Louisville Magazine

JUL 2012

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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[ Circuit ] Smillie's Picks >>by Thomson Smillie illustration by Bart Galloway N othing divides the generations as sharply as taste in music. It's a rite of passage for children to roll their eyes when dad plays some of his music, in my case usually anything written as pop after 1910 . Conversely, the time comes when the child plays a favorite track and the parent listens in unspoken disapprov- al. One time, on a long family trip from Louisville to Delray Beach, Fla., a daugh- ter sought to make Duran Duran fans of us all. So my trepidation was great when my www.helpkosairchildrenshospital.com [22] LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.12 young editor at this magazine gave me some tracks of the Louisville-born band My Morning Jacket — in town this month for the Forecastle Festival, July 13- 15 at Waterfront Park — and asked me, a musical curmudgeon of long standing, to comment. At that point, I hadn't heard any of the group's music. Fact is, the yawning generational divide is not about one song or album versus another but the whole aural landscape of the different genres. Just as a child might react to an operatic aria with howling, caterwauling parody, an older person will recoil from monolithic walls of sound, musical ideas that do not seem to contain a germ of melody, repetition to the point of madness, incomprehensible lyrics, and vocal violence, all delivered at a decibel level beyond the threshold of pain. Fortunately, my younger son David has eclectic music tastes. Years ago we shared a passion for Schubert symphonies and Beethoven piano concertos, and while his tastes expanded and now run from popular classics to My Morning Jacket, mine have not. He was happy to guide my listening and help my search for what makes MMJ stand out from the throng of rock bands. At home on Cherokee Road, mostly in the kitchen and garden, we listened to eight al- bums. Many listenings of select songs were necessary, but that is true of most genres . Familiarity with a melody breeds a comfort zone where we feel at home with stuff we know. As one orchestra manager remarked recently: People do not know what they like; they like what they know. Tis famil- iarity is all made so much easier by those twin cultural icons: Google and YouTube. An appreciation of why MMJ is excep- tional derives in my view from the talents of frontman Jim James. He has a voice of beauty and versatility, and an introduc- tion to his qualities might begin by looking on YouTube for the band's appearance on David Letterman. Tis is not typical rock band stuff — MMJ plays "Gideon" with the Boston Pops — but a good example of James' style and range. An early MMJ song like "At Dawn" discards a number of rock clichés: It has a long, complex and instrumentally inter-

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