This Dead Cat Bounce CD is Worth It!

Hey, they use music stands too!

It turns out I can review jazz, too, but it's more difficult. That said, this PopMatters review of hard-thinking sax quartet Dead Cat Bounce worked pretty well, even if I did have to mention Lady Gaga and the Foo Fighters for whatever reason. An excerpt:

Most of [the band's musical] whims come from saxophonist, composer, and liner-note philosophizer Matt Steckler, and his songs for the grant-and-commission-funded album Chance Episodes examine “memory’s haphazard way of bringing to the fore seemingly unrelated events, so that an episodic personal narrative is created, as if ‘by chance.’” Well, you gotta write something on your grant application, but someday Steckler should explain how that compositional approach differs from ANY OTHER MUSIC EVER MADE. Doesn’t all music, or at least all interesting music, incorporate seemingly unrelated events? Why, Lady Gaga’s most recent album recounts the actions of a government hooker, Bible people, and some guy from Nebraska! More to the point, music, simply because it’s music and it sounds intentional, creates narratives all the time, almost despite itself. Granted, most such narratives are listeners’ projections. I dare you to listen to an album and not hear it as some kind of “personal narrative,” even if the narrative is very simple—“this album is the Foo Fighters’ rockin’ return to form”, say. Music, like any artwork, challenges us to take up its disparate elements and make sense of them.