Aural Fixations

THE PERNICE BROTHERS
The World Won't End (Ashmont)
When singer/songwriter Joe Pernice left the Scud Mountain Boys in the mid-90s, just as the band was starting to make a name for itself in alt.country circles, many pundits thought he was crazy. But Pernice felt hemmed in by the stylistic constraints of the Scuds. He wanted to follow his own creative instincts, which leaned more towards the likes of Jimmy Webb and Burt Bacharach than Townes Van Zandt and Gram Parsons. When he debuted his new band the Pernice Brothers in 1998 with the sterling Overcome By Happiness, his gamble was vindicated. The lush pop of Happiness inspired a mountain of critical praise and gained him far more fans than he lost. He then flummoxed his burgeoning fan base by releasing two Brothers-sounding records under different monikers (the eponymous Chappaquiddick Skyline and, under his own name, Big Tobacco) and leaving the well-respected Sub Pop for what he considered the greener pastures of starting his own label. Now, three years after becoming one of the most acclaimed songwriters in rock, he's reassembled the Pernice Brothers for the "official" follow-up to Happiness, begging the question of whether he can live up to outside expectations. (more)

Audio-Visuals

ROOTS OF RHYTHM with Harry Belafonte
(Docurama DVD)
Roots of Rhythm is a three-hour documentary series on the origins of Latin music in the United States. Originally broadcast on PBS in 1989, it appears on DVD for the first time.

The program's original merits are still the prevailing reasons to view and absorb what's here. The viewer is taken on a journey from West Africa to Spain, then on to Cuba for the prolific spread of the combinations and permutations of modern Latin music. Given that the majority of popular styles such as salsa, rhumba, son and chachacha came from Cuba, influences from South America and the rest of the Latin world are given only cursory nods. Frankly, a study that inclusive would take a much more extensive documentary series, or a course in Latin ethnomusicology. (more)