THE GIG

Frank Morgan in Tribute

The first album I ever heard by Frank Morgan — the alto saxophonist, rehabilitated junkie and epochal comeback kid — was Mood Indigo, released in 1989 on Antilles. A serenely hushed affair, it features two takes of "Lullaby," the plainspoken ballad by pianist George Cables. As it happens, Michael Connelly, the best-selling mystery novelist, claims "Lullaby" as a theme song for his chief protagonist, Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch. This interdisciplinary homage, implicit in all of the Bosch novels and stated outright in more than one of them, must be one of the more steadfast and prominent of its kind. (Can you think of another one?)

Pick up a copy of today's paper and you'll find my piece about the Connelly-Morgan connection, occasioned by the news of a forthcoming documentary film, Sound of Redemption.

Falling Short

New Music, Aug. 16

Jeff Bridges, "Jeff Bridges"

Mixed Media

‘Louis’

Apollo Theater, Aug. 30

Eclipsed

 Critics’ Choice: New CDs

“Twilight: Eclipse Soundtrack”

 

Sachal Vasandani

Joe’s Pub, June 2

 

Band of the Lost

Recommended Reading Dept: the New Yorker’s Alex Ross spends some time with Michael Giacchino, who’s responsible for the music on Lost. The link goes to an abstract, but trust me, you’ll want to read the full article, which combines close access with serious insight -- about the show, about Giacchino, and about the vicissitudes of film and television scoring.

I’ll admit to following Lost, in the same way that a certain kind of smoker cops to his habit: guiltily, helplessly, with a lot of self-conscious grumbling. (I originally started watching for vaguely homesick reasons: most of the location shooting takes place around my old stomping grounds.) But Ross is right to single out the music for appreciation. It’s one of the few aspects of the show that has never failed to deliver, season after season. 

In a World Gone Mad

As is often the case with appointment television, I came late to the game on Mad Men, the AMC chronicle of Madison Avenue in a martini-swilling age. At this point I’m done with the first season, and have yet to tackle the second. On Sunday night I cheated and watched the Season 3 premiere, which struck me as oddly unimaginative -- certainly less creative than this summer’s ad campaign, a fitting combination of bombast and finesse. (You may have noticed the bus banners, or the Banana Republic storefronts, or the retro-cartoonish Facebook icons of your pals.) But I’ll leave the reviews to the seasoned pros, and to amateurs with a deeper investment than my own. 

One thing has been bugging me all along, though, and I wonder whether I’m the only one. The opening credits to the show, iconic enough to have earned their own Simpsons parody, ring stylish but hollow against the substance of the show. Every time I see them -- and that’s numbingly often, when you’re binging through a full season -- a part of me imagines how much better they could be.

Yeah, this is obsessive. But we’re talking about a show that takes period detail to fanatical extremes. From the fashion to the cocktails, nothing is left unconsidered here. In the world of Don Draper and his associates, image is everything, and so the show cleverly gives us a gleaming fabrication, an idealized and profoundly troubled milieu.