Thursday, March 31, 2016

Superman And The Damage Done | Birth.Movies.Death.


"Batman v Superman" is, for the moment, the most controversial movie ever made, with the internet seeming to bulge beyond its digital boundaries as critics and fans alternately debate, praise, degrade, defend and assault the film and the film maker, Zack Snyder. For the record, I enjoyed the movie immensely, seeing it consistent with the versions of Superman that have come before in the comic book source material. That is an article yet to be written by me. Another day, another year, perhaps.This book post , though, is an example of fans getting too attached to their child hood obsessions; this is somewhat like a Norman Rockwell toned reminisces of a perfect America that never existed. There is a yearning that the world they think they remember should not have changed and that matters have only gotten worse since they gained adult bodies and adult experience.

 Nostalgia is the ultimate buzz kill.  My take away from the blog article is that is still mourning for the Superman of his youth, which is pathetic on the face of it. Mark Hughes in the Forbes piece has the good sense to understand what Snyder is doing with the character and the wits to understand that this "updated" Superman is consistent with how the Man of Steel has been rendered in the comics over the decades. Interpretations of characters have to evolve, especially great and iconic characters , whether Superman, Hamlet or Otello; playing the Shakespeare card here seems a little cheesy, sure thing, but it's to make a point that what makes characters great over several decades or over several centuries is that they are adaptable to current temperaments.

 Plot elements and basic characteristics remain stable, but how characters like Superman, James Bond or Hamlet deal with their circumstances as extraordinary people among ordinary populations in crisis is the element that keeps them fresh. Superman is consistent in BvS with is comic book counter parts, but what Snyder depicts is the struggle with how to go about being a Super Hero; to quote Mick Jagger and pursue the Kal as Christ trope, Superman has his moments of doubt and pain, a man with great power whose first instinct is to help and do good facing grave unintended results and a backlash against his presence . It's an idea borrowed from XMen,of course (but then again, XMen were borrowed from Doom Patrol) , but it's an applicable approach to conveying Superman as an active agent in a world . This is not the world of Curt Swan, a hero consigned to rescuing cats from trees and suffering exposures to promiscuous varieties of Kryptonite, this is a Big Blue with the classic existential crisis, a man emerging from self doubt and ambiguity taking action against a threats and menace. this'

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Zack Snyder: choosing brilliance over coherence

Well, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is getting slammed by the majority of film critics so far, although the complaints about the Zack Snyder directed film--choppy, slow, a mangled storyline, grandiosity, too grim and dark--are not really things that would keep away from the film. Admittedly I've been a Snyder fan since seeing  300, his sword-and-sandals hit, and I've even been a defender of his much maligned riot grrll slug fest Sucker Punch. Plainly, ZS is one of those directors who has a visual style so commanding and brilliantly mounted , film to film, that style literally trumps substance in a very big way. In the case of Sucker Punch , which has a plot line that is easily explained-- an orphan teen girl is consigned to an orphanage where evil management markets them as nubile prostitutes to flabby white men with money and big cigars, and who's protagonist is able to enter another realm altogether by performing provocative dances --but is impossibly muddled in the movie's presentation, Snyder's bravura visuals, honed in comic book action panels, keep the film from being a waste. 

There is evidence of genius in how this man puts together his set pieces, scenes so amazingly executed, CGI and all, that we may have to reconsider what it is we mean when we use the term "masterpiece". Toward that consideration, let me say that I've seen Sucker Punch in it's entirety four additional times since seeing it in the theaters, and have watched large chunks of it on the premium cable channels while staying up beyond my bed time. Yes,the movie is incoherent, but I've seen it several times and I've more than one spirited (and surprisingly lucid) defenses of the film against those determined to make an audience think that Snyder is incompetent. My revisionist take on the auteur theory would advise that Zack Snyder is the Fellini of the Digital Age, a master of crushing spectacle more intrigued a a vivid since of the world, a world beset by seers, odd gods, super heroes and villains, guns, swords, collapsing skyscrapers and splendid evocations of steam punk contrasted against futuristic gleam; his vision over takes all, and his narrative style, at times, fails the visuals under way. It's like trying to find the exact words to describe the best or worst dream you've ever had. In any event, I suspect I 'll find BvS:DoJ entertaining, maybe even evidence of more divisive genius. Or maybe this will the Snyder where I find his maneuvers predictable and tattered in the over use. I will report what I find soon enough.

