Donovan - Beat Cafe
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CD Details
Artist: DonovanEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2004-08-24
Music Label: Appleseed Records
Soundtracks:
- Love Floats
- Poorman's Sunshine
- Beat Cafe
- Yin My Yang
- Whirlwind
- Two Lovers
- The Question
- Lord Of The Universe
- Lover O Lover
- The Cuckoo
- Do Not Go Gentle
- Shambhala
Music reviews of Beat Cafe
Music Review: Donovan: King of Cool
Rating: 5 Stars
After a forty year run as the master of Mellow, not much has changed on Planet Donovan. The wisdom is still as abundant as the weed; poets in berets still blow saxes in the coffeehouse at night, and flowers still don heads of bushy hair in the audience. The man himself may be a little older now, but that doesn't mean that he's not coming on:
If I was your lover I'd take you to the sky
If you are feeling low I will make you high
Let me be your lover baby I will be your beau
This is not exactly the language of a man taking his social security check to the bank on the way to the golf course. In fact, Beat Café is an album that delivers the urgency and freshness one might expect from the debut album of a 20-something nobody, no less a nearly 60-year old flower-child of the original Woodstock generation.
Hushed and haunted, Beat Café plays like a long, seductive whisper from somewhere within the listener's consciousness - a knowing and familiar voice spreading the rumor that utopia is not something that happens in the external world, but rather within the self. It is a sunrise of the soul; a placid and breezy terrain the mind brings you to when the gates of its imagination are unlocked. "Gonna do all the things I've never done before, gonna get myself together somehow," Donovan sings on the downright wicked "The Question." Many of these new tunes expand upon the kind of optimism with which Donovan managed to pit himself against that brooding, bitter and more famous American counterpart, Bob Dylan.
Unlike Donovan's last album - the spare but alluring Sutras produced by Rick Rubin for American Recordings in 1996 - Beat Café explodes into a varied and distinctive musical brew. Danny Thompson's bass playing is worthy of Apollo's crown, and the legendary Jim Keltner turns in a surprisingly hip performance on drums and percussion, managing to keep up with Donovan as he slips in and out of beat after groovy beat.
Whereas Rubin seemed to make a Rick Rubin record of Sutras - mired as it was in his minimalist approach - John Chelew allows for the making of a Donovan record this time around. Chelew, whose resume includes work with John Hiatt and Richard Thompson, proves a more sympathetic cohort throughout this musically fascinating project, even lending a hand on keyboards throughout the set. The atmosphere is much more relaxed and suggests that the artist was allowed to breathe freely during these sessions.
The only resemblance between this latest album and Sutras is the mystic airiness of Donovan's lyrics, an eastern spiritualism cloaked in the psychedelic lexicon Donovan continues to employ. "You yin my yang/I'll yang your yin," he directs on "Yin My Yang." For an album as overtly conscious of its heritage as this one, it seems almost obligatory that Donovan would nod to Oar, Alexander "Skip" Spence's masterpiece of psychedelic folk/rock from 1969. "I could use me some yin for my yang," Spence sings on his "Dixie Peach Promenade (yin for yang)," "that would make everything alright." Spence's work is not only a direct echo of Donovan's "Yin My Yang," but of the entire universe Beat Café evokes - from its "beatnik café" where "the reefer blow" to the time and place where "there'll be music in the air/flowers in your hair/life without a care."
But where the nostalgic lyrics retread familiar territory, the music reinvents an artist in his fifth decade as a performer. The beautifully brittle "Shambala" closes the album with a moving dream of yearning, escape and resignation:
Take me home back to Shambala
where peaceful rivers flow
Take me home back to Shambala
Where seeds of love they sow
The appropriately titled "Whirlwind" - a song that wins the "coolest groove of the year" award - is dark and sly enough to suffice as the soundtrack for a landfalling hurricane. Most startling, though, is Donovan's impassioned cover of the folk standard, "The Cuckoo" which, amid so many interpretations of the well-traveled song, ranks as one of the most commanding and memorable.
