It's been a long time since I had a review up...this is a good one. It's from Brattleboro's own Sam Amidon.
SAM AMIDON – Bright Sunny South
Nonesuch
BY JENNIFER KELLY
“He’s Taken My Feet” is an old song, a hymn that has been sung in churches for 100 years, celebrating one of the humblest moments of the New Testament, when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet. It’s a homespun melody, ringed in by melancholy but buoyed by the hope of resurrection. Its simplicity, humility and certainty are as foreign to our age as hoop skirts and mutton chops, but when Sam Amidon strips it down, as he does in its ghostly opening, it seems perfectly modern. It is streamlined and unfussy, but like a Bauhaus building, rather than a Shaker box. Later on, a lovely trumpet solo (that’s Kenny Wheeler, a free jazz titan, who has played with Derek Bailey and Anthony Braxton) shades the tune further towards the modern day, and, near the track’s end, it twists suddenly into drum-pounding, guitar-distorting, improvisatory mayhem. It’s the kind of track that you could really only do if you were Sam Amidon, raised on the folk and shape-note-singing customs of rural Vermont and educated as a young man in the post-modern anti-traditions of free jazz.
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4 comments:
I'm excited to listen to this one once I finally finish this Eluvium review.
Cool, do you have it?
I should probably track down that Eluvium.
Yeah, I found a download (and will buy it when I can). I just finished the Eluvium review, if you can't find it shoot me an email.
I just snagged it off the Dusted board, but I haven't listened yet. I'm reviewing the new National, trying to stay focused. (I think I like it more than High Violet, but not as much as Boxer or Alligator.)
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