CD Review: Jack Spann – Beautiful Man From Mars – by Christian Lamitschka for Country Music News International Magazine & Radio Show
1. Beautiful Man From Mars
2. Time
3. Read
4. She Makes Pornography On The Weekend
5. Songman
6. Fear or Loyalty
7. Deep Inside
8. I’m a bird
9. Snooty Acres
10. Mars In Twilight
11. Just Another Version Of You
12. Jack Around
13. Man From Mars
Jack Spann (actually Jon Rosen) started his
music career like many young artists, a college student by day play in local
bars in St. Louis by night.
He joined the local band “Vitamin
A” before he dared the big leap to New York, where in addition to his work
as a studio musician and doing live performances, he had some theater fame with
the show “War Horse” at the Lincoln Center Theater and the “Hank
Williams Story” in the Little Schubert Theater.
The versatile pianist and multi-instrumentalist
released his first solo album “Time, Time, Time, Time, Time” last year; the
follow-up work from 2017 is entitled “Beautiful Man From Mars”.
The artist himself describes his first work
as “emotional, passionate, grounded and sometimes gloomy”. The new
album also has an emotional and sometimes slightly dark mood. With the title
“The Beautiful Man From Mars” spontaneous associations with David Bowie’s song
“Life On Mars” come up and this connection is not entirely absurd, because
Sparr got to know Bowie’s producer Tony Visconti during his 16 years in New
York where he recorded on demos for David’s last album.
Titles such as “She Makes Pornography on
the Weekend”, which has a double life theme, or “Fear Or Loyalty” about the
well-known “hamster wheel” in which most of us are found are certainly not easy
fare. Other pieces such as “Songman” or
“I’m A Bird” spread a cheerful, lively mood. “Snooty Acres” sounds like a
musical from a bygone era and musically stands out from the rest, just as one
is set back in time with the swinging “Just Another Version Of You”.
The last purely instrumental track “Man
From Mars” takes up the melody of the opening piece again and rounds off the
album.
Jack Spann is a perfectionist who often
works hours and hours on song elements before they correspond to his ideas and
convey the emotionality he wants. The
album sounds perfectly arranged and produced, but very few tracks are likely to
be compatible with mass tastes, other than “Deep Inside”.
Walking away from the mainstream, Jack
Spann will find it difficult to break out of an artistic niche existence.