Founding Allman Brothers Band drummer Jaimoe (aka Jai Johanny Johanson) treats listeners to an accomplished mix of blues, jazz-pop and jam-band music.
While many of his contemporaries have ossified, Neil Young claws at the marrow like a deranged miner, digging deep in ways that confound expectation. He launches his new double album with a track that’s almost 28 minutes long—and that largely revolves around two chords. It’s one of three songs on this nine-track effort that top 16 minutes.
Cleverly disguised as bedtime music for young ones, Lullaby doubles as an album of exquisite, dreamy chamber pop that showcases Justin Roberts backed by a string quartet, trumpets and French horn. The plucked strings on “Heart of Gold” infuse the song with a playful sparkle that shimmers like summer twilight.
He was up in the choir loft, tuning his pipes of the old century’s wind-pump organ; I heard taps and bangs on metal, strange half-throated off- notes, near-notes, puffs, sighs and cough-blasts;
and then he was playing—Bach, Buxtehude, Peters— it was a young Jehovah’s making, a bright hands-full soaring over oceans of soul-light, filling the chill of the chapel with a lush of breathing. Now, in my everyday listening,
for the poem,the music, I am Mary before the ash-soft fall of the messenger, I am John after the disappearance beyond the clouds; I listen to the silence beyond the thuck and thudding of a day’s importance, to hear the hum that figures
a countryside of darkness, the sounds of April whispering over into May, the thunder of apple blossoms dropping from the tree; I listen for the tune that my days make in the works of love, in the notes’ approximations to a symphony.
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