http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/04/arts/music/albums-by-neil-young-bette-midler-and-miguel-zenn.html 2014-11-03 22:46:11 Albums by Neil Young, Bette Midler and Miguel Zenón Neil Young, Bette Midler and Miguel Zenón have all released new music. === NEIL YOUNG “Storytone” (Reprise) “Storytone” is, for one thing, The orchestral tracks provide a panoramic backdrop of sustained strings and swirls of harp, while the big-band horns punch up songs grounded in Chicago blues. The vocals hold just enough honest rough spots to celebrate, everywhere else, the purity and committed fragility of Mr. Young’s voice, which is high and clear, even though he’ll be 69 on Nov. 12. Alone or with his soundstages full of studio musicians playing scores, he sounds candid and confiding, especially in the far more exposed solo versions. But the other, more important aspect of “Storytone” is what’s on his mind. Environmental thoughts open the album: “Plastic Flowers,” a piano-based parable about “Mother Nature’s daughter” that harks back to “After the Gold Rush”; and Yet most of the album turns more personal, possibly autobiographical. In July, Mr. Young “Glimmer” — as an orchestral ballad or a country-tinged solo-piano song — revolves around persistent memories of “everything that I first saw in you,” around “the changes in our life that hit so hard,” and then around the revitalization brought by a new romance. In the bluesy “Like You Used To,” Mr. Young complains, “I couldn’t satisfy you” and “You just didn’t want it no more” before he taunts, “Someday you’re gonna need me.” Alongside the breakup songs are affirmations of how a new lover has opened up the singer’s heart and senses. “I’m glad I found you in this sad world/Where so many things go wrong,” Mr. Young sings in the hymnlike “I’m So Glad I Found You.” With Coplandesque orchestral chords swelling behind him, it could be a Hollywood happy ending. BETTE MIDLER “It’s the Girls!” (Warner Bros. Records) The spark of madcap mischief that has lit up Bette Midler’s performances for more than four decades has hardly dimmed, as evidenced by “It’s the Girls!,” her bubbly first studio album in eight years and one of her best. This tribute to girl groups, from the Boswell Sisters to TLC, was produced with Ms. Midler’s longtime collaborator, Marc Shaiman, the composer of “Hairspray,” some of whose songs strongly echo classic ’60s hits produced by Phil Spector. That music, along with Motown, is in Ms. Midler and Mr. Shaiman’s bones, and their fit is as comfortable as ever. Ms. Midler’s brash, mouthy vocal persona is still capable of sounding playfully transgressive, at least by ’60s standards. She injects songs like the Marvelettes’ “Too Many Fish in the Sea” with a defiant air of girl power, which in those days was synonymous with winning and worshiping a sexy bad boy. As vintage oldies mellow into latter-day standards, the reverence surrounding them tends to inhibit any remakes, but not here. The tempos are breezy on the album’s remakes of the Exciters’ “Tell Him” and the Chiffons’ Not all the songs adhere to the style of the originals. The Chordettes’ “Mr. Sandman” is infused with zany Hawaiian guitar that makes its funny/gushy lyrics even more amusing. Most important, Ms. Midler brings her sense of humor. At the end of the Shangri-Las’ hit “Give Him a Great Big Kiss,” she announces that she must rush back to the I.C.U. to visit her sweetheart: “He’s 98, you know,” she explains. “I’ve known him since this record came out.” MIGUEL ZENóN “Identities Are Changeable” (Miel) For at least the last decade, the alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón has organized most of his music around a thematic axis: the cultural and folkloric expressions of Puerto Rico, his homeland. “Identities Are Changeable,” his steeply ambitious new album, shifts the perspective slightly, interrogating the experiences of Puerto Ricans in New York City. Mr. Zenón, 37, was born in San Juan and has lived in New York since 1998. But his focus with this work, a sprawling song cycle that had its There’s a lot of ground to cover here, and Mr. Zenón does his part, interspersing snippets of interview audio throughout a dynamic, large-ensemble composition, featuring what he calls the “Identities” Big Band. The writing is potent and self-assured, girded with polyrhythmic cross talk — multiple meters churning in irregular union — and given to steadily mounting drama. (A live performance of the piece, among the highlights of this year’s Newport Jazz Festival, will be The sweeping intelligence of Mr. Zenón’s big-band arrangements, which occasionally nod toward recent advances in the field made by Guillermo Klein and Darcy James Argue, could have carried this agenda alone, without spoken-word overlay. At times, notably on the title track, the music and words seem to compete for attention. But Mr. Zenón also puts the interview clips to structural use. An anthemic track titled “Through Culture and Tradition” deftly reworks the phrase “bomba y plena,” referring to two related forms of island folk music. “My Home” does something similar with the English phrases “Spend some time in Puerto Rico” and “Back to my homeland,” incorporating their speech cadences in a melody articulated, with his usual expressive charisma, by Mr. Zenón. The voices are conversational, and more or less anonymous, despite a roll call in the piece’s overture. (One exception: Sonia Manzano will be instantly familiar to anyone who grew up watching “Sesame Street,” on which she plays Maria.) Mr. Zenón, who’ll present this music in small-group form