Downloads

The Complete Videos

Beck

www.beck.com

iTunes (www.apple.com/itunes/videos/) has a video retrospective of Beck available for downloading at $24.99 (or $1.99 each) but, aside from two live ones exclusively added for the package, all the others are viewable on his own website. The only advantage to downloading the collection is that it provides an opportunity to view his work as a whole, a magnificent bouillabaisse of musical genres and consistently challenging imagery. On the website, the videos are assembled on a wheel of fortune; you can choose from the computer cartoon “Gameboy (Homeboy)” to dancing robots at a Japanese high-tech convention in “Hell Yes.” He’s been fortunate to work with some of the most creative directors around (Michel Gondry, Mark Romanek) and they have been fortunate to work with him.

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“Yellowcake”

Kaki King

www.myspace.com/kakiking

Kaki King has steadily acquired a devoted fan base over the past three years for her astonishing, thwacking acoustic guitar work. Perhaps the most worthy successor to the late Michael Hedges, she skirts that unclassifiable ground of folk, jazz and generally experimental-

all-get-out. In August, “...until we felt red,” her third album, will feature her singing as well as playing. “Yellowcake,” the lead track, has a gentler finger-picked approach than her previous work, and her quiet vocal is in perfect simpatico. A video is in production.

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“Why Won’t You Give Me Your Love”

The Zutons

www.thezutons.com/player/

This band from Liverpool provides two different videos and audio tracks of this no-frills bar band rocker. One is a homage to Jerome Robbins’ “West Side Story” choreography, complete with a rumble at the end featuring a pas de deux between singer David McCabe and sax player Abi Harding. The other is live, truly live, with a guitar feeding back nastily and the sax having some intonation problems. But it matters not because, in both videos, the colors are vibrant, the sound sharp (the album, “Tired of Hanging Around,” was produced by ace Brit producer Stephen Street) and the energy infectious.

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“Bury Me Under the Kissing Teens”

The Moore Brothers

www.themoorebros.com/news/default.htm

There has always been an uncanny symbiosis in the vocals of siblings. One thinks immediately of the Everlys, the Andrews Sisters, the Wilsons and the Gibbs -- and the Moores are no different. In this sweet song taken from their current album, “Murdered by the Moore Brothers,” Greg and Thom Moore sing the praises of a graveyard as a final resting place. But the macabre element is well-buried beneath the gentle acoustic guitar and vocals. The track is found by clicking on the album cover and available as a stream.

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“Yesterdays”

Art Tatum

www.youtube.com/watchvwYcmWIrtK-E

Simply extraordinary. Art Tatum was among that stellar group of pianists whose technique defies what would normally be considered humanly possible. Like Charlie Parker several weeks earlier in this column, he has not been served well in visual documentation. Here he stuns a 1950s TV audience with a version of Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays” that synthesizes late Romanticism, neo-Classicism, Dixieland and a suggestion of just how magnificent a stride player he could be. “Tatum runs” abound and he takes the harmony far outside at one point. www.youtube.com has been gradually accumulating a fabulous library of jazz videos and doing music fans a great service.