Lou Reed when I wanted someone to tell stories that made me think.

At some point over the last few years, I started to enjoy Kurt Vile, The War on Drugs, the late, great David Berman, James McMurtry, Waxahatchee, and even some Jason Isbell. It’s not that any of these guys are direct descendants from Springsteen or anything like that, but they’re songwriters, they tell stories, they perform a kind of folksy rock music (even if it’s tinged with country), and they remain in the rotation at my house despite the weekly onslaught to new music and sounds.

Going back the Greetings (with it’s amazing album cover by John Berg), I’ve found that I’ve grown into Springsteen a bit. Maybe I’m more comfortable with his provocation. Maybe I’m more eclectic in my tastes. Or maybe I just find the teenage angst in Greetings less confrontational and more nostalgic now. 

Whatever the case, I’ve found myself listening to and enjoying this album far more than I expected.