Ornette Coleman

The Complete Science Fiction Sessions/Skies of America/Dancing In Your Head

columbia/ legacy /verve

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After disbanding hisprecedent-setting quartet in 1961, Ornette Coleman spent the decade releasing sporadic and stylistically varied recordings. Hamstrung by low budgets and an apparent artistic funk, the Fort Worth native's work rarely achieved its earlier brilliance. In 1971, when Tony Orlando ruled the airwaves, Coleman signed with Columbia Records and launched a new period of creative fertility, demonstrated by this trio of reissues. Though still unfocused, the full septet performances from the Science Fiction Sessions zeroed in on Coleman's unique and evolving notion of "harmolodics," which liberated artists from the tyranny of structure and merged individual freedoms into a unified whole. Coleman rounded up musicians--including Dewey Redman--with the ears and the smarts to navigate such a crowded and complex route, and the whiplash stops and starts of Fiction burn with a propelled energy. Realizing a lifelong dream, Coleman next recorded one of his symphonies. Skies of America proved as dense thematically as it was chromatically; with the London Symphony as his palette, the busy orchestrations were as far-reaching and as turbulent as the times from which they sprang. Overlong for an LP, the work is presented in its entirety for the first time. By the time of its release, Coleman was in Morocco with the Master Musicians of Joujouka, whose strange tunings and polyrhythmic fury enthralled the saxophonist. Columbia was less impressed; they dropped Coleman and shelved the tapes (where they remain, except for the short tracks on Dancing in Your Head). Coleman turned to the stringlike overtones of electric guitars for his next album and launched the jazz-funk-rock group Prime Time. Its 27-minute treatment of a recurrent nursery rhyme-like theme may have made the purists scoff, yet it remains one of Coleman's most exhilarating and joyous successes.

Steve Earle

Transcendental Blues

e-squared/artemis

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In the fourteen years since Steve Earle released his debut LP, Guitar Town, and carved "Dwight Yoakam Eats Sushi" into an elevator wall at MCA-Nashville, he has given a generation of songwriters the courage to buck the Nashville suits. But somewhere in Earle's well-documented war with authority (a dollar for every "hell and back" profile of Music City's most visible recovering drug addict would allow Betty Ford to retire), he developed into Nashville's most consistently satisfying artist, a trend continued with Transcendental Blues. Highlights among the fifteen new Earle originals include "I Can Wait," a Ferry-Cross-the-Mississippi, Merseybeat valentine, and "When I Fall," a loving duet with his sister Stacey that contains no creepy, Kendalls undertone, just a promise between siblings to take care of each other. But don't confuse "reliable" with "reformed." Reacting to bluegrass patriarch Del McCoury's criticism of his onstage profanity, Earle announces at the end of Blues' bluegrass cut, "Until The Day I Die," ". . . and always remember, friends, there's no room in vulgarity for bluegrass."

Knife in the Water

Red River

overcoat recordings

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You'd probably never call Knife in the Water's music "country," but it certainly evokes country music in the sense that it takes painful and melancholy experiences and turns them into something strangely beautiful. Red River is the Austin quintet's second release, ten moody and meandering tunes that wash together with a pleasantly numbing effect. Laura Krause's haunting organ swells and Bill McCullough's heart-wrenching pedal steel guitar conjure up wide-open spaces, and Aaron Blount's mournful lyrics lend a quality of darkness: "Watch Your Back" is a paranoid love song couched in calmness; "Rene" is a murder ballad set to a snappy beat. The group's cover of Lee Hazlewood's "Sundown, Sundown" plods along, as Blount's sing-speak trades verses with Krause's hypnotic vocals until the track melds into a whirlpool of off-kilter harmonies and lap steel. Like the Velvet Underground's country-tinged songs, Knife in the Water's music is country twice removed, reinterpreted and influenced by the tranquil space rock of contemporaries like Bedhead and Spiritualized.

Dallas Alley Drag

yazoo

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In the history of Texas blues the glory often went to the guitar players, but this collection of twenties and thirties blues, rags, and stomps proves they weren't the only show in town. Playing rolling bass underpinnings with their left hand and rocking lead lines with their right, the Dallas pianists represented on this CD display the eclecticism, invention, and airy feel of all good Texas blues. The best-known is rollicking juke-joint sage Whistlin' Alex Moore, who crossed ragtime and stride with blues to lay the groundwork for boogie-woogie, rhythm and blues, and certain piano-jazz styles; his five tracks here include the delightful "They May Not Be My Toes." K. D. Johnson, who backs both Ida Mae Mack and Bessie Tucker, is all over his keyboard, and Texas Bill Day's hard bass lines are tempered by his bright, bouncy lead runs. Billiken Johnson's comic vocal effects (he neither sings nor plays an instrument) bring a jug-band spirit to six tracks. These musicians, though not wholly averse to falling back on traditional lyric lines, were also adventurous songwriters; efforts like Bobby Cadillac's "Carbolic Acid Blues" can stand alone regardless of what instrument plays it.

Goudie

Peep Show

the music company/elektra

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Austin's Goudie has built a reputation for melodic pop, but its major-label debut is surprisingly rock: Peep Show wallows in thick walls of guitar and arrangements constantly on the verge of collapse. While it's not the kind of bombast you'd expect on Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich's Elektra imprint, rarely do young bands cover so much territory as confidently. There's something futuristic about the effects and loops that are used to integrate influences like Radiohead, the Cars, and Cheap Trick, yet front man Johnny Goudie offers an appreciation for the fine line between spooky and sexy. It could be just the right recipe; competitors like Limp Bizkit certainly haven't come up with anything as suggestive and fulfilling as "Made," a psychedelic-metallic freakout that sounds like Nine Inch Nails covering Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker." And sure, most of Goudie's songs are variations on the same theme, but what great rock debuts weren't all about sex?