Ben Harper Burn to Shine (Virgin Records, 1999)
Don Byron Romance with the Unseen (Blue Note Records, 1999)
Reviewed by Micah Holmquist
September 25, 1999

All but the very best musicians have an occasional dud album. Sometimes even those exceptionally creative artists do produce works that are less than stellar. The key is usually how long does it take them to rebound. Ben Harper and Don Byron may or may not be in the highest echelon of creative musicians. Yet both have produced more than one album in the past that showed at least glimpses of brilliance. Both Harper and Byron have recently released discs that serve as follow-ups to some of the weakest material of their respective careers. The results, while not stellar, show that both have the ability to produce plenty of fine music for years tome.

Burn to Shine is the fourth official full length Ben Harper release. This Los Angeles native first album was the excellent 1994 release Welcome to the Cruel World. This was basically an acoustic blues and folk album. Harper varied up the usual song-and-dance by playing a Weissenborn guitar. Weissenborn’s are tuned quite low and played on the lap like a steel guitar and are also tuned quite low. Then came 1995’s superb Fight for your Mind, which featured a much different sound. The Weissenborn was still there but was now electrified and additional rock, rap, and funk influences became evident. These changes were far more evolutionary than they were abrupt. Upon first listening to Fight for your Mind, this reviewer was surprised at how different the disc sounded from its predecessor. Relistening to Welcome to the Cruel World, though, made it clear that it had been a gradual shift and that all the ingredients of the second album had really been present previously. That just needed to be taken out and shown to the world. The one consistent of both albums was a lyrical focus on social issues. From police brutality to racism to gay rights and poverty, Harper covered all of these topics with a degree of simplicity and lucidity not often seen. 1997’s The Will to Live would not spend much time looking at social issues. It also lacked the sense of progression and originality that the previous two had. Listeners were basically left with hard rock songs mixed with vaguely spiritual themes. The same musical textures were used throughout and the songs lumbered on excessively.

Unfortunately Harper’s most recent release, Burn to Shine, shares many of these same problems. The first two or three songs show little reason to exist other than to fill up space and showcase heavy guitar playing. The fourth track is "Two Hands of a Prayer" and is a love song. The acoustic guitar work is interesting if a bit a predicable. The lyrics, for their part, should serve as a text book definition of cliched. That said it is still somewhat enjoyable to listen to. Next comes the electric song "Please Bleed." Despite differences in amplification, "Please Bleed" and "Two Hands of a Prayer" share the same virtues as well as faults. After that comes the only two great songs on this disc. "Suzie Blue", a fun Dixieland tune, and "Steal Me Kisses", an up tempo and up beat piece that pays nod to the sound of hip-hop records of yesteryear but does not lost its own identity. One would like to think that Harper would realize that it is these types of songs that suit him best. He may prefer all out brooding rockers or acoustic songs but from album to album, it is the lighthearted songs that he does the best on. And, as Harper leaves this style behind, it is all downhill for the rest of the disc. None of the songs are particularly bad or good. Only the title track leaves a lasting an impression and that is because it sounds more like what would come from a fictional band on a t.v. show than anything else.

This review might sound particularly harsh. It doesn’t mean to be. Harper’s problem is less that he is producing substandard music than that anything but the best sounds substandard in comparison to his first two releases. Hopefully he will soon find a way to return to that previous form.

Jazz clarinetist Don Byron has never had the problem of being predicable. His debut release as a leader was 1992’s Tuskegee Experiments. That disc combined elements of fusion, free jazz, and bop in ways that were both smart and unique. Byron would go on to explore swing, klezmer, and Latin jazz styles. It was his look at Latin jazz that produced in 1995 Music for Six Musicians, his best album to date. What made that album so good was that it sowed a tight thread between the seemingly incompatible worlds of Latin and avant-garde jazz. Byron’s next studio recording was a look at funk called Nu Blaxploitation. The release continued a tradition of Byron’s by looking closely at the oppression faced by black people in the United States. This lead to provocative commentaries on topics as varied as sports and the death of that British princess. Unfortunately the album’s sound, while daring, did not hold up well to repeated plays.

Romance with the Unseen is Byron’s newest release and it is unlikely to suffer the same fate. Joining Byron are noted guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Drew Glass, and drummer Jack DeJohnette who is best known for his work with Miles Davis. The quartet begins with Duke Ellington’s "A Mural from Two Perspectives" and then moves on to 6 Byron originals as well songs from John Lennon and Paul Mccartney, Herbie Hancock, and Juan Tizol. Besides the Duke Ellington cover, the best cut here is Byron’s take on the Bernhard Goetz story called "Bernhard Goetz, James Ramseur and Me." The funny thing about instrumental explorations of very specific topics is that they usually rely on a title to put the wordless music in context. Yet this oddity can produce amazing results and this is one such occasion. All and all this is a low volume effort that loses nothing in intensity. It is highly recommended and will probably wind up as one of the four or five best discs of 1999.

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