CD
Will Bernard: Party Hats
(Palmetto Records)
Acid jazz rose to prominence in the early ’90s, with Bay Area acts like the Broun Fellinis, Slide Five, and the Hieroglyphics Ensemble updating traditional jazz with funky rhythms and hip-hop attitude. Berkeley native Will Bernard played guitar for Hieroglyphics, and even after the movement lost the national spotlight, he continued composing with the Will Bernard Trio, Motherbug, and Grammy-nominated T.J. Kirk while also collaborating with the Coup and the Greyboy Allstars. On Bernard’s latest disc, he seems to be trying to find some middle ground between his funky roots and the contemporary jazz scene, in the process coming up with a style that might appeal to both young urban professionals and Deadheads. Most of Party Hats is pretty chill. Yes, there are smooth guitar riffs, growling horns, and slinky rhythms, and the players do occasionally evince a bit of heat (especially Will Blades in his organ work on “Folding Green”), but mainly they seem to be playing for the background more than the dance floor. If this is party music, someone might want to slip some tequila into the punch. C+
DAN STRACHOTA


BOOK
Liza Dalby: East Wind Melts the Ice
(University of California Press)
Structured like an ancient Chinese almanac, Liza Dalby’s fourth book (following her nonfiction Geisha and Kimono and a novel, The Tale of Murasaki) divides the year into 72 periods of five days each. Each section features a short essay inspired by the natural world she observes in Berkeley, where she lives, and Sonoma. Clearly a fiend for multiculturalism, Dalby models the essays on a Japanese literary form called zuihitsu; the conceit is that the brush (that is, the writing implement, of whatever kind) has a mind of its own. When Dalby truly allows her thoughts to wander, these zuihitsu make for quietly compelling reading. For example, the entry for the end of March, “Thunder sings,” opens with an exploration of the traditional Japanese celebration of cherry blossom season, moves into musings on the late-March whale migration up the California coast, and finally touches on the social unacceptability of eating horse meat. Trained as an anthropologist, Dalby sometimes trips herself up by overexplaining and overcontextualizing her work. But gardeners and armchair naturalists in Northern California and beyond should find much to love in this exacting and poetic journey through the seasons. B+
CLAIRE DEDERER


CD
Joe Goldmark: Seducing the ’60s
(Lo-Ball Records)
Ever since the advent of pedal steel guitar back in the 1930s, its wavering, weeping tones have been generally synonymous with country music. But over the past 25 years, no one has tried harder to reposition the unwieldy instrument than Joe Goldmark. Having played with everyone from blues master Taj Mahal to pop music innovator David Byrne to punk-pop group Mr. T Experience, Goldmark (who co-owns the San Francisco branch of Amoeba Music) continues to broaden the instrument’s horizons. On his sixth solo CD, he reworks 13