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Sonny Stitt , a wonderful jazz saxophonist



Image result for SONNY STITT In the seventies, while a young man appropriately bored with the slamming two-dimensional dynamics of late-period jazz-rock (which had morphed into a stylized arena of tick-rock riffing termed "fusion" that was monotony incarnate), I ventured forth into older jazz forms, bop, swing, big and, Ellington, Davis, Mingus, people who swung over unpredictable tempos and fantastic chords. It was a love affair that hasn't stopped yet. Curiously, though, I formed jazzbo attitudes about artists I hadn't heard, a phenomenon not uncommon among some of us desperate for a hip reputation. You followed the herd-thinking. What I heard was that alto saxophonist Sonny Stitt was nothing but a low down Charlie Parker imitator, technically adept and adroit in extemporizing over a 6/8 time breakdown of a popular tune, but he was a technician only, without a soul. I went with that for years and dug into my Miles Davis phase, binging over a the late eighties and nineties on as Much MD as I could afford, everything from what he'd done as a sideman with Bird and through his various labels as band leader, from the hard bop session he'd done, through the modal experiments and into the blistering jazz-rock he created., noting, as well, the history of his saxophone players, a fine fettle of reed geniuses: George Coleman, Cannonball Adderley, Gerry Mulligan, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Sam Rivers, Dave Leibman. Nothing but the best for Miles. I was one of those who scoured the used CD bins, looking for my preferred artists and one day, lo! I came across a record titled "Walkin': A Jazz Hour With Miles Davis" on released on the now-defunct economy label Laserlight.


 Featuring a previously unavailable live performance in Stockholm in 1952, this was not the classic earlier studio album "Walkin'" (one of MD's many masterpieces), but so what, it was Davis live and on sale. Reading the personal, all seemed worth the purchase despite the misdirection of the title, as it highlighted, worthies like pianist Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers on drums, Jimmy Cobb on drums, on saxophone...Sonny Stitt?? The plagiarist, the rip off artist, the Parker wannabe? The man I relegated to the minor leagues without endeavoring to hear what he played like? With Miles? This wasn't so earth-shaking a revelation as I might want to make it sound and, of course, I didn't ask myself that sequence of disbelieving questions presented in incomplete sentences. I was curious and bought the record. I was more than pleasantly pleased with the hard bop brilliance of the band--Miles Davis of this period is essentially flawless as he applies to his muted, modulated, middle register approach to the hard-charging changes this fine band challenges him with--and came to the conclusion that Sonny Stiff had been given the short shrift as a musician. 

The resemblance to Parker is there, undeniable, and it's understandable how jazz snobs of the time, wanting to consecrate jazz as America's art music in opposition to the tradition of European classicism and establish both canon and criteria for our best gift to the world, would deride particular players, diminish them in stature without fair estimation in an effort to create standards for an emerging aesthetics. Understandable and unfair, because what I discovered was a musician of envious fluidity and lyric invention within his scope as an improviser who could negotiate steeple-chase tempos and obstacle course chord progressions with precision and yet never, or at least rarely lose a song's melodic nuance ; for all the high-velocity bravura bop-related jazz musicians are known for, Stitt had a ribbon-like, sweetly undulating method of teasing notes and shading their sounded presence with variations within the pitch, a legacy from the blues that maintains a vocal quality, a sharp note of surprise as the solo unfolds. 

 Stitt, in any regard, was not a soulless technician. Whatever debt he owed to Charlie Parker is nearly besides the point; the style is something Stitt took possession and made it his means to express something that, in itself, was beyond race, economics and the general ugliness mere existence weights us with; it is simply beautiful and exciting music made by a musician who deserves to be reexamined for his best recorded moments. Life itself does not get rosy, as a unified condition of creation that maintains a just and serene equilibrium merely because a black musician could make beautiful music with a saxophone. Whatever his whole story, Sonny Stitt remained black and a male and, above all, only human when it came to the combined forces of human stupidity, judgment and physical gravity pitted against his too-too vulnerable flesh. He made his music, found some solace for those moments during and after the notes played, and then returned to the eternal struggle of being in the world, dragging our burdens, sometimes easily, sometimes slowly, dirthfully, always toward the grave. But the magic a person can make with imagination, skill, a mind that wants something better than the weight of weather and wealth grinding them into the ground, well, I believe, that much makes life worth living and worth going back. We have the capacity to make this life of ours a better one, if only by the smallest increments, a little at a time, and , let us not forget, we can make the lives of each other better, even if only slightly. 

