Josh Shepherd’s Top 10 Albums of the Year

1. St. Vincent – Marry Me
Multi-instrumentalist Annie Clark releases her first album, Marry Me, with incredible production work and even better song writing. Art rock fans unite. The amazing thing about this album is that it could have been absolutely terrible. It isn’t over sweetened, it isn’t over kooky and it isn’t over whatever else would make you nauseous. She’s like Mary Poppins; sweet but you know she could kick your ass if she had to!

2. Wilco – Sky Blue Sky
It wasn’t what the fans wanted…at first. It wasn’t all over the place; it wasn’t experimental and weird for the sake of being weird. That’s what makes it great. It’s the left turn you didn’t expect when you expected it. It’s chill, it’s 70’s west coast goodness. And you can’t help but sing every song.

3. Brownout – Homenaje
Don’t mistake Brownout as a random off-shoot of Grupo Fantasma. It’s vice versa. These guys have been funking it up from the beginning and they have finally gotten to do it on an album. Putting good jazz and funk on an album is tough. The best albums always seem to be live, but Adrian Quesada and his crew have produced an album that is as close to seeing them live as possible without having to leave your cluttered desk.

4. Slow Runner –Shiv!
On the first track, “Lower Your Standards”, Michael Flynn sings…“the party is big but not big enough.” Make room for Slow Runner. Made up of Michael Flynn and Josh Kaler, Slow Runner did what their label wouldn’t! J Records wouldn’t release their 2nd album so they did it themselves. Shiv! is a complete album of indie esoteric pop that truly rocks out loud.

5. Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Not much to say about this that hasn’t been said. The funkiest Spoon album of them all. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga has superb grooves and lyrics that stick to the roof of your mouth. You Got Yr Cherry Bomb might be one of the best songs of the year.

6. Timbaland – Timbaland Presents: Shock Value
Yep. It’s on the list. I don’t care what you think. This album is sick. Timbaland is the best pop producer right now and he kills on every track. Each one is bangin and each one is so incredibly complex. There’s an evolved musicality that still has roots in 1997 that makes you bob your head, even when you don’t want to.

7. Iron and Wine – The Shepherd’s Dog
Sam Beam may be the coolest guy in the world. People were worried this album was an all-out rocker; no more sad bastard music. This album is an expansive thick universe of music. It’s like quicksand. It sucks you in and you hear things you never heard the first 20 times you listened to it. African rythyms, hand drums, latin grooves make this a joy to listen and groove to.

8. Golden Arm Trio – The Tick Tock Club
Six years since the last release from the Golden Arm Trio, Tick Tock Club is like a soundtrack for a movie never made. With 12 tracks and 24 musicians, Tick Tock Club takes on everything from crime jazz to impressions of Shastikovitch.

9. Talib Kweli – Eardrum
How long did we have to wait for this? It’s Talib Kweli doing exactly what he’s meant to do. With tracks produced by some of the best like Madlib, Pete Rock, Hi-Tek and will.i.am, Talib shines. He’s joined by a great cast; Norah Jones, Justin Timberlake, UGK and Roy Ayers. I can jam this album any time of the day.

10. Joshua Redman-Back East
The only pure jazz album on my list. Joshua Redman is back at it with this studio recording. It’s straight ahead trio jazz, slashing and flying through the standards and the experimental tracks as well. Full of energy, Joshua Redman has learned how to harness his power, but also the power of those in the group. Along with Redman, there is some great work from Christian McBride, Brian Blade and Ali Jackson.

Want to comment? Am I wrong? Am I deed-on right? Email me at josh@metelevision.com

Explaining who jazz musicians are isn’t anything new for me. Growing up I listened to Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Branford Marsalis, Joshua Redman and so many others. I listened to these on my own; these were my choices. It was difficult to explain that I wouldn’t be making it to a basketball game, because Chick Corea had a gig at the Backyard. It was usually interpreted into…”Josh has some chick in his backyard and can’t make the pick-up game.”

So I sit here trying to explain who Max Roach is and was. Max Roach passed away last week. He was 83. But with his passing, so much else left this world. He was the master of modern jazz. A drummer by trade he was the last of the incredible circle of jazz musicians who moved jazz from the big band era into bee bop and beyond. It was a circle of Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Mr. Roach pushed the boundaries of music throughout his career writing compositions and he even became part of the teaching faculty at the University of Massachusetts. While I was in high school, he also lived in my CD player, with me, a wannabe jazz drummer, learning every piece, every note and every stroke of Birth of the Cool.

He represented something else as well…the last of the Jazz Giants. There are very few others left who have helped to advance such a wide and encompassing genre. A genre that I feel is fading away. There are only a handful of the old school greats, Roy Haynes and Oscar Peterson being two of them. There is the second generation that includes Chick Corea, McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock. The third generation hosts the Marsalis brothers, Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau and Harry Connick Jr. That isn’t much of anything. I am not denying their abilities; they are all great players, but their numbers are dwindling. There were handfuls of brilliant jazz musicians playing from 1920s and the 1960s.

