Had Jean Paul Bourelly recorded another post-Hendrix, Afro-fusion blowout-the sort of thing on which he built his career-he probably would have posed for the cover photo with an electric guitar. Would he also be wearing a shirt? One can only assume. As it happens, the guitarist and his naked torso pose in bed. He pokes at the camera lens with a lit cigar. An acoustic guitar leans against a bureau behind him. What this questionable image tells us is that Bourelly is switching things up. News From a Darked Out Room (“darked out”?) presents the sensitive, raw Bourelly, the bedroom lothario Bourelly. He picks, strums and thumps the acoustic guitar and sings about sex.
On the recording’s few instrumentals, Bourelly pairs back his rapid-fire style. Spare and spacious, the tunes light on sketches of melody, fly off, and return. As for his vocal turns, that’s another matter entirely. He has a nice baritone, but he sings in an awkward, sort-of-bluesy style. With his lyrics and delivery, he aims to be suggestive but ends up with something both bizarre and unsettling. Psychoanalysts and literary critics, make what you will of this from “Cross Cut Saw”: “I’m your cross cut saw, drag me across your log/ Cut your wood so good for you, baby, you can’t help but say hot dog.”
Related Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro