24 ARTS Review of reviews: Music & Stage
“For Madlib, making
music is as elemental
as eating or sleeping,”
said Hua Hsu in The
New Yorker. “One of
the most respected
producers of his gen-
eration,” the 47-year-
old beat-maker and multi- instrumentalist
records hundreds of tracks each week,
sampling and splicing “everything from
hip-hop, jazz, and soul to German rock,
industrial music, Brazilian funk, and
Bollywood.” Jackson’s latest project, a col-
laboration with British electronic musician
Four Tet, “distills his eclectic, globe-trotting
approach.” Its 16 tracks are “full of unlikely
samples, slack drum loops,” and snippets
of borrowed vocal tracks to add warmth.
“While Madlib earns obvious comparisons
to jazz experimentalists,” said Jeff Ihaza in
Rolling Stone, “Sound Ancestors makes a
strong case for considering him alongside
musicians like Brian Eno, known for pow-
erful sonic landscapes.” With a curatorial
assist from Four Tet, we can see Madlib for
who he is: an artist who “digs through the
past for clues about the future, connecting
tendrils of ideas from disparate genres to
create something wholly original.”“It seems all but inevi-
table that Arlo Parks will
be one of the break-
through artists of 2021,”
said Jem Aswad in
Variety. The 20-year-old
London-based singer-
songwriter “almost
could have been created in a test tube for
a certain type of music fan.” Her melodic,
easygoing music is “steeped in R&B and
alt-rock but anchored in singer-songwriter
tradition,” and her lyrics “often have the
feel of a perceptive email from a friend.”
It’s not hard to understand why Michelle
Obama, Billie Eilish, and Phoebe Bridgers
were early fans, said Hannah Jocelyn in
Pitchfork.com. “Parks’ songwriting is
affectionate and friendly, never straining
too hard, always cool and collected.” What’s
more, “nearly every song has a message
of comfort,” a line like “You’re not alone” or
“We all have scars,” often explicitly aimed
at a character battling a mental crisis. Taken
alone, every song here is charming. But the
total experience is unmemorable. “It’s easy
to imagine someone walking into a coffee
shop, nodding their head to the support-
ive chorus wafting over the speakers, and
never thinking about it again.”
Ani DiFranco’s 20th
studio album “takes
on the tumult and
anxieties of the current
moment with some of
the lushest arrange-
ments and finest vocals
of her entire career,”
said Jim Shahen in NoDepression.com. The
folkie activist and feminist icon, now 50, has
long maintained that the personal and the
political are one in the same—“that merely
existing, thinking, and emoting are political
statements.” Revolutionary Love makes that
idea explicit with 11 “warm, vivid” jazz-pop
songs about perseverance, forgiveness,
and what it means to search for inner peace
while fighting for a more just society. “She’s
still willful and determined, but her defiance
is more strongly connected to compassion
than it is to youthful anger.” Don’t think that
DiFranco has gone mellow, though, said
Steven Wine in the Associated Press. She’s
most vociferous on “Do or Die,” a catchy,
Latin-inflected groove “suitable for a rally.”
After condemning the “sheetless KKK”
marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, she
urges listeners to regroup, recover, and
vote accordingly. “DiFrancophiles will find it
positively patriotic.”Madlib
Sound Ancestors
++++Arlo Parks
Collapsed in Sunbeams
++++
Ani DiFranco
Revolutionary Love
++++Lauren Gunderson, America’s most pro-
duced living playwright, has a knack for
conveying “the passion of scientific discov-
ery,” said Alix Christie in Economist.com.
Her husband, Nathan Wolfe, is a world-
famous virologist, so it’s easy to understand
why after writing bio-plays about Marie
Curie and Ada Lovelace she was tempted
to write a drama about her spouse.
“Fortunately, her material was rich.” In
this new one-actor play, William DeMeritt
is “mesmerizing” as Wolfe, who begins by
explaining his work and his globe-trotting
life. The setting is 2016, though, so every
frustration that this slightly cocky expert
expresses about his pandemic warnings notDeMeritt as Wolfe: A virus virtuosoThe Catastrophist
++++being heeded has double significance. But
The Catastrophist is not about “I told you
so.” Instead, the story “sheds compassion-
ate light on the all-too-human tendency to
ignore catastrophe until it is too late.” In
the end, even Wolfe is not immune from
such blindness.As dynamic as DeMeritt is, even he can’t
liven up “the script’s many longueurs,” said
Lily Janiak in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Gunderson simply puts too much focus on
personal side dramas, such as Wolfe’s com-
plicated relationship with his father or the
death of a friend. “They’re the sort of tid-
bits you’d care deeply about if Gunderson
and Wolfe were telling you them in their
living room,” but they’re tedious here. The
Catastrophist is far better when it gives
us Wolfe in his wheelhouse: a passionate
researcher armed with an arsenal of aston-
ishing facts about virology, risk perception,
and more. In its best moments, the play is
“a freewheeling, virtuoso science lesson—
the kind where you don’t just absorb fun
facts but recalibrate your mental ordering
of the universe and your place in it.” $36,
MarinTheatre.org, through Feb. 28Bollywood Kitchen
++++
“I’m not sure if
Bollywood Kitchen
is the first theatri-
cal adaptation of
a cookbook,” said
Allison Robicelli in
TheTakeout.com.
“But I hope that it
won’t be the last.”
Screenwriter Sri Rao
is offering an innovative mix of one-man
show and cooking demo, sharing with
online viewers a family immigrant story
punctuated by clips from classic Indian
films while he teaches us how to make
a curry and a dessert. At the lowest price
point, viewers can stream the show; in
two higher tiers, they’re provided with
a spice kit and live support from Rao
himself. The show “can occasionally feel
like a promotion for the cookbook,” said
Helen Shaw in NYMag.com. But Rao
is most impressive in damage-control
mode. A knack for improvising helps
him correct flavor imbalances just as it
helped his parents survive in an unfa-
miliar culture. “His nothing’s-so-broke-
you-can’t-fix-it attitude is the smaller
version of their courage.” From $40,
GeffenPlayhouse.org, through March 6Rao’s added spiceMarin
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