Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Extreme power of music, 28 Feb 2003
Rarely, very rarely, one comes across a piece of music so moving, so powerful, that it causes a slight but permanent shift in the way you look at life. The last time it happened to me was listening to a performance of Duruflé's Requiem in the chapel of St John's College, Cambridge, on Remembrance Sunday. Years passed without anything touching the heart to quite such an extent - until my wife played me "Jesus' Blood". She had heard it on her car radio and had to pull over for a few minutes to recover.It penetrates the soul like a hammer drill. Even in isolation the old tramp's voice, its frailty bolstered by his simple faith, is enough to snap the heartstrings. Add the wonderfully sympathetic Gavin Bryars orchestration, sometimes extremely simple, other times rich and lush, and you have a the most unlikely blend of vocal line and harmonic backing that fixes you in the strangest way. It is a musical and lyrical match with a dimension that you can see and feel, yet is impossible to describe in words alone. The use of suspensions and surprise cadences over the tramp's humble hymn tune are certainly part of the magic. It is so profoundly involving that you soon give up trying to understand what's going on and just let the music take you to places you've never been before. Tom Waits' gravelly vocal contribution has been criticised as an intrusion, but I don't find it so. Since the piece is already so full of visual imagery, I quickly found myself imagining him as the Victorian gravedigger come to take the old tramp away, and then he made sense. Amazon's US-based site contains many more reviews than there are here, nearly all wildly enthusiastic about the piece but with a few who seem to loathe it. How anyone could find "Jesus blood" anything but brilliantly imaginative and intensely moving beats me. But that's human life. And human life is what this piece is all about.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A piece that will repay the time invested in listening to it, 27 Feb 2005
Gavin Bryars' premise is simple and yet extremely effective. He made a loop of a homeless man, a tramp, singing an innocent childlike religious ditty, and created a minimalist symphony around it. The old man keeps singing the same verse throughout the 74 odd minutes, over and over, while the backing orchestra accompanies as a quartet, with strings, with horns, with no strings, and other variations. At the climax, the old man is joined by Tom Waits, who has made a career out of being a counterfeit wino. Waits initially seems like the perfect choice of accompaniment to the old man, his voice gravely and sad at times, but then booming and strong; never do I believe that Waits has anything to worry about, and certainly does not need the help of Jesus. The old man however is sad, melancholy, nostalgic, and finally, hopeless; by the end of the recording he sounds like a defeated man, someone in desperate need of help, a child (and yet the listener knows that no help is coming, ever). While Waits accompaniment initially sounds like a good idea, and I think this was what drew me to this recording in the first instance, I was left wondering whether the recording would have been better, maybe less theatrical and more real, without him.This is a beautiful recording, if somewhat overlong. Bryars has taken 20 seconds of recorded material, almost ambient in the way it was captured, and spun a deeply moving piece of music around it. This is not easy listening; do not put this on in the background as you cook. This requires you to sit down and listen. As such its unlikely to be played very often, but on those odd occasions, when its raining outside, you are alone, and you wish to drift into a world of melancholy for an hour or so, this is a fine portal.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Incredible, 11 Nov 2004
This piece really is a life-changing experience. A minimalist work of epic proportions, it uses as its main subject a loop of a old tramp's simple song of faith, combining it with a shifting, kaleidoscopic set of accompaniments to produce a curiously moving yet uplifting piece. Be warned - this is not for everyone; it will be too long for some, while others will dismiss it as too repetitive. But if you're like me, after a few minutes you won't be able to stop listening (I stayed glued to the spot for the full hour and a quarter), and you won't want it to end. This is one of very few pieces which has moved me almost to tears. Astonishing.
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