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News & Reviews.

try. Meanwhile,
"Pleasure and Pain"
— penned by
Bolton, Rich and
the ubiquitous
Diane —is a
smooth, textured
piece that adds a
welcome sense of
tension to the
singer's reper-

OF NOTE ... NEW ON CD

Releasing a new Michael Bolton
album is kind of like sending a dart
board — with steel tips — to a crit-
ic's office. You know the rap; he takes
relatively innocuous and inoffensive
pop melodies and wails them to the
point where they're almost not musi-
cal, at the same time smothering
them in banks of synthesizers, strings
. and other tools of lushness that hc
long made the middle-of-the-road a
mushy terrain.
What's more — he's cut off those
long, permed-out locks! Bolton's new,
tightly cropped coiffure does hew to
the sound of his latest release, All
That Matters (Columbia), perhaps his
most restrained album to date.
Not that he doesn't emote; Bolton
still reaches back into his throat and
diaphragm for the every-bit-of-my-
soul delivery that's his trademark. But
this time he deploys it for accents
rather than spending too much of his
time in full vocal flight.
On "A Heart Can Only Be So
Strong," the kind of sweeping lost-.
love paean on which Bolton would
usually go to town, he holds back just
a bit, and the result sounds far more
sincere and believable.
He also reaches out on this album
for collaborations with hitmakers
such as Babyface and Tony Rich, who
bring a different — and welcome —
dynamic sense to the album.
The acoustic-flavored "The Best of
,Love" is a by-numbers Babyface for-
mula, but "Why Me," co-written
with 'Face and former Motowner
Lamont Dozier, is convincingly sul-

/12
997

2

toire.
These mostly mid-tempo
pieces tends to blur into each other,
although "Go the Distance" from
Disney's Hercules provides a jolt of
familiarity at the end of the album.
Bolton still has a taste for fully
loaded arrangements when it
might be nice to hear him
singing with more sparse
accompaniment. All in due
time, perhaps; on All That
Matters, Bolton makes
some baby steps that indi-
cate he's not beyond
redemption.

--- Reviewed by
Gary Graff

REMEMBRANCE

The Polish city of
Luboml once had
4,000 Jews. That was
before the Holocaust.
Only 51 survivors,
finding their way to
Israel or the United
States, were left to
remember the town.
An exhibit paying
tribute to the peo-
ple of that city,
"Remembering
Luboml: Images
of a Jewish Corn-
munity," includes
photographs,
documents and
memorabilia
and is being
presented by
the Yeshiva
University
Museum in
New York

City, where it will be through Dec.
31.
"I wanted to restore a portion of
Jewish memory destroyed by the Ger-
mans, to create portraits of people
who lived and loved, who went to
school and married, who knew sor-
row and joy, laughter and tears," said
Aaron Ziegelman, who immigrated to
the United States in 1938, when he
was 9.
Ziegelman created the Luboml
Exhibition Project in 1994 to pre-
serve the memory of his hometown
and give a face and voice to the
townspeople of his youth.
The project has collected nearly
2,000 photos and artifacts from
Luboml emigres and archives

throughout the world.
There is film footage taken by a
visiting Americanin 1933 as well as
videotaped interviews with former
residents. The range of memorabilia
goes from a postage stamp in Yiddish
to a pair of recovered and polished
silver Kiddush cups, which had been
buried when the Germans came.
While many of the photos show a
community of optimistic, middle-
class men and women, they show the
hard times as well — a line in front
of a soup kitchen in 1917 and cloth-
ing distribution to poor children in
1929.
The Yizkor Book of Luboml is a
compilation of memoirs and essays in
Hebrew and Yiddish first printed in
1975. It's been translated into Eng-
lish and titled Luboml: The Memorial
Book of a Vanished Shtetl, and is avail-
able at the exhibition.

"Remembering Luboml: Imacres
of a. Jewish Community" will be
on exhibit through Dec. 31 in the
main floor gallery of the Ben-
, jamin N. Cardozo School of Law,
55 Fifth Ave., New York. (212)
960- 5390. Luboml: The
Memorial Book
of a Van-
ished Shtetl
may be pur-
I chased
through
Ktav Publish-
/ ing House,
900 Jefferson
St , Box 6249,
Ho' boken, NJ
I 07030-7205.
$39.50 plus $5
/ shipping and
handling. (201)
963-9524.

— Suzanne
Chessler

•

ON DISPLAY

Academy Award-
winning producer Sue
Marx will unveil a new
film about Old 16,
dubbed the "Mona Lisa
of American historic
automobiles" for its clas-
sic good looks and signif-
icance in vehicle develop-
ment, during a multime-
dia exhibit opening Dec.
13 at the Henry Ford
Museum & Greenfield Vil-
lage, where the rare 1906

LJ