1995 Dallas Observer Music Awards (Part I)

"Bela Lugosi: The Lost Years" and the Brave Combo-Lauren Agnelli remake "J'ai Faim Toujours," from the 1994 follow-up album World of Fireworks, are Felliniesque swirls of spangly brass and drums that come off as slightly scary precisely because they're so energetic and playful; they're the sounds of men tap-dancing away from the abyss. "Barbie and Ken," an as-yet-unreleased tale of marital illusions slowly dissolving, is so engulfed in obviously doomed hopefulness that it doesn't matter whether you take it as a fairy tale about two famous dolls or a stylized pop fable about a perfect union that isn't: either way, the song's free-floating aura of melancholy is so sincere that you can't help being touched by it.

Without the astounding versatility and enthusiasm of Little Jack's musicians--Jerome Rossen (organ, harmonium), Mike Stinnett (alto sax), Dave Dorbin (tuba), and Norm Bergeron (drums and percussion)--none of the group's songs would be remotely convincing. Note by note and chorus by chorus, they construct alternate musical universes so rich and strange that you can't help chuckling as you wander through them--chuckling at the group's confidence in its ability to take you any place and show you anything, and make you not just believe it, but feel it.

That's why Little Jack Melody and his Young Turks can take you "screaming 'cross the Kalahari on the way to Berlin" in "Bastard Moon," and recast the history of Sinatra-inspired crooner pop as an Old Testament creation myth in "Happily Ever After," then ease back into low-key domestic bliss in "A Waltz in Springfield, Missouri" and bohemian listlessness in "Ballad of The Night Cafe" and party-time giddiness in their rollicking remake of Petula Clark's "I Know a Place." They merge the grandiose and the everyday in every note they play, and every word Little Jack croons with that evocatively dry, direct, unfussy phrasing of his evokes both a whispered playground secret and a mystic incantation. To immerse yourself in their music is to visit a world where genre boundaries bend like the frame lines in an old Krazy Kat comic, love songs are arranged on sheets of wind, and moons and stars drop from the heavens to form notes, chords, and rests.

--Matt Zoller Seitz

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