Dwight Yoakam has always been one of Nashville’s proudest outsiders. Hearing him on the radio between the Garths, Tracys, Tys and Tobys is like getting a dose of the Stones after too much Bob Seger. “Gone,” his eighth album, is a whole little jukebox unto itself: nearly every song feels like a hit, from the sly-eyed honky-tonk of “Baby Why Not” to the lush strings and flangey guitar of “Nothing.” The most promising debut of the season looks to be “Thunderstorms and Neon Signs,” by Texas wildman Wayne (The Train) Hancock. A cold, lonesome wind blows through his voice, and he plays a vehemently old-timey country style built around guitar, upright bass, pedal steel and no drums. You probably won’t hear him on your megawatt FM station, because every song sounds like it should be emanating from a scratchy old Philco tuned to a dark night decades past.
Once you’re back in the present, the megawatt pop and rock stations will be playing an abundance of women. Maybe it’s the Sheryl Crow influence, but the fall’s powerhouse releases are mostly female: Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Melissa Etheridge, Gloria Estefan. Lisa Loeb, the only unsigned artist ever to have a No. I hit (“Stay,” from the “Reality Bites” soundtrack), finally releases a debut album filled with more dorm-room dramas. k.d. lang’s new album, “All You Can Eat,” is bouncier and a little less introspective than she’s been in the past. Kim Deal of the Breeders has a new band, the Amps, and a new album of thinking girls’ art-rock. And country icon Emmylou Harris teams with ethereal pop producer Daniel Lanois for “Wrecking Ball,” lending her southern tremolo to songs by Neff Young, Steve Earle and Bob Dylan. “Wrecking Ball” isn’t a calculated attempt to get Harris radio exposure. But a voice like hers should never be hard to find.
When a great jazzman dies, other musicians sometimes grumble, “Maybe now he’ll get famous.” But then, jazz artists have a lot of gripes. When it comes to jazz radio, for instance, there’s no longer a single commercial station in the country for acoustic jazz, only college stations and pub-lie radio. Is it any wonder that record companies tend to promote the dead but proven stars? Or that some of the best jazz artists use electricity to make more mainstream records that can get airplay on big stations?
Four years after his death, Miles Davis remains a star of the Columbia stable. This fall the big event in jazz is a six-disc box of Davis’s classic collaborations with orchestrator and composer Gil Evans in the 1950s and ’60s–baited with two never-released pieces. Another event is the first solo record in seven years from saxophonist Wayne Shorter, one of Davis’s most brilliant collaborators in the late ’60s. Shorter wrote rich orchestrations threaded with haunting melody-and combined with synth, funk bass and a heavy drum backbeat. Shorter says he wants his music “outdoors”; he’s attempting “street Shakespeare.”
Jazz players can also sell more records by leaning toward the blues. A new moment has arrived for the funky groove of groups anchored by the Hammond B-3 electric organ, a sound pioneered in the ’50s by Jimmy Smith. Don Braden, one of the most musically Sophisticated young sax players, turns to the classic organ-trio sound for his big-label debut this fall. Organist Larry Geldings makes an even more down-home debut. Guitar great John McLaughlin has an innovative new organ-trio record coming out, too. Wish them all luck–if they do well, maybe their labels can afford to keep taking some chances on jazz’s acoustic free spirits.
OK, he’s a dead white male, but he’s been doing great box office for centuries: no wonder orchestras around the country are planning big celebrations of Beethoven’s 225th birthday this season. At New York’s Carnegie Hall, Maurizio Pollini will play all 32 piano sonatas in a series of seven concerts beginning in October, and the Philadelphia Orchestra will perform a complete cycle of the nine symphonies for only the third time in almost 60 years.
In Detroit, music lovers will be looking to the future instead of the past. The Detroit Symphony has two African-American composers in residence this year: Anthony Davis, 44, best known for his opera “X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” and Jonathan Holland, 21, a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Holland, young as he is, has already won numerous awards and commissions–he’s one to watch.