Really, though, only Donovan's own smooth voice manages to outdo Danny Thompson's pervasive double bass, which thumps and groans through every minute of the album, lending a jazzy depth to the distinctly international sound Donovan achieves here. Thompson raises "The Question" into a kind of frenetic street march through "the darkest hour of night," while abrupt solos on "Love floats" or the instant classic, "Poorman's Sunshine," fuse these songs with the spontaneity of a particularly inspired demo. It bears mentioning that Donovan tosses some killer guitar licks of his own into the mix, most notably on the deliciously fiendish title track.
After following up a prolific period of creativity in the 70s with two decades of piercing silence, the release of a new Donovan album is unlikely enough. That the man would emerge out of nowhere with the coolest album of the year nearly forty years after his debut is nothing short of astonishing. Beat Café is further proof that something incredible happened in the decade of assassinations, flowers and weather factions, and the story is still far from over.
Description of Beat Cafe
That shimmering, intimate voice . . . the poetic, seductive lyrics . . . the dreamy, hazy music that surrounds them . . . From folksinger to flower-child to timeless musical poet, Donovan and his distinctive, magical songs have become familiar to decades of music fans since the early Sixties through hit singles like "Mellow Yellow," "Sunshine Superman," "The Hurdy Gurdy Man," "Catch the Wind," "Colours," "There is a Mountain" and "Atlantis," in TV and movie soundtracks and commercials, and on a precious, infrequent trickle of new releases."Beat Café" is the first new Donovan CD for grown-ups since 1996?s "Sutras" ("The Pied Piper," a children?s CD, was issued in 2002). While "Sutras," produced and released by Rick Rubin (Johnny Cash, the Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mick Jagger) emphasized Donovan?s folk roots, "Beat Café" is an extension of the heady rock/folk/pop/jazz/blues/world music brew that has become Donovan?s trademark.
To capture the spirit of the Bohemian café happenings dating back to 1840s Paris that combined philosophy, poetry and free thought and inspired this CD, Donovan enlisted multiple Grammy-winner John Chelew (Blind Boys of Alabama, Richard Thompson, John Hiatt) as producer and keyboardist and the world?class rhythm section of folk/jazz double bassist and longtime Donovan accompanist Danny Thompson (Nick Drake, Richard Thompson, The Pentangle, John Martyn) and drummer/percussionist Jim Keltner (Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder, George Harrison, many more). Applying a "no fixed arrangements" approach to foster the proper mood of spontaneity, Donovan (vocals, guitars) and his cohorts have created a lusciously atmospheric collection of eleven new original Donovan compositions plus a cover of the folk standard "The Cuckoo."
This "beat café" of the mind is a sensuous, smoky den of fevered seduction (the hypnotic "Love Floats," "Yin My Yang," "Two Lovers," "Whirlwind"), jazzy, finger-snapping hipness ("Poorman?s Sunshine" and the title song), death-mocking blues ("Lord of the Universe"), and gentle spirituality ("Shambhala," "Do Not Go Gentle," the latter song an adaptation of Dylan Thomas?s famous poem). The contemporary production values meld mystic chants, teasing wordplay, tender meditations and warm musical telepathy into a reaffirmation of Donovan?s status as a unique and vibrant musical visionary.
Donovan, the British folkie and poor man's Bob Dylan best known for '60s and '70s Flower Power opuses like "Season of the Witch" and "Sunshine Superman," takes a slightly self-indulgent but utterly intriguing turn here on his first album in eight years. Backed by a deft band of ace session musicians, Donovan serves up a spacey, electronica-laden tribute to one of his most enduring influences: the Beat poets (Ginsberg, Burroughs, et. al.) of yesteryear. A few of these cuts, like "Two Lovers," "Yin My Yang," and "The Question," are merely dazzling word play set to hot licks. But others--"Poor Man's Sunshine," "Lord of the Universe," and "Do Not Go Gentle" (a hip-hoppish variation on a famous Dylan Thomas poem)--resonate with the eerie power of spacey elevator music from U2's loopy Zooropa phase while briefly showcasing Donovan in all the whispery, flower-draped splendor of his salad days. -- Bob Allen
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