Monday, March 21, 2016

Better Get It In Your Soul

jazz vespers
JAZZ VESPERS, vol.3
Archie Thompson and The Archtone All Stars
Tenor saxophonist Archie Thompson leads a cracker jack ensemble called the ArchTones and with this record release, Jazz Vespers, Vol. 3, he and his troupe offer the latest volume of in an ongoing project to perform and record gospel—inspired jazz at the Chapel of the First Presbyterian Church in San Diego. This isn’t, rest assured, slow, plodding, and sinner–beware rants from a musical pulpit. This is in line with my own feelings of what the foremost goals of a spiritual life and art are, which is to create joy, that state when you are aware of the miracle of being alive and the power of kindness and creativity to rouse the downtrodden soul and lift a person up with an open heart.


The music made by Thompson and the ArchTones is intended to move the listener to have the willingness to live in the moment, senses fully alive, imagination active, to go into the world with the conviction that life needn’t be dour, sad, and tragic. It is testimony praising the Creator, couched in terms of the African–American Christian tradition, but it’s a liturgy that concerns itself with life here and now; one needn’t wait for life after death for reward or judgment. Now is the time to get the feeling, to feel pulse, to experience the love of one’s fellow man in a community that nurtures service and creativity. Thankfully, Thompson and his players use music, not a slew of over–heated words, to get the message across. This jazz of the old school values, showing an intimate relationship with black gospel and blues roots, jump swing and classic ballad work. It’s not just a session of hot licks, though, being an album whose title describes an evening prayer service; gospel songs are strongly represented, their message of deliverance and joy in pursuing the good in life made more emphatically swinging and alive by the vitality of the musicianship on hand.
Especially revealing in how the spirit can be moved by music and letting go of old ideas emerges as the band brings their talents to bear on the Jackie Wilson 1967 classic “Higher and Higher.” Wilson’s original version is a rhythm and blues masterpiece, a stirring melody that complements the singer’s magnificently ascendant vocal, one of those testaments of a man’s undying love for a woman. The ArchTones mix it up just a bit, make it a tad funkier with a New Orleans march beat, sweetly framing a sinner’s profession of love in his or her God, the force from which all that is worth living for flows. Tony Davis’ vocal is crisp and clear, testifying as it climbs the scale. This is an inspired transformation of a classic song. Thompson gets behind the piano and takes a turn at a vocal with “Old Blind Barnabas,” a rumbling, keyboard-charged performance, a fine, grizzled, graciously raspy vocal. With steadfast drumming from Danny Campbell, this is music that sways and rocks, rousing the soul to follow example and do better by our fellow citizens. Gospel receives equally rewarding treatments throughout the rhythmic uplift this album brings us, as in Whitney Shay’s clarion–like rendition of “Come Sunday,” a magnificent voice of a young singer who reveals skills and nuance of an older, subtler approach to a vocal. Spirituality in repose, there is a sense of ease when gratitude is expressed and the tonnage of woe is released.
The ArchTones and their guests have ample opportunity to strut their sense of what truly swings and moves the listener. A standout number is the standard “Sweet Georgia Brown,” a chestnut in lesser hands, but Thompson’s saxophone is sure and spry, chasing down the effectively propulsive rhythm of drummer Danny Campbell and the resonant bass underpinning provided by Jason Littlefield, stating the melody just slightly and causing a glimmer of recognition but then breaking off the iteration and moving ahead with swift and sweeping forays. It’s a performance that seems to me to dance on the edge of the band’s accents and rapidly modulated chord voicings, or perhaps more like Olympic gymnastics performed on a high wire.
Thompson has grace and instinctive sure–footedness when he offers up a brisk sortie, but he performs the deeper, moodier colors of ballads as well. His tone cuts deep and his manipulations of his pitch, stretching upward toward a breaking point but then easing off the stratospheric exploration to return again closer to the ground where he stands, burnishing his sound with a dark, gritty sound that contains the bark and back beat of classic rhythm and blues. His reading of “Comin’ Home Baby” makes this quality clear, his saxophone work nearly vocal in telling the tale of a man returning to his one and only by any means he can devise. It’s a tale without words, just notes shaped to the resonance of human emotion. There are quite a few memorable moments here—a lively combination of gospel, blues, and mainstream jazz. 

