Randy Newman is rightly known for his Oscar-winning movie music but it always has kind of bugged me that his place in the popular conscious is generally occupied by goofy-sounding songs (unless you really pay attention to what the words say) like "Short People" and "I Love LA" and not, for example, by his brilliant sets on "Good Old Boys" and "12 Songs," the latter a musical cornucopia.
Violinist Jenny Scheinman says her own "12 Songs," Cryptogramophone, is in part a nod to Newman's disk and it's an aural feast in its own right. "The Frog Threw His Head Back and Laughed" could be the background music for the scene in "Stripes" where Bill Murray loses his girlfriend, his car gets repossessed and he drops the pizza he's bringing home for dinner on the ground ... face down. You gotta laugh so you don't cry it says. There's a noticeable Bill Frisell influence (see "Unspeakable") on parts of the CD, which Frisell appears on with regular collaborator Scheinman. OK by me because I'm a Frisell fan.
The music is diverse. In one stretch you get the Latin-inflected "Little Calypso," while "Satelite" has overtones of classical chamber music, "Atenna" starts like an avant-garde electronic experiment before becoming a fairly conventional ballad and "Albert" could be a piece from "Cold Mountain." "Moe Hawk" sounds to me like a march composed by Mingus instead of Sousa. The instrumental mix, including an accordion and a claviola, and especially drummer Dan Rieser, also is a big part of what makes this a keeper.
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Jenny Scheinman plays fairly often at Barbes, a great tiny club in Brooklyn. If you're ever in the neighborhood . . .
Hello Jennie. I have never gone to see jazz in New York and I need to fix that. Then again, I said the same thing about New Orleans last year and look what happened.
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