CONCERT REVIEW
Jim Brickman's piano pap
by Seth Rogovoy(LENOX, Mass., Aug. 2, 1997) -- Every once in a while -- not too often, hopefully -- we need a concert by the likes of a Jim Brickman to remind us just what it is we value about music. Brickman's solo piano effort at the National Music Foundation's Berkshire Performing Arts Theatre on Friday served that purpose splendidly.
The utter lack of substance in Brickman's music served to clarify by contrast what are the elements of good music. Just to toss out a few examples, music should have variety, dynamics, harmony, rhythm, excitement, passion, integrity, tension and release.
Brickman's had none of these. His songs were indistinguishable and consisted of simplistic figures that resolved predictably. They were all performed at the same calm level. Brickman himself said that his music is meant as background to allow listeners to think about something else. What he left out is that there's nothing suggestive about his music at all. Brickman's music is anti-music, or music for people who hate music.
Brickman is a kind of Victor Borge of new-age pop. But whereas the classical-oriented Borge has the good taste to take a solid musical tradition and make it accessible to a wider audience through comedy and vaudevillian routines, Brickman takes an already homogenized style of music -- bland, white-bread pop balladry -- and filters out everything nutritious -- every last trace of soul -- until all that is left is an empty, deracinated melody with all the emotional impact of one of the commercial jingles he used to write. He played some of those jingles for the audience. Bad move -- you couldn't tell the jingles from the so-called songs.
Brickman markets himself as "America's new romantic piano sensation." While he poked fun at the description ad nauseam on Friday night, he clearly seriously believes that his music is "date" material. If Brickman's compositions represent his idea of romance, it is a romance utterly devoid of passion, sex, heat, emotion, color, moisture and fear. Instead, it's a naive, childlike romance, exemplified by his variations on nursery rhymes, such as "Frere Jacques," which he played.
At one point near the end of his show, when Brickman was cracking silly jokes about guest vocalist Ann Cochran's outfit, I thought I had found the clue to understanding where Brickman was coming from. His dim repartee with Cochran vaguely reminded me of Sonny and Cher.
As it turns out, I was giving Brickman way too much credit. Sonny and Cher, after all, were TV personalities who turned hippie culture into pop fodder, but at least there was some sort of culture in the equation to begin with. Brickman himself revealed that the model for his act was of the next generation, the quintessential '70s TV duo: the Captain and Tennille. Indeed, from the Muppets to the Captain, TV seems to be the alpha and omega of Brickman's musical reference.
My dictionary defines "pap" as "something lacking real value or substance and considered to be unsuitable for the minds of adults." Brickman's music is often called "solo instrumental pop." Change that last "o" to an "a," and you've got the perfect description of an evening with Jim Brickman.
[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Aug. 3, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
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