This is a sparkling jazz session that inspired me to plug in my microphone and play harmonica along with some of the tracks and inspired me further to walk along Mission Bay, no destination in mind, nothing but me, blue sky, the blue water, and hundreds San Diegans and visitors taking advantage of warm temperatures and sunshine. This is what Jazz Vespers Vol.3 can inspire you to do, perhaps: turn off the computer, arise, and explore the miracle of the world we’re blessed to live in.

Saturday, February 27, 2016

Word drunk philosophers


204011
POSTMODERNISM
or
The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism

Jameson is a Marxist literary critic and it seems he has another goal in addition to discussing the why and the why-not? of a fluid philosophy that seems to undermine any sense of "fixed" areas of knowledge that might otherwise give a culture a sense of itself, an identity, ethos and larger purpose that makes the past acceptable, the future brimming with a promise yet to be fulfilled, an entrenched optimism that makes the present tolerable or, at least, a condition where apathy is the preferred stance; he is intent of maintaining the authority of Marxist methods of discerning the economic superstructure of capitalism and, as well, holding on to the progressive notion that properly executed critiques and political actions based on them will further us along to Marx 's and Engle's prophecy that after the revolution, after the dictatorship of the proletariat has been established and operating for an unspecified amount of time, the State will eventually, naturally wither away , as men and women have, it's assumed, been restored to their natural state before the foul distortion of capital fouled every thing up; that is, we will have become, to paraphrase a famous promise, fishers, and farmers in the morning, poets, musicians, and artists in the afternoons, scholars and philosophers at night. That is to say, we will no longer have occupations, our labor, informing us who we are and destroying our potential of being much more.
This is a key book for those struggling to comprehend the verbal murk that constituted the postmodernist theory, which is a shame because Fredrick Jameson cannot help but add his own murk to this occasionally useful overview of a directionless philosophical inclination. He certainly brings a lot of reading into his digressive discussions and reveals how much the idea of postmodern strategy--Lyotard's notion that the Grand Narrative that unified all accounts of our history, purpose and collective sense of inevitable autonomy over the earth and those outside our culture has been shattered, eroded or made unpersuasive in a century that has known the horrors of 2 world wars and the overwhelming emergence of new technologies and the efforts of populations outside the margins of acceptable culture to claim their rights as humans , first and foremost--has usurped preceding and established ideas in areas of literature, architecture, movies, the arts, philosophy itself.

Free to be you and me, as the philosopher Marlo Thomas would have it, which is essentially the same promise made by libertarians , a cult of free-market zealots who believed that more of us in the culture would be more fully realized examples  of human potential if, quite literally, all trappings of the socialist state were gotten rid of and the conditions of society were laid to the workings of uninhibited capitalism. But here we find something interesting, as both scenarios, the success of the socialist revolution and the replacement of the State with a pure free market , seem modeled after the most basic tenet of Christian theology, that the world will make sense and those who are fully prepared with achieving the best lives they could have when the Savior returns to earth with the keys to the kingdom of Heaven. All three involve better days deferred; all that remains is for us is wait and distract ourselves with work, however, packaged the labor comes to us as. Is that postmodernism? 


Merely noticing the formula for competing Grand Narratives isn't especially new, since there have been critics and theorists in the older modernist wing of social critique who've noticed more similarities than differences in absolute scenarios involving cures for our ills and the sources that make us sick. But that was a matter of one idea trying to bankrupt the other. There are, to be sure, more specific arguments of the differences between modernism and postmodernism, all of them utilizing more opaque language than  my excruciatingly vague rant here, but it would be a safe guess to assert that modernist still had a view of a whole universe and various sorts of slavishly detailed theories to express the causes, conditions, and direction of that unity, and that postmodernism, as a rule, was the kid we all know who could take radios, clocks, computers, bikes and such things apart and have no idea about how to put any of it back together. 


