Top CDs of 2000
By Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., December 10, 2000) -- The following list, like those of years past, is not intended to reflect a cross-section of the best pop music of the past year. In putting together this list, I eschewed any attempt at comprehensiveness and objectivity (whatever that is). Rather, instead I indulged my increasingly quirky, oddball personal tastes. With the passage of time (otherwise known as aging), this listener looks increasingly for surprise, originality and intelligence in music, in whatever form, style or genre it appears.

I’m sure by the time you read this I will have thought of a dozen other worthy albums of note. Think of this more as a snapshot of a musical moment than as the last word on the year 2000 in music.

1. Phoebe Legere, Blue Curtain (Einstein): Legere’s most recent work far surpasses her previous pop-art novelties. This time out, the queen of the downtown avant-garde has constructed a veritable contemporary symphony with spoken and sung text (a one-woman opera?) built of samples, found sounds, original keyboard composition, Native American chant, free-form vocalese, programmed dance and electronic beats. A meditation on the revolutionary role of the artist in the consumerist society. An inquiry into gravity. A commentary on the media. A paean to New York City. All this, and jazz and pop too.

2. Erik Friedlander, Skin (Siam): Cellist/composer Erik Friedlander’s avant-jazz compositions are alternately brash, dynamic, mellifluous and haunting. Sometimes they’re all four at the same time. Balkan melodies morph into street-funk and back, as Friedlander’s versatile quartet, Topaz, featuring saxophonist Andy Laster, toss around the focus. The byplay between Friedlander and Laster is spectacular, so telepathic that often it’s hard to tell which is the cello and which is the sax. In addition to Friedlander’s compositions, the group tackles Julius Hemphill, Charles Mingus, Iranian pop diva Googoosh, Carlos Santana and Henry Mancini.

3. Paul Simon, You’re the One (Warner Bros.): His best album since Graceland, Simon marries that landmark’s world-beat textures to his whimsical powers of observation and uncanny ear for old-fashioned melody, on a set of songs that explore marriage, parenthood, aging, religion, spirituality, death and racial politics. A marvelous comeback and return to form.

4. Gary Lucas, Improve the Shining Hour (Knitting Factory) and Street of Lost Brothers (Tzadik): The 20 years’ worth of songs and instrumentals that Lucas wrote and played on that are collected on Improve the Shining Hour read like a subterranean history of rock and cutting-edge music, with collaborations including Nick Cave, David Johansen, Captain Beefheart, Eric Mingus, Peter Stampfel, Mary Margaret O’Hara and DJ Spooky. What unites it all is Lucas’s sensibility, in which his guitar is just a tool at best or an excuse at worst for the genius to play music. Street of Lost Brothers is just one of several new works by Lucas, whose strong writing and invention prove that his best days are not behind him, but are in the present and perhaps yet to come.

5. Emmylou Harris, Red Dirt Girl (Nonesuch): Red Dirt Girl proves not only that Wrecking Ball was no Daniel Lanois-influenced fluke, but that Harris doesn’t need Lanois or that album’s lineup of all-star songwriters who provided the material for one of the best albums of the past decade. This time out, Harris bears the lion’s share of the songwriting duties and proves she stands shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Neil Young, Lucinda Williams and Jimi Hendrix. And her voice has never sounded better - she’s one of the best soul singers we have.

6. Roy Nathanson, Fire at Keaton’s Bar and Grill (Six Degrees): The bartender is Blondie’s Debbie Harry, the storyteller is Elvis Costello, and the arsonist in question is Richard Butler of the Psychedelic Furs. But the visionary behind this piece of musical theater - a jazz opera, really - is avant-jazz saxophonist/composer Roy Nathanson, a co-founder of the Jazz Passengers. The musical style ranges from ballads to tango to jazz-noir to street-funk, but the best piece is probably Nathanson’s “Fire Suite 2,” in which a quartet of honking and squeaking saxophones paints a blazing furnace.

7. John Zorn, Taboo and Exile (Tzadik): Ranging from blissful, ambient mood music to blistering guitar-punk and everything in between, the dozen tracks here are a tribute to John Zorn’s vision as a composer. Zorn himself plays saxophone on only one track, but the album functions as both a sampler of Zorn’s composition and of the downtown instrumentalists who appear here, including violinist Mark Feldman, guitarists Marc Ribot, Robert Quine and Fred Frith, percussionists Cyro Baptista and Joey Baron, and bassists Chris Wood, Bill Laswell and Greg Cohen.

8. Mr. Bungle, California (Warner Bros.): It’s unfathomable that an album as weird as this one came out on a major corporate label in the year 2000, and one might even take some solace from the fact -- maybe there is faint hope for the “pop industry” after all. Undoubtedly it’s partly because Mr. Bungle is fronted by singer-songwriter Mike Patton, who once led Top 10 act Faith No More. Song titles like “None of Them Knew They Were Robots” and “Golem II: The Bionic Vapour Boy” hint at the weirdness within, in which Hawaiian music, surf rock, psychedelia, prog-rock, jump blues and noise all fly by in the wink of an eye on songs that bite the corporate hand that feeds them with such venom it’s enough to make one go back and take another close listen to Faith No More to see if it was all a subversive put-on.

9. Patti Smith, Gung Ho (Arista) and Lou Reed, Ecstasy (Reprise): Neither of these are the artist’s best efforts ever (although Smith’s comes closest), but they both rank near the top of these living legend’s recorded efforts. With every new recording the likes of poet-rockers Patti Smith and Lou Reed pave new ground, as they show how to rock with dignity into late-middle age.

10. The Other Quartet, 13 Pieces (Knitting Factory): On the ensemble’s debut recording, the four musicians (saxophonist Ohad Talmor, trumpeter Russ Johnson, guitarist Jim Hershman, drummer Michael Sarin) who comprise the Other Quartet avoid all the cliches that haunt jazz quartets, in spite of original material that is often recognizably blues, jazz, Latin and ballads. It helps that they’re all virtuoso improvisers and composers, but it has more to do with an all-ensemble sensibility which incorporates humor, melody, and classical-based dynamics and arrangements, especially on a version of Elliott Carter’s “Canon for Three.”

The best of the rest: Johnny Cash, American III: Solitary Man (American); Medeski Martin & Wood, Tonic (Blue Note); Stone Coyotes, Situation Out of Control (Red Cat); Steely Dan, Two Against Nature, (Giant); The Nields, If You Lived Here You’d Be Home Now (Zoe); The Kennedys, Evolver (Zoe); Madonna, Music (Maverick); Steve Earle, Transcendental Blues (E-Squared/Artemis); John Lurie, The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits (Strange and Beautiful); Mario Pavone/Nu Trio, Remembering Thomas (Knitting Factory).

Also Richard Shindell, Somewhere Near Paterson (Signature Sounds); Meg Hutchinson, Against the Grey (LRH); The Jayhawks, Smile (Columbia); Living Daylights, Electric Rosary (Liquid City); Pharaoh’s Daugher, Out of the Reeds (Knitting Factory); Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All-Stars, Di Shikere Kapelye (Piranha); June Tabor, A Quiet Eye (Green Linnet); Masada, Live in Sevilla 2000 (Tzadik); Lauri des Marais/Erik Lindgren, Stimuli: Stories in Sound Volume 1 (SFZ).

[This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Dec. 15, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]

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