Categories. Sometimes accepted definitions just don't fit; the boundaries blur. It's true in politics, in business, in art - in music. For example, a whole new range of vocal music is coming of age out there that sits on the fuzzy edge of new age, contemporary jazz and adult contemporary, as the radio programmers would have it. What is this stuff - art pop? Post-modern folk? Who's to say?
SERAH; "Flight of the Stork" (Great Northern Arts); produced by Serah.
Now here's the perfect album to illustrate our point. One of the trends in music's new age movement has been to mix instruments familiar and exotic to create hypnotically serene melodies. And suddenly, musical explorers are rediscovering the potent magic of words and the human voice as well.
Enya's mesmerizing masterpiece, "Watermark" (on Geffen Records), with its use of English, Gaelic and Latin, is, so far, the magnum opus for this budding genre (if it can be called a genre). Serah's "Flight of the Stork" is broadly of the same ilk . . . without being nearly as daring. Serah, a nomadic American inspired by sojourns in Europe and Africa, we're told, is more mellow-traditional than experimental. Her 10 pretty songs celebrate nature (water-reflected swans, crown-crested cranes, storks, dolphins, giraffes, wild horses, crashing waves, etc., etc.) and tranquil, harmonious thoughts.
"Beauty: Song for Africa," a duet sung by Serah with the German musician Friedemann, may sum up what she and her music are about:
There are times when the music must be quiet,
There are times when we must whisper low;
Like the wind through the leaves to bring me to my knees
In praise for the beauty around us, some loving arms that surround us.
The lyrics do seem a tad clumsy, alone on the page like that. They're more effective in the intended context, swimming in a sweet stream of melody. Indeed, the instrumental arrangements on "Flight of the Stork" could almost stand on their own as graceful examples of the new age art (as a concluding, lyric-less version of the title song demonstrates). Guitarist Friedemann, woodwind-keyboard artist Philip Geiss, keyboardist Johannes Wohlleben and many, many others weave a haunting tapestry of sound. If anything, the weak link in the ensemble is Serah herself. Her vocal performance is not unacceptable, and she shines here and there. But often her tone wavers, and she can't seem to sustain a note very long. The instrumental perfection only serves to spotlight her limitations.
Even the packaging and distribution of "Flight of the Stork" put it in a class virtually to itself. This, we are to understand, is a multimedia work of art.
The album includes a booklet with delicate illustrations and the lyrics, featuring detailed illuminations and calligraphy. The creation comes in three versions: a $1,200 "Collectors Edition," limited to 500 copies, with a special book and signed by the principal artists involved; a $30 "Special Edition" box with a gold-leaf-embossed jacket for the booklet; and regular-priced CD and cassette versions. Finally, the project is the inaugural release of a new label, Great Northern Arts, which will specialize in cross-genre artists like Serah.
THE TELLING; "Blue Solitaire" (Music West); produced by Frosty Horton; co-produced, written and arranged by Don and Sheri Swanson.
Where Serah is luminous, The Telling is moody and twilight-tinged in the dreamy album "Blue Solitaire."
Virtually every song in this impressive set is a haunting gem. The first three, "True Gold," "Guardian Angel" and "Blue Solitaire," explore loneliness and lost love in varied ways. "World on a Wing" ponders the mandala-like cycle of life. "Wind Without Walls" remembers the magical fantasies and nighttime reveries of childhood. "Santa Maria," almost alone, takes a light, bright tack. Two tracks are instrumentals.
Essentially, The Telling is a duo: husband and wife Don and Sheri Swanson. They wrote the songs for "Blue Solitaire" and mapped out the instrumentation, then created the swirl of sound on their own and with musical soloists. Sheri Swanson's breath-and-satin vocals float above beautiful, subdued arrangements of synthesized keyboards, acoustic guitars and perfectly interpolated trumpets, French horns and oboes.
The Swansons are both involved in painting and photography (they shot and designed the blue-shaded photographic montage on the cover of "Blue Solitaire"), and that visual orientation shows in their songs, full of images employed for layers of meaning.
"People have told us they feel our music is cinematic because of its atmospheric, moody quality," Sheri Swanson says. "Our goal is to write music that creates a kind of magical landscape."
Fantasy and the real world comingle in the songs of The Telling, and that's appropriate: The result is a stylized sound that's at once introspective and otherworldly.
ANNIE HASLAM; "Annie Haslam" (Epic Records); produced by Larry Fast/Synergy.
Both Serah's "Flight of the Stork" and The Telling's "Blue Solitaire" recall, in admittedly brief flashes for the initiated, the '70s work of the eclectic group Renaissance. Annie Haslam's latest album does, too, but that's not exactly surprising - she was the voice of Renaissance. Still, where the other two new recordings lean toward the new age frontier, Haslam seems to be decidedly tipping toward contemporary pop.
Haslam's classic voice and five-octave range shine, as a rule, in this solo collection, produced by synthesizer ace Larry Fast (known for his many albums under the nom de group Synergy). Especially fine are "When A Heart Finds Another," wherein her soprano ultimately soars to stratospheric heights over a driving synthesizer-syncopated pop melody; the medley "She's the Light"/"Celestine," her closest approach to the old Renaissance sound; the catchy "Further From Fantasy," and especially "The Angels Cry." Justin Hayward wrote and contributes background vocals to "The Angels Cry," and if you've ever wondered how the Moody Blues' grand-romantic style would work in another setting (say, with an effective female vocalist), this is one you should hear.
Unfortunately, many of the other selections seem downright wrongheaded. For instance, Haslam and Fast try for a hip soulfulness on "Let It Be Me" (not the old chestnut), and it just doesn't work. Ditto on "Wish-in' on a Star," riddled with "baby" this and "baby" that.
Now, what if someone urged Annie to give a listen to the songs and long-form concepts of "Flight of the Stork" and "Blue Solitaire". . . .
JULEE CRUISE; "Floating Into the Night" (Warner Bros.); written and produced by David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti.
Yes, the co-producer of Julee Cruise's debut album is indeed that David Lynch. Everything Lynch has a hand in, from movies like "Eraserhead" and "Blue Velvet" to the TV series "Twin Peaks," veers off into the quirky, the strange - the bizarre. "Floating Into the Night" is no exception.
Mood is everything here. If The Telling's "Blue Solitaire" captures twilight, "Floating Into the Night" smacks of midnight. The midnight of romance, at first, then of the lonely and lovelorn, finally of the half-dreaming, half-awake.
This isn't for all tastes, but those enthralled by the opening-credit theme of "Twin Peaks" might be among the listeners drawn to this album. The song "Falling" is a variation of that theme, with Cruise's soft, whispery vocals supplementing the graceful, synthesized bass line that's become familiar to much of America. "Into the Night" and "Nightengale," which features a haunting vocalise background by Cruise, are of the same spirit.
Lynch wrote the lyrics for all the songs, Badalamenti the music. The somnolent melodies are laced with references to floating lovers and nighttime. And somehow the songs seem lost in time - as if they were composed by someone with one foot in the early 1960s and another in the 1990s. The night-soaked saxophone solos play a part in this effect. As does the shoo-bop chorus toward the end of "I Remember." And as do the girl-group harmonies of "Rockin' Back Inside My Heart."
Disquieting and dissonant in places, but gently elegant and alluring as a rule, "Floating Into the Night" is an odd, yet interesting, musical experience.