The postmodern inclination undermines the metaphorical structure and linguistic devices philosophies use to make their systems persuasive; Derrida and Baudrillard were smart men with much influence over the Left who had their own discourses that argued that every argument contains the seeds of its own counter-assertion. Jameson doesn't seem to want any of that and proceeds to write as densely as the thinkers he seeks to critique, often times stalling before coming to a major point he seemed to be traveling toward in order to indulge himself with clarifications about terms being used, ideas and artifacts that have been used as examples of opaque references . There is much the notion of the word-drunk in this volume, the idea that Jameson is thinking out loud and that the writing is a species of verbal stream of conscious wherein there is the assumption, an act of faith actually, that the longer the associative chain, the more inclusive the argument the analysis becomes and that in this process there will come the connecting conceit that unifies what might have been mere intellectual drift into a bravura performance. I can't shake the idea that Jameson is stalling here and is, honestly, out of his depth in his discussions that are not directly involved in parsing the creation and use of narrative forms as political tools in a problematic culture. There is value here, though, and I would suggest reading the opening essay, "Culture", where one gets the choicest ideas and insights has in this volume. For the rest, it is a reminder of just how bad a writer Fredric Jameson is.

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Talking our way to oblivion



 ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDERSTERN ARE DEAD
a play by Tom Stoppard

The neat trick with Stoppard's play is how he places  the most subsidiary characters in Shakespeare's play  "Hamlet" in the foreground and relegating the famous narrative--the Prince of Denmark taking his cue from a ghost and investigating the death of his father and, in time, plotting to expose the killer and take revenge in ways too clever to be wholly successfully in the world as it's constituted-- into mere background noise. There has been sufficient commentary over the decades, perhaps the centuries , as to what the actual relationship of Rosencrantz and Guilderstern was to the the troubled Prince Hamlet, a question worth pondering and certainly one that provides endless gristle for the industry that produces Shakespeare criticism. Tellingly, Shakespeare was mum on the subject , since in his day there was little in the way of poets and playwrights furnishing their own comments and critical apparatus to consider the work. I suspect he hadn't given it much thought and considered them strawmen who's purpose , who's function was to basically emerge, say their lines and then recede, their dialogue, such as it was, functioning to move the action along. 

To a certain degree, the theorizing over  Rosencrantz and Guilderstern has been a learned indulgence, a species of balderdash. Fun, but the speculation is poetry of a sort, a wandering in intangibles, intriguing but finally inconclusive. Tom Stoppard , though, decides not to theorize but to use his imagination instead, investigating the quality of existence R and G have when they are not in the presence and command of Hamlet, Polonious or Gertrude. With the famed play reduced to background bustle that emerges to the forefront only occasionally, R & G are basically amnesiacs barely aware of who they are and where they are and what they are doing. Clever with words, free associating as a means of constructing their own narrative line, this pair  are conspicuously modeled after the tramps  Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot". In the Beckett, the two hobos find themselves on a road they cannot name in a life they cannot remember, trying to recollect their names, where they were, where they are going , prating on as they await the arrival of someone named Godot , who would make everything clear and provide a direction for the indigents.

Godot , though, does not come, and  Vladimir and Estragon remain as the play closes, defined, if that's the word, by their rudimentary role, to wait for someone or something to clear up the confusion, to reveal something large. Smart folks have long guessed that Godot represents God or Jesus or something other religious construction; Beckett, though, refrained from debating the existence or non-existence of a deity and instead gave us a grim metaphor of modern existence, civilizations reduced to rote practice, routines, conventional thinking, a horror of unacceptable repetition that we are forced to reenact however much our backs , feet and souls ache, with the promise of deliverance deferred and filed away with a legacy of other cliches and tropes that no longer sparkle. It's an existential hell; all we know of the world's condition is the perpetual waiting. Stoppard takes it a little further, with the two aimless, talkative, amnesiac Rosencrantz and Guilderstern given momentary purpose in world that suddenly  has a place for them when the original "Hamlet"play intervenes in the pair's procrastinating dither. As Hamlet and others take the foreground, the dialogue switches to Shakespeare's original dialogue; queried and instructed by their superiors, R and G respond as the Bard originally had them, and then are left alone , again, to their own devices, slumping shoulders again, back to pondering and wondering without end who they are and how they got there and what it is they are supposed to be doing.

