Crazy People Music

Neil Young has announced the release of Toast, a shelved 2001 album he made with Crazy Horse and declined to put out at the time because it was "so sad."
Aptly, the album is heavy and distressed, brimming with electrifying tension. Even its sweet-sounding opening track, 'Quit', features the refrain, 'Don't say you love me'. 'Standing in the Light of Love' and 'Goin' Home' let the Horse off the tether in fields of overdriven guitar; an out-of-work logger grapples with his faith on the breakneck 'Timberline'; and on 'Gateway of Love', Young dreams of a less painful future over a hypnotizing 10 minutes, leading into the somber, brokedown 'How Ya Doin'?' The songwriter sums up the album best during its shadowy finale 'Boom Boom Boom': 'All I got is a broken heart, and I don't try to hide it when I play my guitar'.

Mamie Smith's pathbreaking 1920 recording of "Crazy Blues" set the pop music world on fire, inaugurating a new African American market for "race records." Not long after, such records also brought black blues performance to an expanding international audience. A century later, the mainstream blues world has transformed into a multicultural and transnational melting pot, taking the music far beyond the black southern world of its origins. But not everybody is happy about that. If there's "No black. No white. Just the blues," as one familiar meme suggests, why do some blues people hear such pronouncements as an aggressive attempt at cultural appropriation and an erasure of traumatic histories that lie deep in the heart of the music? Then again, if "blues is black music," as some performers and critics insist, what should we make of the vibrant global blues scene, with its all-comers mix of nationalities and ethnicities?

Since the mid-'80s, Branford Marsalis has led various incarnations of his quartet, issuing a bevy of highly inventive and playful albums like Random Abstract, Crazy People Music, and Braggtown, all of which showcase his love of swinging acoustic jazz and dynamic group interplay. 2019's The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul is no exception and finds the saxophonist balancing an expressive maturity with a continued sense of fun. Following up 2012's Four MFs Playin' Tunes, as well their 2016 Kurt Elling collaboration Upward Spiral, this iteration of the quartet features pianist Joey Calderazzo, bassist Eric Revis, and drummer Justin Faulkner (who replaced Jeff "Tain" Watts in 2009).