THE NEW YORK TIMES The songwriter David Yazbek is a daredevil juggler catching spiked pins in the traveling carnival of his imagination. The nihilism in his deceptively rollicking songs is sometimes so pungent that you wonder how much of his own bile he can stomach before he shrugs and allows those pins to bop him on the head. That road that you’ve been walking |
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THE NEW YORK TIMES The demands of musical theater—beeline storytelling and transparent prosody among them—usually crush indie-rock songwriters into miserable bits of limp pulp. If David Yazbek has been an exception (his scores for The Full Monty and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels are superbly cut gems), that’s partly because he sees his Broadway work, including his next project, “Bruce Lee: Journey to the West,” as an exacting if lucrative day job. “When you write for the theater, some of it comes from the gut,” he said recently, “but often it’s someone else’s gut.” Fans of his Frank Loesser dexterity and Jule Styne savvy will find that Mr. Yazbek’s night job has a rather different cast. At his American Songbook concert on Saturday night, he shares the stage not only with the longtime backup band he calls His Warmest Regards but also with special guests who exemplify his range: from the world of opera, the adventurous soprano Lauren Flanigan, and from the world of bizarro, the singer-songwriter Nellie McKay. When it comes to inspiration, Mr. Yazbek, above, half Jewish and half Arab, is something of a pantheist, drawing on sources as diverse as Captain Beefheart, the German group Can, early Godard movies and Tin Pan Alley. The results can also be heard on his new album, “Evil Monkey Man,” which Ghostlight Records will release on Feb. 26. The sulfurous and often despairing mood of its 14 cuts (the first is called “Terrible Thing”) comes as quite a shock after the general sunniness of his Broadway scores, but the raw materials here are the recent death of his mother and his attempts to understand it. What’s no shock is that emotion doesn’t capsize his craft. The words may be about the inevitability of decay, but the grooves include mellow bossa novas and uptempo blues. And he still has the wit to rhyme “soldiers” with “Folgers.” “Form is like religion,” he explained, “a very comforting box for delivering very discomfiting thoughts. |
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ALLMUSIC David Yazbek's music is grounded in a hodgepodge of performing and non-performing arts, breaching categories and genres that listeners seldom imagine working together: comedy writer, musical soundtrack composer, and confessional songwriter. The inquisitive listener might be curious but skeptical: can such disparate media be made cohesive? Yazbek's answer is Evil Monkey Man, an album that, at least during its first half, pulls together these elements with aplomb. The humor is dry, understated, and absurd. In "Terrible Thing," the narrator repeats, against a jazzy backdrop, that he has really screwed up, lightly tossing off—in the climax—that he is now dead, his head covered with blood and his "face stamped in clover." The titles, including "Monkey Baby Hanging on Chicken Wire" and "Bazooka Joe," hint at Yazbek's absurd outlook. He mixes up the arrangements, too, combining elements of jazz, rock, and pop, and keeping the overall soundscape intriguing…The material that works, however, works quite well, and half of an unusual album that is unusually good is more worthwhile than the same old, same old. And Yazbek should also get credit for the cool title. |
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NEW YORK POST Talk about bad timing. Broadway's The Full Monty—music and lyrics by David Yazbek—seemed set to take multiple Tonys until The Producers came along. A couple of years later, Yazbek's Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was riding high . . . then Spamalot galloped up. It's enough to drive a person crazy - unless, like Yazbek, you're not set on being the next Stephen Sondheim. "Musicals are lucrative and fun, if you get them right," he says. "Sondheim was clearly born to write musicals. I was born to write music, and these albums are what I have to do." The latest of those albums - which the 47-year-old records with His Warmest Regards (yes, that's the name of his band) - will get an airing tomorrow night at the Allen Room, part of Lincoln Center's American Songbook series. Titled Evil Monkey Man—amed, it seems, not for any particular song, but for a drawing his 11-year-old son made—it's full of pop-rock hooks and quirky, occasionally harrowing lyrics. Look no further than "Monkey Baby Hanging on Chicken Wire," inspired by the ghastly experiments on Capuchin monkeys in the '50s. If it's not quite the stuff he wrote for the Letterman show years ago, so much the better. "That was a really good first job after college," says the Brown University grad, "and it was fun for a couple of months. My partner quit before I did, and then it was no fun." Winning an Emmy helped dull the pain, he says, and writing scripts—and the occasional Broadway show—kept him solvent when record sales didn't. Come Saturday, expect to meet a couple of his friends: wacky chanteuse Nellie McKay and opera's Lauren Flanigan, who'll sing some of his Broadway stuff. "We're all guys for the album, so there's a lot of testosterone lumbering around the stage," he explains. "Their voices will give us a whole other timbre." Call it The Full Yazbek. |
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TIME OUT NEW YORK David Yazbek wrote the scores of The Full Monty and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. On his own, he plays what he calls “challenging pop.” Sporting influences ranging from XTC’s Andy Partridge to old-school Broadway tunester Frank Loesser, Yazbek’s music is full of bouncy riffs and hooks, as well as his trademark nasty-naughty sense of humor; in tonight’s concert for Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series, he performs selections from his latest CD, Evil Monkey Man (Ghostlight), with assists from soprano Lauren Flanagan and magical crackpot Nellie McKay. |
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THE JOURNAL NEWS |
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THEATERMANIA Yazbek's concert will focus not on his theater music, but on selections from his soon-to-be-released CD, Evil Monkey Man—many of which were written during the past two years and mix jaunty melodies with pitch-dark lyrics. "They came out of this dark, angry, and sad time right after my mother got sick and died," he says. "Plus, having had success with my Broadway shows [The Full Monty and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels] has forced a reexamination of my identity. I'm very serious about that work, but it's an expression of what those characters are feeling instead of a direct expression of what I'm feeling." Yazbek has also invited two very special ladies—Nellie McKay and Lauren Flanigan—to join him on the stage. "I don't usually take my live shows too seriously; if you fly by the seat of your pants, more interesting things can happen," he says. "But because of this amazing venue, I wanted to make it special, and I also thought it would be good to have a female voice around. My friend Ted Sperling gave me Nellie's first album, and while I thought I might hate it, she reminded me a lot of what I was like at her age. So she's going to do this song called 'Wasted' from the new album, and give a different spin to 'Nothing Is Too Wonderful to Be True' from Scoundrels." But how did he convince Flanigan, another of the world's great opera singers, to take part? "I heard her voice on NPR about eight years ago, and it really stuck out for me as a major musical instrument," he says. "Ted knows how to network, so he got me to call her. When I did, she said she was a fan of mine. And I've since found out she's just like me; she's game to do anything." |
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