You may argue that this is how it works; this is musical progress. Music comes and fades away. Jazz isn’t a big deal anymore. It may not be a big deal, but it needs to be. It’s America’s only original music. Hip hop is a derivative of jazz. In the beginning, jazz samples laid the ground work for hip hop beds.

There are still jazz musicians out there making jazz relevant and that is a relief. I’m trying to stay optimistic. If jazz does fade away, it just means I won’t have to explain it to anyone anymore. I would rather tell them all about it.

Want to comment? Am I wrong? Am I dead-on right? Email me at josh@metelevision.com

756. It’s only a number. A number that’s causing quite a debate. San Francisco slugger, Barry Bonds hit his 756th home run the first week of August. For those who may have been out of the country, Bonds broke Henry Aaron’s record of most home runs in a career. That’s a hefty record to break, but no one seems overly excited.

Once again for those who may have been out of the country or just waking up from cryogenic sleep, Barry Bonds has been extensively linked to steroids. Books, magazine articles, radio shows and television specials have tried to dive into the swamp of steroid use in baseball and most have pointed towards Barry Bonds. I must say this is all alleged use, as Barry has never failed a steroid test. He gets an A+. All this has highlighted a much larger issue. What are the overall effects of performance enhancing drugs on sports? It isn’t fair that’s the problem.

Luckily in the music world, there are no such things as performance enhancing drugs. You won’t see musicians using steroids to shred guitar better. Steroids can only help those roid rockers fill out those tiny black t-shirts. I have never seen a ripped violinist or oboist. That ability to play, create or write music is very cerebral and very soulful. Some musicians may argue that marijuana, LSD or other hallucinogens have helped in their creativity. Those drugs don’t write good music for you. They may loosen up inhibitions; they may make you look at things differently. But with too many of those drugs, you may forget you were supposed to write a song at all.

If there was a pill one could take and then brilliant songs would follow, you’d see Britney Spears, Rhianna and Hinder all lined up outside Walgreens. That pill doesn’t exist and I am glad it doesn’t. There is no easy way to make good music. Bad music that’s quite easy to do. There is no reason people can’t make great music. The tools are there and they are easily molded. It may take years of hard work, but the fruits of all that labor are worth it. As the character played by Tom Hanks in the movie A League of Their Own said, “it’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard…that’s what makes it so great.” I figured Barry Bonds would have seen that movie.

Want to comment? Am I wrong? Am I dead-on right? Email me at josh@metelevision.com

Here it is; my first blog for ME Television. I feel pretty good about this as I type away on my keyboard at my cluttered desk. You may have seen me on Tex-Mix, but you may not know that I am also the Music Director for the network. I have stacks of CDs, videos, EPKs, stickers, guitar picks, and post-it notes all over my desk. That’s how it’s always been for me. My room at home isn’t any better; clothes, CDs, magazines and papers all over the place. That’s me and I am not going to change any time soon.

Change is a weird thing. Sometimes it really is needed. Sometimes change happens for the wrong reasons. Kanye West can’t stop changing. He is the ultimate musical Chameleon. He’s the guy who went to your high school who left for summer break a cowboy and came back a surfer. His pearl snap shirt is a wife beater and his once tidy brown hair is a frosted rat’s nest.

With his 2004 release of The College Dropout, Kanye West was on top of the world. Praise and expectations were heaped on Kanye; it was voted album of the year by Rolling Stone and garnered two Grammy’s. Three years later, Mr. West has become the Lon Chaney of the hip hop world. His newest production, Common’s Finding Forever, sounds more of J. Dilla than K. West. J. Dilla, a producer who once worked with Common, was always an indie hip hop sensation, but his reverence has reached a new level since his death in February of 2006. Kanye West admits to being a J. Dilla fan, nothing wrong with that, I love Jay Dee. I also love originality and that’s why I loved J. Dilla.

Kanye West has recently announced he wants Swedish indie band, Peter, Bjorn and John to be his back up band. Peter, Bjorn, West and John will perform together August 11th in Gothenburg, Sweden. No truth to the rumor that Kanye will be wearing skinny black jeans and staring at his shoes through the whole show. I shouldn’t be surprised. Kanye is the Don of biting. He scooped up Jamie Foxx for a song, as soon as Ray blew up. It seems Kanye West will be on the cutting edge of everyone else’s cutting edge.

I don’t know what Kanye West will sound like next and the sad part, I don’t think he does either. Where ever you find the next hip thing, look around, Kanye will be there to scoop it up. He should take a tip from Timbaland. Timbaland hasn’t changed anything; he has only evolved. 2007’s Shock Value is only a slight, pop deviation from 1997’s Welcome to Our World; a decade of music and a sound that is brilliant, new and his own.

Kanye West may find the answer and for all I know, it could be on one of these post-it notes on my desk. If that’s the case, he’s doomed.

Want to comment? Am I wrong? Am I dead-on right? Email me at josh@metelevision.com