Music to Fill a “Well-Needed Gap”

from the Amazon.com Web page of the recording being discussed

Back in my past life as a computer science researcher, like many of my colleagues, I had to devote some of my time to reviewing the work of others when it was submitted for either presentation at a conference or publication. These were timely events, so I would often be reviewing one set of papers while my fellow workers would be dealing with submissions from the same pile. We would occasionally share our impressions (after they had been documented to avoid undue influence); and I still have fond memories of a review that began with the sentence:

This paper serves to fill a well-needed gap.

I have always found that to be the strongest put-down ever since Enrico Fermi interrupted a fumbling talk by a graduate student by shouting:

It isn’t even wrong!

This is the context for my impressions of Just a Dance, the fifth album of songs with both words and music by Al Hammerman, who is also one of the three producers of the recording. Hammerman seems to have made a good living for himself by providing music for movies, television shows, and commercials. However, he basically puts out “raw material,” which is then “processed” by arrangers and performers without his own involvement in either activity.

On this album the arrangements are provided by Mark Maher, who is also the keyboardist and probably the leader of a generous number of instrumentalists and vocalists. Since Maher cannot do anything about the texts, there is no escaping the trivialities encountered in both subject matter and turn-of-phrase. Five vocalists account for delivering those words: Erin Bode, Feyza Eren, Arvell Keithley, Brian Owens, and Alan Ox. All of them do their best to bring a personal style to Hammerman’s songs; but there is a limit to what one can do when, as Gertrude Stein put it, “There is no there there.”