 A life guided by the enlivening elements of philosophical certainty or religious fervor exists for others, a privileged crown in the background operating in narratives of their own invention , scheming . plotting and lusting to reasoning that is entirely self-serving.  What one can do with this is fascinating, endlessly so, and one needn't think too hard before coming up with an analog for which Stoppard's absurdist plot is a keen metaphor: think of millions of Americans obsessed with the fictionalized , extra-curricular  skulduggery witnessed on professional wrestling programs. Witness the arguments of a very few mostly white politicians about principles that are essentially bankrupt virtues but which still excite an agitated electorate that knows only frustration and and the return of conveniently hazy "good old days".  The theme is waiting for someone or something to arrive that will clean up the obscuring mess we've made of our associated cosmologies. The uniform experience is the waiting,the waiting, the waiting. "Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Dead" leaves you with this feeling, that bit of uncertainty that makes you question even the ham sandwich you might be raising to your mouth. 

It provokes, it agitates, it haunts you in large and small ways. What are we doing , who are we, how did we come to not remember where we came from?  Stoppard asks the question and convincing responses are not fast in coming.

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Brooklyn Dreaming: jazz flutist Lori Bell returns home



 Brooklyn Dreaming--Lori Bell 
In the 1970s and early ’80s I worked at the Summer House Inn in La Jolla as a combination desk clerk, switchboard operator, bell man, reservationist, and whatever odd job that needed to be done that didn’t require driving the company car. It was an okay job, nothing great, but the greatest benefit of working there was that Elario’s, at the time one of the best jazz clubs in Southern California, was perched on 11th floor of the high-rise. It was at Elario’s where I was introduced to the music of Brooklyn native and San Diego resident Lori Bell, a jazz flautist (or flutist?) in live performance. Playing with the very fine pianist Dave McKay and with her own groups, Bell’s flute work was a revelation of sorts. Her tone is firm and she shows a virtuoso’s command of the sounds it produces. Whether digging into the sub-atomic emotions that are the genius of the blues, releasing a torrent of inspired runs on the obstacle course complexities of bop or the nuanced, minor key subtleties of a ballad, Lori Bell played her flute in any fashion she chose.

Delicacy and strength, firm and rhythmic, unfaltering and malleable, hers is a sound with verve and lyricism. That said, Bell has released her ninth studio album, Brooklyn Dreaming, a tribute to her place of birth and where her heart and roots remain. She is joined her by Matt Witek on drums, Tami Hendelman on piano, and Katie Thiroux on bass, an ensemble reveling in what seems like telepathic communication during in both the softer and more dynamic album selections. The album is a tribute to the vital elan of Bell’s fabled native grounds, but over anything else this album’s main attraction are the top shelf performances.

These sessions wails, soars and swings on the good grace of superb musicianship.Noteworthy are the hard-charging interpretations on the twisting turns of Charlie Mingus’ “Nostalgia in Times Square”; brisk, given to fast tempo changes and the odd quirks Mingus is known for in his writing, Bell’s solo is magnificent, building with simple statements and gradually accelerating the speed, upping the ante, and dancing on the edge of the rhythm section’s sublimely kept pace. Bell’s original compositions—“Times Squared,” “Brooklyn Dreaming,” “A Dog on Coney”—provide what we can take as the New York attitude: fast, in-your-face , loquacious, but friendly and swinging. Bell finds the mood, explores the variations, makes it all swing, her notes precise and rounded, fleeting and wild in their spirit. Hendelman’s piano work has that extra-sensory element suggested from before. His chords  chime magically to provide a suitable push and texture to the ensemble, and his solos are rich complements to Bell’s, matching her in stratospheric outlay of ideas but adding his own deft touches. Half chords, short runs, and bell-tone octaves make him the necessary musician to have around. Likewise, the teamwork of the Witek and Thiroux rhythm section move this wonderfully realized session with an ease dually dynamic and apt.

The songs cover a wide swath of styles, and the team is there, keeping the pace lively, varied, soaring. I would ask that the musicians take a bow, one by one, for the fine work they created for this very fine album.

(This review originally appeared in The San Diego Troubadour. Used with kind permission.)